Maybe you've see little cans of chocolate-covered ants or grasshoppers in the exotic food section of your grocery and thought to yourself, "Yuck—who eats that?" Insects may not come to mind when you think of superfoods. But they could be the next hot "alternative" protein. They're low in fat and loaded with fiber.
You might be surprised to learn you may have been eating insects already. More than 30 companies are already using cricket flour in their products such as cookies and energy bars. And while eating insects is common in Latin America, southeast Asia and parts of Africa because they're a cheaply available commodity, in the U.S. food items containing cricket flour, which is still expensive to produce, are being marketed as artisan products intended for adventurous foodies eager to try something before everyone else.
"Demand for food-grade insects is growing rapidly," says the website for Tiny Farms, a Silicon Valley-based start-up "pioneering the industry production of insects."
Currently, it admits, edible insects are a niche products with the cost of a pound of cricket flour ranging from $25-$45. But it says that's due to lack of scale and it hopes to change that.
"Right now in February 2015," said a recent post on the Tiny Farms blog "there are dozens of restaurants around the country experimenting with insects on their menus—from culinary hubs like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City to more conservatively palated Austin, Texas and Youngstown, Ohio. Food startups Exo, Chapul, Hopper Foods and Bitty Foods are ramping up production of their cricket flour energy bars and baked goods and growing their brick-and-mortar distribution networks in addition to serving up online sales. Exo's bars are even slated to be included in a snack box served on JetBlue Airlines flights. Boston-based Six Foods is preparing to launch their cricket chips, and dozens more new companies are developing products, business plans and marketing strategies to serve edible insects to the Western masses."
Youngstown, Ohio is mostly known for the death of its once-prosperous steel industry, which shrunk the city from 170,000 people to 65,000. But maybe it will become the edible insect capitol of the U.S. Big Cricket Farms, a project mentored by Tiny Farms, bills itself as "America's first urban cricket farm." Launched just last year, it says it's "devoted exclusively to raising human-grade entomophagical products" and that its crickets are fed high-quality, organic, sustainable feed. Founder Kevin Bachhuber first got the idea when he found himself snacking on bugs during a trip to Thailand and "found them to be delicious."
"So I raise bugs and I feed them to people," said Bachhuber in a recent TEDxYoungstown talk. "I'm shocked at how popular this has proven to be."
The farm raises European House Crickets, which it says "are considered to be tastiest, and are thus the most popular. They also offer a better nutritional profile than some of the other cricket species that humans typically consume."
The Washington Post referred to crickets as a "gateway bug" in an article titled How crickets could hook America on eating insects. What could they lead to? "Keep an eye on meal worms, fly larvae, caterpillars, black soldier flies and wax worms," says the Post.
England's Edible Unique, which serves the high-end gourmet market with edible bugs, offers such delicacies as chocolate-dipped crickets, bug kabobs, "extra large 'n' crunchy" Thai scorpions, bamboo worm larvae, edible giant water bugs and a mixture of Weaver ant eggs and Chinese black ants advertised as particularly "high in protein." They're sold out of insect lollipops so a lot of kids must have gotten a special treats.
With agriculture accounting for more than 8 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases, there's a great environmental benefit in going to insects as a source of protein. They require 1/12 as much feed as cattle, 1/4 as much feed as sheep and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens for the same amount of protein as well as a fraction as much water per gram of protein as all of these. And 80 percent of a cricket is edible, compared to 40 percent of a cow. A 2013 report released by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), Edible Insects: Future prospects for food and feed security, focused on using insects as viable solution for feeding the world's growing population in a planet-friendly way as well as an engine for economic development.
"Insects as food and feed emerge as an especially relevant issue in the twenty-first century due to the rising cost of animal protein, food and feed insecurity, environmental pressures, population growth and increasing demand for protein among the middle classes," it says. "Edible insects have always been a part of human diets, but in some societies there is a degree of distaste for their consumption. Although the majority of edible insects are gathered from forest habitats, innovation in mass-rearing systems has begun in many countries. Insects offer a significant opportunity to merge traditional knowledge and modern science in both developed and developing countries."
So what kinds of insects are being consumed for the approximately 2 billion people worldwide who don't live in societies with that "degree of distaste?" Beetles lead the list by a large margin, followed by caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, crickets, grasshoppers and locusts.
Even earthworms are edible, according to Mother Earth News, which gives instructions on how to get the dirt they consume out of their bodies and says, "After purging, their flavor can be a little bitter. Drying them mellows this flavor; incorporating them into various dishes helps as well. They can be added to stirfries, stews, anywhere your imagination wanders."
One big debate remains: can or should vegetarians eat insects? Opinions vary.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Can Insects Feed a Hungry Planet?
6 Things You Need to Know About Protein
How This Trending Diet Is Saving the Planet
Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.