While it might sound like something out of the Survivor reality show, two University of Oregon students have found a way to increase the world’s intake of protein without clearing another acre of forest. Cricket Flour is not a trendy name; it’s an actual description of what Charles Wilson and Omar Ellis are bringing to market—and it’s tastier than you might think.
“My first thought was that this would not work in a Western culture,” said Ellis, an MBA student. But Wilson, a law student, had come armed with a 2013 UN report named “Edible Insects: Future prospects for food and feed security,” which detailed the importance of insects as a food source, according to The Oregonian. Wilson and Ellis recognized two things: First, that the world needs protein, but second, that we cannot continue to feed protein to the world at our current rate of farmland consumption. Conventional protein sources consume a vast amount of resources.
Enter the crickets. Crickets are related to shrimp (yup—that shrimp scampi you had last Friday night was really bug scampi) and are high in protein, calcium, iron and vitamin B12. “Eighty percent of the world eats bugs,” Ellis said. “It’s just Westerners who don’t.” But the pair also knew that selling Americans on eating whole crickets likely wasn’t going to fly. That’s when they came up with the idea of grinding the crickets, which they purchase from a U.S. farm that breeds crickets for human consumption (currently going unnamed), into flour.
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