It's one of a growing number of operations raising crickets for human consumption that these farmers say is more ecologically sound than meat but acknowledge is sure to bug some people out.
Once consumers get beyond the ick factor, they say, there are a lot of benefits to consuming bugs.
“We don’t need everybody to eat insects,” said Robert Nathan Allen, founder and director of Little Herds, an educational nonprofit in Austin, Texas, that promotes the use of insects for human food and animal feed. “The point we really like to highlight with the education is that if only a small percent of people add this to their diet, there’s a huge environmental impact.”
Cricket fans say if only 1 percent of the U.S. population substituted even just 1 percent of their meat consumption with insects, millions of gallons of water in drinking and irrigation would be saved, along with thousands of metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions from machinery and animals.
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