According to the United Nations’ projection, the global population will reach 9 billion people by the year 2050. It will impose severe pressure on the capacity of food and feed production, and consequently, it will possess a serious threat to food security (FAO, 2016). To improve food security, and reduce the environmental impact on food supply for the future global community, researchers have proposed several strategies (Burchi & De Muro 2016). Among those, the FAO has proposed the promotion of insects as a viable food sources to feed both humans and animals (van Huis et al., 2013). Research findings showed that  edible insects contains 44.2 to 69% proteins on dry weight basis (Ghosh et al., 2017), 13-32% lipids on dry basis (Paul et al. 2017) and minerals like iron, zinc, magnesium (Ghosh et al., 2017). Worldwide the number of edible insect’s species is considered to be about 2000 (Jongema, 2015). Insects nutrients (proteins and fibres) are more efficient in terms of feed conversion, greenhouse gas emissions, water and soil use and edible mass compared to most domestic breeding animal species (van Huis et al., 2013). Bangladesh is a subtropical country with plenty of insect species in different agro ecosystem available in all the rear round. Our weather and climate is good for insect mass rearing. Insects still considered here a harmful animal. In this circumstance insect as a food item is beyond the thinking. Surprisingly, many of our ethnic peoples consume insects by collecting these from the wild environment which may be a basement for the insect industry in Bangladesh. Therefore this project aims to investigate the first comprehensive survey on edible insects in different ethnic peoples of Bangladesh. 

Future food

Conference Proceedings: 4

Research Article: 2