Bugged Page 19
The company makes about half a million dollars per year. Yet Cowan takes away an annual salary of maybe $50,000. He is motivated by the challenge of the industry. “When I see a butterfly, I see work.” The fruits of that labor are being poured into development of the world’s first firefly exhibit—a venture he’s undertaken in a secretive lab adjoining LPS. So far it has cost him $150,000. Watching fireflies is an “inexplicable” wonder, he says, that few have been able to witness. The reason exhibits don’t exist lies in shipping, and fireflies’ 10-day life span. Packaged together, certain American species of male firefly larvae kill each other like Siamese fighting fish. Cowan’s solution was to use a gregarious Taiwanese species of firefly. Eventually his breeding process will enable him to farm 1,000 fireflies weekly.
It may take years before his prototype exhibit is aglow. So far only a few dozen adults have emerged. But nearly every institution he ships butterflies to eagerly awaits his breakthrough and the temporary installment of an exhibit that would be priced at $10,000 a week. The exhibit he hopes to construct will mirror the facade of his fishing cabin in Minnesota.
Even successful insect-rearing operations suffer an occasional crisis. Such was the case in 2010 when a massive outbreak of a virus from Europe killed off hordes of warehouse-raised crickets in North America.
Since the 1950s, Michigan-based wholesaler Top Hat Cricket Farms has mass-produced common house crickets (Acheta domesticus) at a rate of 6 million crickets a week for pet stores and lab researchers. You can only imagine their facility’s offensively nutty stink. But seven years ago, a Top Hat employee opened one of their incubation bins to a disturbing discovery: the crickets inside had lost their hop. Known as cricket paralysis virus (CPV), the strain spread via the gloved hands of workers, immobilizing their A. domesticus breed, turning the sedentary crickets into mush. What’s worse was that reports of CPV came from facilities nationwide. The 65-year-old family-run supplier had to trash 30 million crickets, temporarily lay off 30 employees, and opt for a new species, the Jamaican field cricket. But walk into Petco for reptile food today, and you’ll be none the wiser.
The outbreak didn’t harm the animals ingesting the infected crickets, but CPV managed to infect other cricket farms. Krickets UN Ltd. in Alberta lost 60 million crickets in 10 days, and has closed its doors—as did Lucky Lure Cricket Farm in Florida, a company whose debts reached over $450,000. (Now you can see why the USDA is a hard-ass about insect imports.) The loss put greater demand on Georgia’s Armstrong Cricket Farm, one of the largest US facilities, which sells 17 million crickets a week. It remained untouched by CPV.
Large-scale insect rearing holds interesting promises for the future. This last side of insect commerce gives us a glimpse into a new emerging trend—a culinary fascination that begins in cricket farms. There, industrial production methods are inspiring a food source for the twenty-first century onward—a world in which overpopulation will lead to increased food shortages. It’s a venture that will include new, young, and innovative millennials. In terms of sustainability, the Old World got it right.
Nine
Dining with Crickets
Drive south on California’s I-405, get off at Sherman Way, hang a right, head two blocks into the mini warehouse district, and you’ll arrive at Coalo Valley Farms. Unlike your average agricultural landscape, the farm is surrounded by cinder-block walls, garbage bins, shattered beer bottles in the street, and razor-wire fencing with a roll-up dock door. It’s a 20-minute walk from Van Nuys Airport—not far from the Laserium where my high school friends and I would smoke weed from cored apples. A group of New Englanders in their twenties, some walking around shirtless, some bearded, tend to Coalo Valley Farms. Their CEO wears a Shih Tzu topknot. But it’s in 3,000-square-foot facilities like this that the future food industry is taking shape.
“We’re a cricket farm in, uh, the San Fernando Valley,” says Peter “Mama Bear” Markoe, the company’s chief operating officer. He wipes sweat from beneath a dirty baseball cap as we begin the tour.
Viewed from afar, this setup for rearing crickets—solely for human consumption—is reminiscent of indoor cannabis cultivation. (Even their packaging—small jars and vacuum-sealed foil baggies—reminds me of cannabis products.) Hydroponic Gorilla grow tents, erected as large black cubes, have been “repurposed” into climate-control houses for raising crickets. Water from a koi-fish tank streams into a table containing a shallow rock bed. The flowing water then fertilizes mung beans, their roots sprouting through burlap on top of the rocks. The biomimetic aquaponic system doubles as filtration.
“What we found is it’s a great way to recycle water [during California’s] drought and organically grow food ourselves,” says Markoe. “The fish waste provides all the nutrients needed for the plants to grow in record time.”
The fresh spinach, alfalfa, and watercress is fed to about 100,000 crickets, which collectively weigh about 45 pounds alive and 10 pounds once the mature little Jiminys are dried and milled into powder. And then the crickets can be mixed into, say, a protein smoothie—drinks these farmers have prepared for students at the nearby Granda Hills Charter High School, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and for senior citizens at gardening clubs. “It was cool too,” Markoe adds, “because traditionally older folks are not too open to things like that.”
Since Coalo’s arrival, eating insects—a worldwide practice1 known as entomophagy—has made some local impact within the San Fernando Valley.
On the wall hangs a framed 2015 cover image from local magazine Ventura Blvd. It features Coalo Valley Farm’s tie-dye-shirt-wearing, hiking-sandaled cofounders who crowdfunded the venture via Kickstarter and repurposed the San Fernando Valley location several months earlier. A colorful poster made by UCLA students hangs by some hydroponically grown buckwheat grass with painted cartoon bugs and the glittered tenet: “Treat yo self … to Insects!” Inspired by the protein-producing operation, the students made a food documentary (and a cappella song) called Coalo-fornia Dreaming. These new-age farmers might just convince a small portion of Americans to do what four-fifths of the world already does with nary a wince: eat bugs.
Westerners show a growing interest in entomophagy despite the “yuck” factor. While entomophagy dates back millennia, it wasn’t until Vincent M. Holt’s 1885, one-shilling manifesto Why Not Eat Insects?2 that someone suggested the modern world cast aside its “deep-rooted public prejudice.” Over the next century the occasional publication would extol the merits of the practice, pushing for a more “broad appeal.” Examples include Ronald Taylor’s 1975 culinary guide Entertaining with Insects, Gabriel Martinez’s Cuisine des insectes: À la découverte de l’entomophagie (Insect Cuisine: Discovering Entomophagy), and Peter Menzel’s photo essay Man Eating Bugs. But today, some people predict that insects will become engrained in our diet within 10 years.
Since 2009, University of Georgia entomology professor Marianne Shockley has kept a running list of edible insect media mentions. “You went from having a publication once a year to once a month to five times a week,” to now sometimes 20 times a day, she tells me over the phone. Why so much interest? As Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, once told NPR: “Edible insects are going to be part of the toolkit for us to achieve global food security.” In 2010, a student at Princeton began the Environmental Discourses on the Ingestion of Bugs League, aka EDIBL.3 Chapters have formed nationwide. Many have joked that crickets are a “gateway bug.” “When you ask someone, ‘Have you heard about eating insects?’” says Shockley, “most likely the answer is going to be yes.”
The United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) is in large part responsible for entomophagy’s growing recognition. In May 2013, the FAO released an extensive report headed by Paul Vantomme entitled “Edible Insects” that promotes reasons for Westerners to embrace this Old World food. One of its authors, Dutch entomologist Arnold van Huis of the Netherlands’ Wageningen Univer
sity, has been a pioneer of eating bugs for the past two decades. It began when Van Huis took a sabbatical in Africa in 1995. There he tried a number of species like termites (which according to one bartender I spoke to taste a lot like strawberry cheesecake). Van Huis then introduced entomophagy to colleague Marcel Dicke and the two began lecturing on the topic.
Their “Edible Insects” paper was downloaded by millions. A year later they published The Insect Cookbook: Food for a Sustainable Planet, in which they build on earlier research conducted in their lab, such as their greenhouse gas (GHG) study showing that 18 percent of the world’s emissions come from livestock rearing. GHG emissions from cricket and cockroach farms are almost nonexistent. David Gracer, a vocal entomophagy advocate, puts it most eloquently: “Cows and pigs are the SUVs; insects are the bicycles.” Bug-sized footprints aside, the FAO report and The Insect Cookbook address a larger point: “Eating insects makes us aware of our place in the food chain, of ancient traditions, and blind habits as well as new possibilities.”4
In mid-2016, Marianne Shockley and other entomophagists led Eating Insects Detroit. Over 200 people attended the conference with the goal of establishing a coalition of like-minded businesspeople in this uncharted new territory in the food industry. The conference gave birth to the North American Edible Insect Coalition (NAEIC). So far 145 individuals (companies, farmers, curious entrepreneurs) have joined. “It’s a bit of a double-edged sword with current [FDA] regulations, which doesn’t mention insects,” says Shockley. “For some people that makes them a little wary. But it’s kind of a saving grace because as long as we’re going by all the other protocols, they don’t have to mention” that they’re processing micro-livestock.5
In a follow-up phone conference, members detailed the bureaucratic steps necessary for the NAEIC and subsequent lobbying that may be needed. Ryan Goldin, cofounder of Entomo Farms, mentioned that “Canada is really stepping up and seeing this as a real industry.” A Coalo Valley Farms representative was on the call too.
Food inspectors treat the Coalo warehouse as a general food processing facility, Peter Markoe says, standing in their offices. But Coalo hasn’t been producing large enough numbers to merit an FDA approval. “We’re exempt in that sense,” he says. “It’s cool to be on the cutting edge. But it’s also scary. There could be this rule that insects can’t be raised in a warehouse because of a high ceiling or something. Who knows?” Apparently big animal-feed-producing farms (recall chapter 8) are retrofitting their lines for human consumption. Markoe’s not too concerned, though, adding “Not too many people want to buy a can of tuna fish from Iams.”
To raise their superior, organic, micro-livestock “tuna,” the team first tested different cricket species. The Acheta family, they learned, was susceptible to cricket paralysis virus. They instead opted for the sturdy tropical house cricket. But more experiments lay ahead.
The “baby tent” holds two different sets of humidifiers and space heaters. Unzip the door and the 90 degree ambient temperature and 90 percent humidity radiate on your palm like a warm car engine. The 90-90 formula—discovered in the farm’s current v3.5 iteration—gets nymphs through eight molting stages into adulthood. But sometimes the crops don’t survive. For instance, a Los Angeles heat wave might dehydrate the crickets to death. Too much water and they drown. “Trial and error,” Markoe says, referring to their lost batches. “A lot of trial and error because there’s no real book out there—at least for a commercial level.”
In another section of the warehouse, the company is experimenting with the mass-rearing of mealworms, similar to what you’d see in a Heinz condiment lab. The room is a Mylar fort with a funhouse mirror ceiling and polyiso insulation boards. A hose for the water-based radiant heating system runs beneath black floorboards, keeping the bugs active. It’s another cheap, innovative, green practice to minimize their carbon footprint as much as possible. Sometimes the overhead warehouse lights are turned off due to the excess heat. The Coalo team, all of them friends from Colby College in Maine, miss the cold. But their LA relocation stems from logic. “[Here] you’re seeing a cross of Central and South American diets, and also Southeast Asian cultures that [practice entomophagy] as well,” says Markoe. “This was a mainland crossroads for that.”
He pauses the tour in brief awe of a female cricket, plump and ready for harvest. The adult crickets from one tent will soon be transferred to a clean room where they will be dried and their limbs will be removed in a salad spinner. Same goes for ovipositors. They’re the pointy tails on crickets, which, if caught in the throat, could be a bit “rough.”
Coalo Valley’s largest client right now is energy bar company Lithic Nutrition. And for Peter Markoe, who followed his cofounding friend Elliot Mermel into this opportunistic sector, eating bugs has been eye-opening. “I had a creepy crawly fear,” he admits. “People are afraid of insects. That was me. I’ve definitely cured myself of that.”
* * *
A different fear underlies this recent Western push toward entomophagy. Fear in the form of the estimated 9.1 billion mouths to feed by 2050. Food production will have to increase by 70 percent in order to meet the demand of 2050’s estimated world population. Added to this are the 100 million children who currently die of malnutrition every year. It’s fairly obvious: the need for low-cost, sustainable food sources has become drastically dire.
So why the big bug-eating hoopla? It turns out insects are nutritional nuggets—storehouses of proteins, fibers, and vitamins.
“Developing human brains depend on long-chain essential fatty acids: the omegas-3,-6, and-9,” writes Daniella Martin. Her book Edible—a culinary travelogue praising bug diets—details an array of economic, anthropological, and delicious reasons why we should eat bugs. Martin points out that some researchers theorize termites’ long-chain fatty acids helped humans initially evolve. You know those nature shows where apes jam sticks6 into logs and pull out termites? That gross practice might be the reason we can do multiplication in our heads.
Crickets are a great source of omega-6 fatty acids. And like mealworms, they are rich in B vitamins. Other bugs have healthy levels of vitamin E and beta-carotene. On a dry weight level, some grasshoppers comprise 60 percent protein, write Marianne Shockley and Aaron Dossey. They also contain 50 more grams of protein per kilogram than ground beef. Lucinda Backwell, a paleontologist, notes that rump steak provides “322 calories per 100 grams.” Termites, however, provide “560 calories per 100 grams.” Cold-blooded animals don’t need to draw energy from food to keep their body temperature level. So all those extra nutrients are stored away. To find out what that’s worth, scientists measure the efficiency of conversion of ingested food. Sheep, with all that ceaseless noshing, have a value of 5.3. Caterpillars? You’re getting a range of 19 to 31. Another bonus? Diseases like swine flu are only transferred between warm-blooded animals.
Livestock and the production of their feed take up 70 percent of the world’s agricultural land. As we saw at Coalo Valley Farms, container bins can store not only Christmas decorations but also large quantities of food. The food conversion ratio (FCR) for beef far outweighs that of insect meat. One pound of beef requires cows to consume 1,000 gallons of water and have two acres to graze, writes Martin. One pound of insects requires a gallon of water and two cubic feet. (The more crowded and orgiastic, the more fruitful.) The FCR for cows—the amount of feed to produce a pound of edible meat—is 10:1. Crickets? 1.5:1. In the end, micro-livestock contain three times as much calcium as beef; and on a dry weight level, mopane caterpillars have 12 times the amount of iron.
There are drawbacks, as with any food. Chitin, the sometimes-waxy exoskeletal coating of all insects, isn’t easily digestible and sometimes “limits nutrient absorption.” But certain species, like the nutrient-rich black soldier fly, have smaller, more digestible levels of chitin. It’s also been “speculated that excessive consumption” of exoskeletons, writes food scientist Ruparao Gahukar, could lead to kidney stones. But g
roups like the NAEIC and scientists and economists are not pushing for us to become insectivores. Bugs merely represent a new food ingredient with vast potential. Just skip the all-you-can-eat insect buffet, all right?
The inherent advantages make entomophagy a worthwhile enterprise for food scientists and large industries—industries that could scale up enterprising urban operations like Coalo Valley or Ohio’s Big Cricket Farms. But these evangelicals are besmirched by public aversion. Eating insects is often regarded as sci-fi fodder, like entomophagy’s negative portrayal in the film Snowpiercer. Reintroducing this practice to appetites shaped and informed by culture over millennia remains one of the biggest magic tricks entrepreneurs are trying to figure out.
“The Western abhorrence of eating insects,” observed two anthropologists, “is unusual on a global scale.” As much as 64 percent of animal protein diets in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, come from insects. Eleven European countries already consume 41 different types of species. For example, in Sardinia, you can munch on the maggots secreting “tears” in casu marzu cheese. A common misconception about bug eating is that it takes place only in developing nations. In reality, insect diets are based on what’s available in both a geographic and seasonal space. The majority of the West is simply turned off by odd-looking foods.
Neophobia, or the fear of anything new, is the same guiding fear behind a toddler fussily dodging an incoming fork of Brussels sprouts. New foods and their “unknown variables,” writes entomophagy expert Julieta Ramos-Elorduy, scare us—and healthier ones almost more so. And it’s hard to avoid making contact with the black beady eyes of a cricket before tossing it in your mouth. In terms of looks, though, lobsters are equally repulsive. Crabs look like aliens. And chickens aren’t going to win any beauty contests. But dismembering animals behind closed doors and reassembling them anew on a plate makes them, literally, easier to swallow. “The biggest difference,” Marianne Shockley says about exotic meals, “is the aesthetics. The average consumer in the US today is very disconnected from their food. They do not want to see a whole fish on their plate, they want to see a fish fillet. They don’t want to have a cow sitting beside them while they eat a hamburger.” The “average consumer,” she says, wants “to eat the insect in various products.”