Tiziana di Costanzo makes pizza dough from scratch, mixing together flour, yeast, a pinch of salt, a dash of olive oil and something a bit more unusual — ground Acheta domesticus, better known as cricket powder.
Di Costanzo is an edible insect entrepreneur who holds cricket and mealworm cooking classes at her West London home, where she also raises the critters in a backyard shed with her husband, Tom Mohan.
Her start-up, Horizon Insects Ltd, is part of Europe’s nascent edible insect scene, which features dozens of bug-based businesses offering cricket chips in the Czech Republic, bug burgers in Germany and Belgian beetle beer. The EU headquarters in Brussels is also backing research into insect-based proteins as part of a broader sustainable food strategy.
Photo: AP
As the Earth’s population puts more pressure on global food production, insects are increasingly seen as a viable food source.
Experts say they are rich in protein, yet can be raised much more sustainably than beef or pork.
Around the world, 2 billion people in 130 countries eat insects regularly. The global edible insect market is poised to boom, investment bank Barclay’s PLC has said, citing data from Meticulous Research that expects it to grow from less than US$1 billion in 2019 to US$8 billion by 2030.
Yet despite all the European start-ups working to make insects appetizing, do not expect them to start appearing at mainstream restaurants or on dinner tables yet.
One big reason is a strong cultural “yuck” factor in Western countries that Arnold van Huis, a professor of tropical entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said would be hard to change.
“It’s very difficult to turn people’s minds around, but insects are absolutely safe to eat, maybe even more nutritious than meat products,” with the only risk coming from allergies, because insects are closely related to crustaceans like shrimp, Van Huis said.
Instead, humans might end up eating more insects indirectly because the market that shows the most promise comes from using insects as for feeding animals. The EU approved insect protein as feed for fish farming in 2017. The US Food and Drug Administration approved it for chicken feed in 2018, while EU approval for poultry and pigs is due later this year.
European production of insect-based food products is forecast to mushroom from 500 tonnes at present to 260,000 tonnes by 2030, said the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed, a Brussels-based lobby group.
Still, it is dwarfed by the 22.8 million tonnes of pork or 13.4 million tonnes of chicken that the EU produces annually.
Insects require one-10th of the land, account for a fraction of greenhouse gas or ammonia emissions and need much less water than cattle or pigs, Van Huis said.
The first approval came earlier this year for Tenebrio molitor larvae, or dried yellow mealworm, after an application from French insect farm Micronutris.
The EU Commission’s food safety regulators said that mealworms are safe to eat, although they warned of possible reactions in people allergic to crustaceans or dust mites.
Regulators issued another positive opinion this month on grasshoppers, based on an application from Protix, a Netherlands-based insect farming company.
“Our vision is that insects will go from niche to normal,” said Protix chief executive Kees Aarts, who predicted an “explosion of food applications” to EU regulators.
At Protix’s state-of-the-art vertical farm in Bergen op Zoom, green plastic crates stacked in towering columns are filled with wriggling black soldier fly larvae.
The high-tech facility turns the larvae into protein meal and oil for use in fish feed and pet food. The company also has a line of bug-based snacks and ingredients such as cinnamon mealworms and cricket protein falafel mix and, after getting final approval, plans to market frozen, dried or powdered grasshoppers as an ingredient for breakfast cereals, pasta, baked goods, sauces and imitation meat.
In London, Di Costanzo’s Horizon Insects is developing an insect-based cooking ingredient after discovering that there was not much of a local market for fresh edible mealworms.
Di Costanzo said that the cricket powder she uses in her pizza gives it “a very nice, meaty, healthy taste,” while boosting the nutritional content with protein, macronutrients and omega acids.
“Definitely, I think the future is products made with insects rather than the actual insect,” Di Costanzo said.
Antoine Hubert, chief executive of Ynsect in France, said that the most lucrative opportunity would come from the sports and health nutrition markets for its mealworm-based protein powder.
The company also makes insect protein for fish feed that Hubert said helps farmed salmon grow bigger and faster while reducing the need for fishmeal — smaller fish caught in huge quantities — which helps improve the ocean’s biodiversity.
Investors including Hollywood star Robert Downey Jr’s FootPrint Coalition were among the backers contributing to Ynsect’s latest round of funding worth US$224 million.
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