Eating insects: Taking the crunchy way

 Researchers from the  University of Adelaide   are  surveying    Australian  attitudes to eating insects in the hope of curbing carbon dioxide emissions.

Put bluntly, it takes a lot less land to produce 100 kilograms of insect meat than 100kg   of beef. Insects have long been part of the diet in  south-east Asia, Africa and Central America. In the Philippines  in the 1990s, a locust plague was effectively controlled by the rather neat measure of  urging  people to catch the little buggers and cook them. In some quarters, they have remained on the menu ever since.

However, insects have played very little part in Western cuisines. Indeed, land-living invertebrates of all kinds – apart from French snails and a type of maggot-infused cheese from Sardinia – have been pretty much excluded from European-derived diets, at least since Roman food writer Apicius penned the world’s earliest surviving cookbook, De re Coquinaria, in about AD400. Lark tongue, calf’s foot jelly, pig blood, yes; mealworms, no.

As the  Adelaide research perhaps presumes, the reason for this is probably more psychological than nutritional. ‘‘Once you get over the initial ‘ick’ factor, you find that they actually taste quite good,’’  says Skye Blackburn, 32, who runs Australia’s only online food-grade insect supply service, The Edible Bug Shop.

Blackburn’s company supplies a couple of Sydney restaurants  and has found a growing demand from health-food stores for insect-derived protein powders and energy bars. But how big a hurdle is the ick factor? And do insects, in fact, as per the spruik, actually taste quite good?

 I  decided to find out, ordering  a swag of stuff, including cricket protein powder, whole roasted crickets, roasted mealworms, ants and chocolate-covered bugs. More exotic and potentially challenging species, such as scorpions, were temporarily out of stock.

When they arrived, it was time to hit the kitchen. The first telling moment came during a trip to the supermarket to pick up some extra ingredients.

‘‘What are you making?’’ asked the   checkout  operator.

‘‘Banana bread,’’ I replied.

‘‘Yum,’’ she said.

‘‘Using flour made from crickets.’’

‘‘You’ve lost me now.’’

Indeed, the aversion to the idea of insects as food seems deep-rooted.  Just the mention of it causes men to pretend to retch, and women to assert a sudden, defiant vegetarianism. Well-known  US  food critic Jeffrey Steingarten once wrote: ‘‘Like most Americans, I have always reacted with revulsion to the idea of eating insects, despite their high nutritive value, crunchy texture and wide availability.’’

This is a pity, because in terms of goodness, it’s hard to argue against a cockroach sandwich or a caterpillar stew.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), ‘‘many edible insects provide satisfactory amounts of energy and protein, meet amino acid requirements for humans, are high in monounsaturated and/or polyunsaturated fatty acids, and are rich in micronutrients such as copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorous, selenium and zinc, as well as riboflavin, pantothenic acid, biotin and, in some cases, folic acid’’.

The diversity of edible insects is staggering. Writing in the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed last year, La Trobe University entomologist Dr Alan Yen estimated 2000 species are eaten around the world, but the real number could be vastly higher. As many as 5 million species    have yet to be formally identified.

Some of the annual harvests are impressive. Yen notes that Mexicans chew their way through 30 tonnes of ants, Thais swallow about 100 tonnes of crickets, and Indians consume 183 tonnes of silkworms.

He suggests  witchetty grubs, bogong moths and weaver ants could become ‘‘flagship species’’  in Australia.  The FAO says  100 grams of weaver ants contain 5325 kilojoules of energy. The same weight of rump steak produces just 3554 kilojoules.

 As it turns out, recipes for insect-based foods are few and far between.      However, several websites are dedicated to   entomophagy, as it’s called, including an  large recipe collection on Pinterest.

 I  decided to first taste the ingredients straight from the packets.   

Whole roasted crickets taste slightly nutty, not unpleasant, with a mouth-feel a bit like the skins of roasted peanuts or cashews. A little salt improves them. The same coated in garlic and chilli is quite acceptable. They go well with a cold beer.

Dried mealworms don’t taste of anything. Ants allegedly have a strong citrus taste, but perhaps  my tongue is ill-equipped to detect it. And chocolate-covered bugs (crickets and mealworms, I discovered) are perfectly fine but, to be fair, the chocolate overwhelmed any insecty notes.

The cricket protein powder had a noticeable musty odour  that would disturb should it   dominate a dish. However, used as one-third of the total flour component in the banana bread, it was easily submerged beneath the scents of the other ingredients.

The result was delicious, indistinguishable from a bug-free version.

 My  chocolate-and-cricket crackles looked wonderfully gross, with whole insects jutting out from between  corn  flakes. Sadly, however, they didn’t taste very nice. This had nothing to do with the crickets.  I had  boosted the amounts of icing sugar and chocolate powder to mask any unpleasant insect taste.

This was despite having already eaten several of the crickets and finding nothing objectionable. Truly, the ick factor runs deep.