6 ms·

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

75 points by DanI-S 12y ago

tomjen3 12y 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 12y 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.
  - tomjen3 12y 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.
    - veemjeem 12y ago
      People already eat bugs in other countries where bugs are hardly disgusting compared to their usual food. Convincing Americans to eat bug food might be harder, but Americans only make up of 5% of the earth's population. I've consumed roasted tarantulas in asian countries and they taste quite good, so I can see that insect consumption in those countries will be quite a bit easier.
  - bduerst 12y 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 12y ago
    I don't find lobsters scurrying behind my trashcan though.
    - martindale 12y ago
      Well, actually... http://i.ytimg.com/vi/z54da6-fz94/hqdefault.jpg http://i.ytimg.com/vi/z54da6-fz94/hqdefault.jpg Okay, so it's a coconut crab, not a lobster, but... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab
  - barrkel 12y ago
    Lobster is 100% bug to me - huge yuck.
    - pvaldes 12y ago
      You should seriously consider to task it if not done yet, is simply delicious if properly prepared. Just keep trying, is just a cultural wall. You'll thank me in the future.
  - Nursie 12y 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.
    - gnoway 12y ago
      So do plants, more or less.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > lobster, or any other type of mollusc Lobsters aren't molluscs, they're crustaceans. Not even the same phylum.
      - Nursie 12y ago
        I didn't say I was a doctor of entomology :)
    - dingaling 12y ago
      > on the basis that they filter-feed and will quite happily chow down on faeces Just like cod, which my Hull fishing-town relatives taught me is a dirty, wormy fish unsuitable for consumption. All you can do with it is sell it to the naive land-lubbers...
  - vamur 12y 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.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      Oyster are expensive because rarity. They used to be food for poor people. http://www.missfoodwise.com/2013/03/beef-stout-and-oyster-pie-poverty-and.html http://www.missfoodwise.com/2013/03/beef-stout-and-oyster-pi...
      - pvaldes 12y ago
        Expensive because they are classified as "luxury". More than 91.000 Kg of oysters produced each year in Europe exclusively for human food.
    - Lethe101 12y ago
      I hate to correct you, but this isn't correct (your 'downvoted' status might reflect this). Canine / felines are carnivores (omnivores these days, but you get the gist) and their muscle structure / diets cause them to taste 'off' and be tough fleshwise. Not to mention that they're worth more as biological weapons / companions. There are also more scientific reasons, for example: There was a quick deterioration in the men's physical condition during this journey. Both men suffered dizziness; nausea; abdominal pain; irrationality; mucosal fissuring; skin, hair, and nail loss; and the yellowing of eyes and skin. Later Mawson noticed a dramatic change in his travelling companion. Mertz seemed to lose the will to move and wished only to remain in his sleeping bag. He began to deteriorate rapidly with diarrhoea and madness. On one occasion Mertz refused to believe he was suffering from frostbite and bit off the tip of his own little finger. This was soon followed by violent raging—Mawson had to sit on his companion's chest and hold down his arms to prevent him from damaging their tent. Mertz suffered further seizures before falling into a coma and dying on 8 January 1913.[8] It was unknown at the time that Husky liver contains extremely high levels of vitamin A. It was also not known that such levels of vitamin A could cause liver damage to humans.[9] With six dogs between them (with a liver on average weighing 1 kg), it is thought that the pair ingested enough liver to bring on a condition known as Hypervitaminosis A. However, Mertz may have suffered more because he found the tough muscle tissue difficult to eat and therefore ate more of the liver than Mawson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Mawson#Australasian_Antarctic_Expedition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Mawson#Australasian_An... It is highly likely that if those explorers had asked the original breeders of said animals, they'd have been told strongly that eating them was a bad idea.
  - pvaldes 12y 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.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      You don't eat wild insects because they could be carrying disease. You eat farmed insects which are clean and you can be sure they're free of pesticides or other agrichemicals. Farming insects uses less land and water than farming meat and is less problematic regarding cruelty.
      - pvaldes 12y ago
        "cruelty" is a false problem, a species of new religion that can accept as perfectly good move to set free a mink from other continent that you know will kill thousands of native birds later. Just a modern fairy tale, that did never prove to solve absolutely nothing. Is just manipulation. If there is a market for bugs something will end selling ilegally wild bugs (cheaper, better profit margins). This is what history tells us again and again. I really hope that we as species can be more smarter in the future about this. Famines are not caused by people not eating bugs, are caused by people creating wars by design, etc...
- jerf 12y 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 12y ago
  It would only take a generation to change that.
  - mb_72 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
    You can also convert soy into 'meatballs' as well. It hasn't caught on widely either. Taste is the deciding factor.
    - amyjess 12y ago
      In the case of soy-based fakemeat, it's more about texture than taste. The taste isn't that hard to get down; good luck getting it to have the same mouthfeel as a slice of bacon or a nice, juicy steak though.
jff 12y ago
And you thought chicken farms were disgusting...
- SwellJoe 12y 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!"
  - technomancy 12y 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 12y ago
You can buy some on Amazon today for $40 a pound: http://www.amazon.com/JR-Unique-Foods-Cricket-Flour/dp/B00OMCTODQ http://www.amazon.com/JR-Unique-Foods-Cricket-Flour/dp/B00OM...
Nursie 12y 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.
- Nursie 12y ago
  But kudos to them for working the word 'artisanal' into a story about eating insects
- Brakenshire 12y 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.
  - Nursie 12y 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...
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - nate_meurer 12y 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.
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
Kind of interesting how many people would rather eat bugs than not eat meat at all.
- illegalsmile 12y ago
  Have you ever had a bug burger? They're NOT bad at all.
- axlprose 12y 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/dp/0544114353 http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Adventure-Eating-Insects-Planet...
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y 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.)
    - axlprose 12y ago
      > I don't consider dha/epa and carnosine to be essential nutrients We're at a point where we don't even know what we don't know about nutrition, so it's fair to have "beliefs" like this I suppose. But there is substantial evidence for DHA's impact on brain development if nothing else, including the brain development of children birthed from mothers low in DHA stores. Not much significant evidence suggests equivalent impact from ALA/plant-based fatty acids, nor do they convert predictably in the body to forms the forms that are actually directly useful. I will grant you that EPA is more debatable, but DHA is pretty solid. And while I don't trust speculative 'evolutionary' evidence, it does make sense that human brain development (and thus human development in general) supposedly started to take off once they migrated near the coasts where there was an abundance of seafood to hunt. Not to mention that plant fats/oils are the largest contributors to the problem of having imbalanced omega-6 to omega-3 ratios to begin with: http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000141000000000000000-w.html http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000141000000000000000-w.... Either way, "essential nutrients" and nutrition in general aren't things that we can assume as being settled, because much of what we "know" about all that will almost certainly become outdated in a few short generations. In the meantime, I think moderate diversification of nutrients isn't a bad idea. Edit: I also made no mention of vegetarianism/veganism, I simply referred to plant-based food sources specifically, because many animal-derived products (including eggs as you mentioned), most certainly still have the benefits I was describing. It's not about lifestyle or ideology, it's about finding quality sources of things that promote optimal human functioning.
magic_beans 12y ago
When will crickets NOT be $40 a pound? And then I'll consider it...
tehchromic 12y ago
I can say that bee larvae taste like raw almonds and cow milk butter and I eat on sight.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  I'm going to be seriously disappointed if bee larvae in my region taste differently than raw almonds and cow milk butter.
tbrownaw 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectnutrition.html http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectnutrition.html http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/21/why-eating-bugs-is-good-for-you-its-about-the-nutrients/ http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/21/why-eating-bugs-is-goo...
- _abattoir 12y 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 12y ago
If anyone wants to get into this game, I'll sell you edible-insects.com and https://twitter.com/edibleinsects https://twitter.com/edibleinsects :)
computerjunkie 12y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonimbrasia_belina
- MengerSponge 12y 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!
  - computerjunkie 12y 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.
tehchromic 12y 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.
- cgh 12y 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 12y ago
    It has the "ick" factor regardless of whether ground up or not. And the article does talk about flavor, etc.
  - 12y ago
ppereira 12y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth
perdunov 12y ago
Don't think so. We'll rather have lab-grown meat.
- towelguy 12y ago
  I'm looking forward more at Soylent[0] than lab-grown meat. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_%28drink%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_%28drink%29
  - dothething 12y ago
    Enjoy! http://www.meghantelpner.com/blog/the-soylent-killer/ http://www.meghantelpner.com/blog/the-soylent-killer/
    - towelguy 12y ago
      That article is attacking the current implementation, but I'm looking more at the idea and want to see where it goes. Implementations can be made better.
      - soylentemployee 12y ago
        Like ensure or enfamil?
    - esrauch 12y ago
      You can easily find blogs talking about how anything is terrible. Just offhand, your link recommends multivitamins, but there are many more-credible sources that will tell you that multivitamins are bad for you.
    - conjecTech 12y ago
      "Dont drink Soylent! Buy all these things I'm getting a commission on instead!" This article has absolutely no ethos. It is little more than an advertisement wrapped in logical errors and playing off contrarianism.
    - 12y ago
desireco42 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
- tehchromic 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
jotux 12y ago
Japan got over the ickiness of insects a long time ago: http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-the-west-fears-insects-while-japan-reveres-them/ http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-the-west-fears-insects-w...
Dewie 12y 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.
- technomancy 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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!

75 points by DanI-S 12y 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 12y 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.
- tomjen3 12y 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.
  - veemjeem 12y ago
    People already eat bugs in other countries where bugs are hardly disgusting compared to their usual food. Convincing Americans to eat bug food might be harder, but Americans only make up of 5% of the earth's population. I've consumed roasted tarantulas in asian countries and they taste quite good, so I can see that insect consumption in those countries will be quite a bit easier.
- bduerst 12y 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 12y ago
  I don't find lobsters scurrying behind my trashcan though.
  - martindale 12y ago
    Well, actually... http://i.ytimg.com/vi/z54da6-fz94/hqdefault.jpg http://i.ytimg.com/vi/z54da6-fz94/hqdefault.jpg Okay, so it's a coconut crab, not a lobster, but... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_crab
- barrkel 12y ago
  Lobster is 100% bug to me - huge yuck.
  - pvaldes 12y ago
    You should seriously consider to task it if not done yet, is simply delicious if properly prepared. Just keep trying, is just a cultural wall. You'll thank me in the future.
- Nursie 12y 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.
  - gnoway 12y ago
    So do plants, more or less.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > lobster, or any other type of mollusc Lobsters aren't molluscs, they're crustaceans. Not even the same phylum.
    - Nursie 12y ago
      I didn't say I was a doctor of entomology :)
  - dingaling 12y ago
    > on the basis that they filter-feed and will quite happily chow down on faeces Just like cod, which my Hull fishing-town relatives taught me is a dirty, wormy fish unsuitable for consumption. All you can do with it is sell it to the naive land-lubbers...
- vamur 12y 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.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Oyster are expensive because rarity. They used to be food for poor people. http://www.missfoodwise.com/2013/03/beef-stout-and-oyster-pie-poverty-and.html http://www.missfoodwise.com/2013/03/beef-stout-and-oyster-pi...
    - pvaldes 12y ago
      Expensive because they are classified as "luxury". More than 91.000 Kg of oysters produced each year in Europe exclusively for human food.
  - Lethe101 12y ago
    I hate to correct you, but this isn't correct (your 'downvoted' status might reflect this). Canine / felines are carnivores (omnivores these days, but you get the gist) and their muscle structure / diets cause them to taste 'off' and be tough fleshwise. Not to mention that they're worth more as biological weapons / companions. There are also more scientific reasons, for example: There was a quick deterioration in the men's physical condition during this journey. Both men suffered dizziness; nausea; abdominal pain; irrationality; mucosal fissuring; skin, hair, and nail loss; and the yellowing of eyes and skin. Later Mawson noticed a dramatic change in his travelling companion. Mertz seemed to lose the will to move and wished only to remain in his sleeping bag. He began to deteriorate rapidly with diarrhoea and madness. On one occasion Mertz refused to believe he was suffering from frostbite and bit off the tip of his own little finger. This was soon followed by violent raging—Mawson had to sit on his companion's chest and hold down his arms to prevent him from damaging their tent. Mertz suffered further seizures before falling into a coma and dying on 8 January 1913.[8] It was unknown at the time that Husky liver contains extremely high levels of vitamin A. It was also not known that such levels of vitamin A could cause liver damage to humans.[9] With six dogs between them (with a liver on average weighing 1 kg), it is thought that the pair ingested enough liver to bring on a condition known as Hypervitaminosis A. However, Mertz may have suffered more because he found the tough muscle tissue difficult to eat and therefore ate more of the liver than Mawson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Mawson#Australasian_Antarctic_Expedition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Mawson#Australasian_An... It is highly likely that if those explorers had asked the original breeders of said animals, they'd have been told strongly that eating them was a bad idea.
- pvaldes 12y 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.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    You don't eat wild insects because they could be carrying disease. You eat farmed insects which are clean and you can be sure they're free of pesticides or other agrichemicals. Farming insects uses less land and water than farming meat and is less problematic regarding cruelty.
    - pvaldes 12y ago
      "cruelty" is a false problem, a species of new religion that can accept as perfectly good move to set free a mink from other continent that you know will kill thousands of native birds later. Just a modern fairy tale, that did never prove to solve absolutely nothing. Is just manipulation. If there is a market for bugs something will end selling ilegally wild bugs (cheaper, better profit margins). This is what history tells us again and again. I really hope that we as species can be more smarter in the future about this. Famines are not caused by people not eating bugs, are caused by people creating wars by design, etc...
jerf 12y 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 12y ago
It would only take a generation to change that.
- mb_72 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  You can also convert soy into 'meatballs' as well. It hasn't caught on widely either. Taste is the deciding factor.
  - amyjess 12y ago
    In the case of soy-based fakemeat, it's more about texture than taste. The taste isn't that hard to get down; good luck getting it to have the same mouthfeel as a slice of bacon or a nice, juicy steak though.

jff 12y ago

And you thought chicken farms were disgusting...

SwellJoe 12y 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!"
- technomancy 12y 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 12y ago

You can buy some on Amazon today for $40 a pound: http://www.amazon.com/JR-Unique-Foods-Cricket-Flour/dp/B00OMCTODQ http://www.amazon.com/JR-Unique-Foods-Cricket-Flour/dp/B00OM...

Nursie 12y 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.

Nursie 12y ago
But kudos to them for working the word 'artisanal' into a story about eating insects
Brakenshire 12y 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.
- Nursie 12y 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...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- nate_meurer 12y 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.

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago

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

illegalsmile 12y ago
Have you ever had a bug burger? They're NOT bad at all.
axlprose 12y 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/dp/0544114353 http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Adventure-Eating-Insects-Planet...
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y 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.)
  - axlprose 12y ago
    > I don't consider dha/epa and carnosine to be essential nutrients We're at a point where we don't even know what we don't know about nutrition, so it's fair to have "beliefs" like this I suppose. But there is substantial evidence for DHA's impact on brain development if nothing else, including the brain development of children birthed from mothers low in DHA stores. Not much significant evidence suggests equivalent impact from ALA/plant-based fatty acids, nor do they convert predictably in the body to forms the forms that are actually directly useful. I will grant you that EPA is more debatable, but DHA is pretty solid. And while I don't trust speculative 'evolutionary' evidence, it does make sense that human brain development (and thus human development in general) supposedly started to take off once they migrated near the coasts where there was an abundance of seafood to hunt. Not to mention that plant fats/oils are the largest contributors to the problem of having imbalanced omega-6 to omega-3 ratios to begin with: http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000141000000000000000-w.html http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000141000000000000000-w.... Either way, "essential nutrients" and nutrition in general aren't things that we can assume as being settled, because much of what we "know" about all that will almost certainly become outdated in a few short generations. In the meantime, I think moderate diversification of nutrients isn't a bad idea. Edit: I also made no mention of vegetarianism/veganism, I simply referred to plant-based food sources specifically, because many animal-derived products (including eggs as you mentioned), most certainly still have the benefits I was describing. It's not about lifestyle or ideology, it's about finding quality sources of things that promote optimal human functioning.

magic_beans 12y ago

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

tehchromic 12y ago

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

0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
I'm going to be seriously disappointed if bee larvae in my region taste differently than raw almonds and cow milk butter.

tbrownaw 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectnutrition.html http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectnutrition.html http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/21/why-eating-bugs-is-good-for-you-its-about-the-nutrients/ http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/21/why-eating-bugs-is-goo...
_abattoir 12y 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 12y ago

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

computerjunkie 12y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonimbrasia_belina

MengerSponge 12y 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!
- computerjunkie 12y 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.

tehchromic 12y 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.

cgh 12y 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 12y ago
  It has the "ick" factor regardless of whether ground up or not. And the article does talk about flavor, etc.
- 12y ago

ppereira 12y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth

perdunov 12y ago

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

towelguy 12y ago
I'm looking forward more at Soylent[0] than lab-grown meat. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_%28drink%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_%28drink%29
- dothething 12y ago
  Enjoy! http://www.meghantelpner.com/blog/the-soylent-killer/ http://www.meghantelpner.com/blog/the-soylent-killer/
  - towelguy 12y ago
    That article is attacking the current implementation, but I'm looking more at the idea and want to see where it goes. Implementations can be made better.
    - soylentemployee 12y ago
      Like ensure or enfamil?
  - esrauch 12y ago
    You can easily find blogs talking about how anything is terrible. Just offhand, your link recommends multivitamins, but there are many more-credible sources that will tell you that multivitamins are bad for you.
  - conjecTech 12y ago
    "Dont drink Soylent! Buy all these things I'm getting a commission on instead!" This article has absolutely no ethos. It is little more than an advertisement wrapped in logical errors and playing off contrarianism.
  - 12y ago

desireco42 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
tehchromic 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.

jotux 12y ago

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

Dewie 12y 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.

technomancy 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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!