Flour Made From Insects Will Feed Underfed Populations

PHOTO: Grasshoppers at a market near Oaxaca, Mex.ABC News

Chew on this.

A team of MBA students were the recipients of the 2013 Hult Prize earlier this week, providing them with $1 million in seed money to produce an insect-based, protein-rich flour for feeding malnourished populations in other countries. The product is called Power Flour.

“It’s a huge deal because we had a very ambitious but highly executable five-year plan in place,” said team captain Mohammed Ashour, whose team hails from McGill University in Montreal. “So winning this prize is a great step in that direction.”  

Ashour, along with teammates Shobhita Soor, Jesse Pearlstein, Zev Thompson and Gabe Mott, will be immediately working with an advisory board to recruit farmers and workers in Mexico, where a population of roughly 4 million live in slum conditions with widespread malnutrition.

“We will be starting with grasshoppers,” Ashour said.

He noted that the insect is already familiar to the local diet and currently sells at a premium because of a three-month harvesting season and because grasshoppers are typically hand-picked. But farmers have already expressed interest in raising grasshoppers on a mass level, according to Ashour.

While for Americans the idea of eating bugs remains mostly a novelty, in other areas of the world they are a common form of protein. The kinds of insects people consume from country to country varies, with the people of Ghana preferring palm weevils and in Botswana, caterpillars. The Power Flour product will vary ingredients according to those habits, adjusting production to the breeding cycles and nutritional profile of each culture.

In order to research their business plan, the members of the McGill Hult team have all consumed “kilos” of insects themselves, Ashour said.

“Shobhita was recently researching in Thailand and tried everything from worms to water beetles,” he said.

Even Gabe Mott, who identifies as a vegetarian, has consumed his fair share of basil-flavored palm weevil.

“He’s a vegetarian for ethical and ecological reasons, and when he looked at insects, for him it was really not an issue as far as being a source of protein that is ecologically balanced,” said Ashour.

Pass the chapulines.

http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/flour-made-insects-feed-underfed-populations/story?id=20402024

5 thoughts on “Flour Made From Insects Will Feed Underfed Populations

  1. All well and good until the profitmasters get involved then it will be a millstone around poor countries necks, you wait and see.

    Humanitarian aid has become perverted and should be renamed food for usury which is really what it is, when the US or UK say go into Nigeria offering “aid” they promise billions in food, machinery, expertise etc BUT to qualify for this aid, Nigeria would have to sign secret deals making the US or UK have most favoured status for exports, sell their natural resources under the cost price, sign over land or buildings for corporations and government programmes and of course the target nation loses immensely every time.

    China on the other hand takes the opposite view, it solicits trade through gifting projects, if a target country enters into a trade agreement with China, China could sweeten the deal by building a couple of schools or hospitals or a sports centre, yet because of tenets in the US or UK’s aid deals state “we must have exclusive access” the Chinese are unable to access some of the African states due to this.

  2. That’s gross…oh 10+11= 21….I win…lol.
    Why not give everybody flour and food that isn’t made out of fukking insects? What? Can’t be done? the Fukk you say.
    The pedophiles that call themselves the English royalty own more acreage on this planet than anyone else.
    The Queen of England could stop world hunger with a snap of her fukking Lucifarian fingers…but she chooses not to.
    If I owned 1 sixth of the non oceanic land on this planet and people were starving….I would be planting as many crops as I could….just sayin.

    1. Yes tammyc, that is why the NWO/PTB are no where close to being our freind. In fact they should be considered our most dangerous enemy

    2. Ah but you will come up against Henry Kissinger’s “useless eaters” if we did that and there is a lot of powerful people at the top of this who are quite happy to see whole nations starve to preserve their own free access to resources.

      Europe and the US throw away more food as waste that could feed every person on this planet a balanced diet, Britain alone discards billions of eggs every year simply because they are too small, wrong colour or slightly misshapen, the same again with vegetables, if it doesn’t fit the supermarkets stringent criteria, into the landfill it goes.

      But the theory goes if we were to give all that nice food to them starving people in Africa or Asia, that they would then go off and have lots more children and up goes the population, if you have ever read NSA#200 by Kissinger and remembering that this was signed into US policy by Ford, it is very frightening to think that the US government has been on a crusade to cull the world population through carrot (abortion clinics abroad, sterilisation programmes) and stick (war, pestilience, famine, forced sterilisation through pharmacopoeia) to the tune of 2 billion people, yep people like Gates and Kissinger are actively looking to reduce the worlds population by about a third and to create a situation where they are top of the pile and the rest of us are definitely hoping it is rain splashing down on us.

  3. The morons that be, keep trying to reinvent the wheel….
    If they want to solve the worlds hunger problems, they
    should revert back to what works best……
    LET THE FARMERS FARM !
    Instead of paying them not to.
    Or inventing some crap ……
    Or trying to save some damned three eyed newt.
    But of course that would be too easy and make way
    more sense for their pointy little heads to comprehend.
    This country, amongst several others, feed the world.
    LET’S JUST DO IT AGAIN ! End of problems…Period !

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