Insects seem like an animal that would be easy to raise in captivity. How difficult would it be to choose a nice, large edible variety and raise them in some kind of container within my own home? Maybe they would even be able to feed from various food scraps that I would otherwise throw away. Seems like it might be a cheap, easy (albeit unconventional) source of healthy protein. Advice? Recommendations?
Crickets seem to be one of the most popular edible insects.
There’s quite a bit of small-scale cricket farming in the US, and there’s loads of information on the internet about how to make and maintain a cricket farm, which doesn’t look more complicated than keeping, say, tropical fish or worms in a vermicomposting system.
The vast majority of American cricket farming seems to exist for the purpose of supplying pet food to owners of amphibians and reptiles and/or live bait for fishing, but online suppliers such as this one seem to offer crickets both for feed and for human consumption.
And you can also find lots of recipes.
Giant water beetles and Witchetty grubs seem pretty substantial. Anyone with any knowledge of what raising these would entail?
Witchetty grubs live in decaying wood - so probably aren’t very easy to farm.
If you want to eat larvae, mealworms are probably the easiest - they are raised in commercial quantities for feeding reptiles and birds - and you’d be able to get your starter herd from a pet store.
I remember when I was in grade school they had a bunch of people of different nationalities in that brought unique foods to expose us to their culture. Someone from Africa brought in chocolate-covered ants.
If you’re looking for a source of ants you’re welcome to visit my fleabag apartment and collect as many as you like. I’m willing to part with them for a reasonable price.
its already been said: Crickets or mealworms.
Methods already exist for industrial-scale breeding of these species (mostly as prey food for insectivorous pets). Anything done on that scale can be done cheaply.
Whether ou could breed enoigh to sustain yourself, I don’t know. How big is your garage?
Need to worry about pathogens, a problem when farming or growing any species in monoculture at that scale. Cricket farmers right now are being devistated by a highly infectious virus that is killing their stock.
Oh, and I suspect you will get mightily sick of I sects before long.
Using your own food as a source for the animals is problematic. Just as you woudln’t eat leftover scrambled eggs an hour after they’d been left on the counter, you woudn’t want to eat a cricket who’d been crawling around in them at that point either.
I did know a couple who raised freshwater shrimp in just about the manner you describe. They had a 500 gallon rubbermaid container, and and changed out 50 gallons of water per day. But in the end the water became infected all sorts of bacteria and they got really sick. Ended up draining the thing and (over my horrified protests) releasing the shrimp into a local creek.
Bottom line is: feeding and keeping them clean enough to eat would probably cost as much in time and money as a part time job to buy yummier groceries.
Now, if we’re talking post-apocalypse protein production, it might be worthwhile but keep in mind that most insects are extremely low in fat, so you’d need to watch out for rabbit starvation.
I’ve raised both crickets and mealworms - not for my own consumption. It’s not that hard.