Could insects be the wonder food of the future?

At first my meal seems familiar, like countless other dishes I’ve eaten at Asian restaurants. A swirl of noodl­es slicked with oil and studded with shredded chicken, the aroma of ginger and garlic, a few wilting chives placed on the plate as a final flourish. And then, I notice the eyes. Dark, compound orbs on a yellow speckled head, joined to a winged, segmented body. I hadn’t spotted them right away, but suddenly I see them everywhere – my noodles are teeming with insects.

 

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. On this warm May afternoon, I’ve agreed to be a guinea pig at an experimental insect tasting in Wageningen, a university town in the central Netherlands. My hosts are Ben Reade and Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab, a non-profit culinary research institute. Reade and Evans lead the lab’s ‘insect deliciousness’ project, a three-year effort to turn insects – the creepy crawlies that most of us squash without a second thought – into tasty treats.

The project began after René Redzepi (the chef and co-owner of Noma, the Danish restaurant often ranked the best in the world) tasted an Amazonian ant that reminded him of lemongrass. Redzepi, who founded the Nordic Food Lab in 2008, became interested in serving insects at Noma and asked the researchers at the lab to explore the possibilities.

 

The Food Lab operates from a houseboat in Copenhagen, but Reade and Evans are in the Netherlands for a few days, and they’ve borrowed a local kitchen to try out some brand new dishes. I, along with three other gastronomes, am here to taste the results.

We take our seats at a long, high table as Reade and Evans wheel in a trolley loaded with our meals. We each receive a different main course. I get the Asian-style noodles and fixate on the bug I can see. “That’s a locust,” Reade says. “[It] was alive this morning. Very fresh.” But he’s much more excited about another, hidden ingredient: fat extracted from the larvae of black soldier flies (or, to put it less delicately, maggot fat). The whole dish has been stir-fried in it.

“I believe you’re the first human being on the planet to have ever been served anything cooked with this,” Reade tells me. But not to worry: “I’ve eaten some of it myself, an hour ago. I’m still alive.”

I inspect my plate.

Reade urges us to begin: “Eat before it gets cold.”

Feast or famine?

The next morning, Reade and Evans join 450 of the world’s foremost experts on entomophagy, or insect eating, at a hotel down the road in Ede. They are here for Insects to Feed the World, a three-day conference to “promote the use of insects as human food and as animal feed in assuring food security”.

The attendees are all familiar with the same dire facts. By the year 2050, the planet will be packed with nine billion people. In low- and middle-income countries, the demand for animal products is rising sharply as economies grow; in the next few decades, we’ll need to figure out how to produce enough protein for billions more mouths. Simply ramping up our current system is not really a solution. The global livestock industry already takes an enormous toll on the environment. It’s a hungry and thirsty beast, gobbling up land and water. It’s a potent polluter, thanks to the animal waste and veterinary medicines that seep into soil and water. And it emits more greenhouse gases than planes, trains and automobiles combined.

The insect authorities assembling in Ede believe that entomophagy could be an elegant solution to many of these problems. Insects are chock-full of protein and rich in essential micronutrients, such as iron and zinc. They don’t need as much space as livestock, emit lower levels of greenhouse gases, and have a sky-high feed conversion rate: a single kilogram of feed yields 12 times more edible cricket protein than beef protein. Some species of insects are drought resistant and may require less water than cows, pigs or poultry.

Insect meal could also replace some of the expensive ingredients (e.g. soybeans and fishmeal) that are fed to farm animals, potentially lowering the cost of livestock products and freeing up feed crops for human consumption. As an added bonus, bugs can be raised on refuse, such as food scraps and animal manure, so insect farms could increase the world’s supply of protein while reducing and recycling waste.

The gathering in Ede, jointly organised by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Wageningen University and Research Centre, is the culmination of all these efforts – the first major international conference to bring together entomologists, entrepreneurs, nutritionists, chefs, psychologists and government officials. They are here to discuss how to expand the use of insects as food and feed, particularly in the Western world, and to lay the foundation for an edible insect industry by reviewing the science and identifying the obstacles to its progress.

Over the next three days, they will lay out their vision for the future. It is ambitious and optimistic; an insect aisle at the supermarket and fast-food restaurants that serve bug burgers. Packages of ‘beautiful, clean’ shrink-wrapped mealworms on display at the meat counter, alongside the skirt steak and chicken wings. And a world in which forests are thick, land is fertile, the climate is stable, water is clean, waste is minimal, food prices are low, and hunger and malnutrition are rare.

This conference, they hope, will be the beginning of it all. The experts assembled in the darkened auditorium are fired up, ready to give the world the gift of six-legged livestock. But are we ready to receive it?

Bug buffet

Turning to insects for nourishment is not a novel idea – the Bible mentions entomophagy, as do texts from Ancient Greece and Rome. But insect eating never became common in Modern Europe. The reasons are unknown, but the spread of agriculture – and, in particular, the domestication of livestock – may have made insects, and undomesticated plants and animals in general, less important as food sources.

Nevertheless, entomophagy remains common in some parts of the world: at least two billion people worldwide eat insects, according to the FAO. Yellow jacket wasp larvae are popular in Japan, cicadas are treasured in Malawi, and weaver ants are devoured in Thailand. Termites, a food favourite in many African nations, can be fried, smoked, steamed, sun-dried or ground into a powder. The list of edible insect species is at 1,900 and growing.

Laura D’Asaro’s first brush with entomophagy came in Tanzania. In the summer of 2011, D’Asaro – a tall, freckled Harvard student with a relentlessly cheerful disposition – had gone to East Africa to take classes in Swahili. One day, she came across a Tanzanian woman standing by the side of the road, selling fried caterpillars out of a big basket. D’Asaro, an on-again off-again vegetarian, wasn’t sure she wanted to eat an insect, but curiosity trumped apprehension. “When else am I going to try fried caterpillar?” she wondered. She was pleasantly surprised – the texture and the taste reminded her of lobster.

When the summer ended, D’Asaro returned to the USA and moved on with her college life until, two years later, she stumbled across an article on the benefits of bug eating. She thought back to her time in Tanzania. “All these things clicked,” she recalls. “It made me reconsider why I was vegetarian and made me realise that insects could be this more sustainable protein that I’d been looking for pretty much my whole life.”

D’Asaro decided to start a company to introduce insects to American diners and enlisted two of her college classmates, Rose Wang and Meryl Natow, to join her. They began ordering boxes of bugs from pet food companies and playing around in the kitchen, making waxworm tacos and smothering crickets in soy sauce. “We were immediately very impressed with the taste of it all,” D’Asaro says. They partnered with a Boston chef and started developing recipes. But when they shared samples with friends, or bravely brought some of their new dishes to potluck dinners, it did not go well. “People seemed very frightened.”

Some foods, like chocolate, sell themselves. Insects are not one of those foods. “Insects,” says Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “are disgusting. Things that are disgusting are offensive because of what they are. It’s not that insects taste bad. It’s that the idea of an insect is upsetting to people.”