I am a year older than I was two days ago. Sitting here, thinking of the passing of another year in my life has led me to ponder the future. Specifically, the future of food. There are some interesting things happening in our food system. Over the next two to five years we are going to start to see things that were only possible in science fiction a few years ago. Things like lab-grown meat will be starting to appear on grocery store shelves. And even more interestingly, we are going to start eating things, that we never thought we would eat.

I want to talk about cricket protein/cricket flour. Well, insects in general actually. Like it or not, they are going to be a huge part of the human diet in the future. They are sustainable. Easy to produce. Loaded with protein. And cheap. Insects are the key to feeding the world once our population swells to 10 billion in about 2050.

Now, you may think I’m crazy. However, you can already buy cricket protein at the grocery store. It has been quietly sitting on grocery store shelves, seeping into your subconscious for the last few months. In the next year or two, our diet will not consist of a large portion of insects. But, people heavily involved in fitness will be drinking cricket shakes every day by this time in 2020. It won’t take long for the rest of us to catch up.

Keep in mind that there are cultures all over the world that eat different insects today. It’s just going to be much more widespread. Really, it all just comes down to marketing. We just need to stop thinking of insects as creepy crawlies and start thinking of them as food. It won’t take that long.

I know that you are probably thinking that you will never eat insects, well you will. Unless you are older than 50 or 60, you definitely are going to be eating insects. Insects are a perfectly healthy, and safe food source. They also need very little water to grow which is going to be very important with the already beginning water crisis.

I’m not here to talk about doom and gloom, but the reality is the reality. We need to feed a pile of people. Think about how hard it is to feed 8 or 10 people on the holidays. Now, multiply that by a billion. We are not currently producing or properly distributing enough food to feed the world. We are running out of the clean water as you can currently see in South Africa, India, and California. And insects are a practical solution to a lot of these issues.

The next time you see a centipede cross your path, try and think of it a little differently. Because it won’t be long until that little guy is staring up at you from your dinner plate.