Have you tried eating insects? “Although they look a little strange, they are crunchy（脆的）. I eat them for their protein,” Yang Xingyu, who likes fried insects, told China Daily.

A growing number of people are beginning to eat insects such as beetles, bees and grasshoppers. They can be fried, boiled with soup, or mixed with dessert. About 2 billion people have already added insects to their diets, according to a UN report.

Insects are rich in protein, vitamins and minerals. As professor Guo Jianjun at Guizhou University said, insects are known as “God’s last piece of cake for mankind”.

“Most of the fat in insects is unsaturated fatty acid（不饱和脂肪酸）.” Guo said, “It’s good for the heart and brain. Insects are sometimes used in medicines as well. Researchers have been looking at how eating insects can make humans’ immune function better.”

More importantly, insects are rich in number. They can play an important role in fighting the lack of food due to the growing population worldwide. According to the UN, the global population will rise to 8.5 billion by 2030, and about 10.4 billion by the 2080s. It is rising much faster than the availability of food, said Huang Dawei from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Developing new food sources is needed right away.

Eating insects helps with the environment, compared with traditional food sources. For example, pigs produce 10 to 100 times more greenhouse gases per kilogram than mealworms（面包虫）, reported China Daily.

“We study insects which can be eaten to benefit our own health, animal health and environmental health,” said Huang.

Around the world, people have different traditional foods to celebrate different festivals. Traditional foods also show a new year of good luck and good health.

An English Christmas dinner has a meal of turkey, and it also includes pies and plum puddings（李子布丁）. In Germany, Christmas is celebrated with bread, cookies and cakes, which are made like Christmas trees. In France, Christmas dessert is a cake filled with butter cream.

In southern parts of India, there is a three-day festival in mid-January called Pongal. It includes rice and a dish of rice cooked with sugar that is shared with families, relatives and friends.

Japan celebrates the New Year with a seven-day festival. It begins from January 1st. People prepare food before the festival so they don’t need to cook during the festival. On New Year’s Day, different dishes called Osechi Ryori（御节料理）are served—each dish is a wish for the New Year.

In most Asian countries, the New Year begins with the first full moon of the first Chinese lunar（阴历的）month. Each place has its special food to welcome the coming year. People in China prepare their food before the festival to avoid（避免）using a knife during the New Year’s time. Foods with lucky names are popular, such as fish, which sounds like “surplus（剩余）”.

If you’re too busy, maybe it’s time for you to slow down and enjoy a meal with a friend. Try to get away from fast food and choose slow food.

For years, the pace of life has increased for many people. They are too busy to cook. Luckily, business people provide a “fast” way to deal with the problem. You can go to the supermarket and buy cooked food. All you have to do is to heat it and you can enjoy your meal in 10 minutes.

Still too slow? OK, just go to a fast food restaurant, order your meal and within 5 minutes it will be made for you.

The problem is health. Fast food has much more fat, sugar, salt, oil and calories and far few vitamins than homemade food. And so, since people have always wanted to live longer, a small but growing population is choosing not only fresh food, but also organic (有机的) food.

Another reason for changes in eating habits is social. Over the centuries, mealtime has been used to visit, laugh and learn. However, today most of us are having a very different lifestyle! Some people have realized it and they are looking for ways to return to that. Goodbye, McDonald’s.

Finally, it makes you feel good to plan your meal, cook your meal and see your meal looking like the picture in your cookbook. So if you’re too busy, maybe it’s time for you to slow down and enjoy homemade meal.