Eating Crickets

by Holly Bennett

Would you like a few honey-mustard crickets sprinkled over your salad?

How about a tasty taco filled with spicy fried chapulines (grasshoppers)?

Gabriele Curcio, age 11, voted “No thanks” when his family ordered a plate of roasted crickets at a restaurant in Mexico. “I didn’t like the idea of eating something that had been jumping around in the dirt,” he says. But his mom, dad, and five-year-old brother Simon all tried them – and liked them! “Simon said they tasted like corn,” says Gabriele. His dad, Dave, says, “They were crunchy and the taste reminded me of seasoned peanuts.”

In many parts of the world, eating insects is nothing new – but it’s not common in North America and Europe. That may be starting to change.

A few years ago, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported that raising and eating insects has a lot of benefits and should be encouraged.

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What’s so great about insects?

“Edible insects are healthy for you and healthy for the planet,” says Stacie Goldin, Community Manager of Entomo Farms in Norwood, Ontario. They raise and roast crickets and mealworms for human food. Crickets, for example, are a great source of protein, fibre, vitamin B12, essential amino acid, calcium and more. And compared to raising animals for food, raising insects uses fewer resources, is better for the environment, and causes less animal suffering.

Efficiency

Insects require less space, food material, and water than animals. For example:

10 kg of feed

to produce 1 kg of cow

(and only half of that can actually be eaten)

to produce up to 9 kg of insects

(and nearly all of that can be eaten)

What insects can we eat?

There are about 1,500 species of insects known to be edible! Some of the most common are:

Greenhouse gas emissions

beetles

grasshoppers and locusts

caterpillars

Raising livestock is a major source of methane, a harmful greenhouse gas. Most insects don’t produce any methane at all.

Animal welfare

It is much easier to raise and kill insects humanely than it is animals. At Entomo Farms the crickets live free-range in cardboard “cricket condos” until near the end of their six-week lifespan.

ants crickets

Don’t eat wild bugs that you catch yourself, though! They may have been exposed to pesticides or other harmful substances.

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