Lovely Grub: Are Insects the Future of Food?
D’Asaro and her partners realized that they’d need to ease consumers into the idea of bug gastronomy, so they abandoned the idea of serving whole insects and decided to work instead with cricket flour, which could be invisibly incorporated into familiar foods. They decided to launch their company, which they named Six Foods, with a product Americans already love: chips [crisps]. They created ‘Chirps’, a triangular chip made of black beans, rice, and cricket flour, which is lightly spritzed with oil and then baked. Chirps are high in protein and low in fat and taste similar to tortilla chips, D’Asaro says, although the cricket flour adds a slightly nutty, savory flavor. Six Foods plans to begin shipping them in October 2014.
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 beef burger, 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 last year created a pop-up restaurant devoted to insect cuisine. In the USA, Chapul and Exo sell protein bars chock-full of cricket flour, while 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.