Next time when you are going to kill that cockroach in your kitchen, think twice!
It could just be a great substitute for meat and you could be doing a good deed to the Environment. Read the excerpt from an article in TIME Magazine:
"The very qualities that make bugs so hard to get rid of could also make them an environmentally friendly food. "Nature is very good at making insects," says David Gracer, one of the chefs at the Richmond festival and the founder of future bug purveyor Sunrise Land Shrimp. Insects require little room and few resources to grow. For instance, it takes far less water to raise a third of a pound (150 g) of grasshoppers than the staggering 869 gal. (3,290 L) needed to produce the same amount of beef. Since bugs are cold-blooded invertebrates, more of what they consume goes to building edible body parts, whereas pigs and other warm-blooded vertebrates need to consume a lot of calories just to keep their body temperature steady. There's even a formula, called the efficiency of conversion of ingested food to body substance (ECI), that can be used to compare the weight different animals gain after eating a certain quantity of feed. Beef cattle have an ECI of 10. Silkworms range from 19 to 31. German cockroaches max out at 44.
Incredibly efficient to raise, insects are also crawling packets of nutrition. A 100-gram (3.5 oz.) portion of cooked Usata terpsichore caterpillars--commonly eaten in central Africa--contains about 28 grams (1 oz.) of protein, slightly more than you'd get from the same amount of chicken. Water bugs have four times as much iron as beef."
So next time you see a cockroach in the kitchen when you're cooking, SMILE cuz' you just earned yourself something delicious.
Source:Eating Bugs :
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1810336,00.htmlImage :
www.digitalrailroad.net/menzelphoto/