Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects

by David Waltner-Toews

  Darren Goldin had almost finished his undergrad degree in environmental studies at York University in Toronto when he decided to head west to join a protest against the clearing of old-growth forests in Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia. After that, he and a friend decided to build a cabin in the Kootenay mountains and live off the grid. Finally concluding that he was missing social and family connections, Darren returned to Ontario. He and his partner, Caryn, made percussion instruments and then got into producing insects for pet reptiles and amphibians. Then came the 2013 FAO report on insects as the future of food. That was also the year that the Aspire group from McGill got their million-dollar prize. Darren talked to his brothers. “Hey, we didn’t get any prizes,” they said, “but we already know how to do this. What’s stopping us?”

  For Darren and his brothers and their partners, Entomo became a way to translate concerns about environmental degradation into useful action, creating ecologically sustainable alternatives to big-eco-footprint agriculture. I have been on a lot of livestock farms — beef and dairy cattle, chickens, turkeys, ducks. I like the companionship of cows, their low-voiced coughing and grunting, and am happy to sometimes enable them to fulfill their ecological job descriptions, but a cricket farm — the chorus of male crickets singing for a mate — was a whole new experience for me.

  Darren walked me through the process. Eggs were grown on clean, slightly moist peat moss. Set on top of this was a cardboard structure of interlocking columns that looked like the kind of thing one would pack wine bottles in to keep them from breaking. The hatchlings would climb upward as soon as they were born, an instinct that seems to be unrelated to light.

  From the “nursery,” the hatchlings were moved (in their interlocking columns) to blue storage boxes, which were stacked on shelves in a long, narrow room. They were fed a mix of ground corn and soy (grown on the farm), which was spread on the bottom of the blue plastic tubs. For two weeks, as they went through a couple of molts, this was their home: condos for crickets.

  Darren then guided me into a much larger room, where the crickets were taken out of their blue boxes, and the cardboard columns were set in rows on either side of long, rubberized water troughs, fed by a drip system. In this room, warmer than the rest of the building (about 30 degrees Celsius), the crickets would stay for four weeks, growing to maturity. I watched them lining up along the thin stream of water, like any other animal, sipping. I felt at home here, amidst the quiet skittering of tiny animals. They were being fed the same feed mix as before. As they matured, the males would begin to chirp out for mates and then (assuming they found a willing female) to breed. Pregnant females would then look for places to deposit their fertilized eggs. Egg-laying places were provided in the form of shallow trays with slopes at either end and a bed of soft peat moss. The eggs would be harvested for use in starting a new generation. If you put the whole tray into a bucket of water, the moss rises to the top and the eggs sink to the bottom. These eggs can then be put into the nursery, where they hatch.

  Shortly after mating and laying eggs, crickets die. Just before this happens, between breeding and death, it is time to harvest. The crickets are shaken from their cardboard towers into blue boxes and then dumped through a metal funnel into bags on a weigh-scale — five pounds at a time. Dry ice is added, and the crickets quickly die from a combination of cold and lack of oxygen.

  Once the crickets are harvested, Darren said, the water troughs are flushed first with chlorinated water and then with fresh, clean water. The frass is swept up from the floor and kept in sacks. The few crickets that are left run for a “hotel” (one of the cardboard interlocking arrangements) from which they are shaken out into a bag.

  Back outside, Darren waved at the bags of frass stacked up next to a fence. The frass, he said, was excellent fertilizer, high in phosphorus and potassium. He has been using it on their own crops and selling to area farmers, and he told me that I could take as much as I wanted for my garden. They didn’t yet have a marketing plan, and he wished someone would pick it up as a business venture. They were already so busy just keeping up with the demand for their primary products.

  The crickets were processed at a different site, a building in the nearby town of Norwood. Just around the corner from some restaurants and other businesses, there was no smell emanating from the small building, and the neighbors appeared to be just fine with Entomo being there. Inside, beyond a reception room and some offices with computers, was a room with stainless steel ovens like pizza ovens (many drawers, crickets on large cookie sheets). Derek Delahaye, Entomo’s processing manager, was washing off batches of crickets in the sink and spreading them on the cookie sheets. If the crickets are to be flavored, that will happen at this point. Otherwise they are toasted and then ground up for “flour.” The biggest market for this flour is companies that produce energy bars and protein bars. Derek rattled off a list of at least half a dozen such companies.

  Besides Derek, two other people were in and around the kitchen area, a young man and a young woman about high-school student age. For a while they sat at computers, then they moved around the room packing things. As with the other insect businesses that I’d visited in Canada and Europe, I was struck by the fact that this phenomenon seems largely driven by people in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Given that this is the generation inheriting the unsustainable agri-food mess we Boomers have created, it seems appropriate that they are the ones coming up with innovative solutions.

  Standing there looking over the cozy kitchen, I popped a few crickets into my mouth: my first bona fide cricket snack. Then, as we talked, I tried more, some straight from the ovens and others that were flavored (BBQ, Honey Mustard, Moroccan) before roasting. Once I got past the eyes and legs, and the idea of bugs, and popped them into my mouth, I concluded that they tasted, as Darren had warned me, like food. A little nutty. I had expected the legs to stick in my teeth, or trigger my gag reflex, but it all crunched up nicely. Healthy snack food, Darren informed me, crickets were high in protein, omega 3 fatty acids, B vitamins, calcium, and iron. The mealworms, higher in (good) fat, had a slightly richer flavor, like potato chips.

  In the summer of 2015, Entomo was producing 4,000 pounds (about 1,800 kilograms) per week of crickets and 1,500 pounds (700 kilograms) of frass, and using about 30 gallons (just over 100 liters) of water per day. I asked Darren if crickets — like pigs, chicken, and cows — had any disease problems. He nodded. Cricket farmers in North America used to raise Acheta domesticus, which grow quickly to maturity and have a good feed conversion ratio. In 2009, an epidemic of Acheta domesticus densovirus put half of the cricket producers in North America out of business or forced them to select different species. Darren knew of one farm in Alberta with the virus, and the farmer almost dismantled his barn, did a thorough cleaning, and got fresh crickets; in nine weeks, they were all dead again. They now use a different species of cricket, Gryllodes sigillatus (the banded cricket), which is resistant to the virus but doesn’t grow as large.

  Why crickets? The rationale, not only for Entomo but also for other similar companies, is that these are the insects most likely to appeal to North American palates and preferences. If entomophagists wanted to make a big difference, normalizing insects for the North American palate, it wasn’t going to happen in $500-a-plate upscale restaurants. As whole animals, crickets and mealworms are like pub food — popcorn, peanuts, chicken wings. They can easily be made into protein powder and used to fortify soups, breads, and energy bars.

  In searching for marginal sources of renewal, we can look historically at the origins of our current ways of securing food, and geographically or culturally at places where the modern system has not yet eradicated traditional practices. And then we can look at ways that these different approaches can skittle into the system and change it. These options are not mutually exclusive. If humans have any hope of finding homes on future earth, we will need to continually wrestle with the ‘unres
olvable’ tensions between maintaining some version of an agri-food system and the need for eco-social diversity. The only animal — the only world — without tensions is a dead one.

  To come back to Cahill’s formulation of the issues, the problematic beast whose margins we wish to define ranges in size and shape from food security for nine billion people to the somewhat more ambiguous monster of modern urban life itself. At a very simplistic level, the margins could be defined by the insects themselves, since insects are at the margins of what people who run the globalizing agri-food system consider edible. There are those who see insects as a way to improve the efficiency of the system as it is now configured, and those who, in the spirit of Michael Pollan’s critiques, see the current system itself as a trap. These latter proponents argue that entomophagy offers more revolutionary, transformational possibilities. In this view, eating insects can both bring down the old system and bring in a new way of eating. And because the old agri-food system is so deeply entangled with what we think of as modernity, this new way of eating offers the possibility of profound changes in how we live on this planet.

  SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE CHICKEN WINDOW

  Insects as Feed in Non-Insect-Eating Cultures

  We may not see them, but they are here

  In 2015, more than forty researchers from eighteen countries published a review titled “Protecting the Environment through Insect Farming as a Means to Produce Protein for Use as Livestock, Poultry, and Aquaculture Feed.” They argued that “international fisheries are being over-exploited and current practices are not sustainable, which is evident as current production of fishmeal and fish oil has decreased from 30.2 million tons (live weight) in 1994 to 16.3 tons in 2012. Alternate sources of protein are therefore urgently needed to sustain the aquaculture industry.”88

  Paul Vantomme, one of the people most active on the entomophagy file within FAO, said in an email to me that “the major innovation with insects will be their use as animal feed (aquafeed and chickens mainly) (and with the insects fed on organic waste streams that do NOT compete with human grade foods).” Similarly, Alan Yen, editor-in-chief of the new Journal of Insects as Food and Feed, wrote to me that he was observing a shift of emphasis, at least at the insect production end, toward making protein powders that could be used in either animal feeds or products for human consumption.

  Enterra Feed in British Columbia, Canada, is considered one of the global leaders in the insects-as-animal-feed business. In May of 2015, since I was already in Vancouver for a public health conference on linking ecological and social determinants of health, I called them up. I was, at that point, naive and ignorant about the business side of entomophagy, but I’d read their website, which sounded promising — but then, what good is a website if it doesn’t sound promising?

  According to the Enterra website, the company was born when internationally known environmentalist David Suzuki and business entrepreneur Brad Marchant were fishing on the Firth River in British Columbia. Suzuki worried out loud about the unsustainable practices of depleting wild fish stocks to make fishmeal to grow farmed fish.89 When Marchant asked him what would be better, Suzuki “pointed to the end of the fishing rod, ‘How about insects and their larvae?’ And thus began the journey of Enterra and the genesis of Renewable Food for Animals and Plants™.”

  The timing was perfect. In 2014, the City of Vancouver passed a law that required all organic waste to be recycled. It would come into force in 2015. Some businesses cried foul, saying it was not workable, but some of the larger grocery stores, who generate tons of pre-consumer waste — old broccoli, cabbage, ready-made salads, overripe fruits — were thinking more creatively. They could set up their own biofuel systems as some municipalities and farms have done with feces and food waste — or, they could sell their waste to someone who would do it for them. Enterra was ready.

  The original Enterra office, located in a low-rise building in Vancouver, was where I met Andrew Vickerson, the Chief Technology Officer. Vickerson is a short, fit thirtysomething with a neatly trimmed beard and moustache and a ready, slightly bemused smile, as if he can’t quite believe this is all happening to him, but is comfortable going along with it. He grew up on a hobby farm, studied aquaculture, and then worked as a volunteer in Cambodia looking at raising fish in rice paddies. He figures that this stimulated his interest in insects as feed for fish. I mentioned the insect traps I’d seen in Cambodia, and he raised the problems of by-catch in foraging for edible insects and the possible loss of biodiversity if crude methods were used. He compared it to what had happened to the ocean fisheries.

  Enterra started in Vancouver bringing in food waste and processing it in their original facility. Despite its small scale, the neighbors were a little wary. So they moved their farm up the Fraser valley to Langley, where a greenhouse nursery owner invested in their business and let them use his property and old greenhouses. At first, the local government was not sure that insect farming was a “real thing.” Officials initially saw the farm as a transfer station for organic food waste, a way to sneak Vancouver garbage out of Vancouver and dump it in the suburbs. In the end, though, they were convinced.

  The farm is located just past residential developments of row houses and cheek-by-jowl detached houses. What greeted me as we drove into the paved driveway was a row of large greenhouses and barn-roofed, open-sided storage sheds, belts, conveyors, and pipes. Dump trucks loaded with a sweet-and-sour-smelling wet mess of carrot peels, old fruits, and vegetables pulled in and were weighed full, then dumped their loads. Later they would be weighed empty. Enterra took the “waste,” ran it through some mixers to make a slurry, and then used it to feed black soldier fly larvae (Hermetia illucens).

  I watched the adult flies hatching out in a tall screened-in area. The adult males were doing a kind of spiralling circle dance, first alone and then around the females, who each chose one with whom to to breed. While breeding they were stuck together, like dogs. I saw one copulating couple flying around like a two-ended helicopter. The females then laid eggs into plastic trays that looked like tiny honeycombs. I asked why the flies laid eggs there and not elsewhere. Andrew looked at me and smiled: trade secret. This was a response I would encounter often over the next few months. A lot of angel investors are pouring heaps of money into these ento-start-ups, so it was no surprise that the people involved were reluctant to describe any potentially money-making processes in any detail.

  I guessed that Enterra was using a pheromone attractant of some sort. From my quick tour, I understood that fresh fly eggs were put into large flat trays of the kinds that young nursery plants are started in. These trays were stacked, and it took about three or four days for the eggs to hatch. The larvae were fed purchased brewers grains to start. They were shifted to the food waste diet as they went through four molts, at which time they were big enough to pupate and to harvest. Then the cycle started over. The overall process took about a month. The larvae were grown in staggered batches, and each batch was fed daily until they were of harvestable size. A few adult flies flitted around the old greenhouse, lost, having escaped their screened breeding cages, and I saw one satisfied-looking bird perched inside the door. I asked Andrew about escapees, and he said that they contained them as much as possible, but the flies were not an invasive species, besides which the adults didn’t feed at all, living only a few days, and the larvae fed on organic matter and detritus.

  Andrew told me that 5 kilograms of fly larvae can process 100 tons of feed to produce 6 tons of fertilizer (frass and pupae casts) and 6 tons of larvae for protein supplements. The organic frass was used by local farmers, greenhouse operations, and home gardens, and some experimental data indicated that the frass had insect-repellent or insecticidal properties that kept other pests away from gardens and crops. This would not be surprising since, in evolutionary terms, it would have enabled more larvae to survive.

  So Enterra was getting paid to take the substrate
(organic waste) and then using it to produce high-quality feeds for chickens and fish. They used only a small amount of land to produce a large amount of protein, and they did not need any extra water; since they could recover water from the fruits and vegetables used as feed, they were actually net water producers. Enterra’s website asserts they can recover 4 million gallons of fresh water annually. Again, according to their website, this compares to the 1,400 gallons of water necessary to produce a pound of beef, 500 gallons for a pound of pork, and 400 gallons for a pound of chicken. I asked Andrew about producing insect proteins for human consumption. He laughed. There had been so much paperwork to get their facility registered with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) as a legitimate, licensed producer for animal feeds that he wasn’t about to start working on the forms to produce food for people.90

  Not even taking into consideration the ecological benefits, it sounded like a sweet business deal to me. I looked around the small, rudimentary lab. Most of their more sophisticated lab work, Andrew explained, was done elsewhere. The workers I saw looked to be in their thirties: the future had arrived.

  The greenhouses and food-waste trucks at Enterra conformed at least somewhat to my expectations of an ecologically based insect-producing farm, an integration of Suzuki’s environmental credentials and Brad Marchant’s business acumen. As their website declares, “At Enterra, we’re on a mission to secure the future of the world’s food supply by solving two major global problems: food waste and nutrient shortage.”