Mealworms

[notacommittee]

No, seriously. I'm getting into entomophagy and want to start my own colony of something so I don't have to keep buying them and I can have a sustainable, renewable protein resource in my closet. Crickets make too much noise (I live in an apartment building and don't want my neighbors to hate me) but mealworms look easy to raise and perfect for my needs.

 

I'm assuming from the recent post on cricket flour energy bars that crickets are A-OK for the Whole30, but as I said, they're too loud for me. Does the cricket seal of approval extend to other bugs as well?

 

Regarding nutrition, I have institutional access to all kinds of stuff through my school, so I looked up some studies (sadly nothing free full-text) and found: (from here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/zoo.10031/pdf)

 

Per 100 grams, approximately 138 calories of "metabolizable energy" (not sure what that means). The numbers in the study didn't add up though because they also said 24 grams protein and 5.4 grams of fat, which would make 141 calories. But I guess it's almost the same. Either way, that's about twice as much protein as fat by calorie, which is a little protein-high for my taste but I'd just cook them in lots of EVCO or something.

 

(from the same paper) Per 100 grams: 23mg calcium, 285mg phosphorus, 60mg magnesium, 63mg sodium, 340mg potassium, plus trace amounts of other stuff.

 

There were also huge tables about amino acid composition and fatty acid composition that I'm happy to post if someone wants to take a look at them; they mean nothing to me and I'm not interested in spending hours on Wikipedia to figure them out.

[Tom Denham]

Mealworms would be fine.

[notacommittee]

Mealworms would be fine.

 

Awesome; thank you!