This could be the food of the future—if you can handle it
It's an evening of entomology—cooking, eating, and trying to understand an insect diet.
by Jason Plautz - Mar 7, 2016 8:30am CST
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/...can-handle-it/
The boxes at my door were plastered with red drawings of bugs and the blunt warning: “Live Insects.” I could hear audible scratching and shuffling—and even what I thought was an errant “chirp”—as I placed them on my kitchen counter.
I slowly opened the first lid. Out poked two antennae, followed by the head of a cricket. I lifted the lid higher and saw dozens of them hopping around. Inside the second box, a thousand mealworms wriggled over an egg crate.
The first ingredients for my dinner party had arrived. Gagging slightly, I moved the boxes to my fridge.
In Western culture, eating insects is most commonly treated more like a stunt than a trend. Think of the dares on Fear Factor or of the gross-out twist in Snowpiercer when the poor find out they’ve been fed smashed insects. In other countries, however, insects aren’t uncommon in tacos or stir fry; sometimes they’re eaten straight out of the bag like potato chips.
“We have in Europe and North America a culture that leads to a lawsuit when you find an insect part in food. It’s ridiculous,” said Tom Turpin, a professor of entomology at Purdue University and a bug chef.
But slowly, entomophagy—eating insects—is catching on. In a 2013 report, the United Nations recognized that, given the food demands of a booming population, insects presented a “significant opportunity.” High in protein but with a small carbon footprint, insects seem like a “superfood’ at a time of increasing scrutiny on the sustainability of the food chain.
In the US today, protein bars and cookies can be baked with cricket flour. High-end chefs like Jose Andres and Rene Redzepi serve up grasshoppers and ants. It may soon be possible to keep a small bug farm in your kitchen, fed only by food waste—and then empty the critters directly into a pan for dinner.
Of course, all this progress continues to run into one small problem: bugs give people the creeps. So to cross that psychological barrier and embrace the food of the future, the recipe is clear. I would make a bug-based dinner of my own and actually convince my friends to eat it.
The first hurdle
I already had a passing familiarity with entomography thanks to Exo, a line of protein bars made with ground-up cricket flour that helped fuel several months of marathon training. My bug-based dinner party would have to go much further than that—we’ll get to those live mealworms in a bit—but cricket flour seemed a good place to start.
It turns out this is exactly what the bar’s creators had in mind.
“If the idea of consuming insects is a challenge already, we need to get [people] over the hurdle in a form that’s recognizable and approachable,” said Kyle Connaughton, a California chef and Exo’s head of R&D.
Connaughton first worked with insects while at England’s Fat Duck, which hosted a Victorian dinner featuring roasted crickets injected with sauces. That’s not exactly mainstream, but a protein bar is already a regular part of many people’s lives.
Exo chose deliberately non-exotic flavors for its bars, things like peanut butter and jelly or cocoa nut. The packaging emphasizes just how much protein each bar contains: 40 crickets’ worth. Each cricket has about twice the protein, by percentage, as beef jerky and just under three times that of chicken.
Crickets have been described as the “chicken of the bug world”—ubiquitous, easy to cook, providing a good base for other flavors. Since crickets are a popular pet food, the infrastructure for mass production already exists, though not every farm raises food-grade crickets (that is, grown in a manner safe for human consumption and big enough to make them worthwhile).
As an added bonus, Connaughton said, the protein from cricket flour just tastes better than conventional whey or soy protein, which is usually masked with sugary vanilla or fake chocolate. Crickets have an earthy flavor on their own, but Connaughton said that roasting and drying them before grinding brings out “reactive flavors” that deepen the flour’s taste (like the difference between a roast chicken and a boiled one).
Decades ago, sushi was popular in Japan, but it just wouldn’t catch on in America—until a Los Angeles restaurant wrapped up crab and avocado and called it a “California roll.” Exo hopes that cricket bars can do the same for bugs.
If protein bars aren’t your thing, cricket flour is expanding into more foods. Bitty, a New York-based retailer, now offers up cookies and biscuits made with cricket flour. Portland, Oregon-based Cricket Flours sells oatmeal blends with crickets and has partnered with the chain Wayback Burgers to sell a cricket chocolate milkshake.
Considering all this, cricket flour felt like a good way to ease my dinner party guests into the meal. I ordered a box of Exo bars and a bag of cricket flour from Bitty, which promised that it could be swapped into any baked-good recipe. I added both to my growing list of ingredients.
See your food
It may seem counter-intuitive; not everyone wants to disguise the “bugginess” of bugs by grinding them into flour.
“I want to help people get over that ‘oh gross, bug’ thing, so bugs are always going to be prominently displayed in my recipes,” said David George Gordon, a cookbook author who markets himself as The Bug Chef. “I wanted people to be aware of what they’re eating.”
Gordon, while excited about the industry growth potential of products with cricket flour, doesn’t believe that normcore is ultimately the best way to go. Rather than crickets (“for whatever reason, they’re considered cuter”) or mealworms (“that name is a detriment”), he’d like to see more imaginative bugs served up. Bugs like… giant centipedes.
“I’ve got a great recipe, you just have to remove their genitals before serving... that’s a lot more work than just adding some flour,” he said.
When I asked what he’d choose as a birthday treat, he responded quickly. “A big bowl of deep-fried tarantula,” he said. Gordon compares it to crab.
For my dinner party, therefore, I needed to diversify away from the crickets and mealworms I had already ordered. I eventually found Bug Vivant , an El Paso-based distributor that hopes to make bugs more accessible. Founder Meghan Curry will even go down to Mexico to pick up insects that are more popular there.
“So far we’ve had really good luck bringing stuff over the border; nobody’s stopped me yet,” she said optimistically.
Curry—who did a two-week climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan fueled only by insects—said that the insect industry has grown dramatically since she first got involved in 2013.
“Even from just a year ago, it’s a whole different landscape,” she said, estimating that there’s a new startup every month in the US alone. She’s organized a semi-regular teleconference called “EnthoCall” where people are hatching plans to form a trade association, to set industry standards, and to create bigger-scale production systems.
When we spoke, Curry happened to have some more interesting bugs for sale. I ended our conversation by buying a bag of gusanos, a worm you might find at the bottom of a mescal bottle, along with some chapulines, a Mexican grasshopper eaten as a snack.
Despite all the chef’s high praise, when the chapulines showed up sealed in a freezer bag, I must admit… I had a serious “oh crap, these things are going in my mouth” moment
Gross vs. greenhouse
There’s a reason cricket meal is more appealing to most eaters than looking at a bunch of actual bugs, wings and thoraxes and all.
According to Eric Hamerman, an Iona College professor, that’s how we’re hard-wired to react. One of the dimensions of disgust (yes, disgust is more nuanced than Inside Out would have you believe) makes whole animals tough to stomach.
“‘Animal reminder’ disgust reminds people of their own animal nature, that we are animals in a physical shell,” Hamerman explained. “Steak is called steak, not cow, and it doesn’t look like a cow, so you can separate that from eating an animal. But a raw insect—you can tell that’s an animal you’re eating.”
Hamerman recently published a study in the journal Appetite that found that the mere mention of “cooking” helped people volunteer to eat bugs. Knowing that the animals would be transformed through the cooking process helped some people make the psychological leap past disgust.
But subjects who were more sensitive to “core disgust”—the “threat that stems from oral consumption of offensive items”—still wouldn’t go for the bugs even when primed to think about cooking. That problem, Hamerman said, will be harder to address.
“Think of eating a fish with eyes on it. In cultures where that’s the norm, I’m guessing it’s a very different response than it would be here,” Hamerman said. “There’s sensitivity to disgust and then there’s the types of food that trigger that sensitivity. And it has a lot to do with culture.”
Supporters hope that the environmental benefits can help people overcome such disgust reactions. The food and agriculture sector ranks third in global greenhouse gas emissions, behind power production and transportation. With the world’s population projected to hit nine billion by 2050, we’ll need more food than ever. Plus, rising temperatures can make that food more difficult to grow in many places.
That has put the spotlight on meat. A 2013 report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said that livestock account for 14.5 percent of manmade greenhouse gas emissions, while mainstream American practices, like using soy and wheat for feed, make it worse.
Bugs, by contrast, don’t emit harmful gases directly, and they use far less feed and water. According to the FAO, crickets use six times less feed than cattle and twice as much as pigs for the same amount of protein (although a recent University of California study has said some of those estimates might be overstated). Here’s how a well-known entomophagist described it to the New York Times Magazine in 2008: “Cows and pigs are the SUVs; bugs are the bicycles.”
Meeru Dhalwala, the co-owner and chef at several Indian restaurants in Vancouver, British Columbia, said that reading that quote got her thinking about how to bring insects into her restaurant. By the summer of 2008, she had debuted a cricket flatbread.
But, she said, her interest didn’t stop at sustainability.
“There are all these foodies who are into food intellectually but not emotionally,” she said. “Intellectually, it’s this great hipster food thing… but it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t taste good.”
Dhalwala spent months testing the crickets before settling on a blend of Indian spices like cumin that accentuated, rather than disguised, their natural flavors. For a sequel, she put a cricket pizza on the menu of a now-closed Seattle restaurant.
“The flavor was out of this world, let me tell you, but women were so squeamish about it,” Dhalwala said. She even got hate mail after the dish appeared; she recalled one reading, “You’re serving whole bugs. What’s next, mud from Haiti?”
In the food world, perception matters. If Exo bars are a vending machine snack, Indian-spiced cricket pizzas are a fancy lobster dinner. There’s a belief that, to make insect foods normal, the higher end of the market is just as important as the lower end. After all, lobster itself was once seen as so abundant and disgusting that businesses in the early Massachusetts colonies had to sign contracts limiting how many times they could feed it to their servants.
If bugs can make the leap to four-star dining, they might one day become just as prized.
With that in mind, I asked Dhalwala for some dinner party advice.
“Food is like a blind date, and you want to put your best foot forward,” she said. “Food is the most important thing that connects so many aspects of life, and our choice of food is what’s hopefully going to save this planet from catastrophe. So make it look beautiful.”
Then she added, “Oh, and don’t worry about the poop. With active bugs, their poop is clean. If you see a little bit, seriously, don’t worry about it.”
Prep time
It was time to cook.
Most of my cooking involved garlic. Lots and lots of garlic. Turpin, the Purdue entomologist, had semi-jokingly told me, “You have to get people over their negativity, and everything tastes good with garlic and white wine sauce.” It’s a not-so-dirty secret that most bug dishes are either fried or just drenched in deliciously strong flavors.
I was braced for revulsion but surprisingly felt no qualms about cooking the bugs. I had frozen my box of live insects, having read that was the most humane way to kill them. Once thawed, the dead mealworms were soft and squishy but easy to handle. The crickets were firm and, tossed with olive oil and garlic, I could roast them just like Brussels sprouts. Straight out of the oven, they tasted just as good—crispy and with a pleasant burnt flavor that comes from browning.
I slid the gusanos into the oven to dry out for an hour, filling the kitchen with an unexpectedly sweet and smoky aroma. While they roasted, I sautéed the grasshoppers with onions and chile peppers. As I cooked, any remaining queasiness slipped away, and I munched on worms and grasshoppers as I worked.
But whether others would feel the same was the real test. So on the appointed Saturday night, with The Beatles playing (get it?) in the background and with a setting of matching dishes (the true sign of a classy meal among 20-somethings), I served my skeptical girlfriend and two very patient friends a dinner designed to mirror the culinary rollout of insects.
First up, a small appetizer: spicy corn fritters made with cricket flour. As promised, the flour did have a unique flavor; an almond-like smell wafted out of the bag as soon as I opened it. The natural taste of the powder complemented the cornmeal nicely, creating a richer flavor than your average corn fritter (the kick of the jalapeno didn’t hurt).
To drink, I laid out margaritas with a buggy twist. I ground up the roasted gusanos and mixed them with salt to put around the rim of the glasses for a sweet, smoky flavor.
As we began to eat, none of my guests had any complaints about the presence of bugs in their food, and the fritters especially were a hit. But the bugs had been invisible up to this point. The next course, I knew, would be a challenge.
I served my chapuline and onion mixture in tacos with guacamole, trying to mirror the way bugs might be served in Mexico. Seeing the whole chapulines—each about the size of a thumb—poking out of the tortillas got everyone giggling nervously. But they proved to be delicious, offering a nice crunch with a flavor masked by the chilis.
“It’s like when you eat a taco and it’s messy so you have to push the filling back in, but this is a whole bug,” said one friend, skeptically eyeing the mess on her plate. Underscoring the point, another friend picked a stray chapuline leg out of his beard.
Finally, we faced the real test: a main course that put the bugs front and center. I took my inspiration from a video featuring a former finalist from the Great British Baking Show, which combined my two great loves: breakfast food and genteel British reality TV. For my breakfast pie, I put bacon and eggs into a pie shell, then heaped mealworms over it.
The sight of the whole mealworms spewing out of the pie was unsettling, to say the least. But after taking a bite (more than one person had their eyes closed), it became clear that the mealworms added nothing but some texture. If anything, it became a nuisance trying to wrangle them back onto the fork for a perfect bite.
Salad was kale topped with cranberries and roasted crickets. “It’s like sticking a fork into a garden,” one friend said. But the crickets made a nice supplement, offering a crunch more akin to a crouton with a nice garlicky flavor (though, unlike with croutons, you could sometimes feel a wing scraping your tongue).
As a palate cleanser, I offered a small bite: mealworms marinated in lime juice, tabasco, and parsley. Here again, the mealworms had nicely taken in the spice and citrus of the marinade and slid neatly down the throat. It wasn’t much different from eating ceviche, my girlfriend observed as she took a gulp of wine as a chaser.
For dessert, I whipped up some chocolate chip cookies with the cricket flour. As advertised, I was able to just swap it in for regular flour with no trouble. In fact, the cricket cookies brought something new to my tried-and-true recipe. The same earthiness that had crept into the fritters now balanced the sweetness of the cookies, much like the depth that comes from replacing white flour with whole wheat.
As a parting gift, I gave everyone treats from Hotlix—a block of candy with ants and other bugs plastered inside, just like the mosquito from Jurassic Park.
In the end, even my most skeptical friend made it through every course. The pizza order I had plugged into my phone in case of emergency proved unnecessary. Perhaps the lesson is simple. If you can make everything taste of garlic and peppers, people can more easily overcome their aversions.