I drank two pints of milk a day. That story’s not unique. Most teenagers will fuel up at any given opportunity.
But it’s the range of food, not the volume, that is also interesting. These days when I go out to dinner I often look for the meal I wouldn’t cook at home – the lamb’s fry, the snails or the ostrich. I like to eat as wide a variety of food as I can.
An AgResearch survey found 67.4% of respondents would be happy to eat crickets if they were processed into flour. I’ve eaten cricket flour and it’s pretty good. It’s also high in protein, which differentiates it from more run-of-the-mill offerings like wheat. More than half of people said they’d eat fried crickets. I’d be up for that too. Respondents weren’t as keen on some other creepy crawlies such as porina or wax moth larvae, which, I guess, is understandable.
The take-home from this research is that palates are evolving and people are open to try new things if they think they’ll taste good and are produced sustainably. It’s something New Zealand food producers need to be aware of. There are already farmers here branching out from traditional farming and adding crickets to their businesses. Farming insects doesn’t take up much land and we all know diversification can help insulate a farming business from price fluctuations.
Beef and lamb will continue to be a part of global diets and the mainstay of NZ farming. But good food is good food, whether it’s a slow cooked brisket or a well-marinated hunk of tempeh. The world population is growing and there’s room at the snack table for crickets as well as chicken wings. It appears consumers have the appetite for these novel foods. Do farmers have the stomach to produce them?
Bryan Gibson
