Eating insects can help save the planet, says EU climate change innovation chief

Kirsten Dunlop says climate change offers numerous ways to transform our lives for the better

Eating insects can help protect the planet against climate change and water and land shortages as the global population soars, according to the EU’s climate change innovation chief.

Kirsten Dunlop says insects such as grasshoppers, silkworms and crickets are rich in protein and other nutrients and have a much lower environmental impact per kilogram than meat.

“We need protein and we need to continue to eat it. And we need to be able to support an exponentially growing population. But we must do so in a way that stops destroying species around us,” Dr Dunlop told i.

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“We know that insect protein is very good protein and it’s also cultivatable in a way that has significantly less carbon environment impact than cultivating millions of cattle, sheep and pigs,” added Dr Dunlop, chief executive of EIT Climate-KIC.

She said startups around Europe were working to harness the potential of insect protein as food for people and animals.

She was talking to i at her group’s ClimateLaunchpad event in Amsterdam last month, a competition among environmental business startups that has been dubbed the ‘Dragon’s Den of companies fighting climate change’.

Her comments came after a study published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition in July predicted that insects could soon join quinoa and kale on the hallowed list of “superfoods”.

This found that they are five times as rich in healthy antioxidants as fresh orange juice.

Free radicals

These chemicals protect against the effects of free radicals – molecules produced by the body that have been linked to diseases such as heart disease, cancer, Parkinson’s and arthritis.

More than 2 billion people around the world regularly eat insects, but they are rarely consumed in the UK. That is starting to change, however.

Having been restricted to a handful of specialist stores and the internet they moved into the mainstream in November as Sainsbury’s became the first UK supermarket to sell them, launching a range of crunchy barbecue roasted crickets.

Previous studies have shown insects to be a good source of minerals, vitamins, healthy fats and fibre, as well as protein.

Environmental revolution

Dr Dunlop says we are in the early stages of an environmental revolution that could create new kinds of jobs and transform the way we live – and startup companies around the world are working furiously to deliver that change.

In her own words:

“Our physical environment is changing forcing us to quickly redesign a significant part of the way we live, we move, we go to work, we play and we eat. That’s actually an extraordinary opportunity for people to make new work and to make different kinds of work.”

Rewilding Europe

“For example, we desperately need new forests, we need to rewild Europe, we need to rethink physical building construction and the way we use materials. We need a completely different mix in terms of what we eat but also in terms of our relationship to where we get our food from. And we need a different relationship to air and the quality of the air we breathe.”

“Every single one of those represents an entirely new suite of jobs – be it stewarding nature, looking after forests, or growing green areas. On cities we need to ask, not ‘how many hotels can I build?’ – but ‘how many parks can I create that suddenly create an entirely different quality of air and captures carbon’. How can we create different forests for foods and fruits? – things that people can live on. There’s an entirely new set of ways of living and working and playing that we have only just begun to imagine and to tap into.”

Biggest obstacle is the narrative

“The biggest problem [obstructing green development] in a big city has been the narrative around austerity – ‘I’m going to take away your car, I’m going to ask you to eat meat once a week, I’m going to stop you doing, x, y and z’.

But if you think about what it actually stands for – ‘I’m going to give you better air quality, you’re going to live longer, you’re going to be more connected to the community you live in, your going to be able to spend more time in Nature and environments that make your feel psychologically and emotionally healthier – that’s not a bad story.”