Can a civilization arise around insect cultivation

Question

Unnecessary Setup

In my story, a race of gods arrive in our solar system from the far flung colonies of a Type III civilization. When they arrive at Earth and see the rise of hominids, they split into groups and take bets on which ape will become the dominant species on earth.

As evolutionary history occurs and money changes hands, one small, ill intentioned faction opts to cheat in hopes of great reward. So, they descend to Earth and find a small, unsuccessful species of Homo, and tweak its "build" specifically to serve as a counter to Homo sapien - an up and coming hominid still kicking around at the spawn point Africa, and Homo neanderthalensis - a well established West-Eurasian Hominid that has much support and is gaining ground, much to the grief of Heidelbergensis and H. erectus backers.

They take odd mutations from H. sapiens and H. Heidelbergensis that would, on their own, be game breaking were it not for real world impracticalities, and combine them into one being. The result was one dream hominid endowed with all the gifts man often dreamed of. They hide their creation on the remote New Zealand island, lest it come into contact with other Hominids immediately and the wayward faction's cheating be found out.

To kickstart the rise of civilization, the faction gives their designer man the gift of the knowledge of the cultivation of bugs to make up for the lack of large river valleys, cereal grain, and domesticable animals on the island, which other hominids would have access to.

Question : Could a civilization arise around the cultivation of bugs in the same way that they historically have around the cultivation of grain?

Note: I'm asking more if the pull to permanent settlement would or could be as strong with the cultivation of land arthropods, mollusks, etc. as it is with traditional plant cultivation.

Answer 1

Any cultivation of insects requires cultivation of plants.

Honeybees , for example, require cultivation of flowering plants. For specific flavors of honey, specific plans need to be cultivated.

Locusts and grass hoppers require cultivation of grasses (grains).

Some ants actually cultivate fungus to feed aphids, so we can see the principle is already visible in nature.

Cultivating insects would naturally lead to the cultivation of plants, including plants we cultivate today.

Answer 2

New answer

If you can cultivate insects and replace grain in your diet, then a culture can arise based on insects rather than grain. However, there are differences that will affect the civilization:

• Kept dry, wheat (and many other grains) will store for years. I'm not convinced insects (most likely cooked & dried) can store that long. Consequently, your civilization would be more susceptible to food shortages.

• When drought dries up the crops, it dries up the insects, too. Now, there are more edible insects than their are grains — but the nature of cultivation is to focus on low-count/high-bulk (meaning you crow an awful lot of a few things, not low amounts of many things). Consequently, when drought hits, the food supply will wither just as grains would. However...

• I frankly have no experience cultivating insects, but I suspect that when disease strikes insects, it will be much harder to eradicate than it would for crops, making food shortages with cultivated insects more likely than with cultivated grain. However, that could lead to a civilization that preserved meats earlier and to a greater degree rather than grains. The problem, of course, is that you can make a lot of grain with little effort, but you can't make a lot of meat with little effort.

• There are likely other issues, but perhaps the most important (really!) is the tendency toward rampant sobriety. Though Cheech and Chong tried valiantly to convince us otherwise, insects might not have the same kick as fermentable grain. The resulting civilization may have a high number of well behaved adults and children, unusually high degree of responsibility, and a confusingly low number of knock-knock jokes. It's possible that they would be attacked on sight for making too many common-sense decisions and having the ability to consistently walk a straight line, making them somewhat less likely to survive.

While I still think such a civilization is plausible (certainly enough for suspension-of-disbelief), I think there are enough weaknesses involved with supplanting insects for grain to make it a long shot in reality.

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Here is the original answer, before the question was modified

Insects are rich in protein, minerals, vitamins, amino acids and fats. They are surprisingly comparable to beef and fish in the amounts of these nutrients. (Source)

What this tells me is that they would not be a 1:1 replacement for grains. They would be a 1:1 replacement for any kind of meat.

However, even communities that eat insects regularly [eat] other foods too. For example, in parts of Africa where insects are eaten frequently people still get about 90 per cent of their protein from other sources, suggesting insects can’t satisfy all our dietary needs. (Source)

You can replace vegetables with a protein-based source (Insects) just as you can replace protein with an all-vegetable source (beans and rice). However, I suspect that if you put a group of dieticians and vegetarians in a room, the argument as to whether or not it makes sense to make these substitutions would raise the roof. My gut (hah!) tells me that the reason there's an issue is because it's inefficient to replace one with the other.

Conclusion: Yes, insects could replace grain, especially if other vegetables are available as they are in a grain-based diet.

Possible Consequence: It is particularly difficult to replace vegetables with meats (which is what insects are). Perhaps the primary problem would be the fats. Your natives would have a higher incident of heart disease (cholesterol) compared to other societies. But then, if they worked with it for thousands of years... their bodies may adapt to the high fat diet. Indeed, they may culturally be a more active people to compensate for the higher fat diet.

Answer 3

No for two reasons.

1. Efficiency, Insects are secondary or tertiary consumers which means you can't raise the directly for long without a primary food source. Worse you can't free range insects like you can cattle or sheep, if you release a cloud of locusts you can't collect all or even most of them again. That means you have to keep them in closed containers, which is time consuming and energy intensive to make and maintain. That also means you have to provide for and feed them, which means you are doing all the work and have to be raising plants to feed them. So you are doing all the work of agriculture and only getting 1/10th the caloric content at best (secondary consumers remember). Likely even less, small animals are less efficient calorically.

The only way this even comes close to viable is if you are raising some high efficiency grain for to feed them,(even then its iffy) but at that point just eat the grain. The only insects humans have been able to domesticate for food prior to the industrial revolution are bees, which herd themselves, even then bees were never a major source of calories because harvesting a hive often killed it, (Yay for Mr Langstroth). And again the calories in for the calories out is crap.

2. Nutrition, humans need carbohydrates, a carbohydrate free diet is toxic to lethal, Even the most animal centric human diets still use things like milk, cheese and forage or crops for carbohydrates.

   Low fat is not a good thing in preindustrial societies, it means the food is low in calories, the quality of a staple diet can partially be broken down to how many calories it takes to raise vs how many it provides, insects are high input low output, fine in a society with industrial surpluses but massively limiting without it, even if they somehow manged to survive off it they are never getting large population sizes and the advanced technology it allows for.