Video: Gourmet insects: Four dishes filled with grubs
Editorial: “Eating insects: Disgust is just the first hurdle“
FROM a dark corner of the kitchen, chef Ben Reade pulls out a plastic container that has become home to a giant cockroach. In any other kitchen, such a sight would merit a call to pest control. But here at Nordic Food Labs – a house boat in Copenhagen transformed into the research arm of world-beating restaurant Noma – this insect is only one of many poised to graduate from their small countertop farm to a dinner plate.
Reade and his chefs are preparing a menu for Pestival, an event promoting insect-eating at the Wellcome Collection in London, where Reade hopes to overcome Westerners’ instinctive revulsion for his unusual recipes. Delights will include French-style mousseline concealing pureed wax moth larvae, butter-roasted crickets, and a tangy ant cocktail.
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It’s not just haute cuisine chefs who are keen to put six-legged snacks on the menu. A growing chorus has it that insects are the superfood of the future. They provide a viable alternative to meat that’s not only more sustainable than pork and beef, but full of vitamins and minerals too.
The only obstacle to this protein nirvana, the thinking goes, is our aversion to putting insects anywhere near our mouths, let alone inside them. And so from governments to chefs to cricket-energy-bar entrepreneurs, there is a push to find ways to make insectivores of us all.
But is this revulsion really the sole obstacle standing in the way of a globally sustainable protein source? Or is the road to insect consumption pocked with other pitfalls?
Worldwide, 1900 insect species have been identified as edible, and in parts of Africa, Asia and Central and South America, people have been eating them for centuries.
In the past few years, however, governments and environmental groups have expressed a growing interest in putting insects on everyone’s plate. According to a recent United Nations report, the current rate of global population growth will require a . The demand will mainly be for foods rich in protein, but there isn’t enough land available to raise the necessary livestock. The UN report identified . Not only can they be reared in a fraction of the space necessary for traditional livestock, but their waste products contain less ammonia – – and emit far fewer greenhouse gases.
Mainly, however, they are protein powerhouses. Mealworms contain more protein than the equivalent amount of pork. A 100-gram serving of dried flies or Mexican grasshoppers contains about the same 28 grams of protein you’ll find in 226-gram steak. Many insects are also packed with vitamins and minerals, in particular the zinc and iron that many diets lack; two silkmoth larvae contain 10 times the iron found in 100 grams of grilled beef, and a 100-gram serving of cooked caterpillars – a popular dish in Angola – . Most insects even contain fibre and healthy which is reflected in their flavour. Raw Australian witchetty grubs, for example, have the taste of almonds, if not the texture.
Before Westerners can avail themselves of this cornucopia, however, they will need to overcome the psychological hurdles of eating something that is conventionally associated with filth (See Insects in Disguise). The good news is, it seems entirely plausible that in 25 years’ time, we’ll all be enthusiastic entomophagists. Unfortunately, our preferences are only half of the story.
Something wild
One very basic problem is finding a rich source of insects. Nutritious or not, you will need to eat quite a few to feel full. In Mexico, some restaurants will fill a taco with 25 grams of ants, and serve up two as a light lunch, but in Thailand, and most insect-embracing countries, .
“You will need to eat quite a few to feel full – even in insect-embracing countries, they are predominantly seen as a snack”
So where will we get enough insects to offset the ultimate shortfall in beef and its ilk? It would be disastrous to attempt to harvest them from the wild. “If everyone does that, there is the risk of over-exploitation,” says Marcel Dicke, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Sure, in the West, the thought of a foraging gold-rush might be far-fetched, but trouble is already brewing in Mexico, where several species are endangered by the eating habits of a growing population. The increasing demand from restaurants both in Mexico and abroad , including butterfly larvae.
What’s more, eating wild insects could be nearly as troublesome for humans as it is for the insects. There is no way to know what a wild insect has been eating; it could be teeming with potentially harmful microbes. But while legislation exists to define, for example, how many insects are acceptable as contaminants in other foods, . To kill microbial passengers, chefs are told to blanch the insects, then freeze them, or to purge them by feeding them clean food for 24 hours – now a common practice when serving snails.
Other contaminants, however, could prove harder to remove. When Adedoyin Davies Banjo at Olabisi Onabanjo University in Nigeria examined giant termites and African palm weevil larvae – two species commonly eaten in the area – his team discovered considerable amounts of heavy metals including lead and cadmium. The most likely culprits, they concluded, were chemical pesticides sprayed near the insects’ habitats, or airborne waste released by industrial sites. For humans, a regular diet of these contaminated insects could result in .
For many reasons, then, wild insects are off the menu. The only viable alternative is farming. Battery farms for insects have already taken off in a few countries. In Thailand, where insects used to be consumed mainly by the rural poor but are now increasingly in demand from urbanites, farming helps make them plentiful year-round. Since cricket farming was introduced there about 15 years ago, it has become big business. About 20,000 farms mass-produce crickets in concrete pens that can comfortably hold about 2000 of them apiece.
Insect farmers in the northern climates won’t find it so easy, though. Insects’ reputation for resilience, even pestilence, is misleading. Locusts, for example, need high temperatures to survive. The good news, according to Dicke, who has bred locusts in his lab for research purposes for 30 years, is that there is no danger of farmed locusts forming Biblical plagues if they were to escape captivity in a temperate climate.
So which insects can be farmed in the north? Finding the answer will require extensive trial and error because different species thrive under different conditions. Requirements can vary almost as widely between insect species as they vary between chickens, pigs and cattle, as the countertop farm taught the chefs at Nordic Food Labs. “Any insects that go through a larval and chrysalis stage are more tricky,” says Reade. So cockroaches may reproduce easily, but rearing beetles is harder.
In Europe, the Netherlands is paving the way with farms that focus on less sensitive, mass-producible varieties like migratory locusts, mealworms and beetle larvae. Because locusts thrive in tight quarters in nature, they can be reared en masse in boxes, living off grass. Mealworms flourish in darkness, although heating is required when they are raised in temperate climates, which reduces their vaunted green credentials. A recent study found that the energy used in the production of mealworms is more than that used to produce the equivalent amount of milk or chicken but similar to pork and beef (see diagram). However, the amount of energy required could be reduced by .
The lessons learned in the Netherlands can be adopted by other Western countries to help them make insects a part of the regular food supply. But there’s a long way to go before insect farms become as commonplace as chicken and dairy farms.
What happens, for example, when insects get sick? “There are no veterinarians for insects,” says Marion Peters, who was confronted with this lack of knowledge when she founded Dutch edible insect supplier Bugs Originals. We don’t know anything about insect diseases, she says: “if an insects gets ill, we don’t know how to cure it.” But disease is almost certain to strike in cramped quarters.
“There are no veterinarians for insects – but disease is certain to strike in cramped insect farms”
Then there’s the lack of equipment. Insect farming is so new in the northern hemisphere that no labour-saving technology is available yet. But it is necessary, Dicke says, if insects’ faeces are not removed promptly, for example, they will often eat them. The manual labour required to keep cages clean, is a major impediment to mass production.
Solving these problems is only a matter of time and effort, but a more intractable issue might be taste. Discerning palates will tell you that farmed insects simply do not taste as good as those that grow in the wild. In rare cases, some insect farmers have been known to succumb to shortcuts to keep prices down – for example, rearing crickets on fish food. “They taste like rotten fish,” Reade says.
To anticipate the gustatory demands of diners, chefs like Reade now pay exorbitantly for tastier specimens reared for zoos, rather than buying those farmed in Holland. “The small grasshoppers we bought cost 20p each, and that was a reduced rate,” says Reade. At these prices, to get the same 25 grams of protein that you would find in a steak costing £3.40, .
But the news is not all bad. Even if they do not become a dietary staple, there is another way insects could revolutionise the 21st-century food supply: simply by moving an additional rung down the food chain.
Insects could do a lot of good being adopted as a new source of food for livestock. Feeding bugs to animals requires less of a mental switch: chickens, for example, already slurp up insects in the wild. And changing regulations in the European Union will soon be modified to . “Feeding insects to pigs could be an alternative to fishmeal which is skyrocketing in price,” says Dicke. “As fish populations are at risk of being depleted, it’s also an environmentally friendly alternative.”
Insects could become even more appealing, for both environmental and cost reasons, if we start feeding them food waste. Dicke is now looking into turning the by-products of biscuit and beer production into insect food. While humans might not enjoy insects fed unwanted slurry, animals are unlikely to object.
But perhaps the most intriguing benefit is insects’ potential role as a natural antibiotic. Chitin, which is the main component of many insect exoskeletons and also found in shellfish, has been shown to enhance the immune system, promote healthy gut flora and inhibit the growth of several pathogens. Researchers at the University of Technology in Thailand found that chicken feed supplemented with small quantities of chitin-containing shrimp resulted in a small increase in the chickens’ gut bacteria . Incorporating insects into animal diets in the US, for example, could .
It is tough to predict what our relationship with edible animals will look like 25 years from now. Even Reade, who loves the prospect of a new ingredient, has no trouble saying insects are unlikely to replace meat on a large scale. What is clear, though, is that meat production, if left to grow unchecked, will demand more land and energy than the planet can afford. The real issue may not be what kind of protein we eat, but how much. “We can investigate insects as food for the rich, or for the poor,” he says, “but maybe we should really just accept that we shouldn’t be eating so much meat.”
As he serves up the final course of his tempting feast – a scoop of beeswax ice cream with honey kombucha sauce – it is hard to argue that we should not be eating insects. But the high cost of out-of-season bee larvae is a reminder that this dish will stay an occasional treat, for the time being at least.
Insects in disguise
“People still often think that we take insects out of the trash bin,” says Marian Peters, a Dutch entrepreneur whose company, Bugs Originals, sells farmed insects to local supermarkets. Her consumer tests found that while most people do not mind seeing insects listed on a food label, they’d rather not be able to recognise them. “Even adventurous eaters hesitated when they saw mealworms on their plate,” she says.
To appeal to the less adventurous, efforts are under way to present insects in disguise. Researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands are investigating whether proteins could be extracted to supplement food. “There could be a whole new source of quality protein we have previously ignored,” says Marcel Dicke, an entomologist who pioneered research at Wageningen to study edible insects.
Meanwhile, entomologists at Khon Kaen University in Thailand are turning insect protein into a powder that can be sprinkled on meals at home or baked into cookies, crackers and noodles. And a company called Chapul in Salt Lake City, Utah, is grinding up crickets, turning them into flour and mixing them into energy bars.
But perhaps we’re trying too hard. In a recent study of Flemish attitudes toward meat alternatives, another group of researchers at Wageningen found that even people who were initially averse to meat alternatives like tofu easily got used to them after repeat exposure. What’s more, the less the substitute was disguised to resemble familiar meats, the more quickly people grew to like it – and the less likely they were to get bored of it. This, the authors concluded, was encouraging news for “using novel sustainable products to reduce meat consumption.” ().
This article appeared in print under the headline “Grub’s up”
