Insect flours may be a trend but they pollute more and are not safe from a nutritional point of view for those who have always eaten something else
Eating insects would be safe and would be part of the ecological practices of the transition, reducing the production of C02? It ‘s all to prove in practice. In fact, the opposite seems to be true.
It is argued that the water we would use to produce one gram of worms is much less than the water we would use to produce one gram of wheat flour. But the problem is the production cycle and the maze we are going to get into.
The European Commission has recently authorized the production of lesser mealworm larvae which are added to cricket flour, the migratory locust and the yellow larva of the flour. In practice, in the near future, insects may be present in many commonly used foods, from snacks to pizza, from beer to flour.
The problems however are not only the possible disgust but the production cycleperhaps more polluting than the products we have been eating for hundreds of years, e nutritional security.
Food should be considered ecological in function of the energy expended to produce it, not of the ideologies that the lobbies promote in the European Union. Example: if I grow wheat to make flour, I process the wheat and produce the flour to then eat it. Work once, consume once. If instead I breed insects, (they don’t ‘catch’ by the millions in the fields), to produce insect flour, first I have to raise them and feed their production cycle and then process them to obtain flour that I will eat: therefore I have worked and produced twice to consume only once. With the not remote possibility of polluting, destroying and consuming more compared to the first cycle. An unecological principlebeyond what the World Economic Forum claims.
The second aspect is perhaps even more obvious and concerns safety. It’s a topic that has been discussed for some time: is eating insects safe for humans? It is well known that food safety is of two types, and he has recently explained it well Professor Pier Luigi Rossi, professor at the University of Siena from 1995 to 2009 and doctor, specialist in food science and preventive medicine with extensive experience in the field. There is food safety, the absence of chemical, physical, microbiological pollutants in food and there is nutritional safety, the absence of nutrients harmful to the human body in food.
A food can be “safe” (food safety) because it has no pollutants of any kind but may not have the nutritional security because it contains nutrients not suitable for the human body, especially on human organisms they have adapted for generations not to swallow insects as part of their daily diet.
Eating some insects can happen but in the West they become ordinary and widespread foods, on a par with wheat flour or any vegetable, is a very different thing. Having breakfast every morning with cricket flour would be an absolute novelty for our body, presenting unpredictable unknowns.
“Insect flours”, explains Professor Rossi on Linkedin, “are a food that does not have nutritional security because it can generate functional disturbances in the intestine, generate food allergies, activate an altered intestinal microbiota”. In addition to publishing the names of insects or of the homonymous flours contained on supermarket labels, a practice that restaurants should also follow who use insect flours in the preparation of their gastronomic recipes, it would be best practice to abstain from consumption in case of allergies. This is because, Professor Rossi explains, insect flours have nutrients that are not suitable for the human body: “Those who suffer from food allergies should refrain from eating insect flours”.
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