Have you ever eaten a bug?
Everyone probably has by accident.
But what we’ve mostly rejected as a culture is that bugs are a pretty great source of protein. And now, niche food markets are taking this knowledge back.
The University of Connecticut has a food truck called Food for Thought, where they sell crickets as a side, topping, or snack with their tacos.
This truck sells about two to three containers of crickets every day. They’re sourced from Next Millenium Farms, an insect farm where the mission is to make insects a sustainable, mainstream form of protein.
Of course this idea isn’t new. In fact, it’s thousands of years old.
Eating insects even has a word: entomophagy. Insects are high in protein and fiber, they’re environmentally friendly, and they’re great sources of calcium, iron, zinc, and tons of other vitamins and minerals.
Even the United Nations is telling people they should be eating more insects.
At Food for Thought, John Smith, assistant manager of dining services at UConn says, “Some people do get them as a topping, some get them for the protein, some for the ‘wow factor’ of having these things. I think people are just surprised we have them.”
But are they really a sustainable replacement for meat or other proteins?
Recent research from UC Davis shows that farmers who want to grow healthy, edible crickets need to feed them a certain diet, which would make them just as expensive as chickens.
The authors of the study then said that using crickets as protein “will depend on capturing regionally scalable organic side-streams of relatively high quality that are not currently being used for livestock production.”
Even if they don’t end up sustainable, one thing is for sure: there’s no harm in eating them. So if someone offers you crickets, think of all the weird seafood you eat and give them a try.
