Crickets are the New Kale
By Charlotte Ouwehand
Chapman’s annual International Food Fair rolls around, where
especially international students cook dishes from their home countries to
share the culinary experience with the community. But what if you want to make
dishes with an ingredient that could impact us globally and is already consumed
in most cultures? You represent as United Nations!
I’m personally very interested in the development of insect
farming for human consumption and think that eating protein from animals like
crickets or mealworms would have a plethora of benefits. Wait. Crickets?
Mealworms? Human consumption as in me? Yes! Most people don’t realize that we
all eat on average a pound of insects every year through consumption of
vegetables, fruits and processed foods that contain them such as chocolate or
ketchup. Our United Nations team wanted
to use this great opportunity to deliver delicious food, challenge people’s
minds and show how normal it can be to incorporate insects in your dishes.
Two wonderful fellow MBA and MBA/MS Food Science students, Charlie Stephen and Sophia Pollack, joined me, who both share the passion for culinary experiences and innovation. Together we prepared 10 pounds of pesto pasta, 8 bags of caramel popcorn and 1 pound of
pan-fried crickets from Big Cricket Farms in Ohio to give it a crunchy,
delicious protein load. Additionally we had 7 bags of crackers that are made
with cricket flour from a company in Austin, Texas, called Cricker Crackers and
topped them with brie cheese and strawberry marmalade.
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| Caramel Popcorn and Crickets |
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| Pesto Pasta, Crickets, Avocado, Tomatoes |
Honestly, I was nervous how the reactions would be and whether
people would be willing to try our dishes. Those concerns turned out to be
absolutely unfounded and we ran out instead! As a team we were so enthusiastic
about what we wanted to share that the vast majority of people were willing to
try all three dishes we had prepared. Many reactions were absolutely priceless,
when the information sunk in that we were serving actual crickets.
Now you are still asking yourself why on earth you should be
eating insects?
Healthy: Different insects have slightly different profiles,
but crickets for example are very high in calcium, iron and protein. They also
deliver a ‘complete’ protein, meaning they contain all 9 essential amino acids.
Sustainable: To produce the same amount of edible protein
from a cricket compared to traditional livestock (beef, chicken, pork) only
about 0.1% of water is used and 80% less feed. Furthermore crickets would
create 0.03% of greenhouse gases compared to beef and use a fraction of the
cultivatable land, mainly for feed since insects can essentially be farmed in a
skyscraper.
Cruelty free: Insects are probably the only animals that are
happier to be farmed than to live free. Insects like crickets or mealworms
prefer to be surrounded by many of their kind in close, dark spaces and be save
from a variety of predators as they are the lowest link in the food chain. To
make them ready for consumption, crickets are put into a big freezer, where the
temperature is slowly lowered. This puts them into a state called diapause,
which means their metabolism naturally slows down and at low enough
temperatures they can’t wake up again. Insects are not proven to feel pain, but
this is certainly a very stress and cruelty free end to their life.
The current challenge to this rapidly growing industry is to
scale the production to be able to compete on price with traditional protein
sources. There are great new companies out there like Exo protein, Chapul,
Coalo Valley Farms, Bitty Foods, Six Foods and many more that are offering
everything from the crickets, cricket flour, energy bars, chips, crackers,
granola to cookies and more. One of the largest contributors to climate change
is livestock and the necessary production of feed for them. Including insects
in our normal diet would have great positive impacts everywhere, but will
become increasingly important due to our fast growing world population and
already not having enough resources in terms of water, energy, fertile lands or
space to supply everyone with the necessary nutrition.
We hope you could try our dishes during the fair or made you
curious about trying it!
Bug Appétit!
