Edible insects are a novelty today, but they'll be mainstream tomorrow

http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/R-D/Tiny-Farms-Edible-insects-will-be-be-mainstream-in-future

by DanI-S • 11 years ago

75 110 11 years ago

tomjen32• 11 years ago

Unlikely. They are icky, unappealing and do not have the "man" quality one gets from real meat.

Food is mostly about taste and convenience today, because we have access to enough of it - insects doesn't really give you either.

In short it is highly unlikely that I will wake up tomorrow and eat insects, nor that the majority in the developed world will.

And yes shrimp may technically be insects. Technically correct does nothing for the ick factor.

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

Lobster is a bug; it used to be 'ick' and now its 'yum'. The ick factor is cultural. No reason the OP can't be right - if bugs are tasty, and some people start eating them, and then more people, they could easily become a regular thing.

tomjen32• 11 years ago

Yeah after reading the article I am slightly less skeptical - the headline, as usual, war promising way too much.

That said we are going to look at a timeline of decades rather than tomorrow. I mean Tofu has been around for how long? And it is still somewhat of the beaten path.

bduerst• 11 years ago

That applies to more than just bugs. Given a long enough timeline, anything nutritious could become culturally mainstream. That doesn't guarantee that it will.

yincrash• 11 years ago

I don't find lobsters scurrying behind my trashcan though.

barrkel• 11 years ago

Lobster is 100% bug to me - huge yuck.

Nursie5• 11 years ago

I have a friend who is an entomologist, a doctor of entomology no less. He doesn't eat lobster, or any other type of mollusc, on the basis that they filter-feed and will quite happily chow down on faeces, just like any other insect.

Mind you he finds the texture of boiled eggs repulsive too, so it might just be him.

vamur• 11 years ago

Lobsters, shrimps or mussles are actually delicious, and are thus expensive. Insects or dog/cat meat on the other aren't, as otherwise they would have been adopted into worldwide diet long time ago. So today they still remain a cheap source of food in some third world countries.

pvaldes6• 11 years ago

One problem is that, in a world seing the vanishing of bees and other invertebrates by pesticides, insects are just not so reliable as source of safe food now.

jerf• 11 years ago

You didn't read the article. I can tell because my initial reaction was much like yours, but after reading an article all about cricket flour I realize it doesn't matter to the topic at hand. What obstacles there are to serving people whole insects are perhaps not wholly absent to serving them as an invisible ingredient, but are certainly greatly less.

If insects are going to be introduced into the American diet, this is exactly how it will start. And may well end; I could easily see whole insects never going mainstream. But... they don't have to.

bluedino• 11 years ago

It would only take a generation to change that.

mb_72• 11 years ago

Indeed - raise your kids to eat insects or insect products, and they won't think twice about it. My wife grew up in Eastern Europe and savours the thought of chowing down on blood sausage, whereas I grew up in Australia and it just seems like a 'scab tube' to me! Besides more extreme examples, most food is an acquired taste, and inspect / insect products would be no different.

neuronic• 11 years ago

There have been successful attempts at simply grinding the insects and making them into "meatballs" etc. All that's left over is a sand-like form of them that is highly nutritious and can be processed further.

Sustainability may be a choice today, but it won't be in the future. That's not even a debate.

Looking at r/fitness and trillions of similar boards online, people are readily willing to chug down any sort of powder without need for control through FDA etc. You know, for them "gainz".

So if insects' weird forms are never even detectable by your eyes or tongue, than why should people shy away from them?

I find it pretty crazy that a mental image of a cricket is considered more unappetizing than a bleeding out cow, than a pig kept in a 5ft x 5ft space for all of its life, than newborn chicks ground to shreds by some vacuuming grinding machine because they aren't profitable etc....

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

You can also convert soy into 'meatballs' as well. It hasn't caught on widely either. Taste is the deciding factor.

jff• 11 years ago

And you thought chicken farms were disgusting...

SwellJoe• 11 years ago

I definitely think chicken farms are disgusting (and I've been a vegetarian for 21 years for that reason among many others). Cricket farming, on the other hand, I've considered trying. I'm not entirely confident of the ethics of eating bugs, but it's so vastly superior to the environmental disaster and suffering caused by eating meat, that I think making bugs a part of the average human diet is a net win.

If it tastes good, is healthy, requires less land/water/resources to products, and leads to lower meat consumption, I don't see how it can be a bad thing.

Unfortunately, costs are still very high. I'm not sure why that is, given all the hype about "bugs are a low cost protein!"

technomancy2• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, costs are still very high. I'm not sure why that is, given all the hype about "bugs are a low cost protein!"

My guess is that while bugs are more efficient than most animals at converting energy, the equipment and methods to raise the bugs and convert them into human-ready products have not had the centuries of optimization that mainstream animal husbandry enjoys.

smackfu• 11 years ago

You can buy some on Amazon today for $40 a pound: http://www.amazon.com/JR-Unique-Foods-Cricket-Flour/dp/B00OM...

Nursie5• 11 years ago

People have been publishing this article every few months for as long as I can remember.

They may well be an efficient form of protein but... squick. Basically.

Nursie5• 11 years ago

But kudos to them for working the word 'artisanal' into a story about eating insects

Brakenshire• 11 years ago

It's just unfamiliarity - you would have the same reaction to a prawn if you hadn't grown up with it. And many outsiders would have a similar reaction to squid cooked in its ink (Spain), half-rotted herring (Scandinavia), or even just strongly flavoured blue cheese (everywhere). For that matter, lots of people feel icky about fresh tomatoes.

It's not likely to become something which is mainstream overnight, but there are large parts of the population in the West who actively seek out different experiences. Or, to put it another way, the food market is heavily segmented by interest, class, age, location (national, regional, and metropolitan/rural), and so on. In the short term, you're likely to get movement into early/adventurous adopter parts of the market.

Nursie5• 11 years ago

That's the thing though - it's been there for years (maybe not in the form of cricket flour), and it gets hyped every few months, yet AFAICT there's not been any indication of it being any more than a niche interest.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the sector is really growing this time...

nate_meurer• 11 years ago

Or any kind of meat -- just a fuckin chuck of animal muscle, tendon, gristle, sometimes even skin.

I think there'd be a lot more vegetarians if everyone had to do their own butchering.

davidw• 11 years ago

I always like to bring visitors to Padova down to the piazza for drinks. On some evenings, there's a guy who cooks up delicious octopus that you eat from a plate with toothpicks. My kids love this, and happily slurp up the tentacles and then ask for more. So do I, now, but it did take some getting used to.

belorn• 11 years ago

I can't speak about the other foods on that list, but half-rotted herring is far from a mainstream food in Scandinavia. It more or less a ritual in the fall, in which people eats it while drinking a lot of Vodka and beer.

philwelch2• 11 years ago

I do have the same reaction to prawns and I did grow up with them.

79522• 11 years ago

People feel icky about fresh tomatoes? Really?

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 11 years ago

Kind of interesting how many people would rather eat bugs than not eat meat at all.

illegalsmile• 11 years ago

Have you ever had a bug burger? They're NOT bad at all.

axlprose2• 11 years ago

Not really, considering the nutritional profile of insects. There are some nutrients you can't readily get from plant-based foods, or only in poor amounts, like DHA/EPA, carosine, lysine, etc. Not to mention all the things you'd normally miss out on with traditional meat, because we're not used to eating the bones and innards of large animals here, but that you get from insects cause you'd eat them whole, so you'd get plenty more minerals, vitamins, and rarer amino acids that way.

I recommend reading this book if anybody's interested in more specifics about insect-based nutrition, and why it's actually more unique and useful than most people realize:

http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Adventure-Eating-Insects-Planet...

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 11 years ago

Beans are full of lysine and, for ovo-lacto vegetarians, so are eggs.

(I don't consider dha/epa and carnosine to be essential nutrients.)

magic_beans• 11 years ago

When will crickets NOT be $40 a pound? And then I'll consider it...

tehchromic4• 11 years ago

I can say that bee larvae taste like raw almonds and cow milk butter and I eat on sight.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 11 years ago

I'm going to be seriously disappointed if bee larvae in my region taste differently than raw almonds and cow milk butter.

tbrownaw• 11 years ago

Which is sushi, novelty or mainstream? Or tofu, or non-wheat flour?

Or maybe there's a middle ground where things are neither.

robertfw• 11 years ago

Sushi in Vancouver or Tokyo? Mainstream. Boise, Idaho? It's all relative to where you are.

Eating insects here is currently novelty. But in many parts of the world, it is a part of daily life.

eltondegeneres• 11 years ago

Isn't cricket feed mostly corn and soy? Seems like it would be more efficient to eat the raw ingredients rather than the crickets.

josefresco• 11 years ago

http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectnutrition.html http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/21/why-eating-bugs-is-goo...

_abattoir• 11 years ago

Crickets are less metabolically demanding than humans. We need tricksy things like fiber and animal protein, but crickets can get by on simple sugars and cellulose.

icey• 11 years ago

If anyone wants to get into this game, I'll sell you edible-insects.com and https://twitter.com/edibleinsects :)

computerjunkie2• 11 years ago

I grew up in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa. I speak in general that eating insects is a delicacy and is favoured as a snack most of the time.An example, the [1] mopani worm is an excellent source of protein and is increadibly cheap in Southern Africa.The guts are removed, cleaned and dried in the sun before being packaged for sale. They also taste delicious once fried in butter and mixed with vegetables.

It might be a novelty right now in the western world but its been years of tradition in African or Asian countries.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonimbrasia_belina

MengerSponge• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure most things are delicious once fried in butter and mixed with vegetables.

Incidentally, I'd love for microlivestock to be more widespread in the US--it could be such an affordable protein source!

computerjunkie2• 11 years ago

It will be a interesting perspective as it becomes more common to eat insects in Western countries. The main barrier to break down would be the 'ick/ew' factor, which has been mentioned in this threads comments, that is usually cultural.

But judging from the way some domestic animals are treated by some farms, the ick/ew factor of eating insects becomes less of a barrier.

tehchromic4• 11 years ago

The article capitalizes on a popular foreboding about resource limits with a thrilling "ick" factor, but it's premise is unsubstantial.

I once met an ancient Jewish gentleman who, due to poverty, had been forced to eat lobsters as a youth. In that day they were considered on par with rats as a food source (not to mention they were forbidden by his religious culture) and he had never recovered from the experience, and still considered them revolting.

I can relate: if it became popular with the youth of tomorrow to broil rats and serve them at market price, I'd probably never get on board.

Like insects, Lobster was once a cheap and common food resource. Money could be made by packing and shipping it of to places where it was exotic and unheard of to the majority of people, and so it's image was specially crafted to make profit.

But unlike insects, lobster had the advantage of a fresh market. It was only viewed as the food of impoverished immigrants in port cities where it was common.

The vast majority of the market, at least in the USA, considers insects icky to look at our touch, let alone to eat.

More substantially, I think any serious study would find that people's eating habits rarely change based on broad, even minded assessment of future resource limits. Current rates of meat consumption are a good example: we know it can't last, but few people change their diet so that their great grandchildren can eat more chicken.

I do think insects will be a food source in the future, but that will be because a clever marketer discovers the killer bug that is both exotic and delicious. In general I think it will be a very long and slow process by which everyday insects like crickets become palatable to the status quo.

cgh2• 11 years ago

The article is about cricket flour, not eating whole crickets. Cricket flour products are already on sale in hundreds of stores. The key is to mass produce the flour as right now it's quite expensive. That's what's specifically addressed in the article, not the issue of convincing people to eat it in the first place.

robbrown451• 11 years ago

It has the "ick" factor regardless of whether ground up or not. And the article does talk about flavor, etc.

notahacker• 11 years ago

Whether the challenge of mass producing cricket flour is actually worth solving of course, depends on demand for the product extending beyond novelty value, which is part of the problem with edible algae, also widely available in stores and rather simpler to produce and yet far from being a mainstream foodstuff.

As far as I'm aware use of cricket flour is also virtually nonexistent amongst the many cultures that consider whole insects a delicacy.

On the basis of both of the above I'd hazard that cricket flour is unlikely to become a significant staple food even if niche businesses perfect the art of cricket-farming.

79522• 11 years ago

I understand that Cricket Powder contains protein and other nutrients. But is it more efficient than just using plants as a source of those things? Surely the choice is not steak vs crickets but crickets vs soya?

ams6110• 11 years ago

Rats, raised in clean conditions and fed properly, would probably make a good food source. People eat rabbits and squirrels, there's really not much difference.

tehchromic4• 11 years ago

True, but what you consider clean conditions is relative. City streets are dirty, but so is the bottom of the ocean! where sharks vacate and whales rot to bits and all kinds of sediment and detritus gathers: there's your market price lobster's "clean conditions and properly fed". So would you knowingly eat a rat off the city streets? Well, I probably would too in fact, even if the thought truly disgusts me :}

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

There are other cultures where lobster is available domestically but without the negative connotations; I have good memories of eating fresh-caught lobster for dinner in a tiny fishing village in Ireland, where people had been enjoying them along with crab for many generations.

Shellfish are considered unclean in Judaism, but you shouldn't generalize from that to assume every other culture views them the same way, as with pork, the religious prohibition probably originated with the elevated risk of food-borne illness that was exacerbated by the climate.

rayiner• 11 years ago

In Bangladesh, it's always been considered a treat, though one affordable to villagers before the export market became a thing.

aaron695• 11 years ago

I can relate: if it became popular with the youth of tomorrow to broil rats and serve them at market price, I'd probably never get on board.

Then you will become like most old people.

New things like interracial marriage, gay marriage, trying to not use a lot of resources(baby boomers not pre war), computers etc frighten old people.

And you also will get older and die, like they will before you.

But while you are dying off the youth will embrace the new and the better.

I just feel sad you have pin holed yourself already to not even want to try.

And although I don't like boiled meats, BBQ rat tastes fine.

[Edit] broil != boil I see from Google :)

coldtea• 11 years ago

But while you are dying off the youth will embrace the new and the better.

Yeah, ain't that a shame? Those old belle-epoque people getting older, while the younger generations embraced Word War I and then the Nazi party.

Or those people that got older after the sixties, were the younger generations embraced Raeganism...

Sarcasm aside, new is not necessarily better. It's not even a strong correlation. There is new stuff that can be better than old, and old stuff that can be better than new in equal measure.

Only technology monotonically progresses to better and more advanced things. Morals and customs (and aesthetics) can and do change either way.

philwelch2• 11 years ago

They used to have laws limiting how many times a week you could feed lobster to prisoners because it was considered inhumane.

ppereira• 11 years ago

As with bacteria, human living conditions will get quite ugly near our population's stationary phase.[1] Exponential growth does not last forever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth

perdunov• 11 years ago

Don't think so. We'll rather have lab-grown meat.

towelguy2• 11 years ago

I'm looking forward more at Soylent[0] than lab-grown meat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_%28drink%29

dothething• 11 years ago

Enjoy! http://www.meghantelpner.com/blog/the-soylent-killer/

desireco42• 11 years ago

I don't know how much of the process of raising and making flower from insects is proprietary, but some kind of open source knowledge base might provide appeal for people to refine production and innovate on consumption.

pistle• 11 years ago

I'd try it. I eat raw fish, urchins, rare eggs, rare-ish meat of mammals and fowl. Who knows? Who would know if I would like it better than me?

I've eaten whole insects including crickets and the flavor was whatever. The texture of the legs was like trying to eat the tail of a shrimp - impossible. I'll be interested to see what the processing is like as I'm not sure about the utility of a flour that includes fine grains of exoskeleton. Proteins turn into magical things during cooking and shells don't do quite as well. Flour hints at baking, but I don't think it would function nearly as well.

From the first link on google, the baking results look like it doesn't form anything that can trap air or steam, so dense and mushy seems likely.

mmanfrin• 11 years ago

I've had cookies made with cricket flour, they tasted normal; wouldn't have been able to tell you anything was different from the taste/texture alone.

tehchromic4• 11 years ago

the tail is like, the whole shrimp :} haha, but I know what you mean. Maybe it's good, maybe it's the kind of baking goth teenagers carry on just to disgust their stiff parents!

putzdown• 11 years ago

If I agreed that edible insects were a novelty today I might be persuaded that they'll be mainstream tomorrow. Since I believe that edible insects are a source of revulsion to most Westerners (at least) today, I'm doubtful that they'll be mainstream tomorrow. There's a general principle of argumentation here: if you want me to believe your apodosis, make sure we're on the same page with your protasis.

abecedarius• 11 years ago

I'm a Westerner and just don't understand the revulsion, except from a vegan. Yes, I wouldn't chomp down on a raw cricket from the backyard, but the same goes for a rabbit, only more so -- a rabbit seems more conscious.

I gave a friend some cricket bars and he thought I was joking about the ingredient until after he'd tried it. Well, that's one answer to the ick factor.

robhack• 11 years ago

Am I the only one bothered by the sheer amount of killing this means? You might have to feed poultry 2lb to get 1lb of food, but you kill only one living creature. With insects, how many living creatures are you going to kill to get 1lb ? (even though that would only require 1lb of feeding). Yes I know, they are not conscious at the same level, and are killed in a way so that they don't suffer, but still.

mattchew• 11 years ago

I'm sure you're not the only one, but you're pretty unusual.

Eating meat doesn't bother me, but if I imagine myself attaching more moral value to nonhumans, I would rate insects a lot lower than chickens a lot lower than pigs, and switching to insects being a net gain morally.

Does it bother you to eat plants? Things made with yeast? Do other activities that kill lots of insects bother you?

Not trying to needle you and I hope I am not setting off your scrupulosity, I'm just wondering how far it goes. I am also curious if this is a "thing" in the West now, I know something similar is sometimes practiced in India.

seszett• 11 years ago

I have had the same reaction as him.

I know insects and plants are not "at the same level" as mammals or birds, but I always have the thought that squashing insects or eating plants is still killing living beings and I can't help being bothered by it. Yes, I also do have a thought for the yeast I'm using when baking bread, waking it up from stasis just for baking it in the oven soon after... but unicellular beings seem much less important as they're mostly clones, they don't have the same individuality.

I grow plants as a hobby, and having a few small trees that have grown from seeds, in pots where they entirely depend on me for their life, makes me really see them as individuals - especially since the genetic variation that comes with growing seeds also means they have observably different behaviours.

On the other hand... I do eat some meat, and for some reason I don't have a single thought for the pigs that have to get killed to make the dry sausages or cured ham I eat. I guess that is because I am just so used to eating these, and they are less recognizable as animal parts than, say, chicken wings.

In the end, you just can't live healthily by only eating things that don't harm any living being, so I just live with it, knowing that I have to kill things to eat.

About the India thing, I have thought like this for a very long time, I remember in kindergarten trying to stop other kids from stomping on ants, and (a bit later of course) my parents being amused when I talked about plant being like ununderstandable aliens. So I don't think this has much to do with trends, it's just a thinking you can come up with on your own.

blacksmith_tb• 11 years ago

Hmm, I have been a vegetarian for 25 years, but I am unfazed by it, broadly. It's a quantity vs. quality argument; the chicken has a much more complex nervous system, much longer lifespan, and frankly is a more empathetic creature. Cows and pigs, even more so, on all counts. So I would personally consider it a significant step forward in human morality if fast-food burgers were made of crickets.

pikachu_is_cool• 11 years ago

I kill insects in my house all the time so I'm not bothered by it.

jotux2• 11 years ago

Japan got over the ickiness of insects a long time ago: http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-the-west-fears-insects-w...

Dewie• 11 years ago

Insects might be more economical, or at least eventually when their production is more mainstream. But food is relatively cheap today anyway; what is expensive is rent/or mortgage. Food for a single, working person doesn't really make such a dent in the budget that they are forced to thin "damn, there has to be some alternative to this", compared to what they spend on their rent. So I don't think it's that much incentive to eat insects, from an economical perspective.

technomancy2• 11 years ago

If this were the case, why does Coke contain cheap corn syrup instead of good-tasting cane sugar?

Even if there's not enough of a difference for an individual to choose one over the other it doesn't mean companies with huge economies of scale won't choose differently.

jqm• 11 years ago

I suspect it won't be terribly long before we have genetically modified plants to produce a more complete fat and amino acid profile, and this will essentially replace meat in most cases. Probably this will happen before anything like cricket eating goes mainstream. I wouldn't bet on this at all.

Scarfleece• 11 years ago

Why is there a push for crickets, grinded-up-bug-meatballs and insect flour when there's one that people aren't actually disgusted by -- escargot?

gogoBitz• 11 years ago

Cricket bars are yummy. For me, they pass the taste test. Not a lot of real kick factor. Hope they get the price down with mass production.

gumby• 11 years ago

That article was fascinating but ignored the branding factor. I realize that was intentional, but it is an important factor. What's considered food is basically a cultural/fashion issue, and can be explicitly changed by marketing (e.g. rapeseed can sound horrible in the US but was made acceptable by rebranding it "Canola", and likewise the Chinese gooseberry was much more successful as the Kiwi Fruit).

This is different from passive shifts of food from scorned to fashion, such as lobster or oysters, or how açai briefly swept the Whole Foods set -- that's more of a Veblen issue. Once the technical issues are worked out, someone's going to make a killing (literally I suppose) by rebranding ground up mice and crickets as "Natural Field Protein"

BTW I enjoyed this quote: > "Journalists always ask me what do you say to people that can't get over the psychological hurdle of eating insects?", said Crowley. "I say, 'nothing' - we're not targeting these people. We're targeting people that are receptive to our message, that will be our early adopters."

Good for him!

Edible insects are a novelty today, but they'll be mainstream tomorrow

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