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Lovely Grub: Are Insects the Future of Food?

Lovely Grub: Are Insects the Future of Food?

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Grub

Nevertheless, entomophagy remains common in some parts of the world: at least 2 billion people worldwide eat insects, according to the FAO. Yellow jacket wasp larvae are popular in Japan, cicadas are treasured in Malawi, and weaver ants are devoured in Thailand. Termites, a food favorite in many African nations, can be fried, smoked, steamed, sun-dried or ground into a powder. The list of edible insect species is at 1,900 and growing.

Laura D’Asaro’s first brush with entomophagy came in Tanzania. In the summer of 2011, D’Asaro – a tall, freckled Harvard student with a relentlessly cheerful disposition – had gone to East Africa to take classes in Swahili. One day, she came across a Tanzanian woman standing by the side of the road, selling fried caterpillars out of a big basket. D’Asaro, an on-again off-again vegetarian, wasn’t sure she wanted to eat an insect, but curiosity trumped apprehension. “When else am I going to try fried caterpillar?” she wondered. So she tried not to look too hard at the brown, inch-and-a-half-long caterpillar as she placed it in her mouth and chewed. She was pleasantly surprised – the texture and the taste reminded her of lobster.

Grubs as food

When the summer ended, D’Asaro returned to the USA and moved on with her college life until, two years later, she stumbled across an article on a newly released FAO report called Edible Insects: Future prospects for food and feed security. As she read about the benefits of bug eating, she thought back to her time in Tanzania. “All these things clicked,” she recalls. “It made me reconsider why I was vegetarian and made me realize that insects could be this more sustainable protein that I’d been looking for pretty much my whole life.”

D’Asaro decided to start a company to introduce insects to American diners and enlisted two of her college classmates, Rose Wang and Meryl Natow, to join her. They began ordering boxes of bugs from pet food companies and playing around in the kitchen, making waxworm tacos and smothering crickets in soy sauce. “We were immediately very impressed with the taste of it all,” D’Asaro says. They partnered with a Boston-area chef and started developing recipes. But when they shared samples with friends, or bravely brought some of their new dishes to potluck dinners, it did not go well. “People seemed very frightened.”

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