Who wants us to eat bugs, and why?
Since the topic is becoming popular, I found myself reflecting on the use of so-called insect flours. Because in the fiction I read there are many things that don't immediately add up.
The narrative is focusing a lot on the fact that the insects, in order to be "hidden", are ground and reduced to flour. In other cultures eating insects is normal, so they would have no problem leaving them whole, but in the western world it is necessary to grind them into flour.
That said, the mere fact of presenting them as "flour" causes the first catastrophic misunderstanding, because we automatically classify them within the food niche of flour.
But that's not true: flours are almost always composed mainly of carbohydrates, and the only exception is gluten, which is a protein.
One hundred grams of wheat flour is about this:
While one hundred grams of cricket flour is this:
As you can see, the energy value is in the same order (then the proteins digest more slowly, etc.) but they are two COMPLETELY different things.
Placing cricket flour where we place wheat flour, that is bread-making, pasta, pastry or anything else, makes no sense.
On the other hand, I doubt that with six grams of carbohydrates you can leaven cricket flour. Maybe just a little, but I really don't think something like this can "leave".
In short, this flour is not a flour, but a powder. You cannot call it "flour" just because it is finely ground, otherwise powdered sugar, fine cocoa, ground cinnamon, etc., also become "flour".
So it all started with a food scam, which consists in calling something that should be called "cricket powder" "cricket flour".
I say "food fraud" because if you propose any other powder as flour, you will be accused of food fraud.
In any case, we are not starting well.
But let's go ahead. In which “food niche” should we place something that has the nutrients I showed above? If we are to be exact, it would be this:
It's one of those protein powders used by bodybuilders to build muscle. This is the closest thing to cricket powder on the market today.
The other similar foods in terms of nutrients are: legumes, fish, meat.
Now, fish is almost never eaten as a powder, so I'd rule that out, unless you're using cricket powder as a frying flour. A niche job.
The meat is almost never consumed as a powder, but is consumed in meatballs and as a cream, to make wurst(el), jellies and the so-called nudgets. Maybe you could get something.
We're not doing well with legumes either, because on average we don't consume them as powder.
I mean, we have very limited uses for this cricket powder. The rest is simply an imposition, a forcing of an alien ingredient into existing recipes.
Does the catering world have an interest in selling this stuff to the masses? But also not, because it goes to occupy already occupied niches. I mean, the Kebap has spread because it has taken a precise niche, but if someone had brought the equivalent of pizza they would have collided with a very different competitor. Who was the Kebap competitor?
But if we start making Mc Nudgets using cricket flour, making a thick cream and then frying it, we'll bump into Mc Donalds. It's stuff that exists, after all. If you put them in a food cream like Nutella you're going to bump into the confectionery industry, which has its well-tested and loved products.
This makes me very much question the theory that the food industry is pushing for cricket powder.
But then who is it convenient for?
If we leave the world of catering and agri-food, which already has its own products, what is cricket powder? Not being processed much and not being a final product, it certainly becomes a "food commodity".
Commodity companies are financial companies that limit themselves to booking (as futures) basic food products (flour, wheat, corn, oil, olives, etc), storing the products, moving them, reselling them.
On a global scale, it is about a dozen entities that effectively control the market. Often they are not listed on the stock exchange so as not to make their performances public. However, these commodity traders are enormously wealthy.
What's wrong with them?
Well, let's put it this way: they bought corn, wheat, seed oil and more from Ukraine, in gigantic quantities, but war came. And even if they had futures, there's no way around it. Fields are destroyed, farmers dead, silos set on fire.
Quite a blow to these commodity traders.
If we also include the drought that strikes here and there (for example, it is already clear that the Po Valley is compromised by the water situation), these gentlemen of food commodity trading are quite worried.
It would take something that is not done in the fields, but in some factory, they will think. And crickets are bred in establishments that look like factories.
It is useless to blame the EU, which certainly does not want to destroy its food heritage and its exports, or the agri-food world. The giants of food commodities trading mainly want the cricket powder (and everything they will invent).
Who I am? Here are the top 4:
These gentlemen obviously work very well in a globalized world, while they have problems if we have natural disasters, wars, sudden droughts. As we seem to be headed for more wars and droughts, not to mention "extreme events," their supply lines are less reliable than they once were.
Their dream is to move food production from fields to factories. You put the factories in a safe place, they are small, you build more if you want more stuff.
As a result, you shouldn't be surprised if bioreactor-grown artificial meat is coming, more and more fish raised far from the sea, cricket powder, bioreactor-made artificial milk, and all of it. They are the lords of trading who are tired of dealing with "the earth". Everything will come.
These large traders have huge liquid assets at their disposal, which they use to finance startups which then produce artificial food. The main ones are:
- Impossible
- Beyond Meat
- Mosa Meat
- Upside Foods
- perfect day
- I form
- Motif Foodworks
- Ginkgo Bioworks
- BioMilq – Lab-grown breast milk
- Eat Just
- NotCo
- Perfect Day Food
- Nature's Fynd
all of these enterprises were enlisted or financed for the same purpose: to produce food without using agriculture.
The marketing of this stuff, as you can see, is as obsessive as it is stupid and not very honest:
- by eating this thing you respect animals
- by eating this thing you save the planet.
How animal-friendly grinding animals into a powder is not known to me. But one thing is certain: crickets eat. So if we create a giant factory where they are grown, they will produce waste. I mean, even crickets shit. I don't know what they shit, but this waste will have to be disposed of. I've already seen the Adriatic sea go to shit because of the mucilage due to the pig's waste thrown into the pond.
I'm not sure I want to know what cricket dregs do.
Sure, then there's animal meat grown in the bioreactor, but if it grows it produces some waste, even if the cells don't shit: even in this case, I don't quite understand what waste it is and how it will be disposed of.
In general, it is naïve to think that building a large plant full of bioreactors, or a shed full of insects, can somehow be healthy for the planet.
Certainly, it will be good for traders, who gain economies of scale and low risk of sociopolitical events, natural disasters, or droughts.
They are the ones who want to eat crickets.