COMPLAINING is easy; finding solutions is hard. Take world hunger for example: yes, we know that at this point in time, close to 800 million people are chronically malnourished.

We know that one out of nine people on this planet go to bed hungry each night. We know that, with the world’s population likely to hit the nine billion mark by 2050, it’s only going to get worse, causing social and political upheaval that may make Syria look like a picnic and Donald Trump reasonable and moderate.

We know this because we have defined and debated the problem umpteen times, but what do you hear when you ask for a solution? Crickets, that’s what. Actual, chitinous, completely non-metaphorical, protein packed crunchy crickets, the eating of which may actually end (or curtail) world hunger. Oh, and one also hears of mealworms meals, grilled grasshoppers and the occasional skewered scorpion. 

One out of nine people go to bed hungry. What’s the solution?

Here’s the math: 100 grams of crickets contain 121 calories, 5.5 grams of fat and 18.9 grams of protein while 100 grams of beef contains 298 calories, 21.2 grams of fat and 23.5 grams of protein. Caterpillars do even better, providing more protein and iron as the same quantity of minced beef. Then consider that, according to estimates of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, it takes 2,900 gallons of water, 11 kilograms of feed and 410 square metres of land to produce half a kilo of beef.

In contrast, it takes only a gallon of water, 1 kg of feed and about 40 square metres of land to produce a pound of crickets. Other insects, like mealworms that subsist on wheat waste chaff, are even more low maintenance. No wonder then that in 2013 the FAO released a 200-page report on the benefits of entomophagy, the eating of insects, and called for restaurants, chefs and food writers to promote it.

It’s no millennial fad; Roman author Pliny wrote that the ancient Romans enjoyed eating beetle larvae and Aristotle wrote with great enthusiasm on the perfect time to harvest cicadas. The Aztec emperor Montezuma breakfasted on fly eggs, while the Paiute Indians harvested crickets and pupae the way other native North American tribes would hunt bison.

Locusts have always been a dietary (if seasonal) staple in many lands, including Sindh, until fairly recently and it is estimated that two billion people actively eat insects, not counting all those who didn’t notice the fly in their soup.

Commercial cricket farms have already been set up, and enterprising individuals and companies have launched ranges of edible bugs all wrapped up in pretty packaging. There’s Green Kow’s salty and sweet mealworm spread, there’s Thailandunique’s mixed edible insects bag (yours for the low price of $3.99), a whole range of powdered bugs, and of course, cricket-based protein shakes for bodybuilders.

In short, what we thought of as pests may prove a panacea. Which begs the question: what other simple solutions have we missed out on?

While you chew on that, let’s talk about Dr Claire Guest. Six years ago one of her pet dogs, a docile Labrador named Daisy, started behaving strangely by repeatedly nudging Dr Guest and lunging at her chest. Finding a tender area where the dog had pawed her, she went to the doctor and found a cancer hidden deep in the breast tissue. For Dr Guest, who had already published research claiming that it was possible to train dogs to detect cancer, it was proof positive.

In 2004, Japanese research proved that dogs can detect colorectal cancer from breath samples, and eight years later the European respiratory journal did the same for lung cancer. Just last year, Britain’s NHS approved the use of dogs in cancer-sniffing trials, and one of those dogs is Daisy, who has since gone on to detect over 500 cases of cancer after saving her owner’s life.

As celebrated as the sense of smells that dogs possess is, rats score even higher in the sniff test. Thus, a Belgian nonprofit has successfully used trained giant Gambian rats to detect landmines in Angola, Mozambique and Cambodia. In Cambodia alone there are still four to six million mines buried under the soil, which continue to maim and kill.

Using its sense of smell to detect TNT, a mine-detecting rat can clear an area of 200 square metres in 35 minutes. On the other hand, a standard metal-detecting deminer can take up to three days to clear the same area. Buoyed by this success, the rats’ super-powered noses are now being used to double-check tuberculosis samples in 21 medical centres in the Tanzanian capital of Dar-es-Salaam. Meanwhile, over in Croatia they’re experimenting with using bees as landmine detectors.

The lesson to be drawn from these seemingly unconnected stories is that the simplest and most effective solutions do not have to be technology-intensive ones requiring massive funding and foreign consultants. Sometimes, the answers to our problems are right under our noses, or being scraped off the bottoms of our shoes.

The writer is a journalist.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, February 22nd, 2016