Nature's Bounty: Got Ants in Your Pans?

Find yourself in Toloache, a highly regarded Mexican restaurant in New York, and along with what some consider the best guacamole in town you might tuck into tacos stuffed with traditional Oaxacan-style dried grasshoppers. Prefer your grasshoppers sautéed with shallots and tequila? Order the tacos chapulines at Oyamel in Washington, D.C. California foodies can chow down on Singapore-style scorpions, Taiwanese crickets, silkworm pupae, and Manchurian Chambai ants at Asian-fusion restaurant Typhoon in Santa Monica.

Say hello to entomophagy, the practice of eating insects and a top food trend of the past year. Paleo dieters and CrossFit enthusiasts are already munching on cricket-flour bars from their neighborhood grocery. Adventurous home chefs can stock up on earthworm jerky, live crickets, and mealworms from an array of websites, including Amazon.

"Eating insects is becoming fashionable," says Heather Looy, a professor of psychology at The King's University in Edmonton, Canada, who has been researching entomophagy for two decades. In the last five years, interest from other researchers, the public, and the media has skyrocketed, she reports.

Around the world, insects are common fare, consumed by about 2 billion people—almost a third of the global population. Most live in tropical regions, where bugs are large, plentiful, and available year round. And that may be why many Westerners still view eating insects—a practice that makes increasing sense in a protein-needy world—as about as appealing as chewing a dirty shoe. If anything, they endorse a starvation model of entomophagy: Bugs may be eaten only when there are no other options.

According to a 2013 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), insects have lost favor as food since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. The benefits of bugs paled in comparison to the milk and meat, to say nothing of the wool and leather, provided by domesticated mammals. Besides, large animals could endure cold winters. Insects came to be viewed not as sources of food but as threats to food production.

Cultural bias plays a role, too, says the FAO: Westerners associate eating insects with primitive behavior. "It's not about consciously feeling superior," Looy says. "It's about being blind, the way unconscious attitudes shape reactions to other people."

Grace Tan Hui Shan, a doctoral candidate in sensory and consumer sciences at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, likens insect aversion to ethnic biases. "We have a stereotype about insects: They're squishy, slimy, disgusting, and poke you in the throat when you eat them. These ideas readily come to mind due to the lack of familiarity."

Nevertheless, the FAO sees consumption of insects as essential to food security. Food production must increase by 70 percent to feed 2050's projected 9 billion people.

Insects are sustainable: They need less land and water, emit fewer greenhouse gases, and produce less ammonia than conventional meats. Their high conversion rate—the amount of feed consumed compared to the edible-protein yield—makes insects less wasteful and cheaper to produce than cattle or pork. Insects are nutritious: Mealworms have as much unsaturated omega-3 fat as fish do, and a pound of locusts contains more iron than a pound of beef.

But man does not live by logic alone. Our feelings about insects run deep. "Insects are associated with danger, disease, toxins, and bites," says Matthew Ruby, a postdoctoral research fellow in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In studies conducted with Paul Rozin, the dean of disgust research, he found that 72 percent of Western participants were willing to at least consider eating insects, especially if they were dried, ground into powdery flour, and added to already familiar dishes—no wings or legs, no bug eyes staring back. And then, only some bugs—ants, crickets, and grasshoppers, not flies or cockroaches. "There is some initial evidence to support gradual incorporation as a way to encourage people to eat insect foods," Ruby reports.

Trying a food is one thing. Making it a staple is another. "Because of the hype, people are willing to try insects for the first time," Tan says. "But that doesn't mean they're going to give up steak for dinner or eat a cricket bar for breakfast."

Businesses interested in cashing in on crickets are well-versed in the psychology of disgust. "We're careful in how quickly we roll out products. It is so important to us to get the messaging right," says Greg Sewitz, a founder of cricket protein-bar company Exo, whose products bear no images of the beasties on the wrappers. Sewitz settled on selling cricket flour because crickets are perceived as less disgusting than worms but are not as beloved as butterflies, and flour is invisible in the finished product. To further lower the barrier to bug-based edibles, the bars are flavored with peanut butter and jelly, apple and cinnamon, or blueberry and vanilla.

"We don't believe it's a fad," says Sewitz, who now has plenty of competition. "The industry went from no one to 30 in the year we've been selling," he reports. One of his biggest production concerns: the high cost of cricket flour compared to other protein sources. With cricket farming for human consumption in its infancy, "the benefits of cost efficiency haven't been realized yet," he laments.

Cricket farmer Kevin Bachhuber says he raises the insects because he likes the taste. "The crickets themselves taste like a marriage of cashews and sweet corn," he told a TEDx audience. "There are ants that taste like honey. There are ants that taste like bacon." And it just may come down to taste in the crunch.

Lessons from Sushi

Sushi has been popular in Japan since the eighth century, but it took until the 1960s for
the first sushi restaurants to venture to U.S. shores, and then only in major cities. Although there are still Americans who eat no fish, let alone raw fish, sushi is served in many upscale restaurants. As sushi has gone, marketers and psychologists alike hope, so with crickets and their kin.

"Many experts predicted sushi wouldn't do very well, but there are now over 3,000 sushi restaurants in the U.S. alone," says Penn cultural psychologist Matthew Ruby. Americans were able to accept raw fish in part because sushi was presented as a luxury food and in part because the fish is often hidden inside rice and seaweed. Just as rolls of maki sushi paved the way for minimalist nigiri sushi, and even plain sashimi, perhaps tacos chapulines will herald roasted ants at your local sports bar.