Food options for Thanksgiving? Omega 3-enriched farmed grasshoppers!

I was interested to see this announcement from the University of Eastern Finland about new research suggesting a way to improve the nutritional quality of fats from….edible grasshoppers!

Until I read this account, I did not know that

• Long-horned grasshoppers are widely consumed as snacks in parts of Africa.
• More than 2,000 insect species are known to be eaten by humans.
• Raising edible insects requires less space and water and has lower greenhouse emissions than meat production.
• In some places, overexploitation of insect resources is a problem.
• Feeding omega-3 fatty acids to grasshoppers to finish off their growth (as is done with farmed salmon) improves their essential fatty acid levels.

This research was done for a doctoral dissertation and published in the Journal of Economic Entomology.  It must have been a lot of fun to do.

Yum?