For a little while, I was collecting articles about Insects as Food. I thought it would be fun to feed them into a word cloud generator, so I piled the articles into a giant text file, made some small adjustments and pasted the text into one of the free on-line cloud generators. Initially, I used […]
Tracking Retail Cricket Powder Prices
I have been following the field of entomophagy (insects as food) for a while: watching the news, and occasionally writing news roundups or more detailed pieces (see archive section below). So I have been wondering, as news coverage has increased, new products are launched, and companies start scaling up their insect-rearing operations, what is happening […]
Keeping an Open Mind about Insects and Other Sustainable Foods
(Disclosure: I received a discount on the registration fee in exchange for writing three posts about my experiences at the conference.) One night, the beef tongues in Chef Cesar Cienfuegos’ kitchen started speaking to him. They told him “There must be a better way, you need to start thinking differently.” It was a special night […]
Not a Free Lunch, but a Good Deal: Comparing Crickets to Other Livestock
In “Crickets Are Not a Free Lunch: Protein Capture from Scalable Organic Side-Streams via High-Density Populations of Acheta domesticus,” the results clearly supported the “no free lunch” title: feeding “free” waste food or crop residues to domestic crickets leads to high mortality and low weight gain. A free lunch is great, of course, but wouldn’t […]
Micro-Round-Up of News about Insects as Food (Entomophagy), February 2016
It has been quite a while since my last round-up of entomophagy news, so here’s another batch of fresh and not-so-fresh items. General For insects to gain popularity as food for humans, the insect containing foods need to tasty. Chefs will be leading this effort, whether in restaurants like Meeru Dhalwala from Vij’s in Vancouver, […]
Garbage In, Garbage Out: Low Quality Feed Produces Low Quality Crickets
Crickets are a hot ingredient for some sustainability advocates and start-ups. In marketing materials and other articles, you’ll see claims about how these “mini-livestock” are a low-impact food with enormous potential: they can eat almost anything, they don’t need much land, and so on (you’ll find plenty of examples in my two round-ups about insects […]
Are Media Outlets Writing More about Insects as Food (Entomophagy)?
As I follow the news on insects as food (entomophagy), I have been wondering if the pace of articles has been increasing because it seems that every time I turn around there is another article about cricket flour or a new book about eating bugs. To answer my question, I visited the U.C. Berkeley library […]
Micro-Round-Up on News about Insects as Food (Entomophagy)
One of my favorite posts on my blog looks at the history and psychology of “insects as food” in European and closely-related cultures and U.S., Canada, and Australia. (A quick summary: These cultures have a long history of associating insects with disease and filth, which makes them unappetizing. In addition, not many large insects that […]
Insects are a delectable topic for editors and bloggers
Entomophagy — the practice of eating insects* — seems to be quite a delectable topic for bloggers and editors of magazines and newspapers, with numerous mainstream publications featuring articles on the subject in recent months. Typically the articles follow a pattern that includes profiling someone that raises or cooks insects for human consumption, talking about […]
When the locusts swarm, can we feed them to fish and poultry?
A few weeks before the Olympics started in Beijing, Northern China was hit by a enormous swarm of locusts that affected over 5,000 square miles of farmland and pasture. In response, the Chinese government deployed over thirty thousand workers and 200 tons of pesticide. This made me to wonder if instead of blasting the locusts […]