from Hacker News

Edible insects are a novelty today, but they'll be mainstream tomorrow

by DanI-S on 3/20/15, 6:09 PM with 110 comments

• by tehchromic on 3/20/15, 7:45 PM

  The article capitalizes on a popular foreboding about resource limits with a thrilling "ick" factor, but it's premise is unsubstantial.

  I once met an ancient Jewish gentleman who, due to poverty, had been forced to eat lobsters as a youth. In that day they were considered on par with rats as a food source (not to mention they were forbidden by his religious culture) and he had never recovered from the experience, and still considered them revolting.

  I can relate: if it became popular with the youth of tomorrow to broil rats and serve them at market price, I'd probably never get on board.

  Like insects, Lobster was once a cheap and common food resource. Money could be made by packing and shipping it of to places where it was exotic and unheard of to the majority of people, and so it's image was specially crafted to make profit.

  But unlike insects, lobster had the advantage of a fresh market. It was only viewed as the food of impoverished immigrants in port cities where it was common.

  The vast majority of the market, at least in the USA, considers insects icky to look at our touch, let alone to eat.

  More substantially, I think any serious study would find that people's eating habits rarely change based on broad, even minded assessment of future resource limits. Current rates of meat consumption are a good example: we know it can't last, but few people change their diet so that their great grandchildren can eat more chicken.

  I do think insects will be a food source in the future, but that will be because a clever marketer discovers the killer bug that is both exotic and delicious. In general I think it will be a very long and slow process by which everyday insects like crickets become palatable to the status quo.

• by computerjunkie on 3/20/15, 7:44 PM

  I grew up in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa. I speak in general that eating insects is a delicacy and is favoured as a snack most of the time.An example, the [1] mopani worm is an excellent source of protein and is increadibly cheap in Southern Africa.The guts are removed, cleaned and dried in the sun before being packaged for sale. They also taste delicious once fried in butter and mixed with vegetables.

  It might be a novelty right now in the western world but its been years of tradition in African or Asian countries.

  [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonimbrasia_belina

• by pistle on 3/20/15, 8:21 PM

  I'd try it. I eat raw fish, urchins, rare eggs, rare-ish meat of mammals and fowl. Who knows? Who would know if I would like it better than me?

  I've eaten whole insects including crickets and the flavor was whatever. The texture of the legs was like trying to eat the tail of a shrimp - impossible. I'll be interested to see what the processing is like as I'm not sure about the utility of a flour that includes fine grains of exoskeleton. Proteins turn into magical things during cooking and shells don't do quite as well. Flour hints at baking, but I don't think it would function nearly as well.

  From the first link on google, the baking results look like it doesn't form anything that can trap air or steam, so dense and mushy seems likely.

• by Nursie on 3/20/15, 6:54 PM

  People have been publishing this article every few months for as long as I can remember.

  They may well be an efficient form of protein but... squick. Basically.

• by eltondegeneres on 3/20/15, 7:24 PM

  Isn't cricket feed mostly corn and soy? Seems like it would be more efficient to eat the raw ingredients rather than the crickets.

• by perdunov on 3/20/15, 7:58 PM

  Don't think so. We'll rather have lab-grown meat.

• by robhack on 3/20/15, 9:19 PM

  Am I the only one bothered by the sheer amount of killing this means? You might have to feed poultry 2lb to get 1lb of food, but you kill only one living creature. With insects, how many living creatures are you going to kill to get 1lb ? (even though that would only require 1lb of feeding). Yes I know, they are not conscious at the same level, and are killed in a way so that they don't suffer, but still.

• by tehchromic on 3/20/15, 7:18 PM

  I can say that bee larvae taste like raw almonds and cow milk butter and I eat on sight.

• by putzdown on 3/20/15, 9:16 PM

  If I agreed that edible insects were a novelty today I might be persuaded that they'll be mainstream tomorrow. Since I believe that edible insects are a source of revulsion to most Westerners (at least) today, I'm doubtful that they'll be mainstream tomorrow. There's a general principle of argumentation here: if you want me to believe your apodosis, make sure we're on the same page with your protasis.

• by gumby on 3/21/15, 1:58 PM

  That article was fascinating but ignored the branding factor. I realize that was intentional, but it is an important factor. What's considered food is basically a cultural/fashion issue, and can be explicitly changed by marketing (e.g. rapeseed can sound horrible in the US but was made acceptable by rebranding it "Canola", and likewise the Chinese gooseberry was much more successful as the Kiwi Fruit).

  This is different from passive shifts of food from scorned to fashion, such as lobster or oysters, or how açai briefly swept the Whole Foods set -- that's more of a Veblen issue. Once the technical issues are worked out, someone's going to make a killing (literally I suppose) by rebranding ground up mice and crickets as "Natural Field Protein"

  BTW I enjoyed this quote: > "Journalists always ask me what do you say to people that can't get over the psychological hurdle of eating insects?", said Crowley. "I say, 'nothing' - we're not targeting these people. We're targeting people that are receptive to our message, that will be our early adopters."

  Good for him!

• by magic_beans on 3/20/15, 7:15 PM

  When will crickets NOT be $40 a pound? And then I'll consider it...

• by tbrownaw on 3/20/15, 7:19 PM

  Which is sushi, novelty or mainstream? Or tofu, or non-wheat flour?

  Or maybe there's a middle ground where things are neither.

• by GFK_of_xmaspast on 3/20/15, 6:58 PM

  Kind of interesting how many people would rather eat bugs than not eat meat at all.

• by jqm on 3/21/15, 2:01 AM

  I suspect it won't be terribly long before we have genetically modified plants to produce a more complete fat and amino acid profile, and this will essentially replace meat in most cases. Probably this will happen before anything like cricket eating goes mainstream. I wouldn't bet on this at all.

• by jotux on 3/20/15, 10:19 PM

  Japan got over the ickiness of insects a long time ago: http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-the-west-fears-insects-w...

• by smackfu on 3/20/15, 6:52 PM

  You can buy some on Amazon today for $40 a pound: http://www.amazon.com/JR-Unique-Foods-Cricket-Flour/dp/B00OM...

• by desireco42 on 3/20/15, 8:12 PM

  I don't know how much of the process of raising and making flower from insects is proprietary, but some kind of open source knowledge base might provide appeal for people to refine production and innovate on consumption.

• by Scarfleece on 3/21/15, 2:29 AM

  Why is there a push for crickets, grinded-up-bug-meatballs and insect flour when there's one that people aren't actually disgusted by -- escargot?

• by gogoBitz on 3/21/15, 5:38 AM

  Cricket bars are yummy. For me, they pass the taste test. Not a lot of real kick factor. Hope they get the price down with mass production.

• by icey on 3/20/15, 7:43 PM

  If anyone wants to get into this game, I'll sell you edible-insects.com and https://twitter.com/edibleinsects :)

• by jff on 3/20/15, 6:48 PM

  And you thought chicken farms were disgusting...

• by Dewie on 3/21/15, 12:52 AM

  Insects might be more economical, or at least eventually when their production is more mainstream. But food is relatively cheap today anyway; what is expensive is rent/or mortgage. Food for a single, working person doesn't really make such a dent in the budget that they are forced to thin "damn, there has to be some alternative to this", compared to what they spend on their rent. So I don't think it's that much incentive to eat insects, from an economical perspective.

• by ppereira on 3/20/15, 7:48 PM

  As with bacteria, human living conditions will get quite ugly near our population's stationary phase.[1] Exponential growth does not last forever.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth

• by tomjen3 on 3/20/15, 6:41 PM

  Unlikely. They are icky, unappealing and do not have the "man" quality one gets from real meat.

  Food is mostly about taste and convenience today, because we have access to enough of it - insects doesn't really give you either.

  In short it is highly unlikely that I will wake up tomorrow and eat insects, nor that the majority in the developed world will.

  And yes shrimp may technically be insects. Technically correct does nothing for the ick factor.