The second international conference on insects as food and feed, Insects to Feed the World 2018 was held in Wuhan, China, last week, bringing together 278 people from 40 different countries.
It was a great experience, and I feel really lucky to have been a part of it. This post is a short overview of some of the topics I found really interesting - click here for a full book of abstracts.
It was a great experience, and I feel really lucky to have been a part of it. This post is a short overview of some of the topics I found really interesting - click here for a full book of abstracts.
A photo of the conference banquet, taken by Jeff Tomberlin, a member of the international advisory board and one of the conference organisers
At the conference, we heard about many different types of insect, from many parts of the world. As one of the keynote speakers (Komi Fiaboe, representing Segenet Kelemu, Director General of ICIPE, Kenya) put it, ‘diversity is key’. He was talking about insects in an African context, but the same sentiment applies to the world as a whole.
Using insects as food, feed and even as medicine, is not a new thing. Primates eat insects, and use them medicinally; the chickens and fish we now farm on industrial scales became the species they are now by feeding on insects. So, we can say with confidence that using insects in these ways is a key part of our evolutionary past (a topic covered in more detail here).
But what is new is how we choose to use this wealth of information and innovation.
Komi Fiaboe's keynote Conclusions and Recommendations
John Kinyuru's work bringing cricket farming to Kakuma (200,000 ppl) and Dadaab (250,000 ppl) refugee camps in Kenya
One exciting new frontier mentioned was the use of cricket farming to empower people living in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, as a source of both livelihoods and nutrition. This initiative was described by John Kinyuru in his keynote. Other examples of insect farming used to a similar purpose were presented several times during the conference, including: Amy Franklin, who spoke about Farms for Orphans, which shares the knowledge and technology needed for farming palm weevils in orphanages in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Daniel Ambuhl, who spoke about a project run by the congolese biologist Augustin Konda, who is developing methods for farming edible Saturniid caterpillars to improve food security, also based in the DRC.
Photo of training by Farms for Orphans, via Foodtank - https://foodtank.com/news/2018/03/farms-for-orphans-insect-farming-democratic-republic-congo/
Another major theme in the conference was the use of insects to process waste - a really important topic, given that 1.3bn tonnes of food produced is lost or wasted every year. The main player here is the black soldier fly Hermetia illucens, which can convert all kinds of waste products to usable protein. Black soldier flies are already being reared on an industrial scale all over the world, using automated, cutting edge technology. The outputs of these farms are fly larvae that can be fed to chickens and fish. This takes the pressure off both agricultural land - 33% of which is used for animal feed - and marine resources - 90% of which are now overfished or fully depleted. The frass from the farms is used as fertiliser, meaning that nothing goes to waste.
The black soldier fly, a tiny species with a huge potential for making our food system more sustainable
Professor Meyer-Rochow giving his keynote on insects as medicine
Yet another exciting direction in the field is the potential pharmaceutical properties of insects. Professor Meyer-Rochow gave his keynote on this topic, and presented us with an overview of all the insects used in traditional medicine worldwide. While some of this may be superstition parading as "common sense", Meyer-Rochow made a very good point when he said that “not all common sense makes sense... but we as scientists should examine what makes sense and what doesn’t”. At the conference, a couple of examples of research into insects as medicine included a poster by Ishikawa et al, which presented evidence that ingestion of grasshoppers and crickets reduced stress levels in laboratory mice, and another poster by Kipkoech et al looked at the potential use of insect chitin as a prebiotic to promote gut health.
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For my part, I presented a plenary on the nutritional role of edible insects, chaired a plenary featuring my colleague Kenichi Nonaka from Japan, and, with John Kinyuru from Kenya, co-hosted two sessions on the topic of Decolonising Entomophagy. But I’ll write about all of that at a later date!
Many thanks to everyone who was a part of this conference, and I look forward to next time…IFW2020!!
Many thanks to everyone who was a part of this conference, and I look forward to next time…IFW2020!!
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