Can Architect-Designed Insect Farms Solve World Hunger? By 2050, it is estimated that the world’s population could reach up to 9 billion people. It’s already become increasingly difficult to sustain our food systems, as we outgrow our supply and continue to deplete farmland. So what is the answer to this frightening dilemma? Belatchew Arkitekter came up with a shudder-worthy solution: bug farms. Add To Collection Save this image to a collection The Swedish firm has designed an alternative to Stockholm’s protein production problem by developing a way to farm large quantities of edible protein within the city’s fabric. Farming crickets from an egg to their ready-to-eat condition takes the guesswork out of food production. While Westerners might cringe at the idea of eating bugs, many other cultures and countries around the world — predominantly in Asia, Latin America, and Africa — eat insects for protein on a regular basis.
A Bold Architectural Proposal to Get People to Eat Bugs Some people might mentally retch that the United Nations, believing the world's population could hit 9 billion by 2050, thinks we should prepare to eat bugs. Not the folks at Sweden's Belatchew Arkitekter, though: They want to fast-track the insect-munching. Thus they've whipped up plans to build "vermin farms" upon Stockholm's major intersections, so that by 2018 everybody in the city will be guaranteed plentiful rations of six-legged foodstuffs. Their official name for these unconventional farms are "Buzz Buildings," presumably for the pleasant hum the millions of crickets will add to the urban soundscape. Looking like big, inflated doughnuts with sunlit gardens inside, there would be nine of them total—and if you think Belatchew hasn't done the math on whether that's enough protein for the people, you've got another thing coming: A side benefit of these breeding chambers would be their attraction to other beneficial insects, namely honeybees, they allege.
Cooking with insects: a minibeast maxifeast Ento Box: The Elegant Insect Meal Of The Future Though they’re consumed in most of the world, people in the West tend to be a little squeamish about eating bugs. But a new project from a group of design students in England hopes to put edible insects in a more gourmet light. Avant-garde chefs have been trying to introduce insect eating for some time, but these students approached the question not as a gastronomical issue, but rather a design one: How do you make bugs more appealing? The answer is the Ento Box (that’s a portmanteau of bento box and entomology). Click through the slide show above to see the elegant way you’ll be eating bug-based foods in the future. This isn’t just some tounge-in-cheek project to get us to rethink our narrow palettes. On the flipside, the protein-rich diet afforded us by those vast, unsustainable herds of animals is a hallmark of the developed world. This isn’t just an exercise, the students worked with a chef and made real recipes out of real bugs.