Academia rolls out insect-based flour to feed malnourished populations in developing countries

Friday, October 04, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: power flour, insect nutrition, malnourished populations

(NaturalNews) Reality dictates that there is actually more than enough food on this planet, not to mention vastly more food-growing potential, than we have all been led to believe by social engineers and the mainstream media. And yet the academic sector is still eagerly trying to come up with more top-down solutions to world hunger, including a recent $1 million grant that was awarded to MBA students at McGill University in Montreal to develop a new high-protein flour made of insects, which is intended to feed malnourished populations living in impoverished and developing countries throughout the world.

Known as "power flour," the insect-based foodstuff is the bread and butter of Aspire Food Group's new plan to feed the world. According to CBC News in Canada, Mohammed Ashour and his fellow students recently entered their idea into an annual contest held by the Hult Prize Foundation, which looks for the best and brightest ideas for tackling social and environmental problems, and ultimately won. And with the money they received, they will now shift their efforts towards developing power flour on a much wider scale.

"It's a huge deal because we had a very ambitious but highly executable five-year plan in place," stated Ashour to ABC News about his team's long-term plans for the flour, which had been set in motion prior to it receiving the award. "So winning this prize is a great step in that direction."

Power flour to be made available where bugs are already part of the local diet

For years, global warming fanatics, the United Nations (UN) and others have been pressing for more insect consumption as a solution to the growing demand for food around the world, including in many industrialized nations like the U.S., where it is obviously not customary to eat bugs. These ideas have largely been scoffed at, not only because they are culturally incongruous in nature, but also because there really is no need to force people to eat bugs -- have you seen how much food can be grown on just one acre of arable land?

But Ashour and his team's plan is different, as it focuses primarily on countries where bugs are already accepted as food. Depending on a country or region's individual bug preferences, the group's flour blends can be specially customized to satisfy local tastes and customs, which allows for greater acceptance by locals and thus better chances of the program's success.

"We are farming insects and we're grinding them into a fine powder and then we're mixing it with locally appropriate flour to create what we call power flour," explained Ashour to CBC News. "It is essentially flour that is fortified with protein and iron obtained from locally appropriate insects ... There really isn't a 'yuck' factor. For example, in Mexico, we'd go with the grasshopper. In Ghana, we'd go with the palm weevil."

With the help of a special advisory board, Ashour and his team are already recruiting local farmers and workers throughout Mexico, for instance, to help cultivate the needed insects. According to the latest statistics, there are some four million people living in slum conditions throughout Mexico, many of them severely malnourished, that can benefit from the endeavor. And by 2018, Ashour's team hopes to feed more than 20 million people with its bug flour.

Sources for this article include:

http://abcnews.go.com

http://www.cbc.ca

http://www.npr.org