[melaniejs (OP)]

Galina asks:

Why don't people eat the swarms of locusts plaguing Africa?

What do you think?

[alancalverd]

It's a question I've been asking for years. People catch a few in hand nets and fry them, but the impact is negligible. 

The problem is the lack of a commercial scale harvester and processor. The swarms are enormous but unpredictable, so you need to harvest them quickly when they have just eaten (they land near exhaustion and double their weight in a few hours, quickly converting the plant material into fat and protein - best eaten when they are ready to fly again) then process and preserve them until needed. We do it with peas, and the required kit is pretty similar.

I have suggests a $1M prototype program to develop the necessary hardware but haven't found a sponsor yet. Any offers of help will be gratefully received.

The rewards can be substantial. Top quality frozen locust can be sold as a gourmet food. Extracted protein and fat can be turned into locust surimi for general and emergency food - think "sustainable prawn curry". The waste can be turned into chicken feed, fertiliser and diesel fuel. What's not to like? 

It's being done with cockroaches fed on food waste, but they don't taste as good as locusts.

[Galina]

Interesting! Some very nice suggestions. Also locusts can be used for meal preparation for more versatile use in baked goods, pasta etc, and it will keep well.

So the main caveat is the lack of sustainable infrastructure?

Adaptation of already existing machinery and tools would make it more plausible to apply to such unpredictable events in terms of timing and scale

[alancalverd]

I think the "adaptation" needs such time and effort that it's worth producing a specialised harvester and processor that can do the job really efficiently. 

Perhaps the special kit should be a "bolt on" to a standard truck or tractor - more like a traditional towed reaper than a completely self-powered combine harvester, so it can be driven by any farm hand. On the other hand the processing I had in mind involved on-site chopping, cooking and chemical extraction to deliver a freezer-ready product, which will require specialist operators.

You have set the wheels turning in my brain again! I now see a truck carrying the harvester and tractor, and a processing factory inside a bus. Very neat: we can get two separate teams working on the project - agricultural engineers and food chemists, solving the quite different problems of harvesting over rough ground and processing in a sterile environment.   

As an interim process, we could just chop, dry and separate the components. If you chop an insect roughly, the chitin will remain in large pieces  when you dry it, but the desiccated edible protein will crumble to dust that can be sieved.  Then you can mill the hard bits into a combustible powder that can power the dryer!

[RD]

Galina asks:
Why don't people eat the swarms of locusts plaguing Africa?

In some places they do eat flies ... https://youtu.be/YcXsx8gpN9M?t=217

[chiralSPO]

I have eaten crickets before (quite good). Also, it appears that may types of locusts are kosher! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosher_locust

[Monox D. I-Fly]

I have eaten crickets before (quite good). Also, it appears that may types of locusts are kosher! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosher_locust

Both crickets and grasshoppers are delicious. Dunno about locusts, though. Are they the same as grasshoppers?

[Galina]

Yes pretty much, we tried locusts at Bug Farm in Wales!

The question is why the infrastructure for capture is not established on a large scale given the widespread utility and positive attitudes to insect consumption

[Galina]

In some places they do eat flies ...

This video is exactly what prompted me to wonder! 😊

[Colin2B]

.......given the widespread utility and positive attitudes to insect consumption

I hadn’t noticed that positive attitude 

[alancalverd]

The question is why the infrastructure for capture is not established on a large scale given the widespread utility and positive attitudes to insect consumption

It is a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

The profitable market is at the high end - gourmet foods and a substitute for prawns or chicken in cafeterias and curry houses. This market needs developing and demands continuity of supply, so any investor is taking a long term punt on a fairly capital-intensive project.

The immediate mass demand for emergency feeding is not very profitable, and even if you have product, the problem is one of distribution.

So we need an alliance between a high-end food producer and a charity, to make it worthwhile investing in several years' R&D, field trials and product and market development. I've tried and failed to raise such interest, but would be happy to get involved if anyone has a breakthrough idea or a philanthropic rich uncle.

[Galina]

The immediate mass demand for emergency feeding is not very profitable, and even if you have product, the problem is one of distribution.

Very interesting!
Perhaps coupling the processing and preservation (dessicated meal) with distribution may address some of these issues

Also, to get better perspective I have reached out to a researcher into this field, he pointed out that unfortunately due to the large scales of the insect swarms the harvesting for foodstuff preparation is unlikely to make a dent in reducing the negative economic impact of crop destruction...

Paper:
Alternative approaches to Red-billed Quelea Queleaquelea management: mass-capture for food (2014)

However, the solution is definitely addressing a problem (protein deficiency, etc.), perhaps the startup funding scene would be more receptive to proposal?

[alancalverd]

I think the balance may well favour eating the locusts. They will destroy the crop whether we eat them or not. More to the point, humans don't eat the whole crop - mostly seeds, fruit or a few leaves. Locusts eat everything and convert it very efficiently into fat and protein.

Yes, the swarms are enormous, and it's unlikely that you could harvest more than 80% of even a small swarm, but the locust you eat today isn't going to eat someone else's crop tomorrow, so for every ton of locusts you harvest, you are protecting maybe another 50 tons of raw crop or 10 tons of human food downstream.

 

A desert locust swarm can be 460 square miles in size and pack between 40 and 80 million locusts into less than half a square mile. Each locust can eat its weight in plants each day, so a swarm of such size would eat 423 million pounds of plants every day. 

With an active life of about 50 days, it's worth catching them early!

[Galina]

Yes for sure.

It appears limiting factors to implementation remain investment into infrastructure and logistics

[nicephotog]

Good taste i guess, some grasshoppers are edible in some countrie as food source.