4th Grade Informational
The sources talked about eating bugs. Write an informative essay in which you explain the benefits of eating bugs and how people’s attitudes about eating bugs could be changing.
Manage your time carefully so that you can:
· Read the passages;
· Plan your responses;
· Write your response; and
· Revise and edit your response.
Be sure to include:
· an introduction;
· support for your controlling idea using information from the passages; and
· a conclusion that is related to your controlling idea.
Your writing should be in the form of a well-organized, multiparagraph essay.
Source #1
Bug Bites
Young/ask, R. (2014). Bug Bites
To those of us who’ve never crunched a cricket or slurped a worm, the idea of eating bugs might sound pretty gross. We wouldn’t eat those creepy-crawlies even if someone dared us! Yet lots of bugs are nutritious, tasty, and perfectly safe to eat. Are we missing out on a good thing?
In fact, in Australia, South America, Africa, and Asia, eating bugs is no joke. Bugs aren’t just pests. They’re lunch or dinner or a nice after-school snack.
Eat Up! We’re Out Numbered
Eating bugs is an old habit. Over 10,000 years ago, before our ancestors learned to farm, they found food by hunting and gathering. Bugs were considered part of the daily diet. It made sense for ancient people to eat a source of nutrition that was right under their noses – or buzzing by their ears.
As you’ve probably noticed, bugs are everywhere. Scientists estimate that there are 200 million of the little critters for every person on the planet. No wonder more than half the people on Earth eat bugs daily. Of the million or so types of bugs that scientists have named so far, more than 1,500 are somebody’s favorite snack.
The most popular bugs to eat are crickets and termites, which are said to taste a bit like pineapple, but lots of other bugs are edible too. Restaurants in Mexico sell ant tacos. Cans of baby bees line supermarket shelves in Japan. In Thailand, outdoor markets offer silkworm larvae. And in Mozambique, in eastern Africa, people call grasshoppers “flying shrimp.”
Bugs Do a Body Good
Dinner is served: on one plate, a big, juicy hamburger, and on the other, a heaping pile of cooked grasshoppers. Ground beef or bugs? Which one do you think is better for your body?
Both have lots of protein, which is what your body uses to build muscle. But in other ways, grasshoppers clearly come out ahead. A pound of grasshoppers has less fat than a pound of beef, and the insects are higher in calcium and iron. Other bugs are good for you too. Says biologist David George Gordon, author of the Eat-a-Bug Cookbook, “I tell kids, if your bones are still growing, eat more crickets and termites.”
Not only are grasshoppers better for you than beef, they’re also better for the planet. It takes a lot of grass and water and space to raise a cow. Imagine how many grasshoppers you could raise on the same amount of land!
Still wouldn’t pick the grasshoppers? Gordon says they also taste delicious, a lot like green peppers.
A Matter of Taste
In North America and Europe, the idea of eating bugs is downright disgusting to most people. But even though we don’t think of crickets and termites as food, lots of things we do eat are bug-related. Honey is made by bees. Shrimp, crayfish, crabs, and lobsters are all arthropods, which is what scientists call the bug group of animals.
In fact, lobsters have only recently made the move from being thought of as bugs to being a gourmet treat. The first American colonists ate lobsters only when they didn’t have anything else. In Massachusetts, servants who are tired of getting the “cockroaches of the sea” for dinner wrote into their contracts that they’d eat lobster only three times a week.
Other parts of the world also have forbidden foods. Lots of people would never eat lobsters and the other sea-dwelling “bugs” we consider delicacies. Many people don’t eat pork. Even among people who eat insects, tastes differ. South Africans might munch termites for lunch, but they’d never eat scorpions, which are raised for food in China. In Bali, Indonesia, dragonflies are a treat, but in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, no one would think of eating a dragonfly. Cicadas are on the menu instead.
So when it comes to eating, people mostly stick with food they’re used to. What’s food and what’s not is a matter of taste – and what you’ve been taught.
Future Food
Could our tastes change? Will school lunches someday include grasshopper kebabs and caterpillar fritters?
Attitudes about bugs are already changing. Thanks to bug-tastings at science centers, kids today are less squeamish about eating insects. For people who don’t like all those legs, crickets can be ground up into a protein-rich flour. Bugs may even be a perfect food for long space journeys, since astronauts could raise them in space.
Still wondering who on Earth would want to eat a bug? Better to ask, who wouldn’t?
Source #2
Article: Good Enough to Eat
October 26, 2012
By Suzanne Zimbler
Does a crunchy grasshopper taco sound yummy? If you were living in another part of the world—say, Mexico or Thailand or Kenya—the idea of biting into insects might not seem weird to you at all. For thousands of years, entomophagy, or insect-eating has been common practice among many of the world's people. According to bug-eaters around the globe, insects are tasty. "When they are roasted, I find termites really delicious," said Arnold van Huis.
Van Huis is an entomologist, or bug scientist. He is also an expert on bug eating. He has traveled the world to learn how different groups of people gather insects and prepare them as food. It was in Kenya that Van Huis tried the termites. In Thailand, he had "nicely seasoned" locusts.
Bugs are nutritious. Many are packed with protein, vitamins and minerals. Van Huis is working with other scientists to encourage insect-eating in areas where it is already common, as well as in Europe and North America, where people are more likely to squash a bug than swallow it.
Meat of the Future?
According to the United Nations, the planet's population is now almost 7 billion. It is expected to reach 9 billion before 2050. By that time, demand for meat is expected to double. Raising livestock requires large areas of farmland, and feeding the animals can be expensive. "We have to find alternatives to meat," Van Huis says. "One very good option is using insects."
Raising insects, which are able to live in crowded quarters, would require less land, says Van Huis. Bugs would also be cheaper to feed, since they could eat food scraps, such as potato peels. "We throw away one-third of our food," he says. "Insects could grow on that."
Crunch Time
For insect-eating to become mainstream in the U.S., Fisher says people must have a chance to sample tasty, ready to eat bugs. There are more than 1,700 types of bugs that are safe to eat. But do not even think of snacking on bugs from your backyard, since there is no way of knowing if they are dangerous! If you're in the mood for bugs, it is possible to order insect cuisine at a handful of U.S. restaurants. At Toloache, a Mexican restaurant in New York City, chef Julian Medina prepares tacos stuffed with chapulines, or little grasshoppers, which he imports from Mexico.
Van Huis is working with chefs in the Netherlands to develop scrumptious bug recipes. For one experiment, his team prepared two types of meatballs: some made with plain meat and others made with mealworms and meat combined. In a blind taste test, nine out of ten people preferred the mealworm meatballs.
In the future, will eating insects be common practice for people in Europe and North America? "I'm absolutely sure it will," says Van Huis. Care for a Bug Mac, anyone?
"The Price of Ivory" originally appeared in the October 26, 2012 issue of TIME FOR KIDS: Edition 5-6.