Don’t Worry: Bugs Are Not the Future of Food (Even If They Are Delicious)
Touted as the high-protein solution to animal meat, yummy insects just aren’t going to catch on. Your burger is still killing the planet, though.
This summer, I was walking around a market in Udon Thani, Thailand, utterly agog at the ingredients on display—fresh long pepper, hefty bamboo shoots, green vegetables I scarcely recognized—when Weerawat “Nhum” Triyasenawat, the chef at Samuay & Sons, suddenly stopped me at one vendor’s stall. Well, “stall” isn’t the right word for it; this woman had a stretch of teal tarp laid out on the sidewalk to show off her wares, which included, on this day, wasp larvae. They were thicc, a couple of inches long, and smoky white. Some were alive, still wriggling on a piece of honeycomb from their hive, but the one chef Nhum plucked for me had been steamed. Try it, he said.
I was skeptical. I’d eaten my fair share of unusual foods before, from stinky tofu, braised pig intestines, and horsemeat sashimi to a full range of bugs: ants, grasshoppers, spiders, and more. The very first Internet video I ever appeared in, back in 1999, was of me taste-testing cicadas—they’d been caught in Tennessee, individually packaged in film canisters, sent to New York, and sautéed in butter and garlic. Mostly, they tasted like butter and garlic. Sadly, that video is long-lost, but here’s me two years ago eating eggs benedict—with crickets!
I’ve truly liked many of the, ahem, bizarre foods I’ve eaten. Stinky tofu is awesome. Horsemeat rocks. I looooooove intestines—braised, grilled, stir-fried with chilies and Sichuan peppercorns, whatever. I’m even leading an “Extreme Cuisine” tour of China for New York Times Journeys next year.
But sometimes, often even, weird foods are just that: weird. Pig esophagus? Meh. Goat boobs? Ugh. (That’s a story for another day.) Spiders? Puh-leeze.
So when chef Nhum handed me the steamed wasp larva, I sighed to myself. Was this going to be any good, or were we just playing another round of “Let’s make the foreigner eat the weird thing!”? I’m not averse to the game, but having played many, many rounds, it’s just not as exciting or funny as it once was. Still, I’m a polite guy, so I popped the wasp larva in my mouth.
Holy crap! With one gentle bite, the outer layer burst, flooding my mouth with creamy, but not gooshy, larval innards—delicious, wonderful, umami-tastic larval innards! It was like a slightly more liquidy version of really good mashed potatoes, rich and fatty and a little starchy and so, so satisfying. I was stunned. Wasp larva, who knew?
If you follow headlines, then you’ve probably heard: The future of food is bugs. In 50 years, we’ll all be eating them, particularly since that’s the only way to feed a population of 9 billion by 2050. Climate change is accelerating their importance, since our addiction to meat, especially beef, is unsustainable. (Yes, even grass-fed beef.) If we want to keep protein in our diets—and of course we do, because we’re all insane gym rats now—we’re going to have to find another source, and that source is creepy-crawly bugs. Already, they’re infiltrating our food supply (in a good way!), in the form of cricket flour and cricket chips. Bugsfeed.com lists 47 restaurants around the world that serve bugs, from London’s Nusa Kitchen to San Francisco’s Don Bugito. The six-legged revolution, it would seem, is heartily under way.
But I, a hearty, enthusiastic, and experienced bug-eater, am here to tell you it will not happen. Bugs will not replace burgers. Spiders are not the new steak. Crickets ain’t pork chops. If you want to eat more creepy-crawlies, you’ll be able to, but bugs are certainly not the future of food.
I’ve Got 99 Problems and Bugs Are Actually Most of Them
Let’s start by looking at one of the most commonly touted pro-bug claims: They’re nutritious! High in protein (especially when compared with beef), low in fat, and chock-full of vitamins and minerals! According to InsectsAreFood.com, “100 grams of cricket contains: 121 calories, 12.9 grams of protein, 5.5 g. of fat, 5.1 g. of carbohydrates, 75.8 mg. calcium, 185.3 mg. of phosphorous, 9.5 mg. of iron, 0.36 mg. of thiamin, 1.09 mg. of riboflavin, 3.10 mg. of niacin and .05% fat.”
I have no idea if IAF is right, but their numbers match up pretty well with what I’ve seen elsewhere on the Web. And I’m not here to argue with their basic point—insects such as crickets are indeed very good for you, and good for the planet.
But let’s take a look at one aspect of this claim. How many crickets are in 100 grams?
The answer is actually kind of hard to figure out. I’ve seen weights for adult crickets listed as anywhere from 0.243 grams to 0.6 ounces, meaning you’d need to eat as few as 6 or possibly more than 400 to hit that 100-gram threshold. Just look at a product like this 4-ounce bag of whole roasted crickets (legs removed) and you’ll see that we’re talking at least 100 crickets here.
And that’s just to hit 12.9 grams of protein! A healthy 150-pound adult male like myself requires roughly 50 grams of protein per day—that’s 400 grams of crickets, which is, according to my calculations, a fuckload of crickets.
The problem is not the ick factor of eating hundreds upon hundreds of crickets every day. (And yeah, you could get supplemental protein from other sources, too.) The problem is the cooking: How do you prepare and eat that many crickets every day? There’s cricket flour for baking, I guess, but I’m not sure cricket bread is going to provide all the protein I crave. Cricket tacos, like I had in Oaxaca back in 2003? Maybe, but that’s still an enormous number of tacos. Crickets on my eggs benedict? Okay…
Maybe if you just add crickets in to every single thing you normally eat every day, you’d hit your RDA, but that seems a little ridiculous, and it doesn’t take into account the enormous number of different ways people eat. In my family of four, we cook Chinese food for dinner at least three days a week—how do we figure crickets into that? Sprinkle them into stir-fries along with scallions? Sizzle them in oil with dried chilies before tossing in water spinach? That can’t use up more than a few dozen crickets at a time, and that would be shared between four people.
I suppose I could integrate crickets into my between-meal snacks—grind them into hummus, mix them into my popcorn. (Alas, I don’t snack much!) Bugs are really easier to imagine as a snack ingredient rather than a T-bone substitute, not just because they’re small, often crunchy, and portable but because they do what snacks do—alleviate hunger pangs and brighten your mood—rather than what bigger dishes at main meals do—give you a solid sense of fullness that lasts hours. No one but birds makes a meal out of mealworms.
This gets at another point the entomophages tend to miss: What we eat is less important than how we eat. In other words, if you want to introduce a new ingredient into our society, you have to think about how Americans eat in general. We spend lots of time in our cars, so we eat burritos one-handed while driving. We don’t have time for lunch, so we hit Chop’t and Sweetgreen to feel healthy. We’re rushed in the evening, so we rely on Blue Apron to deliver meal kits. This is why the Impossible Burger is so awesome, because it takes a classic we already understand and adore and preserves its fundamental appeal while reinventing its constituent elements. Make me a spider dog I can buy at Nathan’s, and you’ll change the world.
The other way to get more people to eat more insects would be to make insects incredibly inexpensive. When a new ingredient becomes affordable, formerly cautious cooks get curious. In Vietnam maybe 15 years ago, I remember suddenly seeing kangaroo on restaurant menus — apparently, Australia had a surplus that year and was selling the meat abroad quite cheaply. And it was awesome, nutty and rich, and made a great pork substitute in bún thịt nướng. But the prices must have gone back up, because I haven’t seen it there since. The same could be true for insects, which are currently quite dear — those legless roasted crickets I mentioned above cost $60 a pound! Cut that price by a factor of ten, and you might find folks willing to experiment.
Curiosity, however, won’t be enough. Because in every place I’ve visited where bugs are traditionally eaten—Oaxaca, Korea, Cambodia—they’re still just a sideline, a snack, an outlier. People there looooooooove their meat, be it pork or beef or chicken or whatever. That love is often just as “traditional” as the bug-eating—meat requires sacrifice, requires money, requires organization and preparation that foster a sense of community. (What do you do with a whole cow, right?) People traditionally gather to share meat; it’s hard to imagine the same happening for insects. I don’t want to romanticize meat too much, but I think it provides a kind of satisfaction, both cultural and physiological, you won’t get with meat-alternatives.
(None of this, by the way, should be interpreted as anti-vegetarian. I’d be very happy to go all-veg if I were in Tamil Nadu, for instance, and I’m a die-hard tofu defender to boot. But we’re not talking about meat vs. no meat here—it’s meat vs. insects.)
So, bugs are not the future. They’re expensive and ill-suited for both our diets and our dining culture. Eat them if you like, and enjoy them, too—particularly the steamed wasp larva! Or don’t, and just don’t worry about it; be confident that every “future of food” headline is pretty much bullshit.
At the same time, eat less meat! Raising animals for food is wrecking our planet, and reducing demand for meat—especially beef—could help alleviate climate change. When you do buy meat, try to avoid the stuff raised by enormous agribusinesses in favor of small-farm purveyors (a challenge, I know, for those who don’t live in, say, butcher-heavy Brooklyn), and try to eat every part of the damn animal. Pig ears rule. Chicken livers go in my ragù bolognese. Bones make stock.
Also: goat! Eat goat. It’s not just delicious—it’s got a smaller environmental footprint than just about any other animal, so you can consume it guilt-free. (I mean, except for the guilt you feel about having taken the life of another mammal just for your own sustenance, but you’ve probably made peace with that long ago.) Just pretend, like the Vietnamese do, that it’s lamb, and prepare it like its ovine cousin: kebabs, curries, tagines, or roasted over a wood fire on a school night when the kids are crabbing—you know, your usual everyday all-American meal. You can even snack on grasshopper tacos while it cooks. You’ll be a candidate for sainthood.
But please: Skip the boobs. They’re awful. Barf.
