Lovely Grub: Are Insects the Future of Food?
In some ways, Chirps are a Trojan horsefly, a way to sneak bugs into American diets and transform skeptics into insectivores. Six Foods hopes to introduce products where the critters aren’t so hidden. “That’s our ultimate goal,” D’Asaro says. “Where you can go to the store or a restaurant, and you can get a beefburger, a chicken burger, or what we call an ‘ento’ burger. But we’re just not quite there yet in society.”
D’Asaro isn’t the only one hoping we get there: in the past few years, there’s been an explosion in businesses trying to put the ‘meal’ into mealworms. A Belgian outfit called Green Kow makes carrot-mealworm, tomato-mealworm, and chocolate-mealworm spreads. Ento, based in the UK, sells mealworm and cricket pâtés at food festivals and created a pop-up restaurant devoted to insect cuisine last year. Chapul and Exo sell protein bars chock-full of cricket flour in the USA. At the same time, New Generation Nutrition, in the Netherlands, has experimented with a falafel-like chickpea and buffalo worm patty.
Then there are the companies that are raising insects for animal feed, such as Agriprotein, which is based in South Africa and building “a damn big fly factory”, as co-founder David Drew puts it. The plant is scheduled to open next year and will produce 24 tons of larvae and 7 tons of maggot meal, or MagMeal, every day. Agriprotein plans to create nine more of these factories across the globe by 2020. Enviroflight (in the USA), Ynsect (in France), and Protix (in the Netherlands) have also built large-scale insect production facilities.
Representatives of many of these enterprises have made their way to Ede, carting along product samples or prototypes to display in a large foyer at the conference hotel. During coffee and lunch breaks, participants can ponder whether they prefer miso made with grasshoppers or silkworms, buy a plastic container of freeze-dried mealworms for €3.50, or lean against the enormous sacks of black soldier fly meal stacked up at the back of the room. These businesses may one day be competitors, but for now, they’ve got an industry to build, so the atmosphere is one of camaraderie and collaboration. They trade strategies and suggestions and commiserate about the obstacles ahead.