Nothing outlandish appears on the National Restaurant Association’s list of the 20 top food trends in 2015. It’s peppered with items like locally grown produce, gluten-free cuisine and artisan cheese. But if you check out restaurant consulting firm Baum + Whiteman’s roster of food trends in 2015, your eyes might bug out.
Among the trends identified by Baum + Whiteman: edible insects. Are you grossed out by the thought of chomping on crawly critters like beetles, caterpillars, ants, grasshoppers and crickets? Probably, but it turns out they’re a terrific source of protein and other nutrients, so you might want to get over the yuck factor.
Chapul, which sells protein bars made from cricket flour, says that aside from insects supplying two times more protein than beef, they provide 15 percent more iron than spinach and as much vitamin B12 as salmon. By the way, billionaire Mark Cuban is among Chapul’s investors.
Certainly, bugs aren’t a staple of the American diet, like burgers and pizza are. But insects do wind up on the breakfast, lunch and dinner menus of about 2 billion people around the globe, particularly in Africa, Asia, Central America and South America, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
“Insects have served as a human food source for tens of thousands of years and may be part of our toolkit in the future in helping solve global food security challenges,” Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, wrote in a blog post.
Of 1 million identified species of insects, humans eat 1,900 of them, the FAO says.
“Although it is unrealistic to see families in the West eating insects for their Sunday lunch within the next decade, the potential of insects is huge, and we hope that slowly but surely this potential will be realized,” Afton Halloran, a consultant for the FAO’s Edible Insects Program, says in a U.N. article.
Joan Benson, assistant professor of nutrition at the University of Utah, says that if insect-related food products can be disguised so that they don’t trigger the creepy crawlies, “the public may be more receptive to eating them.” For instance, she says, high-protein cricket flour can be added to baked products like muffins and bread.
“Such treats are inoffensive and, in fact, tasty — and novel enough that consumers might drawn to give them a try,” Benson says.
Why do insects, particularly the edible variety, offend most Americans? Benson blames perceptions picked up during childhood that insects harm or disgust us.
Yet we probably need to conquer those perceptions. As the population’s human population grows, so does the demand for sources of protein, Benson says. Traditional sources of protein — such as cattle and poultry — sap energy, water, land and crop resources, she says, while insect protein does not.
“Cultivating insects as food is a sustainable way to provide all the protein needed to feed the world,” Benson says.
Mark Haub, head of the Department of Human Nutrition at Kansas State University, says a couple of issues stand in the way of insect-based foods taking hold in the U.S.
One issue: taste. Americans are used to the flavor of foods like milk, steak and chicken, but Haub isn’t so sure that insect-oriented foods will elicit the same sort of taste-bud response.
Another issue: cost. Insect-based foods can be pricy. For instance, a pound of cricket flour costs $25 to $45, according to FoodNavigator-USA.com. “This could be a protein supplement option in the short term, but the price is very high at this point,” Haub says.