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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber. This'll just take a minute.

Want to feed a hungry world? According to David Gracer, add bugs¹ to the menu. Gracer is, he says, a normal guy who’s also an entomophagist, an advocate for insects as food. He gave a talk about ingesting insects at a May 16th TEDxCambridge conference called “How We Eat.” The event was a spin-off of the popular TED² talks.

Here’s one of the reasons Gracer’s a fan: "They can’t give us pandemics. So the mass production of insects—farm insects—really easy. There’s no cricket flu on par³ with avian flu or swine flu or E. coli."

And then there’s this: "Look, crickets are not better than beef in every category, just most of them."

Gracer says a bowl of grasshoppers⁴ has more vitamins than beef and is lower in fat—and uses far fewer resources to produce. Our disgust for insects is just cultural, Gracer says. After all, we eat lobsters⁵, which are arthropods, as are insects. Ready to crunch⁶ a cicada?

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber.