Hop to it!
By Jillian Scannell
November 15, 2016
As a new college student, I told myself I would step out of my comfort zone, which meant trying new things. So when this “thing” was a chocolate bar containing crickets, I went for it. And I liked it.
My mother? Not so much. My phone conversation with her the next morning went along the lines of: “Your father told me, I don’t want to talk about it… Are you really thinking of writing an article about it … Do you have to? … Could you at least refer to them as something like I don’t know, lima beans? It makes me less queasy.”
Like my mother, many Americans find the idea of eating insects sickening, but the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says that 20 percent of the world’s consumers already eat insects. This begs the question: what is it about these crunchy invertebrates that has some people hooked?
The chocolate bar was provided by Vermont’s first organic cricket farm, Tomorrow’s Harvest Farm, started by Steve and Jennifer Swanson. After their first child was born, the Swansons began to wonder what was going into the food that they were eating. They began researching, and what they found was a food system that was harmful to human health and the health of the environment. Shocked by this discovery, Steve came across a 2013 report by the United Nations (UN) on edible insects. Steve found that consuming crickets provided an alternative source of protein that would fulfill their diets and sustain the planet. “To meet the food and nutrition challenges of today and tomorrow,” the UN report reads, “we need to find new ways of growing food.”
When I talked with Steve on the phone he spoke of climate change resulting in “some pretty scary stuff.” He explained the sense of urgency to change the course we are on: “There is a small window of opportunity to get this right.”
Organic cricket farming addresses water shortages, overconsumption of natural resources, and emissions of greenhouse gases, three environmental challenges facing our current food system. You do not have to look much farther than the West Coast to see the effects of water shortages, an impact of climate change, in the United States. The Public Policy Institute of California found that the four-year period between 2011 and 2015 was the driest since record keeping of began in 1895. One of the industries most affected by water shortages is that of livestock production. In contrast to the process of raising animals, crickets require far less water and fewer resources. According to the UN, crickets produce the same amount of protein as cattle but require 12 times less feed. Crickets can even turn human food waste into healthy, useable protein; it is the ultimate form of recycling.
The UN also found that animal agriculture accounts for 70 percent of all agricultural land surface of the planet, which includes land use for growing feed. Crickets take up a small amount of land surface and, with a life cycle of eight to twelve weeks, they are not around for long.
Most climate scientist agree that the main cause of climate change is humanity’s contribution to the greenhouse effect by emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A significant portion of these emissions results from food production. Tomorrow’s Harvest’s website notes that “the average American eats 62 pounds of beef a year, which equates to over 21,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. To put that into perspective, the carbon dioxide emissions of your average car each year is less than half that, only 10,300 pounds.”
In the category of protein and nutrients, crickets are winning. Compared to beef, crickets contain two times the protein, five times the magnesium, three times the iron, and have as much calcium as milk. They are low in fat, have more potassium than bananas, contain as much vitamin B12 as there is in salmon, and are considered a complete protein containing all nine essential amino acids, more than avocado. There is a new superfood in town; that is, if you can get these little guys in your town. Here in Vermont, we can.
Adding crickets into your diet really is as simple as “chocolate chirp cookies.” A cricket powder, soon to be launched by Tomorrow’s Harvest Farm, can be used to bake chocolate chirp cookies, cricket bread, or spicy cheddar cricket muffins. Saving the world by eating cookies? It’s an environmentalist's dream. And who knows, crickets are considered “the gateway bug,” so eating crickets could even lead you to try other insects, too .
Maybe I will even convince my mother to allow “lima beans” at Thanksgiving this year.
