Edible insects are a novelty today, but they'll be mainstream tomorrow
foodnavigator-usa.com
foodnavigator-usa.com
I once met an ancient Jewish gentleman who, due to poverty, had been forced to eat lobsters as a youth. In that day they were considered on par with rats as a food source (not to mention they were forbidden by his religious culture) and he had never recovered from the experience, and still considered them revolting.
I can relate: if it became popular with the youth of tomorrow to broil rats and serve them at market price, I'd probably never get on board.
Like insects, Lobster was once a cheap and common food resource. Money could be made by packing and shipping it of to places where it was exotic and unheard of to the majority of people, and so it's image was specially crafted to make profit.
But unlike insects, lobster had the advantage of a fresh market. It was only viewed as the food of impoverished immigrants in port cities where it was common.
The vast majority of the market, at least in the USA, considers insects icky to look at our touch, let alone to eat.
More substantially, I think any serious study would find that people's eating habits rarely change based on broad, even minded assessment of future resource limits. Current rates of meat consumption are a good example: we know it can't last, but few people change their diet so that their great grandchildren can eat more chicken.
I do think insects will be a food source in the future, but that will be because a clever marketer discovers the killer bug that is both exotic and delicious. In general I think it will be a very long and slow process by which everyday insects like crickets become palatable to the status quo.
As far as I'm aware use of cricket flour is also virtually nonexistent amongst the many cultures that consider whole insects a delicacy.
On the basis of both of the above I'd hazard that cricket flour is unlikely to become a significant staple food even if niche businesses perfect the art of cricket-farming.
Basically, bugs are better, comparable to any other animal source.
I think the idea of producing cricket meal as a protein supplement/food additive is pretty novel, but it will be a long time before I cook with it directly.
Shellfish are considered unclean in Judaism, but you shouldn't generalize from that to assume every other culture views them the same way, as with pork, the religious prohibition probably originated with the elevated risk of food-borne illness that was exacerbated by the climate.
Then you will become like most old people.
New things like interracial marriage, gay marriage, trying to not use a lot of resources(baby boomers not pre war), computers etc frighten old people.
And you also will get older and die, like they will before you.
But while you are dying off the youth will embrace the new and the better.
I just feel sad you have pin holed yourself already to not even want to try.
And although I don't like boiled meats, BBQ rat tastes fine.
[Edit] broil != boil I see from Google :)
Yeah, ain't that a shame? Those old belle-epoque people getting older, while the younger generations embraced Word War I and then the Nazi party.
Or those people that got older after the sixties, were the younger generations embraced Raeganism...
Sarcasm aside, new is not necessarily better. It's not even a strong correlation. There is new stuff that can be better than old, and old stuff that can be better than new in equal measure.
Only technology monotonically progresses to better and more advanced things. Morals and customs (and aesthetics) can and do change either way.
Sure, sure, but getting rid of prejudices that are objectively nonsense is better. Things like which foods are delicacies and which are icky that are not at all based on nutrition, sanitation, etc.
It might be a novelty right now in the western world but its been years of tradition in African or Asian countries.
Incidentally, I'd love for microlivestock to be more widespread in the US--it could be such an affordable protein source!
But judging from the way some domestic animals are treated by some farms, the ick/ew factor of eating insects becomes less of a barrier.
I've eaten whole insects including crickets and the flavor was whatever. The texture of the legs was like trying to eat the tail of a shrimp - impossible. I'll be interested to see what the processing is like as I'm not sure about the utility of a flour that includes fine grains of exoskeleton. Proteins turn into magical things during cooking and shells don't do quite as well. Flour hints at baking, but I don't think it would function nearly as well.
From the first link on google, the baking results look like it doesn't form anything that can trap air or steam, so dense and mushy seems likely.
They may well be an efficient form of protein but... squick. Basically.
It's not likely to become something which is mainstream overnight, but there are large parts of the population in the West who actively seek out different experiences. Or, to put it another way, the food market is heavily segmented by interest, class, age, location (national, regional, and metropolitan/rural), and so on. In the short term, you're likely to get movement into early/adventurous adopter parts of the market.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the sector is really growing this time...
I think there'd be a lot more vegetarians if everyone had to do their own butchering.
It definitely gets you over the "ew, there's blood in my pack of chicken breasts."
I know I would be. Of course I already knew I would be if I had to raise my own food.
When I look at it the only way I can eat meat is because I can ignore the fact that it was an animal at the point I eat it.
I can't think of anything else that's even close to tomatoes. I don't touch beer or coffee with a ten-foot pole either, but tomatoes are worse even than that.
There's a chemical(s) in raw tomatoes that most people just aren't able to taste. Cooking alters it in some way; I like tomato soup and stuff, and was very surprised to learn, at 25, that most people find tomatoes and tomato soup taste similar, when they couldn't be more different to me.
Liking tomatoes is basically like being colour blind, except that they're a majority, which makes the non-colour blind people the weird ones.
Also outdated, the new version 1.4 of their formula removed more than half of the maltodextrin in favor of lower GI carbohydrates, which was one of the few potentially legitimate complaints.
Lets start with the the addressing of the fish oils found in soylent. They claim fish oils are good, "but just how high-quality is the fish oil going to be in a mass-produced beverage?", yet they didn't think to check the website where they cite that their fish oils come from algae and even provide information on the shelf-life of soylent based on when the oils in it are likely to be rancid[2]
Moving on to sucralose. The study it cites that was published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health has been revised by studies that have been conducted since then and found that the study was "deficient in several critical areas" and that its conclusions "are not consistent with published literature and not supported by the data presented".[3] But hey, why cite that when we could just be scared by old crappy studies. The other wildly inaccurate claim of the article is it addresses the effects of "cooking with sucralose at high temperatures" when that will literally never be relevant while consuming soylent which is recommended to be prepared at room temperature and stored at even lower temperatures. Another case of employing scare tactics instead of a little bit of critical thinking.
As for maltodextrin? The claim in the article hinges around the high blood sugar spike from maltodextrin which is offset by other ingredients in foods, but if that's not enough, they've measured the glycemic index of previous recipes of soylent and they're doing so for Soylent 1.4 (the most recent recipe)[4]. The point is, this isn't some hidden scandal that this author uncovered in the two seconds that they looked at the ingredients list, it's known and tested and accounted for.
The list goes on with every one of the other concerns with appeals to nature here and scare tactic there (including a false and now corrected claim about an ingredient coming from "a beaver's ass. Literally."). In conclusion, I think the source you cited is not a very high quality one and readers should be aware of it.
Edit: Spaced out sources to be more readable.
[0]:https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/sections/200307055-About-Soy...
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
[2]:http://diy.soylent.me/wiki/perishability
[3]:Brusick, D. "Expert Panel Report on a Study of Splenda in Male Rats." Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology 2009 Oct;55(1):6-12.
[4]:https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/articles/201273715-Soylent-a...
Eating meat doesn't bother me, but if I imagine myself attaching more moral value to nonhumans, I would rate insects a lot lower than chickens a lot lower than pigs, and switching to insects being a net gain morally.
Does it bother you to eat plants? Things made with yeast? Do other activities that kill lots of insects bother you?
Not trying to needle you and I hope I am not setting off your scrupulosity, I'm just wondering how far it goes. I am also curious if this is a "thing" in the West now, I know something similar is sometimes practiced in India.
I know insects and plants are not "at the same level" as mammals or birds, but I always have the thought that squashing insects or eating plants is still killing living beings and I can't help being bothered by it. Yes, I also do have a thought for the yeast I'm using when baking bread, waking it up from stasis just for baking it in the oven soon after... but unicellular beings seem much less important as they're mostly clones, they don't have the same individuality.
I grow plants as a hobby, and having a few small trees that have grown from seeds, in pots where they entirely depend on me for their life, makes me really see them as individuals - especially since the genetic variation that comes with growing seeds also means they have observably different behaviours.
On the other hand... I do eat some meat, and for some reason I don't have a single thought for the pigs that have to get killed to make the dry sausages or cured ham I eat. I guess that is because I am just so used to eating these, and they are less recognizable as animal parts than, say, chicken wings.
In the end, you just can't live healthily by only eating things that don't harm any living being, so I just live with it, knowing that I have to kill things to eat.
About the India thing, I have thought like this for a very long time, I remember in kindergarten trying to stop other kids from stomping on ants, and (a bit later of course) my parents being amused when I talked about plant being like ununderstandable aliens. So I don't think this has much to do with trends, it's just a thinking you can come up with on your own.
I gave a friend some cricket bars and he thought I was joking about the ingredient until after he'd tried it. Well, that's one answer to the ick factor.
This is different from passive shifts of food from scorned to fashion, such as lobster or oysters, or how açai briefly swept the Whole Foods set -- that's more of a Veblen issue. Once the technical issues are worked out, someone's going to make a killing (literally I suppose) by rebranding ground up mice and crickets as "Natural Field Protein"
BTW I enjoyed this quote: > "Journalists always ask me what do you say to people that can't get over the psychological hurdle of eating insects?", said Crowley. "I say, 'nothing' - we're not targeting these people. We're targeting people that are receptive to our message, that will be our early adopters."
Good for him!
Or maybe there's a middle ground where things are neither.
Eating insects here is currently novelty. But in many parts of the world, it is a part of daily life.
I recommend reading this book if anybody's interested in more specifics about insect-based nutrition, and why it's actually more unique and useful than most people realize:
http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Adventure-Eating-Insects-Planet...
(I don't consider dha/epa and carnosine to be essential nutrients.)
We're at a point where we don't even know what we don't know about nutrition, so it's fair to have "beliefs" like this I suppose. But there is substantial evidence for DHA's impact on brain development if nothing else, including the brain development of children birthed from mothers low in DHA stores. Not much significant evidence suggests equivalent impact from ALA/plant-based fatty acids, nor do they convert predictably in the body to forms the forms that are actually directly useful. I will grant you that EPA is more debatable, but DHA is pretty solid. And while I don't trust speculative 'evolutionary' evidence, it does make sense that human brain development (and thus human development in general) supposedly started to take off once they migrated near the coasts where there was an abundance of seafood to hunt.
Not to mention that plant fats/oils are the largest contributors to the problem of having imbalanced omega-6 to omega-3 ratios to begin with:
http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000141000000000000000-w....
Either way, "essential nutrients" and nutrition in general aren't things that we can assume as being settled, because much of what we "know" about all that will almost certainly become outdated in a few short generations. In the meantime, I think moderate diversification of nutrients isn't a bad idea.
Edit: I also made no mention of vegetarianism/veganism, I simply referred to plant-based food sources specifically, because many animal-derived products (including eggs as you mentioned), most certainly still have the benefits I was describing. It's not about lifestyle or ideology, it's about finding quality sources of things that promote optimal human functioning.
If it tastes good, is healthy, requires less land/water/resources to products, and leads to lower meat consumption, I don't see how it can be a bad thing.
Unfortunately, costs are still very high. I'm not sure why that is, given all the hype about "bugs are a low cost protein!"
My guess is that while bugs are more efficient than most animals at converting energy, the equipment and methods to raise the bugs and convert them into human-ready products have not had the centuries of optimization that mainstream animal husbandry enjoys.
Even if there's not enough of a difference for an individual to choose one over the other it doesn't mean companies with huge economies of scale won't choose differently.
Food is mostly about taste and convenience today, because we have access to enough of it - insects doesn't really give you either.
In short it is highly unlikely that I will wake up tomorrow and eat insects, nor that the majority in the developed world will.
And yes shrimp may technically be insects. Technically correct does nothing for the ick factor.
That said we are going to look at a timeline of decades rather than tomorrow. I mean Tofu has been around for how long? And it is still somewhat of the beaten path.
Okay, so it's a coconut crab, not a lobster, but...
Mind you he finds the texture of boiled eggs repulsive too, so it might just be him.
Lobsters aren't molluscs, they're crustaceans.
Not even the same phylum.
Just like cod, which my Hull fishing-town relatives taught me is a dirty, wormy fish unsuitable for consumption. All you can do with it is sell it to the naive land-lubbers...
http://www.missfoodwise.com/2013/03/beef-stout-and-oyster-pi...
Canine / felines are carnivores (omnivores these days, but you get the gist) and their muscle structure / diets cause them to taste 'off' and be tough fleshwise. Not to mention that they're worth more as biological weapons / companions.
There are also more scientific reasons, for example:
There was a quick deterioration in the men's physical condition during this journey. Both men suffered dizziness; nausea; abdominal pain; irrationality; mucosal fissuring; skin, hair, and nail loss; and the yellowing of eyes and skin. Later Mawson noticed a dramatic change in his travelling companion. Mertz seemed to lose the will to move and wished only to remain in his sleeping bag. He began to deteriorate rapidly with diarrhoea and madness. On one occasion Mertz refused to believe he was suffering from frostbite and bit off the tip of his own little finger. This was soon followed by violent raging—Mawson had to sit on his companion's chest and hold down his arms to prevent him from damaging their tent. Mertz suffered further seizures before falling into a coma and dying on 8 January 1913.[8]
It was unknown at the time that Husky liver contains extremely high levels of vitamin A. It was also not known that such levels of vitamin A could cause liver damage to humans.[9] With six dogs between them (with a liver on average weighing 1 kg), it is thought that the pair ingested enough liver to bring on a condition known as Hypervitaminosis A. However, Mertz may have suffered more because he found the tough muscle tissue difficult to eat and therefore ate more of the liver than Mawson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Mawson#Australasian_An...
It is highly likely that if those explorers had asked the original breeders of said animals, they'd have been told strongly that eating them was a bad idea.
http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=1806-05-0...
Clark never ate dog, couldn't bring himself to break the cultural taboo.
In the dry areas of what is now eastern Washington, in fact, where there was little if any game and the only other choice was dried salmon, usually impregnated with sand, the men came to prefer dog.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/12/1204_031204_...
Deciding something is delicious or not has more to do with culture and upbringing than actual taste.
Cats are said to taste pretty much like rabbit. Edible, but nothing really special.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylthiocarbamide
So everyone can taste bitter, but not always from the same things.
A similar thing is probably at work in people who find raw tomatoes extremely unpleasant.
You eat farmed insects which are clean and you can be sure they're free of pesticides or other agrichemicals.
Farming insects uses less land and water than farming meat and is less problematic regarding cruelty.
If there is a market for bugs something will end selling ilegally wild bugs (cheaper, better profit margins). This is what history tells us again and again.
I really hope that we as species can be more smarter in the future about this. Famines are not caused by people not eating bugs, are caused by people creating wars by design, etc...
If insects are going to be introduced into the American diet, this is exactly how it will start. And may well end; I could easily see whole insects never going mainstream. But... they don't have to.
Sustainability may be a choice today, but it won't be in the future. That's not even a debate.
Looking at r/fitness and trillions of similar boards online, people are readily willing to chug down any sort of powder without need for control through FDA etc. You know, for them "gainz".
So if insects' weird forms are never even detectable by your eyes or tongue, than why should people shy away from them?
I find it pretty crazy that a mental image of a cricket is considered more unappetizing than a bleeding out cow, than a pig kept in a 5ft x 5ft space for all of its life, than newborn chicks ground to shreds by some vacuuming grinding machine because they aren't profitable etc....