Go to any market in Mexico and you’ll see piles of grasshoppers—dusted with chile powder, roasted with garlic, sprinkled with lime juice. I’ve eaten grasshoppers ground up in salsas and semi-pulverized in micheladas, their intact legs floating in the refreshing mix of beer, lime juice, and hot sauce. If you’ve ever been served chile-dusted orange slices along with a shot of mezcal—surprise! That chile powder was actually ground up grasshoppers.
By now you’ve probably heard that entomophagy—insect eating—is in our dietary future, or at least should be. Put aside the yuck factor; insects are packed with protein, much less damaging to the environment than other livestock, and can even be killed humanely by popping them in the freezer. It’s all so crazy it just might work; the United Nations published a whole book in 2013 promoting edible insects as a solution to global food insecurity. With Earth looking down the barrel of a population of 9 billion humans, all of them hungry for protein, it makes sense to cultivate animals with 80 percent-edible bodies (crickets) instead of 40 percent (beef), and that don’t require 10 pounds of feed to get two pounds of meat (pigs). In theory.
In Mexico, that’s more than just an idea. With its longstanding tradition of eating grasshoppers—chapulines in Spanish—Mexico would seem perfectly poised to enter the coming age of entomophagy. (Ant eggs—escamoles—are another popular dish.) But there’s one problem: chapulines are expensive. They cost more than pork, or chicken, and sometimes as much as beef or shrimp. Far from being a distasteful last resort for people who don’t have the money for meat (think Snowpiercer), chapulines are an in-demand product more people wish they could afford. The problem isn’t that bugs are rare, obviously. A recent study led by René Cerritos, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, estimated that 350,000 tons of chapulines live on Mexican crops every year. But harvesting them is disorganized, often illicit, and just plain difficult. Only a few hundred tons of chapulines are collected for food annually, and from only a couple of regions in Mexico. Chapulines can be quite affordable if you manage to buy them close to where they are harvested, Cerritos says. But once middlemen get involved and the grasshoppers get shipped around the country, the price can as much as triple.
Some chapulín operations maintain their own fields of alfafa—the bug’s favorite food. But others fly completely under the radar, the catchers trespassing on whatever farms they can find. Chapulines are agricultural pests, so you’d think farmers would be happy to get rid of them. But the clandestine hunts can damage crops and pack down the earth in carefully managed fields, breeding ill will between famers and chapulín catchers instead of cooperation. In Oaxaca, for example, chapulín catchers gather before dawn on a farm—often without the farmer’s knowledge or permission—and run up and down the rows of crops, plucking chapulines from the plants one at a time. “That’s not an effective way to catch your lunch, let alone make an affordable product,” says Gabe Mott, co-founder of the company Aspire, which is working to develop insect culinary products in Mexico, Ghana, and the US. Just like the UN, Aspire thinks entomophagy can help address hunger and poor nutrition around the world; in 2013 the company won the Hult Prize, $1 million in start-up money to social entrepreneurship projects. But before Aspire or any other company can turn these bugs into a feature, edible insects are going to have to get cheaper.
By now you’ve probably heard that entomophagy—insect eating—is in our dietary future, or at least should be. Put aside the yuck factor; insects are packed with protein, much less damaging to the environment than other livestock, and can even be killed humanely by popping them in the freezer. It’s all so crazy it just might work; the United Nations published a whole book in 2013 promoting edible insects as a solution to global food insecurity. With Earth looking down the barrel of a population of 9 billion humans, all of them hungry for protein, it makes sense to cultivate animals with 80 percent-edible bodies (crickets) instead of 40 percent (beef), and that don’t require 10 pounds of feed to get two pounds of meat (pigs). In theory.In Mexico, that’s more than just an idea. With its longstanding tradition of eating grasshoppers—chapulines in Spanish—Mexico would seem perfectly poised to enter the coming age of entomophagy. (Ant eggs—escamoles—are another popular dish.) But there’s one problem: chapulines are expensive. They cost more than pork, or chicken, and sometimes as much as beef or shrimp. Far from being a distasteful last resort for people who don’t have the money for meat (think Snowpiercer), chapulines are an in-demand product more people wish they could afford. The problem isn’t that bugs are rare, obviously. A recent study led by René Cerritos, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, estimated that 350,000 tons of chapulines live on Mexican crops every year. But harvesting them is disorganized, often illicit, and just plain difficult. Only a few hundred tons of chapulines are collected for food annually, and from only a couple of regions in Mexico. Chapulines can be quite affordable if you manage to buy them close to where they are harvested, Cerritos says. But once middlemen get involved and the grasshoppers get shipped around the country, the price can as much as triple.
Some chapulín operations maintain their own fields of alfafa—the bug’s favorite food. But others fly completely under the radar, the catchers trespassing on whatever farms they can find. Chapulines are agricultural pests, so you’d think farmers would be happy to get rid of them. But the clandestine hunts can damage crops and pack down the earth in carefully managed fields, breeding ill will between famers and chapulín catchers instead of cooperation. In Oaxaca, for example, chapulín catchers gather before dawn on a farm—often without the farmer’s knowledge or permission—and run up and down the rows of crops, plucking chapulines from the plants one at a time. “That’s not an effective way to catch your lunch, let alone make an affordable product,” says Gabe Mott, co-founder of the company Aspire, which is working to develop insect culinary products in Mexico, Ghana, and the US. Just like the UN, Aspire thinks entomophagy can help address hunger and poor nutrition around the world; in 2013 the company won the Hult Prize, $1 million in start-up money to social entrepreneurship projects. But before Aspire or any other company can turn these bugs into a feature, edible insects are going to have to get cheaper.
by Lizzie Wade, Wired | Read more:
Image: Getty
