It is being billed as the long-awaited breakthrough moment in European gastronomy for mealworm burgers, locust aperitifs and cricket granola.
Within weeks the EU’s European Food Safety Authority is expected by the insect industry to endorse whole or ground mealworms, lesser mealworms, locusts, crickets and grasshoppers as being safe for human consumption.
The ruling is likely to lead to the final authorisation of their sale across the EU as a “novel food” by as soon as the autumn, opening up opportunities for mass production of a range of insect dishes to be sold across Europe for the first time.
“These have a good chance of being given the green light in the coming few weeks,” said Christophe Derrien, the secretary general of the industry organisation International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed.
“We reckon these authorisations will be a breakthrough for the sector so we are looking for those authorisations quite impatiently. They are taking the necessary time, they are very demanding on information, which is not bad. But we believe that once we have the first novel food given a green light from EFSA that will have a snowball effect.”
In the eyes of leading players in the insects-as-food industry, the potential for their high-protein delicacies has been held back by a lack of EU-wide approval.
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The UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Finland have taken a permissive approach to a 1997 EU law that requires foods not eaten before that year to get novel food authorisation.
Those national regulators decided the EU law did not pertain to animals used for food. As a result, a host of insect-based products can be found in British, Dutch, Belgian and Finnish supermarkets. About 500 tonnes of insect-based food for human consumption is produced every year.
But such products are banned in France, Italy and Spain, among other countries. In 2018, a new EU law sought to bring some clarity. It stipulated that insect-based dishes would also require novel food authorisation.
A transition period was established to allow companies already producing food from insects to operate until they received a judgment on the safety of the species they work with and final approval by the EU’s institutions.
Indeed, companies such such as Protifarm in the Netherlands, Micronutris in France, Essento in Switzerland and Entogourmet in Spain are said to be preparing to ramp up their operations.
“We have many of our members building bigger factories because the key to success is to upscale your companies and produce on a mass scale. And this is already happening,” Derrien said. “We are expecting the next few years will be very interesting ones and obviously the novel food authorisations will definitely help.”
He added: “The sort of foods ranges from whole insects as an aperitif or as snacks to processed insects in bars or pasta or burgers made out of insects. We believe that insects for food is one solution for some of the biggest challenges we are facing on the planet. In the context of scarce resources, and insect production is not too demanding, you have the capacity to produce high-quality protein. That is a very promising solution.”
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It should be remembered that it was communist America and communist Britain who saved the communist Soviet Union during world two. No two countries have done more to advance the cause of communism than Britain and America. They are the staunchest allies of the communist Zionist State of Israel, which was established by communist Jews from the Soviet Union who were allowed to leave Russia and foremost among these criminals were the communist gangsters DAVID BEN GURION and GOLDA MEIR. In 1919 the British and Americans sent armies to Russia to destroy the White Armies who were in the process of defeating the communist Jewish Bolsheviks. When the White Army was almost defeated the British and Americans withdrew from Russia and left the Bolsheviks to defeat the White Army, which allowed the Jewish Bolsheviks to come to power in Russia in 1922. Britain and America by their actions secured a victory for communism. Any one who closely studies world war two will see that it was a war of extermination by the communist Soviet Union and its communist allies Britain and America against the Christian European Army led by National Socialist Germany and against its ally Japan. It should also be noted that the communist USA dropped the atomic bombs on the only two Christian cities in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, showing communist America’s bitter hatred of Christianity. The British and American propaganda will tell you that the British and Americans sent armies to Russia to defeat the Jewish Bolsheviks.
The Left aka “Communism” have killed hundreds of millions of innocents. I am no fan of Mr Hitler as my family like so many suffered under this regime. But credit where it is due. He was right about Bankers and Communists. We face the same enemy today trying to push the same sick murderous agenda. I am sick of it. Now this effing virus caused by filthy eating habits combined with experiments in a Chinese Communist laboratory in Wuhan. The real death toll in China is said to be over a million. Their cupidity and lies then spread this pestilence to the rest of the globe and these oiks want us to eat bloody insects? Damn the lot of them to hell and outlaw Communism as the death cult it is. In the Third Reich shops were full and beaches open while we thanks to these modern Globalists and their Chinese pals confine us to our homes.