CRICKETS FOR LUNCH

CRICKETS FOR LUNCH

This summer, while visiting friends on the North Carolina coast, I ate dinners centered around hard-shelled crabs every night. Catching them in wire traps baited with chicken necks took almost no work, but cooking them was a group effort: one person to pour the live crabs into a steamer, another to guard the lip of the pot with the lid, and at least two others to post the event to Instagram and Vine. As my hosts instructed me in their preferred methods of systematic leg dismemberment and shell cracking, I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s 2004 essay forGourmet, “Consider the Lobster.” It begins with a taxonomical explanation of how crustaceans “are basically giant sea-insects.”

By the same logic, one might argue that edible insects such as crickets and grasshoppers are like tiny land-lobsters and field-crabs. A re-branding could go a long way toward encouraging the practice of entomophagy, or the eating of insects. In 2011, Dana Goodyear wrote about the increasingly popular phenomenon—from grasshopper tacos to wax-worm fritters, bugs are a newly in-vogue source of protein. As Goodyear explains, “eighty per cent of the world eats insects with pleasure,” but contemporary Westerners “tend to associate insects with filth, death, and decay.” As the world’s population explodes and the cost of food rises, we may be forced to reconsider bugs as a sustainable source of protein. Earlier this year, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released a report encouraging the consumption of edible insects as a means to a cleaner, healthier world.

Gabi Lewis and Greg Sewitz, recent graduates of Brown University, are taking a page out of the F.A.O.’s report. They are raising money on Kickstarter to fund their Brooklyn-based startup, Exo (as in “exoskeleton”), whose first project is a line of protein bars. Similar to parents of small children trying to get them to eat more vegetables, Lewis and Sewitz understand that enticing people into eating crickets may involve rendering them unrecognizable, thus avoiding the “ick factor.” A cricket’s chitinous exoskeleton (though analogous to the outside of a soft-shell crab) can be off-putting to some, and their legs and ovipositors can stick in your throat. Exo’s product uses flour milled from whole, roasted crickets, instead of, say, almonds or soybeans. Dried crickets are exceptionally high in protein (almost seventy per cent by dry weight), and have significant amounts of iron and calcium. They require much less feed than traditional factory-farm animals while producing far less methane.

Exo isn’t the only company in the burgeoning edible-insect market. Just last week at the Future Food Salon, all manner of cricket confections were on display, from brittle (“crittle”) to crostini, made by small companies from other food-conscious cities, like Austin and Toronto. There were even representatives from another company born on Kickstarter, named Chapul (after the Aztec word for cricket), which claims to have produced “The Original Cricket Bar.”

Two weeks ago, I tried some Exo bars, made from raw almonds, dates, coconut, honey, cricket flour, and cacao. Unwrapped, they looked like any other densely packed, vaguely cocoa-flavored protein bar: shiny, molasses-colored, and desperate to be confused for a brownie. The taste was rather the sum of its fruit-and-nut parts: chewy, chocolate-tinged, and not too sweet, but with no discernable cricket element (and certainly not the “disturbing aftertaste of shrimp” that Goodyear experienced with some fried embryonic bees). I invited my coworkers to try some samples, and in retrospect I wish I hadn’t told them they contained crickets—I think they’d have been none the wiser. “Is that a leg?” one editor asked in horror; I assured her it was likely an almond sliver. More than one person physically recoiled, as if a cricket might suddenly hop out. “It doesn’t taste as appalling as other things that look like that,” chimed in another. The packaging comes with a warning for individuals with allergies to nuts and shellfish: insects, like crabs, shrimp, and lobster, are arthropods, and so taxonomically close that the allergy often extends into the Insecta class.

Insects aren’t exactly filling; as Goodyear points out, you’d have to eat a thousand grasshoppers to equal the amount of protein in a twelve-ounce steak. (But then again, should we really be eating twelve ounces of steak? That’s already twice the recommended serving size, according to the U.S.D.A.) As one astute colleague pointed out, “Crickets aren’t even the first ingredient” on the label for Exo bars—they’re fifth. According to Sewitz, there are about twenty-five crickets in each bar, accounting for only about six per cent of its mass. Processed crickets can cost hundreds of dollars per pound, but in the days of factory farms and seventy-nine-dollar chicken, it might behoove us to invest in ways to bring those costs down. The team at Exo is already looking into this, starting with a “local” farm in Pennsylvania and another provider in Texas. As Sewitz explained in an e-mail, “There’s a pretty large network of cricket farms that already exist for reptile feed and fishing bait. We’ve worked with a few different farms to tweak their practices to make the crickets optimal for human consumption.”

Another alternative source of protein, as Michael Specter reported earlier in 2011, is to grow our own steak in a test tube—so pick your poison: wiggly critters or disembodied “muscle strips.” There’s a reason entomophagy enthusiasts are trying to get the term “mini-livestock” to catch on. The world of entomophagy is ready for its sushi moment—the normalization and subsequent integration of an unusual ingredient into the American diet through food trends. Already we’ve seen José Andrés’s chapulín taco in D.C., Zack Lemann’s fried dragonflies in New Orleans, and Laurent Quenioux’s escamoles (ant larvae) in Los Angeles. I asked Sewitz if they had any plans to use cricket flour as a protein additive for other products besides protein bars, and he said that Exo hopes eventually to be able to supply it to people for use in their own baking. I can see it now: cricket cronuts.

Photograph by Piotr Naskrecki/Nature Picture Library/Corbis.