Mealworms for Food: A Water Footprint Perspective

By Pier Paolo Miglietta, F. D. Leo, Marcello Ruberti, S. Massari. 2015

205 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we have explored the possibility of substituting traditional meat products with an alternative source of protein (insects) in order to reduce human pressure on water. Insects, in fact, could represent a good alternative source of quality proteins and nutrients and they are already a very popular component of the diet of one third of the world’s population in approximately 80% of countries. In the study, we have taken into account only two species of edible insects (Tenebrio molitor and Zophobas morio mealworms), because they are already commercially produced even in Western countries, and for this reason it is possible to find specific data in literature about their diets. We have used the water footprint (WF) as a reliable indicator to calculate the volume of water required for production and to compare different products. The final aim of the work is, in fact, to evaluate the WF of the production of edible insects with a focus on water consumption associated with protein content, in order to make a comparison with other animal protein sources. We have demonstrated that, from a freshwater resource perspective, it is more efficient to obtain protein through mealworms rather than other traditional farmed animals.

Subfields: Ecology, Insect Science, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6d9c54313f5114ae9462a94c2453f06d69e727a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. A. van Huis
2. D. Oonincx
3. Matan Shelomi

In Insect Science

1. Matan Shelomi
2. Yu-shiang Wang
3. D. Oonincx
4. A. van Huis
5. J. V. van Loon
6. M. Dicke
7. J. Ball
8. V. Varelas

In Social Psychology

1. Matan Shelomi
2. D. Oonincx
3. Yu-shiang Wang
4. A. van Huis
5. J. V. van Loon
6. M. Dicke
7. K. Barragán-Fonseca

Citations in the corpus

• The environmental sustainability of insects as food and feed. A review (2017, background): “To date, LCAs have only been published for mealworms, house crickets, black soldier flies, and houseflies (Oonincx and de Boer 2012; Miglietta et al. 2015; Roffeis et al. 2015; Van Zanten et al. 2015; Smetana et al. 2016, Halloran et al. 2017).”
• Life cycle assessment of cricket farming in north-eastern Thailand (2017, background): “Miglietta et al. (2015) found that mealworms required 4.3 m3 of water per kg of edible mass, a value which is approximately 10 times more than the current cricket farm in Thailand.”
• Review of Black Soldier Fly (Hermetia illucens) as Animal Feed and Human Food (2017, background): “Industrial-scale insect farms need less water and land space than pasture [35], can have a lower water footprint per gram of protein than any conventional livestock or even milk and eggs [36,37], and some insect species can even consume organic waste and side-streams [29,31].”