Eating snake meat!
By Arvind M. Dhople, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Florida Tech
Large pythons are better at converting their food into edible protein than many other farmed animals, including chickens, pigs, cows, salmon and crickets. Pythons turn their food into meat pretty efficiently, making them an intriguing alternative to climate-unfriendly cows. Put aside your chicken cutlets and meatloaf and say hello to python curries and satay skewers. Some snake scientists think eating these reptiles – already customary or at least acceptable in parts of the world – might help lessen the damage our food choice have on the environment.
With some eight billion people on the planet today, all of whom require protein to stay healthy, finding new sources of these nutrients is a crucial issue. “The general conundrum we somehow need to solve is. Where do we get the appropriate amounts of protein for a still-growing global population without the big environmental footprint?” says a food systems scientist at the University of Oxford, U.K.. Humans’ dietary staples, particularly those of Westerners, have serious consequences. The environmental impacts of cattle products such as beef are especially costly: the animals produce nearly 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and growing food for them spurs deforestation. Pork brings a separate set of environmental hazards, notably water pollution from pig waste. The chicken industry faces similar issues.
But how do you get from the challenge of providing sufficient protein to farming pythons for meat? For a herpetologist at Macquarie University in Australia, the idea came about tangentially. He (and colleagues) were working with existing commercial python farms in Vietnam and Thailand to determine whether they could distinguish wild-bred snakes from captive-bred ones. The researchers noticed the farmed pythons’ propensity for speedy growth which they’ve recently documented in his research.
Part of the explanation boils down to biology. Pythons, like all snakes, are ectotherms, or cold-blooded animals, which means their body temperature is controlled by their surroundings. This lifestyle makes snakes prone to sunbathing, but it also means that, unlike mammals, ectotherms don’t need to produce heat to keep themselves warm – a major source of energy savings that allows them to efficiently convert food into body mass.
The Australian scientist decided to quantify that efficiency. The team studied reticulated pythons (scientific name Malayopathon reticulatus) and Burmese pythons (Python bivitatus) on the forms, analyzing what they ate and how quickly they grew. In particular, they struck by the pythons’ resilience during long fasts: the animals sometimes went months without eating but also without losing much weight. Observing the ability of relatively young snakes to go many months without food and remaining a healthy state with minimal loss of body condition was really astounding. Notably, they think that such resilience could be valuable during a major disruption to the food system, such as what occurred during the early days of the COVID pandemic, when some farmers couldn’t afford to keep feeding their livestocks, but also couldn’t get them to processors. These scientists say, because we expect even greater global economic and climatic volatility in the future, pythons could be a solution for those future challenges. Farming pythons could be a big part of the solution for a part of the world, particularly in Africa, that is already suffering from a severe protein deficiency.
According to the scientists, it’s too early to bet on snakes, despite their impressive metabolic feats, to revolutionize our food systems. It needs many more studies about pythons – especially detailed analyses of the environmental impact of farming them and of their nutritional contents, including both proteins and micronutrients. The current study opens up an interesting step in that direction.
And of course, it all depends on whether people will take to eating pythons. Most of the scientists say meat is “pretty tasty and versatile”, and according to these scientists, they tally a billion people in Southeast and East Asia, as well as parts of Latin America and Africa, already, consider snake meat a culturally acceptable for food. It is really just Western cultures (which have few naturally occurring large reptiles) that haven’t been exposed to it.
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