The Kickstarter That Proves We're Finally Okay With Eating Bugs

After centuries of irrational aversion, Westerners may finally be ready to eat bugs.

Want proof? Look no further than Six Foods (as in six-legged), a Boston startup founded by recent Harvard grads Laura D’Asaro and Rose Wang. At the time of writing, they are on the verge of passing the $30,000 mark on Kickstarter in just three days, with a promise to manufacture chips—called “Chirps”—made from ground up crickets.

D’Asaro, who was an African Studies major, says she first “caught the bug” after eating a caterpillar on the side of the street while traveling in Tanzania. A lifelong on-and-off vegetarian who enjoyed meat but struggled with the ethical and environmental issues that came with it, she found insects to be a perfect compromise. She told Wang, who was then her roommate, about her discovery.

“I never thought she’d be into it, because she’s more traditional,” said D’Asaro. “[But] she’d just been in China and had eaten a scorpion, and said it tasted a little bit like shrimp without the fishy flavor.”

So Wang and D’Asaro started ordering live insects and experimenting with them. They knew they were onto something when they made a box of fifty green caterpillar tacos for a pitch competition and left them in the Harvard Innovation Lab fridge. “We didn’t think to label them,” she said. “We got back from our pitch competition half an hour later… and there were only five of them left, because people had eaten them, not knowing they were insects, and had loved them, and just kept going back for more.”

The arguments in favor of entomophagy are convincing. For one, insects are a far more sustainable crop than mammals or poultry. According to D’Asaro, cows produce 100 times the greenhouse gas of insects, and require 2000 times the water. They are also far healthier—dried crickets, which she calls “a superfood,” are 70 percent protein, low in fat and rich with vitamins and minerals. Eating insects makes so much sense that, last summer, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations published a paper advocating for it.

And they’re tasty. “Most of the world eats insects,” said D’Asaro. “And not because of these health or environmental reasons—they eat them because they’re delicious. There’s almost 2,000 varieties of edible insects in the world, all with different flavors and nutritional values. It’s basically a whole undiscovered food group.”

This last point I can corroborate personally. Partway into our interview, D’Asaro produced a container of soy-sauced crickets from her backpack and let me try them. I found that they had a pleasant, subtly nutty flavor, and a chewy consistency that reminded me of a drier, more landbound version of calamari. The legs and wings felt a little weird and fibrous in my mouth, but that didn’t stop me from snacking on them throughout the rest of our conversation.

“In Cambodia and Thailand,” she said, “they eat this for lunch.”

So why do most Westerners still gag at the thought of eating bugs? The reasons run deep. Anthropologist Krystal D’Costa, in a blog post for Scientific American, explains that “[m]ost people [in the West] aren’t exposed to the processes that put food in their supermarkets. While they may know of the processing centers and the distributors and have some awareness of carbon footprints, these mechanisms are largely removed from public view. Consumers are instead faced with the final products.”

In other words, we are accustomed to receiving our food prepackaged, and are usually spared the uncomfortable experience of encountering it in the wild. Insects, who with their small size and preternatural toughness manage to creep their way into our civilization despite our best efforts to expel them, are far more visible than we like our food to be.

Moreover, we have inherited a long history of thinking of insects purely as pests. This may largely be due to the seasonality of the Northern climate in which our culture gestated. Lauren Davis explained in a post on io9 that [w]hen snow and frost kill off your bugs or force them into hibernation, they stay small, and when they reemerge in the warmer months, you're more likely to view them as a pest rather than protein. Combine that with the ready availability of large game in Northern regions, and bugs simply never landed on the dinner table. Because they were seen only as a pest, bugs tended to be viewed as dirty rather than delicious.

But we can no longer afford to allow such fears to keep us from doing what makes sense. If we want to survive the coming century, we might have to get over our hang-ups and finally start eating bugs.