By Kacie Svoboda
If the sight of Bear Grylls slurping up maggots or crunching through a giant beetle makes your stomach turn, you may want to skip this column because this week, an article asking if insects could be the food source of the future piqued my interest.
The story focused on the enthusiastic sales of two products sold at Cibo Express, an airport market chain, Exo protein bars and Chirps. Exo protein bars and Chirps each contain a not-so secret ingredient — crickets. Chirps are tortilla chips made from cricket flour and each Exo bar contains approximately 40 ground-up crickets. According to a Cibo representative, these products are wildly popular at airports around the country and “flying off the shelves,” encouraging cricket-pushing companies around the world to have hope that crickets could be accepted into the mainstream diet and change the world.
On its website, Exo claims its protein bars are an “intelligent first step towards normalizing the consumption of insects, which will in turn have enormous global impact.” Exo also cites several comparisons between crickets and other more conventional protein sources like beef and chicken. According to their charts, crickets dominate in every category — with more protein per product, 60 pounds of “edible” protein converted from 100 pounds of feed, greenhouse gas emissions 100 times less than cows and water requirements of just one gallon per pound.
In the article, Entomo co-founder Jarrod Goldin went so far as to claim, “If you don’t care about food and the environment and health, then (eating crickets) is not for you.”
But all these wonderful benefits can’t eclipse one thing in the American palette — how does it taste?
While I haven’t tried the bars or the chips, I happen to have eaten a cricket, a “waterbug” and a bamboo worm, counting me among the estimated two billion people around the world who have insects in their diet. And what is eating a cricket like? Honestly, it was the worst thing I’ve ever tasted.
It was crunchy and gooey and spiny with legs that refused to be chewed into submission. The Thai stall I was sampling from had soaked the offending crickets in fish sauce, reducing whatever natural flavor a cricket may have to the taste of rotting fish.
I think even environmentalists who are believers in reducing gas emissions and water usage will struggle with the taste and feel of consuming insects to save the environment.
The textural issues alone may explain why cricket-based companies are coating their crickets in conventional products as protein bars or utilizing cricket flour. Cricket flour is generally made by freezing, boiling, roasting and grinding the insects into a powder — with 3,000 to 5,000 crickets in each pound. But after gnawing on a cricket leg, I wonder how any amount of processing could reduce thousands of crickets to anything resembling the consistency of flour.
As you probably know, the United States is not a large consumer of insects and that leads to the new industry’s biggest issue: even if insects taste good, which I’m not sure is true, the concept of eating bugs is icky. In the article, professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming and author of “The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe and Love Insects,” Jeffrey Lockwood, explained that the revulsion of insects — both in and out of our mouths — is based on an “evolutional predisposition” and “cultural messages,” which may explain why I was willing to try a cricket but am loath to consider eating insects on a regular basis. There’s an astronomical difference between consuming bugs out of the spirit of adventure and cultural exploration and eating a pile for lunch.
However, we have made these dietary leaps before with sushi and even lobster. Lobster was still being used as fertilizer for farmland along the North American coast as late as 1876. Around this same time period, Eastern Canadians were cooking them up solely as slop for their pigs and those who ate lobster were considered degraded and were most likely poor.
Now, there are not many North Americans who would turn down a lobster dinner. So maybe we’re just a few decades away from downing a pile of crickets in fancy restaurants served with a side of butter.
It’s possible, but I hope not.
If the sight of Bear Grylls slurping up maggots or crunching through a giant beetle makes your stomach turn, you may want to skip this column because this week, an article asking if insects could be the food source of the future piqued my interest.
The story focused on the enthusiastic sales of two products sold at Cibo Express, an airport market chain, Exo protein bars and Chirps. Exo protein bars and Chirps each contain a not-so secret ingredient — crickets. Chirps are tortilla chips made from cricket flour and each Exo bar contains approximately 40 ground-up crickets. According to a Cibo representative, these products are wildly popular at airports around the country and “flying off the shelves,” encouraging cricket-pushing companies around the world to have hope that crickets could be accepted into the mainstream diet and change the world.
On its website, Exo claims its protein bars are an “intelligent first step towards normalizing the consumption of insects, which will in turn have enormous global impact.” Exo also cites several comparisons between crickets and other more conventional protein sources like beef and chicken. According to their charts, crickets dominate in every category — with more protein per product, 60 pounds of “edible” protein converted from 100 pounds of feed, greenhouse gas emissions 100 times less than cows and water requirements of just one gallon per pound.
In the article, Entomo co-founder Jarrod Goldin went so far as to claim, “If you don’t care about food and the environment and health, then (eating crickets) is not for you.”
But all these wonderful benefits can’t eclipse one thing in the American palette — how does it taste?
While I haven’t tried the bars or the chips, I happen to have eaten a cricket, a “waterbug” and a bamboo worm, counting me among the estimated two billion people around the world who have insects in their diet. And what is eating a cricket like? Honestly, it was the worst thing I’ve ever tasted.
It was crunchy and gooey and spiny with legs that refused to be chewed into submission. The Thai stall I was sampling from had soaked the offending crickets in fish sauce, reducing whatever natural flavor a cricket may have to the taste of rotting fish.
I think even environmentalists who are believers in reducing gas emissions and water usage will struggle with the taste and feel of consuming insects to save the environment.
The textural issues alone may explain why cricket-based companies are coating their crickets in conventional products as protein bars or utilizing cricket flour. Cricket flour is generally made by freezing, boiling, roasting and grinding the insects into a powder — with 3,000 to 5,000 crickets in each pound. But after gnawing on a cricket leg, I wonder how any amount of processing could reduce thousands of crickets to anything resembling the consistency of flour.
As you probably know, the United States is not a large consumer of insects and that leads to the new industry’s biggest issue: even if insects taste good, which I’m not sure is true, the concept of eating bugs is icky. In the article, professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming and author of “The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe and Love Insects,” Jeffrey Lockwood, explained that the revulsion of insects — both in and out of our mouths — is based on an “evolutional predisposition” and “cultural messages,” which may explain why I was willing to try a cricket but am loath to consider eating insects on a regular basis. There’s an astronomical difference between consuming bugs out of the spirit of adventure and cultural exploration and eating a pile for lunch.
However, we have made these dietary leaps before with sushi and even lobster. Lobster was still being used as fertilizer for farmland along the North American coast as late as 1876. Around this same time period, Eastern Canadians were cooking them up solely as slop for their pigs and those who ate lobster were considered degraded and were most likely poor.
Now, there are not many North Americans who would turn down a lobster dinner. So maybe we’re just a few decades away from downing a pile of crickets in fancy restaurants served with a side of butter.
It’s possible, but I hope not.