There's A Fly In My Soup: Why Bugs Are On The Menu As The Future Of Food

Bug farms are starting to look like the most viable way to ween the West off its meat-heavy diet. Sam Wall takes a closer look at this creepy-crawly culinary revolution. 

The first thing to remember about eating insects is that you do it all the time. Chances are you're not really chewing spiders in your sleep but there are bugs or bug by-products in just about everything, one way or another. If you've ever eaten red food dye it was likely crushed cochineal insects. Lac bug secretions are what make jellybeans so shiny. Bee spit is delicious. If you dip a red jellybean in honey it's essentially a grasshopper, genetically speaking.

Depending on your diet, authorities like entomologist, food scientist and Edible Bug Shop founder Skye Blackburn estimate you're ingesting at least a half-kilo of insect matter annually through natural contamination anyhow. So, while we in the West might baulk at taking a bite straight out of something with an above-average leg count, we're sort of already on board with entomophagy, in an 'out of sight, out of mind' kind of way.

In recent years it's come a lot more into the public gaze, however, as rising populations and the questionable sustainability of large livestock and fishing have turned up the Bug v Beef debate. Whether or not the final outcome is as inevitable and all-consuming as some have predicted, insect farms supplying a percentage of your diet in coming years is definitely looking like a viable reality. And there are some pretty solid reasons to get behind micro herds.

It's already here

According to Australian Geographic, Thailand alone has more than 20,000 registered farmers, and operations like Tiny Farms and Bug Farm Foods have been working out of America and the UK for a couple years already. Edible Bug Shop started Australia's own food-grade insect industry back in 2007 and have a whole range of items available to the public; mealworm and wattleseed marshmallows, ant-based seasoning salt, chilli and garlic snack crickets (if you squint, they kind of look like peanuts). Rebel Food Tasmania isn't far from getting its own insect farm up and running as well — they're taking pre-orders on cricket flour and their Instagram says you'll find them at this year's Dark Mofo.

It's good for you…

A study from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) found that adult locusts and grasshoppers have comparable levels of protein to raw beef - about 26g per 100g in cows and 20.6g in grasshoppers. They also contain less than half the fat, more than twice the calcium, have higher levels of iron and are full of vitamins and amino acids, which is pretty wild, really. It's not like you're eating something you found under a rock either, micro-farms are subject to Australian Food Standards like any other so you're as likely to get sick eating the little dudes as you are from a steak. As an added bonus, we're so far removed from insects taxonomically that the chances of cross-species transmission aren't high, which means you don't need to stress about roach flu and mad cricket disease.

...and for the planet

Partly because they're cold-blooded and party because they don't weigh upwards of 800kgs per unit, crickets and the like don't take nearly as much energy to raise as cattle and other livestock, and nowhere near as much space. According to the University of Edinburgh, if we switched half of the meat consumed globally for a more efficient protein source like insects we could potentially repurpose a third of the land used for farming worldwide (about 1680 million hectares). More efficient conversion of feed to energy the cold-blooded thing) means that they eat less and create fewer greenhouse emissions and less ammonia.

Everyone else is doing it

Weighing in again, FAO reported in 2013 that two billion people around the world included bugs in their regular diet. If two billion of your friends jump off a bridge, maybe the water's fine? It's probably worth having a peak anyway. And by all accounts, they taste good. Though the flavour is said to vary depending on diet, Crickets are mainly nutty in flavour, while stink bugs taste like apples, funnily enough. And as much as a tarantula between a couple of slices of bread is a smidge confronting, the primary method of ingestion is to grind the little suckers down into flour or powder to be reconstituted however you like, bringing us safely back to 'out of site' territory.