More and more people are focusing on environmentally friendly ingredients.

But what if I told you the next big thing in sustainable eating has been around for millennia?

It's crunchy, it's nutritious, and it's bugs.

Yes, insects, entamophagy, or eating bugs, isn't some futuristic fad.

It's a global tradition and a culinary practice that routinely feeds around 2 billion people on the planet today.

For example, in Thailand, street vendors sell deep fried grasshoppers, bamboo worms, and large water beetles.

In Mexico, ant larva, known as escamoles, are a delicacy added to tacos and grasshoppers or chapulines are a common snack.

And in Ghana, termites can be a fried treat or even made into bread.

There are a ton of benefits to eating bugs.

They're high in protein, vitamin B12, iron, zinc fiber, essential amino acids.

Omega-three and omega-six fatty acids and antioxidants.

They're also very environmentally friendly when compared to raising livestock.

Insects produce considerably fewer greenhouse gases, and they don't take up much space, so you don't have to clear out as much land as you would to raise animals.

Bugs also don't need much water.

1 pound of cricket protein only requires one gallon of water, versus the 1850 gallons of water it takes to produce the same amount of beef.

And they don't need that much food either.

They can be fed with organic waste.

From an economic standpoint, raising edible bugs, commonly referred to as mini-livestock, is a rising industry that doesn't cost as much as a conventional farm, can provide food security, and be a reliable source of income for people in lower socioeconomic areas.

And they're super abundant.

In fact, the Food and Agriculture Organization says there are more than 1900 species that can be used for food.

Talk about variety.

With wins all around, it seems like a no brainer that eating bugs can help save the world.

So why haven't many of us in Europe and North America started incorporating more crickets, ants, or grubs into our diets, even though the practice was commonplace on both continents for millennia?

Well, historians look at this in two ways.

There's an environmental perspective that looks at the history of geographical limitations.

And then there's a cultural perspective that focuses on learned aversions rooted in cultural biases.

First, let's talk about geographical limitations.

Some historians believe that the likelihood of bug eating decreases in countries with colder climates.

Patterns of global behavior show that rates of consumption are greater in the tropics, and decrease gradually as you travel north.

This makes sense when you consider that places with colder winters have fewer large bugs and swarming insects.

However, bug eating wasn't completely absent in Europe.

As far back as the fourth century BCE, Aristotle wrote about how cossus caterpillars had a sweet and nutty flavor and a mushroom like texture, and were a favorite among the Greeks.

A few hundred years later, Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and naturalist, wrote extensively in his book Naturalis Historia about how bugs were widely consumed by ancient Romans.

He wrote about how people ate beetles, ants, and caterpillars, and how locusts and grasshoppers were considered a delicacy.

He also talked about the supposed medicinal properties of ants.

The Bible also has references to bug eating in the Old Testament.

Leviticus 11:21 to 23 says locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers are acceptable, but not other winged four footed insects.

And in the New Testament, Matthew 3:4 describes how John the Baptist eight locusts and wild honey.

Historians mark the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling that occurred from the early 14th century through the mid-19th century as a point when bug eating across Europe declined.

There are still records of people consuming insects through the Renaissance.

In the mid-16th century, Swiss physician Conrad Gesner reported that the people of Switzerland and Germany ate grasshoppers, locusts, beetles, and ants.

Around the same time, Italian physician and naturalist Andrea Bocci wrote about how locusts and cicadas were a healthy and nutritious food source.

But for the most part, after hundreds of years of colder winters and harsher storms across Europe, the consumption of insects wasn't as widespread as it had been centuries before.

The Little Ice Age and the decline of bug eating in Europe coincide with colonization.

Which brings us to our second perspective: learned aversions rooted in cultural biases.

In the Americas, indigenous people had already developed culinary traditions around bugs.

The Cherokee in North Carolina would dig up young cicadas, roast corn worms, and yellowjacket grubs.

The Paiute were among many Western tribes that developed techniques to smoke caterpillars out of trees, and in what is now northwestern Canada.

The Tlicho would let botfly larva grow on their meats.

But as Europeans started crossing into latitudes where insects were more plentiful, they created this narrative that eating bugs was somehow inferior, which enabled the subjugation of the people and the lands they colonized.

Throughout colonial history, settlers were regularly faced with malnutrition and other deficiencies that would lower their immune systems and subject them to illness and infection.

They refused to try many new foods, including insects, insisting that unfamiliar foods were making them sick and that only their normal European diet would make them feel better.

Other records describe indigenous diets as being driven by desperation.

Further, stigmatizing these traditional foods by labeling them as food for those who were poor and had lower standards of living.

These narratives persisted throughout colonized countries into the 1990s, when Arnold von House, an entomologist doing fieldwork in Niger, noticed that as communities adopted Western culture, they stopped eating bugs.

So where does that leave us today?

We're not in a little ice age anymore.

In fact, quite the opposite.

2024 was the warmest year on record, and we have the technology and infrastructure to raise mini-livestock.

So there aren't any geographical limitations like there were centuries ago.

And though new bugs are yucky, it was never a valid excuse.

I get why a lot of us are hesitant to start chowing down on ants, grub worms, and beetles.

There's the mental hurdle of 500 years of bad press to get over.

But it's important to remember that there are a lot of places around the world where the practice of eating insects never stopped.

It's not only commonplace, but also celebrated.

Take the small Japanese village of Kushi harder, for instance, where the annual Hippo Matsuri wasp eating festival takes place.

The wasps are consumed throughout the year.

The festival brings people together to buy and sell wasps and eat delicious treats like larva with steamed rice.

Wasp tempura and wasp onigiri.

So if you're ready to explore, there are a lot of culinary innovators leading the charge to reinvent our food supply chain.

Crickets are considered a gateway bug, and if you don't want to eat a whole one, there are companies like Three Cricketeers in Minneapolis who are turning crickets into snack foods and grinding them down into a powder you can use to make smoothies, soups and pasta.

North Carolina based company EXO uses crickets in their protein bars.

Beyond just crickets, you've got Joseph Yoon, the founder of Brooklyn Bugs, a group advocating for edible insects who created a whole bunch of cicada recipes, including ones for tempura fried cicadas and cicada kimchi.

For over a decade, Monica Martinez of Don Bugito, a snack company in the San Francisco Bay area, has been leaning into her Mexican pre-Hispanic culinary traditions to make toasted mealworms and chicken squeal and earthy, umami salt made from red agave worms.

Bug eating can be a major game changer for our current food system, and I hope knowing a little bit more about its history opens your mind to a whole world of culinary possibilities.