Beetles, crickets and other bugs: your next dinner?

The United Nations estimates there will be nine billion of us on the planet by 2030. That’s a lot of people, who will need a lot of food. But with land and water already scarce, and oceans overfished, some say we should look to less traditional types of food, made from creatures with more than the traditional number of legs.

“I don’t think that we’re the first to come up with the idea of … farming insects or anything of that sort, but I definitely think that we’re amongst the first to really try to make this into a global, scalable business,” said Mohammed Ashour, one of five business students from McGill University who hope to improve the availability of nutritious food for the world’s poor by mixing flour with crickets, grasshoppers and other bugs.

Insects are already a popular choice with two billion people around the world — beetles and caterpillars in particular — and a UN report says they are the future of food for a hungry planet. 

Eating bugs — coming soon to your menu? Click above for a report from CBC's Ioanna Roumeliotis.