Insect eating

During the Taisho period, people ate more than 50 types of insects! ? Tracing the history of insect eating in Japan.

The grasshopper dish is called いなごの佃煮 (inago no tsukudani) & still consumed in areas like Nagano (where wasps are also eaten).

If people ate Wagyu beef in Edo period, then total pop would have been way < 30 mill

Source: TW

RELATION OF MEAT ANIMALS TO DENSITY OF POPULATION

Japan probably presents the most extreme example of a people who maintain a high civilization with few animals. With the exception of the northern island of Hokkaido, the whole country has a population of from 400 to 500 people per square mile; and the rough and steep country permits only a sixth of the land to be cultivated.
Room for pasture does not exist, because of a “dense growth of bamboo grass wholly unfit for food and impossible to eradicate.”
The effect of this absence of pasture and pressure of population in limiting the production of domestic animals is marked.

The empire has nearly fifty millions of people,
and of horses and cattle combined but 51⁄2 per cent.
of that number, while the number of sheep and hogs is but 5/8 of one per cent of the number of people.
These numbers are utterly insignificant in comparison with those of the United States (95 and 156 per cent. respectively, 1913), or even with those of Europe.
It is needless to say that nearly all of these people are vegetarians, except for fish.
In the graphic words of Professor George T. Warren, of Cornell, “In Japan, the man is a beast of burden, and lives on hay.”

Denmark is an agricultural country where some meat is eaten and animal products are an important factor in commerce.
This country (74 per cent. fields and pastures) has four or five times as much of its area suitable for farms as has Japan;
Denmark has passed the limit of the number of animals it can support on native food;
cattle foods such as wheat bran, cottonseed meal, linseed oil cake, and other grain products have been imported in large and increasing quantities from the United States, Argentina, and Russia.
When the United States entered the war and began to help England starve out Germany, cattle food supplies were cut off from Danish and other neutral European countries.