Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Let’s talk about food.
If we look at food from a biological perspective,
it’s one thing.
If we look at it from a cultural perspective,
it’s another thing.
So, for us now, food – it’s pizza, it’s pasta, it’s panini,
to keep it a little bit Italian.
But it’s not that many years ago, at least in geological terms,
only a few thousand years,
that food for us, when we roamed to the savannah,
was leaves, roots, berries, insects.
And occasionally, when we got lucky, big game.
So you can see, there’s a huge divergence
between what we consider food now and what we used to consider as food.
So, what happened in Europe?
Why is insect not part of our food,
when we have been eating insects for thousands of years?
Well, it was part of our food culture, at least in Roman times,
and sometime into early medieval times.
But then we had other things that shaped our food culture,
like agriculture, providing steady supply of crops, animal livestock.
And also during medieval time, there’s another theory
that tries to explain why we forgot eating insects,
which is that we had the Little Ice Age.
That’s not a theory, that’s a fact,
at least if you believe geological records,
but it meant that temperature dropped.
And insects are cold-blooded animals,
so they need energy from their surroundings
to keep their metabolism going.
And for them, that was a huge blow, when temperature dropped.
So species diversity and abundance dropped accordingly.
So our food supply and hence influence – insects into our food culture diminished.
So,
it’s not something that is completely forgotten.
Actually, it’s just in Europe; North America as well.
Around the globe,
still about two, two and a half billion people,
it’s difficult to count,
but on an average day, millions are eating insects.
Over 2000 species of insects have a known history of being eaten.
When you start counting the cows and the pigs and the poultry,
you don’t even get into the hundreds.
And in Mexico, for instance,
which is probably the world’s leading country,
regarding eating insects,
they eat more than 500 different species.
And here, a very common picture from a food market in Mexico,
where women are selling locusts.
So, why should we start eating insects in Europe again?
I mean, it’s going so well with the pizza and pasta, right?
Well, there are several reasons why we might want to consider that.
And one of them could be climate change.
And at this moment in our history,
our food production, agriculture at large,
has about a fourth of the climate impact,
so about 25 percentish of all greenhouse gas emissions, globally,
comes from agriculture.
And even from animal production alone, it’s 15%.
If you accept the notion
that we have an influence on global change,
and that food production surely contributes a large part of that,
well, here is a place where we can make a difference.
We can start producing more sustainably,
producing it in a way
that at least it’s more good to the environment and to our climate.
And this is where insects come into play.
Because insects have some competencies from nature.
They are really, really efficient.
And I’ll give you a comparison with cows just in a minute,
because that’s the most extreme example, really.
So it’s not that I’m against cows, I do eat steak, now and again.
But it’s just the best example.
Insects are cold-blooded animals, as I mentioned just before.
So just that fact makes them, like fish, really efficient.
So if we can keep the right temperature around them,
then what we feed them is being converted into food
at a far higher rate
than if we fed that same amount of feed to a cow.
That’s my first example, really, when we compare insects with cows.
But we are working on making special diets or feeds for insects,
so this will be better,
but roughly now we get five times more insect biomass,
if we give that feed to them,
than if we gave it to a cow.
Also, what is interesting about insects is regarding land use.
Already now, we can produce 10 times as many insects
in the same space
that it would require to produce a cow.
This is because with insects we can have vertical farming.
Just like many of you maybe know from plants,
vertical farming is also possible with insects.
We’re not talking square metre production, we’re talking cubic metre production.
So if you have a facility that is 10 or 20 meters high,
you can really have a lot of kilograms coming out –
or tons, even, coming out per month per square metre.
And then there is the use of water,
which is also a resource that is really, really valuable,
and on decline in many parts of the world, or –
the distribution of water is changing,
due to our impact on water systems as well, unfortunately.
Insects use in general,
and it is a very generic comparison when you take insects,
because they constitute a million species, really,
but I have to keep a little generic –
about 100-fold less water is being used
as would have been used for producing a cow.
And when we talk of hundreds, the emission of greenhouse gas
is also a 100-fold lower with insects than with cattle.
So,
looks delicious, doesn’t it?
What’s not to like?
It’s good for the planet, also nutritionally,
it has, like an animal product, a high protein content –
40 to 60%, when we look at it at a dry matter level;
good fats, actually,
a lot of unsaturated fatty acids, like omega-6 –
not so much omega-3, a little bit, but they are terrestrial,
so if they had been from the sea, that would have been a little better;
and they have good vitamins and minerals, iron, zinc;
on the vitamins, vitamin B12, vitamin D.
So yeah, it sounds delicious, doesn’t it?
I mean, it maintains our body really well.
But because we have forgotten to eating these types of foods,
culturally, this is revolting.
Maybe I could have wrapped it in a nicer shape for you,
but, yeah, there are products out there.
So really, we need to close this cultural gap.
And how do we do that?
For my own sake,
it’s the biggest change management effort I’ve ever been part of.
And it’s really, that it is what it is, so we need to let it take time.
But we can influence how it will be implemented.
Because it has to be implemented, I will argue.
So,
right now, as it’s not part of our culture,
we are skeptical towards it.
That’s a natural response.
We haven’t seen this before. It could be from Mars, we don’t know.
But as you know from other foods, there’s hope.
Like Sushi, I hear now is getting popular in Italy.
This could be the same with insects.
Maybe it’s not the the older generations that will take this on,
and particularly, perhaps, not in this shape,
but younger people like the millennial generation
who care a lot about climate change,
they are really keen on this.
And in Northern Europe this is a hot topic, I can tell you.
Also younger children, like my own children, six and nine –
well, they may have been a little indoctrinated, I admit that.
But it’s nothing like,
‘You have to eat your insects today, otherwise you won’t have your dessert!’
They really took this on very instinctively, really.
And I’m sorry to say,
but it was far easier for me to having my kids eating mealworms,
like you’re seeing here – beetle larvae – crickets and locusts,
than it was convincing them eating pasta bolognese.
I’m not kidding.
So I think this also shows that this is a natural food to us.
But culture has messed it up a little bit for us
and therefore we need to rely, as always, on the children to implement this.
So within 10 to 20 years, I’m hopeful,
and I will still keep on indoctrinating my children
to make the future a better place,
there’s hope for change.
But, there are still a lot of challenges, for this new industry.
It’s been around for maybe five, seven years in Europe,
in an industrial form, or a form that wants to become industrial,
where we can produce large quantities
that can substitute some of the red meat in particular.
And we are facing some real big challenges, so –
Upscaling, it’s a huge challenge.
Right now, it’s a few thousand tonnes that are being produced in Europe.
We need that to be a million tonnes.
That will likely happen in 2030,
according to the IPIFF, the trade association,
where lots of insect producers are organised.
Consumer awareness or acceptance, I think we covered that.
And then legal framework.
Insects are being put into boxes right now that have been made for pigs and poultry,
but they need their own boxes, really.
But right now, that enables us
to produce and sell insects as fish feed, but also as food.
And then, particularly in northern Europe,
there are many countries where it’s legal to market insects as food.
But we need innovation to help us gain critical mass,
or build critical mass.
And one of the projects which I’m part of, the inVALUABLE project,
which is [short for] insect value chain in a circular bioeconomy,
looks at consolidating the value chain.
So we focus on producing, in this case, mealworms,
how do we process them
and how do we then apply them in products that also consumers are willing to eat.
This is a relatively huge project,
and there are luckily, also, other big projects in Europe.
And is through these projects that we gain momentum
and can hopefully build this critical mass.
And at the same time, of course,
also hoping for some private funding being invested into the companies
that want to implement this commercially.
That is also happening.
I think at present, several hundred millions euros
have already been invested into this new sector
within just five years.
But, there’s more to insects than just food, as I’ve also mentioned.
And I’m sure many of you are right now thinking,
well, it’s ok,
but let a pig eat it, or let a fish eat it,
and then I will consider eating that product instead.
And that’s totally fine,
it’s also culturally, how can I say, understandable.
Insects can really help us implement circular economy
in our food production systems.
Right?
This is a strategic effort in Europe, by the way.
The commission has set a goal
that they want to implement circular economy
and they also want to fight food waste.
And here we can have a win-win situation with the insects.
The commission is also open
towards changing different legal frameworks
to implement the circular economy,
which is needed, as we’ll get back to.
So at the moment food waste, it’s more than just this apple.
It’s actually, in the entire region,
88 million tonnes of food that is being wasted annually.
You can’t even imagine how much that is.
This equals over 140 billion euros that we lose just by wasting this food.
Maybe that’s more easy to imagine, I don’t know; still, two very big numbers.
So, what can we do about it?
Well, of course, we need to waste less food
or we need to make sure that more food is being eaten.
I think there would still be millions of tonnes,
so what can we do about that?
Well, legally we can’t do what I’m supposing on this slide yet
because insects have been put into some legal framework in the EU.
And now, for instance, they are considered farmed animals,
which is a huge win for the insect sector,
otherwise they would not be able to feed them to fish,
when they have been fed on feed material that is considered safe
as we would just use for poultry or pigs.
So a huge win.
And we also have legislation that enables us to to eat them.
But when we use materials that are considered unsafe, like waste,
then, because insects are coined as farmed animals,
we cannot feed them this waste.
I’m sure most of you will have, at some point in your life,
found a few fly larvae in some food that had been left for too long.
It’s a perfect substrate for them, really.
And they are very diverse, some of these.
And one of the superstars in the insect industry
is the black soldier fly.
It’s very general in its diet –
of course, it need certain nutrients,
but it’s very general in how it gets those nutrients.
So food waste, it’s the perfect substrate for black soldier flies.
We’ve done many experiments with that at the Danish Technological Institute,
where I do my work on a daily basis.
So right now it’s not legal. It might be unsafe.
We need to document that, of course, before we can commercialize it, for sure.
But there’s a huge opportunity for letting these black soldier flies,
or other competent insect species, use food waste as a substrate.
Roughly, they can convert 10 kilograms of fresh food waste
into 1 kilogram of dry larvae.
This is as efficient as the most efficient fish producing systems,
which are some of the most efficient in the world.
And then we can take this insect meal and feed to fish, or poultry.
Of course, having documented, before we do this, that it’s all safe.
And I’m quite hopeful that we will be able to document this
because in theory that should be possible.
And we need, of course, to supplement this with testing.
But these black soldier flies, as do other insects,
they actually eat some of the bacteria that might be harmful to us,
so pathogen bacteria that could make us ill.
That’s part of their diet in this whole process.
So they completely take them apart,
and just use the nutrients from these microorganisms.
So, to wrap up, I think it was –
well, I’d like that that fear myself,
because it makes a nice little circle on my talk –
that climate change,
with the Little Ice Age in early medieval times
took insects off our dinner table.
But now climate change,
and we can blame ourselves for that, I believe,
is bringing them back on the table again.
So insects may have been food of the past,
but I would put my money on
that they are also going to be food of the future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Let’s talk about food.
If we look at food from a biological perspective,
it’s one thing.
If we look at it from a cultural perspective,
it’s another thing.
So, for us now, food – it’s pizza, it’s pasta, it’s panini,
to keep it a little bit Italian.
But it’s not that many years ago, at least in geological terms,
only a few thousand years,
that food for us, when we roamed to the savannah,
was leaves, roots, berries, insects.
And occasionally, when we got lucky, big game.
So you can see, there’s a huge divergence
between what we consider food now and what we used to consider as food.
So, what happened in Europe?
Why is insect not part of our food,
when we have been eating insects for thousands of years?
Well, it was part of our food culture, at least in Roman times,
and sometime into early medieval times.
But then we had other things that shaped our food culture,
like agriculture, providing steady supply of crops, animal livestock.
And also during medieval time, there’s another theory
that tries to explain why we forgot eating insects,
which is that we had the Little Ice Age.
That’s not a theory, that’s a fact,
at least if you believe geological records,
but it meant that temperature dropped.
And insects are cold-blooded animals,
so they need energy from their surroundings
to keep their metabolism going.
And for them, that was a huge blow, when temperature dropped.
So species diversity and abundance dropped accordingly.
So our food supply and hence influence – insects into our food culture diminished.
So,
it’s not something that is completely forgotten.
Actually, it’s just in Europe; North America as well.
Around the globe,
still about two, two and a half billion people,
it’s difficult to count,
but on an average day, millions are eating insects.
Over 2000 species of insects have a known history of being eaten.
When you start counting the cows and the pigs and the poultry,
you don’t even get into the hundreds.
And in Mexico, for instance,
which is probably the world’s leading country,
regarding eating insects,
they eat more than 500 different species.
And here, a very common picture from a food market in Mexico,
where women are selling locusts.
So, why should we start eating insects in Europe again?
I mean, it’s going so well with the pizza and pasta, right?
Well, there are several reasons why we might want to consider that.
And one of them could be climate change.
And at this moment in our history,
our food production, agriculture at large,
has about a fourth of the climate impact,
so about 25 percentish of all greenhouse gas emissions, globally,
comes from agriculture.
And even from animal production alone, it’s 15%.
If you accept the notion
that we have an influence on global change,
and that food production surely contributes a large part of that,
well, here is a place where we can make a difference.
We can start producing more sustainably,
producing it in a way
that at least it’s more good to the environment and to our climate.
And this is where insects come into play.
Because insects have some competencies from nature.
They are really, really efficient.
And I’ll give you a comparison with cows just in a minute,
because that’s the most extreme example, really.
So it’s not that I’m against cows, I do eat steak, now and again.
But it’s just the best example.
Insects are cold-blooded animals, as I mentioned just before.
So just that fact makes them, like fish, really efficient.
So if we can keep the right temperature around them,
then what we feed them is being converted into food
at a far higher rate
than if we fed that same amount of feed to a cow.
That’s my first example, really, when we compare insects with cows.
But we are working on making special diets or feeds for insects,
so this will be better,
but roughly now we get five times more insect biomass,
if we give that feed to them,
than if we gave it to a cow.
Also, what is interesting about insects is regarding land use.
Already now, we can produce 10 times as many insects
in the same space
that it would require to produce a cow.
This is because with insects we can have vertical farming.
Just like many of you maybe know from plants,
vertical farming is also possible with insects.
We’re not talking square metre production, we’re talking cubic metre production.
So if you have a facility that is 10 or 20 meters high,
you can really have a lot of kilograms coming out –
or tons, even, coming out per month per square metre.
And then there is the use of water,
which is also a resource that is really, really valuable,
and on decline in many parts of the world, or –
the distribution of water is changing,
due to our impact on water systems as well, unfortunately.
Insects use in general,
and it is a very generic comparison when you take insects,
because they constitute a million species, really,
but I have to keep a little generic –
about 100-fold less water is being used
as would have been used for producing a cow.
And when we talk of hundreds, the emission of greenhouse gas
is also a 100-fold lower with insects than with cattle.
So,
looks delicious, doesn’t it?
What’s not to like?
It’s good for the planet, also nutritionally,
it has, like an animal product, a high protein content –
40 to 60%, when we look at it at a dry matter level;
good fats, actually,
a lot of unsaturated fatty acids, like omega-6 –
not so much omega-3, a little bit, but they are terrestrial,
so if they had been from the sea, that would have been a little better;
and they have good vitamins and minerals, iron, zinc;
on the vitamins, vitamin B12, vitamin D.
So yeah, it sounds delicious, doesn’t it?
I mean, it maintains our body really well.
But because we have forgotten to eating these types of foods,
culturally, this is revolting.
Maybe I could have wrapped it in a nicer shape for you,
but, yeah, there are products out there.
So really, we need to close this cultural gap.
And how do we do that?
For my own sake,
it’s the biggest change management effort I’ve ever been part of.
And it’s really, that it is what it is, so we need to let it take time.
But we can influence how it will be implemented.
Because it has to be implemented, I will argue.
So,
right now, as it’s not part of our culture,
we are skeptical towards it.
That’s a natural response.
We haven’t seen this before. It could be from Mars, we don’t know.
But as you know from other foods, there’s hope.
Like Sushi, I hear now is getting popular in Italy.
This could be the same with insects.
Maybe it’s not the the older generations that will take this on,
and particularly, perhaps, not in this shape,
but younger people like the millennial generation
who care a lot about climate change,
they are really keen on this.
And in Northern Europe this is a hot topic, I can tell you.
Also younger children, like my own children, six and nine –
well, they may have been a little indoctrinated, I admit that.
But it’s nothing like,
‘You have to eat your insects today, otherwise you won’t have your dessert!’
They really took this on very instinctively, really.
And I’m sorry to say,
but it was far easier for me to having my kids eating mealworms,
like you’re seeing here – beetle larvae – crickets and locusts,
than it was convincing them eating pasta bolognese.
I’m not kidding.
So I think this also shows that this is a natural food to us.
But culture has messed it up a little bit for us
and therefore we need to rely, as always, on the children to implement this.
So within 10 to 20 years, I’m hopeful,
and I will still keep on indoctrinating my children
to make the future a better place,
there’s hope for change.
But, there are still a lot of challenges, for this new industry.
It’s been around for maybe five, seven years in Europe,
in an industrial form, or a form that wants to become industrial,
where we can produce large quantities
that can substitute some of the red meat in particular.
And we are facing some real big challenges, so –
Upscaling, it’s a huge challenge.
Right now, it’s a few thousand tonnes that are being produced in Europe.
We need that to be a million tonnes.
That will likely happen in 2030,
according to the IPIFF, the trade association,
where lots of insect producers are organised.
Consumer awareness or acceptance, I think we covered that.
And then legal framework.
Insects are being put into boxes right now that have been made for pigs and poultry,
but they need their own boxes, really.
But right now, that enables us
to produce and sell insects as fish feed, but also as food.
And then, particularly in northern Europe,
there are many countries where it’s legal to market insects as food.
But we need innovation to help us gain critical mass,
or build critical mass.
And one of the projects which I’m part of, the inVALUABLE project,
which is [short for] insect value chain in a circular bioeconomy,
looks at consolidating the value chain.
So we focus on producing, in this case, mealworms,
how do we process them
and how do we then apply them in products that also consumers are willing to eat.
This is a relatively huge project,
and there are luckily, also, other big projects in Europe.
And is through these projects that we gain momentum
and can hopefully build this critical mass.
And at the same time, of course,
also hoping for some private funding being invested into the companies
that want to implement this commercially.
That is also happening.
I think at present, several hundred millions euros
have already been invested into this new sector
within just five years.
But, there’s more to insects than just food, as I’ve also mentioned.
And I’m sure many of you are right now thinking,
well, it’s ok,
but let a pig eat it, or let a fish eat it,
and then I will consider eating that product instead.
And that’s totally fine,
it’s also culturally, how can I say, understandable.
Insects can really help us implement circular economy
in our food production systems.
Right?
This is a strategic effort in Europe, by the way.
The commission has set a goal
that they want to implement circular economy
and they also want to fight food waste.
And here we can have a win-win situation with the insects.
The commission is also open
towards changing different legal frameworks
to implement the circular economy,
which is needed, as we’ll get back to.
So at the moment food waste, it’s more than just this apple.
It’s actually, in the entire region,
88 million tonnes of food that is being wasted annually.
You can’t even imagine how much that is.
This equals over 140 billion euros that we lose just by wasting this food.
Maybe that’s more easy to imagine, I don’t know; still, two very big numbers.
So, what can we do about it?
Well, of course, we need to waste less food
or we need to make sure that more food is being eaten.
I think there would still be millions of tonnes,
so what can we do about that?
Well, legally we can’t do what I’m supposing on this slide yet
because insects have been put into some legal framework in the EU.
And now, for instance, they are considered farmed animals,
which is a huge win for the insect sector,
otherwise they would not be able to feed them to fish,
when they have been fed on feed material that is considered safe
as we would just use for poultry or pigs.
So a huge win.
And we also have legislation that enables us to to eat them.
But when we use materials that are considered unsafe, like waste,
then, because insects are coined as farmed animals,
we cannot feed them this waste.
I’m sure most of you will have, at some point in your life,
found a few fly larvae in some food that had been left for too long.
It’s a perfect substrate for them, really.
And they are very diverse, some of these.
And one of the superstars in the insect industry
is the black soldier fly.
It’s very general in its diet –
of course, it need certain nutrients,
but it’s very general in how it gets those nutrients.
So food waste, it’s the perfect substrate for black soldier flies.
We’ve done many experiments with that at the Danish Technological Institute,
where I do my work on a daily basis.
So right now it’s not legal. It might be unsafe.
We need to document that, of course, before we can commercialize it, for sure.
But there’s a huge opportunity for letting these black soldier flies,
or other competent insect species, use food waste as a substrate.
Roughly, they can convert 10 kilograms of fresh food waste
into 1 kilogram of dry larvae.
This is as efficient as the most efficient fish producing systems,
which are some of the most efficient in the world.
And then we can take this insect meal and feed to fish, or poultry.
Of course, having documented, before we do this, that it’s all safe.
And I’m quite hopeful that we will be able to document this
because in theory that should be possible.
And we need, of course, to supplement this with testing.
But these black soldier flies, as do other insects,
they actually eat some of the bacteria that might be harmful to us,
so pathogen bacteria that could make us ill.
That’s part of their diet in this whole process.
So they completely take them apart,
and just use the nutrients from these microorganisms.
So, to wrap up, I think it was –
well, I’d like that that fear myself,
because it makes a nice little circle on my talk –
that climate change,
with the Little Ice Age in early medieval times
took insects off our dinner table.
But now climate change,
and we can blame ourselves for that, I believe,
is bringing them back on the table again.
So insects may have been food of the past,
but I would put my money on
that they are also going to be food of the future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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