In a comprehensive 2013 report, the UN’s FAO declared that the time has come to unlock “the huge potential that insects offer for enhancing food security.” The reaction was predictable.
“Of course the problem with eating insects is that it’s kind of gross and they don’t taste very good,” wrote one commentator. Another said: “You are probably cringing reading this post.” A third asked: “Care for a serving of grasshopper goulash?”
Well, why not? Two billion people around the world consume insects. Bugs are nutritious, high in protein, low in fat and good for the planet: Insects efficiently convert feed into food, require less land and water than cattle or pigs, and they are reported to emit fewer greenhouse gases by the UN. As for the cringe factor, chef Jose Andres, a James Beard Foundation award winner, serves a chapulín taco, made with Mexican grasshoppers, at his Washington, D.C., restaurant Oyamel. The menu at Typhoon, a chic Pan Asian restaurant in Santa Monica, CA, includes Singapore-style scorpions, Taiwanese crickets and Manchurian Chambai ants. And Exo protein bars, made with cricket flour, will soon be part of snack boxes on Jet Blue.
But, even if we come to love munching on mites, there’s a big problem with growing insects for food. No one knows how to do it efficiently, and at scale. Daniel Imrie-Situnayake, the co-founder and CEO of Tiny Farms, a startup based in Oakland, CA, aims to change that by bringing modern agricultural technology to insect farming.
I wrote about Daniel and his work for the Future of Food 2050 website. Here’s how my story begins:
Two billion people worldwide think nothing of munching on a tasty insect snack or entree, but until recently very few of them were Americans.
That’s changing as edible insects inch their way into mainstream fare in the United States, with crickets rapidly emerging as the “gateway bug.” Hip startups in Brooklyn, Boston and San Francisco are already baking cookies and snack chips with cricket flour, and cricket flour protein bars will soon be part of snack boxes on JetBlue airline flights.
The trouble is, demand for edible crickets exceeds the supply. Only a handful of companies are raising the chirpy insects, and they aren’t nearly as efficient as they could be, says Daniel Imrie-Situnayake, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Tiny Farms, a startup based in Oakland, Calif.
“The entire U.S. farmed output of crickets is still fairly small,” Imrie-Situnayake says. “In order to have a cricket bar next to the checkout of every Safeway in the country, you need a lot more scale and a lot more productivity.”
This could be the start of something big–or not. Remember, though, that if you think eating insects is weird, well, that’s what Americans thought about raw fish when sushi restaurants, which served Japanese immigrants, came to the west coast in the 1960s. Today you can buy sushi at Walmart.
You can read the rest of my story here.