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Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor
The wriggly beetle larvae known as mealworms could one day dominate supermarket shelves as a more sustainable alternative to chicken, beef, pork and milk, researchers in the Netherlands say.
To see if insects really might be a more sustainable food source than livestock, Oonincx and his colleagues analyzed what global warming gases insects might generate as a result of respiration, the production of their feed, distribution networks to stores where they would get sold, and emissions from the heating of climate-controlled rearing facilities.
The researchers found that growing mealworms released less greenhouse gases than producing cow milk, chicken, pork and beef. They also discovered that growing mealworms takes up only about 10 percent of the land used for production of beef, 30 percent of the land used for pork and 40 percent of the land needed for chickens to generate similar amounts of protein. The researchers note that optimizing mealworm growth might lead to even more land savings.
COMPLETE STORY
Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor
The wriggly beetle larvae known as mealworms could one day dominate supermarket shelves as a more sustainable alternative to chicken, beef, pork and milk, researchers in the Netherlands say.
To see if insects really might be a more sustainable food source than livestock, Oonincx and his colleagues analyzed what global warming gases insects might generate as a result of respiration, the production of their feed, distribution networks to stores where they would get sold, and emissions from the heating of climate-controlled rearing facilities.
The researchers found that growing mealworms released less greenhouse gases than producing cow milk, chicken, pork and beef. They also discovered that growing mealworms takes up only about 10 percent of the land used for production of beef, 30 percent of the land used for pork and 40 percent of the land needed for chickens to generate similar amounts of protein. The researchers note that optimizing mealworm growth might lead to even more land savings.
COMPLETE STORY