I found roasted crickets very bland and tasted like oats. I assume thats what they were fed.
I’d probably eat them if they were extremely cheap and accessible but I dont see the point when chickpeas, beans, lentils, and soy all taste better, are cheaper, and easily sourced.
They are popular in China (along with fried bees) with ketchup as a side dish instead of fries.
Kinda works this way, but I’m not sure it could replace meat or soy-based products.
There is a baseball stadium here in the US where the most pop food sold was sour cream and onion flavor crickets. Kinda wanted to try that out since hearing about it.
Do you know what fried bees taste like? I imagine they have a more interesting taste if theyre consuming nectar and honey.
Um, I spent half a year in China. Bees tasted like something deep fried. The texture was nice, but the taste wasn’t memorable.
They basically taste like what you feed them.
For cost and emissions, I think the nascent field hasn’t matured correctly.
The insect farms I see are farms out in rural areas where they truck in feed and truck out protein. A better model would be urban light industrial, where a city can divert grocery store spoiled vegetables to the urban insect farm. Just a few collection points and short distance for big payloads of human food grade waste. Perfect for hungry insects. Easy for an EV truck to do.
Passive house style building with photovoltaics reduces emissions to nearly nil. Insects grown can be processed on site into powders, then further onto food processors with minimal transportation because the entire supply chain is local, and its a waste stream being converted to productive use.
The rural areas are where you run-into the least NIMBY-ism, full-stop. Insect Protein still has a rep in the food and high-brow agriculture world akin to Nuclear Energy or Strip-Mining.
Oh, well if there is nimbyism at play we should just all lie down and accept our fate.
… or just build the stuff where it can be built? Rural≠“Useful for Agriculture”, it really doesn’t.
Literally zero need to eat insects. Plants have everything we need.
Plants have everything we need.
No plant (other than maybe Lemnoideae which only has it because of bacteria) has Vitamin B12
Fair point, but you can still take a supplement instead of eating a cricket
We don’t eat plants in vacuum, most vegan products are reinforced with B12.
I’d much rather eat bugs than pants alone if I had to give up meat
eat […] pants
Awright Bart Simpson
The swipe typing can be a cruel mistress
I read the summary and I half agree. They draw the conclusion based on the insects not being consumed directly but if they would be it’s a whole another ball game.
The thing is that nobody has tried to make protein bars from processed finely ground insects and marketed it as keratin protein bars. Maybe even fried bug-nuggets and just call them nuggets to save money or anything else that is not just directly eating tiny crispy legs that get stuck in the teeth.
If there’s a protein bar with bugs and chocolate that’s cheaper than whey bars I’d buy it every now and then. If it would be sold in a fast food shops in a homogeneous fried blob I’d also try it out of curiosity.
There’s some cricket-based dog treats out there. My last pup adored them. Current pup only has eyes for chicken and anything salty (potato chips, tears). I tried them, they tasted fine, for ą dog treat.
Chirps (chips made of powdered cricket) exist, but they never took off. People have tried a lot of ideas, its moreso that consumers havent really shown much motivation towards insects as a protein
Keratin protein bars is one of the better ideas Ive heard. Even still a lot of people wouldnt touch it if they saw it was insect-derived protein on the label
Yeah, people don’t want it if they know it has bugs in it. That’s why you have to put it under some alias such as the Latin name under ingredients only. Putting “it has bugs” on the label is pretty much the opposite of what you should do because then you only target like 0.1% of the population.
Later on you could make an “organic” version “with real insect keratin” or whatever.
I think people that enjoy keratin just eat their nails.
There are huge cultural barriers to direct intentional human consumption of insects in the US and Europe. I will be very surprised if this can actually be achieved
I think that the cultural barriers can be overcome with a pricing strategy. If the bug nuggets can be a lot cheaper than normal nuggets for example, people would be more willing to try it and adopt it.
A lot of vague, even seemingly-intentionally-obscured links here, many of which don’t fully support claims or mention crucial aspects of the issue that this Analytics Consultancy glosses or ignores. Crucially:
…yeah, replacement won’t be enough, and with global warming pushing the ideal climes for various crops(particularly, nutritious staples) further away from the equator, people stuck closer to the equator need every locally-doable option they can get.
The single biggest failure the Western World keeps hitting with this is how to turn a profit, or how to get past the point on the Bell-curve where it goes from expiriment or novelty to recouping start-up investment costs. Lots of stigma in Western Markets to overcome.
EDIT: sorry all, I had thought I saw “Science Daily” in there and some other filler sites that annoy me to no-end, but still, these are mostly opinion-pieces and editorials.
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But now I can’t eat ze bugz and like it
Yeah, secondary producers are called that for a reason, they’ll literally never ever ever be more efficient than primary producers.
