Eating crickets may not be the answer. Scientists suggest sticking with chickens.

The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation of late has been spruiking the potential of bugs of one kind or another becoming a major source of protein for a growing human population. See, for example, the paper Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security. Yet I, for one, have had difficulty embracing the idea so I was delighted to come across an academic paper suggesting that the little blighters might not be as the FAO suggest in turning vegetable matter into edible meat.

Mark E.Lundy and Michael P. Parella have just published in the on-line journal PlusOne
"Crickets Are Not a Free Lunch: Protein Capture from Scalable Organic Side-Streams via High-Density Populations of Acheta domesticus" that casts doubt on the insects as saviours theories. They concluded:

Although it has been suggested that crickets reared for human or livestock consumption may result in a more sustainable supply of protein, this study finds that such conclusions will depend, in large part, on what the crickets are fed and which systems of livestock production they are compared to. When fed grain-based diets at a scale of economic relevance, populations of crickets in this study showed little improvement in PCE compared to broiler chickens fed similar diets. When fed processed, organic side-streams of relatively high quality, cricket populations achieved a harvestable size. Yet, whether crickets could be raised economically on substrates of similar quality and level of processing requires further analysis. The unprocessed and lower-quality organic side-streams tested in this study could not support adequate growth and survival of cricket populations. Therefore, the potential for crickets to supplement the global supply of dietary protein appears to be more limited than has been recently suggested. However, the feed quality index reported here may be useful in identifying regionally specific organic side-streams with the potential to support the scalable cultivation of crickets.