What kind of nibbles are you planning to pass around at your New Year’s Eve party? Tortilla chips? Roasted nuts perhaps? How about “salty scarabs” or “crunchy cockroaches”?
While savored elsewhere in the world, insects haven’t really caught on as food in most of North America. But that may be changing. With growing concerns over climate change, some experts say it’s only a matter of time before we invite our six legged friends onto the dinner table.
One family in Maine is taking that message to heart, and getting ahead of the trend with a fledgling entomophagy business and bug farm.
Thirteen-year-old Julia Broadbent’s snacks are a little different from what most other kids get.
Julia’s friend, Kaitlyn Sawicki, is visiting. She has already tried some of the crunchy crickets the Broadbent family sells, dried and ready to eat, from their home business, but she is about to try barbecue mealworms for the first time.
“They taste pretty good, it’s kind of like, similar to chips, but they’re not as, like, crunchy,” Kaitlin says.
Julia’s aunt, Susan Broadbent, suggests they’re kind of like Rice Krispies, and the girls agree.
Broadbent co-owns EntoMarket in Auburn, along with her brother Bill Broadbent. The pair launched the business a little over a year ago and, as far as they know, it’s the first marketplace in North America exclusively devoted to edible insects, something they hope will take off.
“Just like everybody has their favorite candy bar, everybody has favorite flavor of ice cream, favorite snack. And they’ll be like, ‘I love water scorpion,’ or ‘I love fried chrysalis,’ or something like that,” Susan Broadbent says.
The Broadbents procure both domestic and exotic species wholesale, and also grow some of their own crickets, cockroaches and mealworms upstairs, but space limitation has kept the operation quite small. In the coming months, they’re hoping to expand into bigger quarters and offer more bugs.
So far it’s promising. They say the Christmas holiday all but cleaned out their stock.
“This has been our full-time job for a year and a half, and this is all we do. We started from absolutely nothing — just an idea,” Broadbent says.
And that idea came from Bill’s son Sam, now 15.
“Uh, sort of,” Sam says. “I asked why we don’t eat bugs when I was 13 maybe, or 12. And we researched it and there wasn’t really any reason why not to.”
“So in other words, he asked me, I gave him a Dad answer and he kept researching it,” Bill says. “Some people do eat bugs. It’s just North America and Europe that don’t.”
And in that, the Broadbents saw an opportunity. Worldwide observers say Western attitudes toward insects may need to change. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in a 2013 report, concluded that to meet the nutritional requirements of a world that will have swollen to 9 billion people over the next 30 years, the harvesting and cultivation of insects should be explored.
David Gracer, a writer and naturalist in Providence, Rhode Island, who has been researching the topic for almost two decades, says with concerns over climate, as well as water and land resources and nutritional needs, it’s not really a matter of if, but when, insects will be coming to a kitchen table near you.
“When we see the collision of all of these factors going forward, we see that insects are pretty much the single best option for producing massive amounts of good nutrition in urban environments because you can farm insects in cities, unlike the bony vertebrate animals,” he says.
That one factor alone, Gracer says, could be a huge step toward food security for millions who can’t grow their own food due to space constraints. And he recommends that gardeners get in on the fun, eating some of the edible pests that plague their crops.
Those annoying little green cabbage worms, for example, are perfectly edible, he says, and taste just like the plants they’re attacking.
And there are other environmental considerations that can be used to make the case for eating insects. One study from 2012 published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE says that the carbon footprint of mealworms is about 10 times less per kilogram of edible protein than beef. Many insects can also be raised on compostable biowaste, getting rid of another source of greenhouse gases, and they need no additional water.
By comparison, it takes some some 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef.
The ideas being proposed are not exactly new. Aside from the millions of people across Africa, Asia, Australia and South America chowing down on mopani worms, stinkbugs and witchetty grubs, as early as 1885 a book published in England by one Vincent M. Holt posed the question in its title: “Why Not Eat Insects?”
The biggest hurdle in that volume, as now, is something the Broadbents call the “ick factor.” Bill Broadbent says for the new insect eater, starting with crickets ground into a protein shake is a good way to go.
“We joke that it’s the gateway bug — it’s the bug that everyone is interested in at the moment, it has a lot of protein, has a lot of vitamins and minerals. But there are thousands of bugs. There are a couple thousand bugs that are readily identified as edible, so we don’t even know where it’s going yet,” he says.
But there are, um, bugs to be worked out as well.
The Broadbents lost a large batch of crickets recently because the habitat became a bit too dry, and they had to figure things out on their own. After all, the local Cooperative Extension agent isn’t going be much help to an insect farmer. But that too will change if the demand is there, say the Broadbents.
They may be on to something. In October, the CEO of Pepsi, Indra Nooyi, announced her prediction for what the next big snack food revolution would be in America — crickets.
