They’re nutritious and plentiful: that’s why insects could be the food of the future

December 13, 2019December 12, 2019 / sueyockneyauthor / Leave a comment

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Entomophagy – the eating of insects

When Monty Python aired the sketch ‘Crunchy Frog’, inspired by the introduction of the Trade description Act of 1968, in which inspectors question the owner of the Whizzo Chocolate Company about the ingredients of his Quality Assortment, including the suspect confection ‘Cockroach Cluster’, they tapped into the taboo subject of eating insects, or entomophagy as it’s officially known. Later, shows like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here added the revulsion element to the proceedings with the eating of live insects in the bushtucker trials, discontinued in 2019, after complaints of cruelty from animal rights groups.

Apart from the accidental consumption of insects, which I like to refer to as the ‘slug in lettuce’ moments, it’s fair to say that people in the western world have not embraced the idea of eating insects as part of a nutritional diet. However, and this might come as a shock to some, we’re already eating insects on a regular basis and have been for years. A certain amount of ‘insect material’ is allowed in food, since it causes us no harm. I won’t go into what foods contain insect parts, but it is a pretty long list. The truth of the matter is this – insects have been eaten for thousands of years in many countries around the world and continue to be eaten, and enjoyed, by two billion people. And everyone’s just fine!

There are so many reasons why we should all be eating insects. With an ever growing population and the need to produce food to feed it, insects could be a sustainable, environmentally friendly solution to fighting world hunger in the future. Farming insects would have less of a carbon footprint than the farming of cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry and could provide developing countries with a viable form of agriculture, since insects can be bred in a lot of different climates, many of which are unsuitable for traditional farming.

Then there’s the nutritional value of insects. They are packed full of protein, amino acids and antioxidants and are, not surprisingly, low in fat, making them a very healthy eating option. So what insects are edible? Well, there is a very large number, the most common being crickets; grasshoppers; mealworms (well, it’s in the name, isn’t it); scorpions and ants. This list is modest compared to the huge range of insects eaten on a daily basis in the developing world, including witchetty grubs, cicadas, giant water beetles and wasp eggs!

Sainsbury’s is the first supermarket in the UK to stock an insect food product, with the introduction in their snack range, of Eat Grub’s smoky BBQ crunchy roasted crickets! In addition, there are a growing number of restaurants that regularly include insects as part of their menus. One such establishment is Archipelago in London which has several insect based dishes on offer, including a dessert featuring chocolate-covered locusts. Not that far away from a Cockroach Cluster, I’d say. Monty Python as prophet. But we’re not laughing now!

Right to repair?

November 8, 2019November 11, 2019 / sueyockneyauthor / Leave a comment

R.I.P.

Recently, my mobile phone died on me only a few months before my free update was due. For a week, I tried to ignore the signs, the flickering screen; the way it flashed on and off; and then, the final stage, the fading of the display to pastel shades, making it appear as if its non-fast colours had been dipped in a strong detergent.

Then it happened. I switched it on the following morning and there was no display at all. I knew it was on, that they were there – the icons, the keypad, the apps, everything, alive beneath the blackness. But if you can’t see them, what can you do? It’s game over. So I made my way down to my local mobile phone shop. With misplaced optimism, I thought I’d ask about the possibility of a repair. I needn’t have bothered, the assistant’s blank stare gave me my answer before he’d uttered a word.

He pointed to the cracked screen, as if to verify his case. I explained that I had dropped it and damaged the screen in two places shortly after I got it, about fifteen months ago. I was surprised to be told that this was what was causing the current situation and that it had suffered a gradual deterioration since that happened. I felt the need to mention that it had been working perfectly alright until a few days ago. ‘That’s how it goes,’ he said, philosophically, as he led me towards the display of shiny new models. Apparently the only option I had open to me was to buy a new one. I didn’t have time to argue with him.

So my phone, like so many others before it, was destined to join the ever growing mountain of junk. It’s a sobering fact that each year Britons throw away two million tonnes of electronic waste alone and I was about to add to it. What’s more, I was being forced to buy a replacement, fuelling climate change from the greenhouse gases released in the manufacturing process. It seemed to me like the world had gone mad.

There is, though, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The EU will be introducing legislation obliging manufacturers to make their products longer-lasting and easier to repair. The move has been hailed as a step in the right direction by consumer groups and environmental lobbyists. The new rules, signed off earlier this year, will come into force from April 2021 and will apply to household consumer products such as lighting, display screens, washing machines, dishwashers and fridges – but not, as yet, smaller electronic devices.

For that we may all need to turn to one of the many repair cafes that have sprung up in recent years, where volunteers help people repair their electronic items. However, in an ironic twist, the EU legislation is likely to be a threat to these very organisations since, repair professionals are set to retain the right to conduct most repair operations, with the new rules stating that producers will have to make most spare parts and repair manuals available for their use only.

Later back home, I placed my old phone, pronounced dead before its time, into the bottom drawer of my bedside table along with all my other ex-phones. It lay snug inside its leather wallet case, the one that doesn’t fit my new phone because the new model is a few millimetres narrower. Yes, I was forced to buy another case, even though my old one was still in excellent condition. Happy days!

Photo by picjumbo.com from Pexels

Space debris: how an astronaut’s discarded glove could cause havoc

October 11, 2019October 7, 2019 / sueyockneyauthor / Leave a comment

Clearing up our rubbish

It seems that wherever humans go they will always leave behind their rubbish and space is no exception to this rather depressing fact. Over 60 years of space activity has resulted in a great deal of space debris being left behind to float aimlessly in orbit around the Earth.

Current estimates indicate that there are almost 130 million objects in space of various shapes and sizes, ranging in size from a few millimetres to many metres and they can all prove hazardous. Amongst it all is known to be a glove lost by astronaut Ed White on the first American space-walk back in 1965. Even something as tiny as a fleck of paint, too small to be tracked, has the potential, when travelling at speeds of up to 17,500 mph, to cause damage. A number of space shuttle windows have had to be replaced because of paint fleck damage. And that’s just the small stuff.

Over 900,000 objects are considered big enough to damage or completely destroy entire spacecraft should they be involved in a collision. Objects like old satellites, spent rocket stages and fragments caused by their disintegration and collisions. In 2009, a defunct Russian satellite collided with and destroyed a functioning U.S. commercial satellite. The collision caused an extra 2,000 pieces of trackable debris to be added to the existing inventory of space rubbish.

NASA has well-established rules for tracking and dealing with possible collisions with such objects, including the most major of these, the evacuation of a space station. Debris avoidance manoeuvres are planned according to the probability of collision and the impact to mission objectives and risk to the crew. Over the last 10 years several collision avoidance manoeuvres have been conducted.

However the problem is not going to go away, in fact it will only get worse as more and more bits of space junk are added to what’s already up there. The only answer is to get rid of it. And that’s exactly what a 100kg satellite called RemoveDebris UK has been doing, by trialling a number of technologies that could be used in the future to deal with the clear up of space debris. The tests, using a harpoon and nets, have been successful and could open the door to a solution to the problem.

Simon Fellowes, from the Surrey Space Centre and manager of the consortium behind RemoveDebris said this, “As a university, we’ve given proof of concept for the basic ideas; we’ve shown the technology-readiness has reached a certain level. It’s now for industry to turn these concepts into a commercial product or business.”

Let’s hope that someone heeds his words and takes action before the very real prospect of space tourism becomes the norm, because that amount of debris floating about on the space highways is an accident waiting to happen.

Something nasty is growing beneath our streets

September 27, 2019September 22, 2019 / sueyockneyauthor / Leave a comment

They’re big, they’re ugly and they’re difficult to get rid of.

Next time you reach for the plunger to attack a blockage in your sink and think you’re having a tough time of it, spare a thought for the poor souls that have to deal with the huge putrid masses of non-biodegradable solid matter and congealed grease or cooking fat that have become regular features in our sewers. Yes, I’m talking here about – fatbergs.

And when I say big, I mean BIG. In 2017, a monster fatberg 250 metres (820 feet) long and weighing in at 130 tonnes was discovered in a sewer in Whitechapel. It took nine weeks and more than £1m to clear it. But if you think that this is only a problem for big cities you’d be wrong. Sewer workers in the south coast town of Sidmouth, not far from where I live, found a fatberg in December 2018 that was 64 metres (210ft) long. It took nearly two months to clear it in very hazardous conditions, involving toxic gasses that warranted the wearing of full breathing apparatus. It was the biggest fatberg that South West Water had ever come across in their service’s history.

Every year the UK spends about £100m clearing an estimated 300,000 fatbergs caused by the things that we pour down our sinks and flush down our loos that we shouldn’t. Interestingly, the problem of fatbergs is a relatively recent phenomenon and started in the 2010’s and isn’t just to do with our aging Victorian sewer system. In fact the name ‘fatberg’ is very misleading, because what they should really be called is – ‘wipebergs’.

Earlier this year, the BBC three-part series War on Plastic presented by Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall and Anita Rani revealed a fact about wipes that came as a huge shock to many and that is that they are principally made of plastic, a fact that the manufacturers have failed to make known to consumers for years. Because of this, a wipe doesn’t break down, but stays intact combining with fats and grease. And since we, in the UK, are the biggest users of wipes in the world it all adds up to a huge and expensive problem for our water companies.

There have been many campaigns to encourage us to flush only the three P’s down our loos – pee, poo and paper! However, it’s obvious that the message isn’t getting through. A welcome initiative from Water UK means that wipes that have passed its testing will get a “Fine to flush” logo. If people switched to using these flushable wipes, then production of ‘plastic’ wipes would soon come to an end – and not before time. Of course, we could all stop using wipes altogether. I’ve always found that a piece of kitchen towel and some water does the job just as well.

How changing your diet could help the environment

July 5, 2019July 6, 2019 / sueyockneyauthor / Leave a comment

What’s your food’s carbon footprint?

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to make my diet more environmentally friendly. Food production is responsible for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming, according to a University of Oxford study. There’s a great deal of information around at the moment about the impact that different foods have on the environment, but one thing’s for sure and that is that meat and other animal products are the main culprits, making up more than half of that figure. That’s why I’ve cut down my meat consumption to once a week and taken a very small step in the right direction.

However, the conclusion that most research comes to is that if we’re serious about reducing global warming, then we all need to become vegan. I strongly believe that this is true and that if the human race survives the consequences of all the environmental devastation we’ve created, then in the future we will all be eating plant-based foods. But like a lot of people, I don’t think that I can make this dietary transition in one step.

So, using the Climate Change Food Calculator (BBC News), I have tried to work out how I could do it in stages, looking at proteins to start with. Now, the calculator is simple and does not include all foodstuffs but it gives you a very good idea of how proteins compare on the ‘environmentally unfriendly’ scale. Beef is at the top of that scale. If you ate a 75g portion of beef 1-2 times a week, over an entire year, your consumption of beef contributes 604kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions. In plain speak that is equivalent to driving a regular petrol car 1,542 miles; or heating an average UK home for 95 days; or 1 return flight from London to Malaga.

OK, so meat’s not good. What about fish, then? The calculator only gives you the option of farmed fish. Eating 140g (one cod fillet) 1-2 times a week over a year would result in a figure of 146kg per annum. That’s 373 miles by car and 23 days heating. But, whatever you do, don’t get on that plane, because you’re not going to get to Malaga. Interestingly, pork is only just below fish on the scale, with chicken quite a bit lot lower. I wasn’t expecting that. So if you can’t give up meat completely, then chicken is the option to go for.

Dairy foods are next, in particular – cheese. I love cheese, in all its varieties, so it was with a great deal of trepidation that I put it into the calculator. A 30g serving of cheese (that’s not much!) 1-2 times a week results in a figure of 75kg of greenhouse gas emissions; or 193 miles by car; or 11 days of heating. The amount of cheese I eat in a week is going to bump that figure up a huge amount. Something will have to be done here!

The most environmentally friendly protein is not beans; and it’s not tofu, which is a relief because, although I’ve never tried it, curdled soymilk pressed into cubes with coagulants doesn’t sound too appetising to me. It is, in fact, nuts. One handful of nuts, 1-2 times a week results in 1.1kg of greenhouse gas emissions which, over a year, equates to 3 miles by car; or 0.2 days of heating.

Photo by Malidate Van from Pexel

sue yockney

Author & Writer

Environmental