By The people who think we should be eating bugs have called on Americans to stop eating so much beef. The United Nations agency in charge of food and agriculture policy will soon be issuing a “road map” demanding that the West, including the United States, drastically lessen meat consumption.
The USDA reported that in 2021 Americans consumed nearly 30 billion pounds of beef, equaling about 60 pounds per person per year. That’s just too much for the leftwing bureaucrats at the UN to handle, so they’ve decided to declare that American enjoyment of protein is a threat to the climate.
It’s probably just coincidental that every single, long-held leftwing belief pushed for decades has magically been designated as “green” policy that will reduce climate change.
The New York Post reports that the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) will publish its so-called global food systems’ road map during the upcoming COP28 climate summit in Dubai which will kick off on Thursday and extend nearly two weeks until mid-December. FAO’s first-of-its-kind document will recommend nations that “over-consume meat” to limit their consumption as part of a broader effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Bloomberg reported.
“The failure of leading meat and dairy companies to reduce emissions underlines the urgent need for more policy focus on the food and agriculture sector,” Jeremy Coller, the chair and founder of the FAIRR Initiative, an investor network that works with financial institutions to promote climate-friendly agriculture worldwide, said in a recent statement.
“Food system emissions deserve a place at the top of the table, alongside energy and transport, as they represent an estimated third of greenhouse gas emissions and 40% of methane,” he continued. “Investors hope the first-ever publication of a food and agriculture road map at COP28 this month will catalyze the transition to 1.5 degrees and a more sustainable food system.”
Overall, the road map will seek to guide policy on lowering the climate impact of the global agriculture industry, which has rarely received such attention at past UN climate conferences. Past COP summits have been far more keen to address emissions generated from the global power, transportation and manufacturing sectors.
In 2013, the same organization at the UN released a report saying that we should all get ready to start eating insects, claiming that the only reason more people don’t do so is because they are biased.
The Register discussed the report during that summer: “World population is slated to top nine billion by 2050, and seeing as how arable land is being rapidly swallowed by towns and cities, oceans are increasingly overfished, and climate change is disrupting traditional farming, a new United Nations study proposes a twist on Marie Antoinette’s dietary advice: let them eat bugs.
“‘Common prejudice against eating insects is not justified from a nutritional point of view,’ write the authors of a 191-page report (PDF) released by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) entitled ‘Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security.’
Bugs are not only good eatin’, say the authors, but they’re also highly efficient sources of nutrition. Your average insect, the report claims, requires a mere two kilograms of food to produce one kilogram of what it charmingly refers to as ‘insect meat,’ a far better feed-to-food ratio than, for example, a fatted calf, which requires eight kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of beef.
‘Many insects are rich in protein and good fats and high in calcium, iron and zinc,’ the authors note. ‘Beef has an iron content of 6 mg per 100 g of dry weight, while the iron content of locusts varies between 8 and 20 mg per 100 g of dry weight, depending on the species and the kind of food they themselves consume.'”
Roughly two billion people eat insects as part of their diet.
Eating insects has become a near obsession among some wings of academia. The University of Minnesota, for example, pushed the idea in 2022, promoting their PhD student named Sujaya Rao who argued, “Consumers want relatively inexpensive food that doesn’t have bugs in it, and farmers try really hard to provide that. The reality is, insecticides are still probably the most effective and economical option for many pest management programs — but when you put insecticides on plants, important pollinators like bees die. My solution is: let’s just eat the bugs!”
For centuries, people have been eating insects as part of their diets. According to Rao, bugs are not just “famine” foods eaten in times of scarcity. Today, around 2,000 species are eaten by choice in more than 100 countries. This is just a small fraction of the millions of insect species on Earth. “Humans also enjoy prawns, crabs, lobsters, and other creatures that feed on matter at the bottom of the ocean,” said Rao. “These are close relatives of insects, so why not eat insects too?”
Is the answer to her question because eating bugs is disgusting, whereas eating beef is delicious? Because that seems obvious to everyone who’s ever tried both.
In case you’re wondering: since 2003, greenhouse gas produced from food production in the United States has declined steadily, according to a recent study.
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