Hi, everyone. I hope you're having a great weekend so far.
Do you want to know about crickets and how you can sustain yourself on them? Well, then listen to this episode Are Crickets the Future of Food? And this is from September seventh, twenty seventeen. I hope you enjoy it all over again.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh W Chuck Clark. There's Charles Malcolm Bryant, and there's Jerry the Wiz rolling.
That sounds like an Aaron Cooper poster gone bad. Yeah already.
Yeah, we'll have like the swirling face like the weird people in Jacob's Ladder.
It's funny.
We had a office visitor a couple of weeks ago, and I don't think you were here, And in fact I know.
You weren't here because you would have been in here, right.
But there was a there's our great step Brothers, you know the movie Step Brothers.
For those of you out here out there, there's.
A promo of John c Riley and Will Ferrell with as like a with an Olin Mills type uh, you know, post photograph and Aaron Cooper or our buddy from Kansas who does our great photoshop stuff, made us into I was John c. Rally and you were Will Ferrell. And the guy came in and was looking around and was like, oh man, these are great and look at that, and you know that looks like I don't know, it looks like it could be like something like the movie Step Brother or something that.
Said, oh, that's exactly what it is. Yeah.
I tried to make him not feel bad.
That was nice of you. That was very gracious of you as a host.
Yeah, like he didn't quite zone in on all of them were us.
We should have like clapped loudly beside his ear. Uh.
Man, I had a little scary thing today, How if I may. This is kind of part PSA. This has nothing to do with cricket farming.
Ok, but.
We're getting our basement waterproofed because for thirteen years it's been leaking water like really bad.
Someone so that we have mold now.
Oh yeah, black mold, yes, and oh no.
We're also getting mold remediation done at the same time.
Man.
So, needless to say, that's a fun, fun way to spend a lot of money. But I come home today and my carbon monoxide alarm is going off because these yahoos are using a gas powered concrete saw in our basement. No, and it's like full on saying, you know, get out of the house, and my animals are in there, so oh, man, Like and I just happened to go home after I went to a coffee shop to study because I needed
to grab something. But like, I literally could have come home to dead animals, man and dead workmen.
And yeah, yeah those guys too. Wow, I'll bet they're not the sharpest tax in the box anymore.
That was weird man. And they were down there.
I mean, not only did they not have on so much as a dust mask for the gas, but like concrete dust is really dangerous too.
They're like, I don't care. I've got Obama care.
It was a.
Weird man, and just it freaked me out to the point where Emily she wanted to like fire the guy. He wasn't even there, like the you know, the foreman or right owner the company. Yeah, and she wanted to be like, man, if he doesn't understand that this is dangerous, and he said, you know, open up your windows, it'll be clear in fifteen minutes and it took two hours for that alarm to stop going off.
Oh my gosh, Wow, that is really scary.
It was really bad. Man.
I was out on my deck basically for the rest of the morning until I came in with my dogs and my cat in a crate.
Man, that's like how some people commit suicide. I know, you know, yeah, and these guys are just doing it. Grottis for you.
Yeah. It was weird.
Yeah, anyway, so I'm slightly shaken. Yeah, I'll bet. I'm glad you made it. Man. You look good. You look okay, Thank you. You look healthy. Your pallor isn't gaunt. I think you're You're okay.
I just got to calm down here. That the sound of the crickets on our miniature cricket farm here for soothing me.
At least I know they put me to sleep.
I'm glad we set that up.
That was pretty good. That was one of our better segues. Sadly enough.
Thanks.
Yeah, we are talking crickets, aren't we.
Yeah, we covered entomophagy.
I meant to look up when, but it was seems like a long time ago, right, And that's eating bugs and insects. But this is focusing specifically on crickets because by all accounts, they seem like sort of the our best bet at trying to get something like this going in America.
For real.
Yeah, they're I mean, they're pretty easy to raise. They don't require much space. You can set up your own cricket farm at home. And really, we should say, the point of all this, the whole reason anybody would want people to start raising crickets at home is because the well, the earth is about to collapse and our food supply is in real danger. Right, So I've got some stats for you, chuck. So meat consumption per capita has increased
into the developed world. Actually it's doubled in the last thirty years, and that's thanks in no small part to the rise of the brick countries Brazil, Russia, India, and China who have huge, massive populations, and as they entered capitalists, the capitalist global economy have generally become enriched, and the more money they have, the more meat civilization tends to consume, at least these days. Right, So that doesn't seem bad in and of itself until you look into what kind
of resources it takes to actually raise meat. So you ready for this one.
I don't know. I'm afraid to produce.
One pound of meat that's a half a kilo basically of meat, beef, beef. Sorry, Yeah, it requires about twenty four hundred gallons of water.
I've heard stuff like that before.
Which is like absolutely nuts, even when you consider that not only are you watering the cow, you're also watering, you know, the crops that you feed to the cow, So there's double water consumption. But one of the problem, one of the reasons cattle beef requires so much water, is because you only consume forty percent of the cow.
Yeah, so sixty.
Percent of the water is going to sustain parts of the cow you're not even eating, right, So there's a lot of wasted water, even if your water delivery system is one hundred percent efficient, right, Yeah, that's just water. Fifty one percent of the greenhouse gases that are emitted on planet Earth come from animal agriculture. Yeah, fifty one percent. And one third of the world's adequate or high quality cropland has been lost to erosion or pollution in the
last forty years. Now. That's a huge problem, whether we are all vegetarians or not. Because we're talking crop land, but we use way more crop land to feed our livestock than we do to feed ourselves. Right, something like fifty six million acres of land are used to grow crops in the United States to feed animals. Four million are used to grow crops for human consumption. So there's a lot, a lot of resources that are used up
just from meat based diets. Right. A lot of people say, well, just go to plant based diets, and other people say you can't get enough protein from plant based diets, which apparently is not true from what I'm seeing. Other people are saying, fine, you want some protein, I got something for you, and it's crickets.
Yeah, I'm kind of all I'm not surprised, but it goes to show you the population boom. If meat consumption has increased that much in the face of probably more vegetarianism and veganism than ever before, too, you know.
Well, that's kind of heartening, Like if if there does seem to be if I guess if societies follow.
Yeah, I'd like we should.
I mean, we've been dancing around doing episodes on vegetarianism and veganism for a while, so we should probably tackle that at some point.
All right.
I'm kind of curious about the history because it seems like in the like probably since the onset of America until and then I'm talking off my at the top of my head here, but until probably the nineties, it seemed like everybody who's just like meat, meat meat, meat, meat.
Well, there's I mean, it's definitely associated with wealth, right, If you can afford to eat a nice steak kind of indicates you have a certain amount of status in your society, right.
Well, like the fifties, it seems like they would eat steak for lunch, right, And I can't imagine, like a steak for lunch.
That seems so indulgent. Yeah, I think it is, you know, yeah, like.
Yeah, just give me, give me the twenty ounce Rabbi for lunch. Right, It's just I don't know, I can't imagine that. But in three martinis, I don't argue with that part.
That is pretty indulgent. Three martinis and a twenty ounce Ribby for lunch.
I mean that was don Draper, you know.
Yeah, I never saw that show. I know, I never saw it.
It's it's available.
Where is it out there? Really? I thought they erased it.
All, Yeah, they did.
So that's it, it's done. Uh huh. Didn't he go become a lumberjack at the end, No he did not. Okay, Oh that's dexter.
Uh oh man. And then we've talked about the ending of that show.
Great, I actually never saw the end of that one. You've just told me about it.
Yeah, I think you still to yourself just to watch the finale.
Okay.
So this dude, Kevin, how would you pronounce that bachhuber bach? Which is fine, that's clearly bach and hub r. You just don't often see two h's side by side. So anyway, Kevin Bachhuba is a dude that is kind of championing, not kind of very much championing this movement. In two thousand and seven, he went to Thailand and tasted crickets deep fried crickets, and he's from California, and he was like, hey, this is really good.
He's been far out.
They've been doing this in Thailand since the late nineties. The king established a big growing program for crickets and cricket farms education in schools, like, you know, this is a good way to get protein in your diet. And he said, I think this is the direction America should go and I'm going to get in on the money side of it.
Yeah, like the farming of it.
Apparently it's a twenty million dollar industry already. Not bad, No, it isn't. And we should say that bach Kuber is one of several people who are into this, the idea of cricket farming, commercial cricket farming, and he's definitely one of the ogs for sure. His business was the first to get approval to sell crickets as food in the United States. You got FDA approval because the cricket industry
actually is kind of old. Well it's not too old, but I saw anywhere between fifty and seventy years old in the US, and they're raised to say feed fish for commercial fish farming, or to grind up as a protein supplement for livestock feed. So people have been using crickets for a while, or to feed to like reptiles, to sell them to pet stores.
Yeah, so there.
Was an established infrastructure of cricket farming, but the making the transition from selling it to feed to cows or fish or snakes to selling it to people to eat directly, that that was a big step. And bach Huber was the first one to take it in the US. I should just say, the reason I point out he's just one of many is because this house Stuff Works article is basically like, here's my report on Kevin back Huber's
ted ted talk sort of. You know, yeah, I think just he definitely deserves, you know, credit, because he's leading the charge, but so are other people as well.
Yeah, he's woven throughout this thing though. Yeah. And you know, if you listen to the Entomopogy episode.
Episode no it's it's episode.
We pointed out then, and it bears repeating that America is new to this. But I think it was like Canada and the United States and Western Europe are literally the only places on Earth that don't consume insects as a regular part of their diet these days.
So I saw, so this article kind of says the standard eighty percent of the world regularly consumes insects as part of their diet. I saw that there's a Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN organization report said something it was more like about a third of the populations rather than eighty percent, maybe like thirty to thirty five percent, which is still significant.
Yeah, that's a big difference.
It is, and in the West specifically, the idea of eating bugs is not It's not commonplace, right, And I actually saw a pretty good explanation for why, Like thirteen of the fourteen large livestock animals that are domesticated are found in Eurasia and made their way over to the Americas, and those things those animals provide not just meat, but
also things like milk, clothing, everything. Basically, so since since these what you would call Western countries had access to these domesticated animals, they never needed bugs as a food source. And then secondly, since they were raising domesticated animals, by definition, they had a sedentary agricultural lifestyle, which meant that their exposure to bugs was bugs as pests. So not only were bugs not edible, they were something you that were
just undesirable on their face. So that led to the it closed the door on bugs being eaten by Westerners, and so that came to be filled by a sense of disgust, which is a basic human emotion, but it's the only one that's culturally bound, which means you learn what is disgusting from your cultural group.
Yeah, for sure.
But that also means you can unlearn it too.
Well, this big cricket has anything to do with it, Why don't we took a quick break and we're going to come back and talked about a UN report that kind of changed a lot of things about four years ago. All right, so I promised you a UN report twenty thirteen there was a big kind of sea change.
I don't know about sea change. It was the beginning beginning of a sea change.
They issued a report called Edible Insects Colon Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security, and it was basically just championing entomophagy and all the benefits that surround it, like how nutrient dense crickets and other insects are, the fact that it's socially sustainable, economically viable, and friendly, environmentally friendly, and it kind of, you know, kind of paints it as like, hey, this is the future, or it could be part of the future at least of getting protein
into you know, Americans.
Right, And the report itself didn't focus exclusively on crickets, but crickets feature prominently in the report.
The star it was about.
It was about bugs in general and eating bugs in general, and it was it made a pretty big splash. I remember when it came out, like it really hit the news cycle pretty hard. But it also caught the attention of that back Huber guy who said, all right, I'm gonna I think I'm gonna get into this because he'd already been exposed to eating crickets in Thailand and then that when that UN report came out, he I think began as start up here in the States of his commercial cricket farm startup.
Yeah, it's funny they put in this article that it was the most popular document in the history of the UN.
Yeah. I didn't see that anywhere. I think that was he said that at his ted report. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, it definitely made a splash. I'll give him that for sure.
Yeah, he spoke at a ted X Youngstown, Ohio, because that's where he's based, that's where his company is, right, and I guess he just made up his own ted X probably. All right, so let's talk about crickets. Well, all insects in particular are very rich in protein. Like we've talked about. They have a lot of healthy fats, Yeah, a lot of zinc, a lot of iron, a lot of calcium, and there's something called I guess efficient animals.
Well, yeah, I mean this.
Is when vegetarians and vegans are like, these kind of terms make their skin crawl, I'm sure. But the kind of efficiency you get out of raising and killing and eating an animal is on a spectrum, and you know, from cows, like you talked about, it's probably the worst, I would guess, don't you think, right?
Right? The animal itself is efficient at converting food that you feed it into stuff that you can get from it.
Yeah, so like you said, not a lot of the cow is used to eat.
No, it's like forty percent of a cow is edible and digestible.
And I think the chicken is about the most efficient animal protein right now, right, nothing like crickets.
So there's two different things here, right. So you've got efficiency in nutrient conversion, which is say, like if you eat an apple, you can convert you know x amount of the energy available in the apple into you know, energy for yourself metabolism, right and poop right yeah, that but poop is waste, so that stuff wouldn't count toward efficiency. It would actually subtract from your efficiency and lower your efficiency.
If you ate an apple and used every bit of it and it produced zero poop, you would have efficiently converted that apple into useful energy, right.
And that'd be a weird apple.
It would be a be a magic apple, and you wouldn't need a poop shoot, but instead you do. Because there is no such thing as one hundred percent efficiency in any animal, right, But some are better than others, like you were saying, And with a cricket, it's something like they're like twelve times more efficient at converting food into usable energy or stored in this case stored protein. Right.
So for every kilogram of live cricket weight, which is a pretty substantial amount of crickets, but but kilogram to kilogram or pound to pound, it just takes one point seven kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of live crickets. Not bad for a cow. It takes ten kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of beef. Very inefficient by comparison.
So if you take the fact that it doesn't take much feed to produce a biomass of crickets, and that crickets are eighty percent edible and digestible compared to the cows forty percent edible and digestible, then you really have a if you're just going pound to pound or kilogram to kilogram and much more nutrient dens, much more efficient and then therefore much much less wasteful animal that you could eat.
Yeah, A lot of that has to do with the fact that crickets are cold blooded, so they're very much more efficient at converting that feed into protein. And crickets aren't even the most efficient insect.
No, no, huh, sure which one is?
Actually?
I think mealworms are pretty efficient.
Yeah, he just said that because you're eating a meal worm.
Right, Well, I have a meal worm farm. I was gonna ask you to buy in on. Oh really, uh huh, all right, in my pocket.
See is that a meal worm farm in your pocket?
It is my pocket mulch Uh.
So, like we mentioned, mister bach Ruber is if he's not German, he should be.
Kevin bach Kruber. I think he's, uh, but he's Irish German.
Maybe it's spelled kV in though, So we're just inserting vowels for me.
Right like d n C.
What's that?
It's this band?
Okay, probably a young person's band, I believe, so, no wonder, I don't know, uh, but he is one of I think they're about and this has probably changed even since this is written.
About twenty five or so.
Uh, cricket startup farms here in the United States.
Yeah, I couldn't find the current number.
Yeah, let's just say at least twenty five.
Okay, although I'll bet they go under pretty quick, you think, so, I could see I could see losing your shirt on cricket farming right now. It's so it's just so early, yeah, and the market is so not there, and the stuff they're producing is so expensive.
Well, and their output right now is still really small in the in the early years here. But you know, the dream for for him and all these cricket farmers is that one day it will it will. I don't think they have designs it will ever be like in some parts of the world where it's on every menu and every restaurant. But they would certainly like to see cricket snacks in grocery stores and menu offerings and some some of the more wacky hipster restaurants, right at least.
Yeah.
Did you do you watch Shirt Tank?
Oh? You know, I do?
Okay, So did you see the one withal was Wang and Laura DeSario. I've seen them all Okay, so you saw the one with chirps their snack, their cricket based snack product, Chirps. I want to try it.
I do too.
I'm not like, I'm not an adventurous eater, as you know, but I would totally try fried crickets and things that doesn't gross me out for some reason.
No, I and I would try it as well. And do you. I don't know if you remember or not, but when we did that locust thing for Science Channel, it's like the second time it has come up this month. Weirdly enough, they made fried locus and I refuse to eat them, right, And it wasn't because I was grossed out. It was because I was sure that I was going to have some sort of weird allergic reaction to them. Oh right, yeah, yeah, And I would have had to have been, like you know, life flighted somewhere to a
hospital and would have missed my flight home. That is the only reason I didn't eat them. It had nothing to do with disgust. But in that UN report they address allergies and they said that it's actually exceedingly rare that somebody has an allergic reaction to an arthropod. Yeah,
or to an insect, I should say. But the reason why I thought so is because yeah, I had had like a shrimp blow up once, right, and I just was not about to roll the dice on that, not for what Science Channel was paying us.
Well, I think it's very funny that you. I remember your shrimp, your shrimp years in that you had an allergic reaction to shrimp, but you wanted to eat shrimp so bad you started to eat shrimp a little bit just to see if you could eat shrimp.
Yeah. Shrimp chips, yeah, which use real shrimp powder. It's like I think Japanese or Korean or Chinese delicacy.
But now you can eat shrimp, right.
Yeah, he did immunotherapy and now I'm fine. I can eat shrimp all day long.
I just love that you were so dedicated to you.
Yeah. I love shrimp man, good shrimp like season with Old Bay, just simple stuff. Oh man, so good.
This is a great time to bring up one of my big pet peeves. Okay, I know that cooking with shrimp heads and tails on increases the flavor quite a bit, does it? Yeah? Okay, which is why they do it.
But it's one thing if you get an appetizer with like the the like.
A prawn with a head left on or something.
But if you like I get pasta dishes sometimes, oh yeah, that have like heads and tails on them.
If there's a fork involved, you don't want to have to put your fork down and take the head and tail off.
No, like you literally have to dig them out of the pasta, take the head and tail off, and then put them back in your food, right, which is just I don't get why restaurants do that, Like maybe cook it in there and then take it off for us.
So I ran across the reason probably why.
All right, let's hear it.
There's something called kiten which makes up the exoskeleton of bugs, but it also makes up the shells of crustaceans as well, and kiten sup if you don't have an allergic reaction to it. Kiten is apparently good for it's it's said to be good for weight loss, yeah, digestion. It aids in digestion allegedly, and I think it has something to do with your blood pressure too. And in other countries, non non Western countries, I think they prescribed kiten quite
a bit as like a dietary supplement. And I saw one study that said, yeah, I had a little bit of an effect, a little more than placebo, but not clinically significant. But it was just one study, so I'm curious if kiten actually does have an effect. But it's possible. They're saying you should eat the whole thing. Well, this shell, what I mean, it's I don't know. They could also just be a fat, lazy chef, you know.
Well, I mean, I'll eat a soft shell crab till the cows come home.
But I'm not eating a shrimp tail.
Yeah it sounds gross. Well, it's just not like they don't soften up enough, you know. But if you think about it, though, if you're eating a fried cricket or something, you're eating the whole thing shell and all antenna.
Well yeah, but I thought that in the soft shell crab zone.
So you eat the shell of the soft shell crab. Yeah, that's what you're supposed to do. That's what it is. I don't know that i've ever had soft shell crab. Oh, my friend, is that like a blue crab?
No.
I think it's a special kind of crab. Oh that has.
Parents must love it very much.
I might be wrong.
I think it's a special kind of crab and then you prepare it with the shell. But I think the shell is soft to begin with, though I don't think it's just from cooking. But like spider roll is one of my favorite sushi rolls, that's soft shell crab.
Okay, yeah, I thought that was crab like spelled with a cave like fake crab.
No.
No, that like the little legs are coming out of the end and everything. That's why they call it a spider roll because it looks like little spider legs.
And I'll try that.
And then like a soft shell crab sandwiches, I mean, you open the bun and there's just like this crab staring at you.
Going, how's it going? You're gonna eat me in a second, aren't you.
Oh I'm getting hungry now, and you.
Want to take a break real quick.
Well quickly before we just should mention that they did get a deal on Shark Tank.
Oh yeah, with Mark Cuban for Chirps.
Right, we're contractually obligated to munch Mark Cuban.
That's right, we get our kickback coming.
I would try chirps for sure. If the Chrips people are out there listening and you want to send us some chirps, I will try them up, all right, So let's take that break. Okay, So Chuck, we said I think I said that one of the things that's holding this industry back right now is that the it's so expensive the products they're making. There's something called cricket flour, which is ground up cricket meal, basically a protein powder made from crickets, right, and it's it's anywhere from like
thirty five to fifty dollars a pound for it. Yeah, it's very expensive, a lot of money, but it's really ironic because crickets require so much less space and food and water and electricity. It's apparently the labor force that is the most expensive thing of any commercial cricket farm because there it's just hard to find people who can do that, even though it's not exactly hard, it's just
there's a lot of trial and error going on. So from what I saw, it's the labor force that's that's eating up most of the revenue or profits from cricket farming.
Well, finding all those tiny people, those three inch people, right, it's not easy.
But there are startups also that are trying to sell like home cricket kits too, Yeah, because that's part of the whole idea where if you're gonna get people to supplement their diet, well just let them grow them at home too.
So should we talk a little bit about the farming. Yeah, So crickets live about seven weeks. I mean that right there shows you a big difference between that and like the beef industry. So during that seven week life cycle, they have three different environments that they reside in, and they basically live and hang out on what they call cricket high rises, which are little egg cartons.
Yeah. I saw that they have tried all sorts of different material and they keep going back to egg cartons for some reason. Crickets just love hanging out on egg carts.
Well, who doesn't.
And what they eat is because I was kind of wondering that they eat grain based feed, organic grain based feed, fruits and vegetables, and they some of them will reach that breeding stage, some won't, and if they do, they're gonna lay a lot of eggs, Like you know, several thousand eggs a mommy cricket will lay in her lifetime.
Yeah, so many eggs in fact, that they they typically just throw most of them out, like they'll keep some to grow a new generation from. But there's just so many that are just tossed out because they don't have the capacity yet to grow them. Yeah, so that you know they're I think back Huber put it like he could be drowning in eggs if he's not.
Careful, drowning in cricket eggs.
He probably wakes up every night sweating occurring greens.
He probably really does wake up every night from the cricket chirping.
Oh, I never really thought about that. That must be nice, Actually, yeah, it can be.
So they like hot, humid environments, or at least warm, depending on your definition of hot. It's hot to me eighty five to ninety five degrees fahrenheit with about a forty eight percent humidity level yep. And the whole process from soup to nuts or from eggs to chirps is about fifty six days.
Yeah, roughly. Yeah. And if you can do this yourself at home, you just need basically two terrariums. You need to put them near heat, because that is substantial. Eighty five to ninety five degrees is hot, way hotter than you're going to keep your house. So you do need like a heat lamp of some sort, and you need water a source of water too. Those are the two
most important things with raising crickets. And the reason you have two terrariums is because in the one where you have like the thirty initial crickets, say, you're going to put a dish of soil and that's where they're going to lay their eggs. You want to check the soil every day for eggs, and when you find eggs, you take that little soil dish out and put it in the other terrarium, and then that's where the eggs are going to grow and hatch. And when the crickets hatch,
they're fully formed. There's no larval stage, right, they don't go from like a maggot into a cricket. They're fully formed. They're just much smaller, right.
Yeah.
And according to Aristotle, it's about around here or maybe within the next like week or so, that they're the most delicious Aristotle. Yeah. Aristotle wrote in his Historia Animalium. Actually he was writing about cicadas that they're better when they're before their last mold. So I guess I wouldn't apply to crickets. No, I would, because they molt?
Did they?
They do molt. He also said that females taste best after copulation because they are full of eggs after Aristotle has copulated, right or after. Instead of a cigarette, you just need a pregnant female cicada. Try this baby, right, it'll knock your socks off.
I bet Aristotle pillow talk with something else.
I don't find it, you know, or it just be like ugh, yeah, man, he just keeps going on and on about cicadas.
So harvesting, I mean, there's no way around it. At some point, like any live thing that you're raising, you're gonna have to kill it. And instead of like what we see on factory farms with cows and pigs, what you do on a cricket farm is you cool them down and then freeze them. And so what happens is they they get cold, they start to get a little chili, their temperature drops, and they go into what's called a diapause,
sort of a hibernation like state. And then pretty much after that they go it is sure is chili in here?
And then they're gone and frozen.
Yeah, apparently they eventually freeze solid. So they spend about twenty four hours in the freezer and then they're ready to be sold. Yeah, either ground into say like a powder, or baked into a fried snack or so old toes somebody else. But that's that. And I was like, do they wake up then if you heat them up in a pan? But apparently after twenty four hours and their frozen solid, they're dead.
Yeah.
But to them it's just like going to sleep forever.
Yeah.
I kind of wonder when I was reading this, I was like, how do vegans and vegetarians feel about eating insects?
Supposedly it does not count as vegetarian.
Well, it depends on who you ask. I didn't get any like there is no official rule book. There's not I don't think so I'm surprised. But basically, I just went to a bunch of vegan and vegetarian websites and looked to see what people said, and it kind of ranged from well, sure, ill eat insects and this is a much better way to get protein in your body than animals, to where other people said, no, it's a living thing, not going to eat it. I get all
the protein I need from plants. If you're eating something a live animal, then you're not a vegan in her a vegetarian.
Yeah, I saw crickets referred to as many livestock all one word. Yeah, I mean they are a live they're a living animal. Yeah, sure, so I guess that's a personal choice. It sounds like, yeah, just like you know, vegetarians eat fish sometimes too.
Uh, Well, they'd be a pescatarian, right.
I guess. But I've met plenty of vegetarians. They're like, I'm a vegetarian and I eat fish. Leave me alone.
And that's when you go technically you're a pescatarian, and then you get punched in the face. Right, So, eating crickets some people say sort of nutty. Some people say it's a little sweet, like sweet corn. I'm I would like to know for myself. I wish we could have gotten her hand on some chirps beforehand. Yeah, but maybe we can follow up in the future.
We need a big bowl of chirps right here.
Like, yeah, like we did with the soilin Yeah, with a soilent.
Soilent will do a follow up soilent.
So there's this lady Danny Ella Martin, and she has a travel show and a well it's an insect cooking and travel show called Girl Meets Bug, very cute, and we should say the chirps ladies called crickets the Gateway
Bug also that was kind of funny and punny. And Daniella says that she started eating crickets and kind of became fascinated with insects in general when she was in Mexico and Yucatan and kind of became, I don't think obsessed, but just super interested in this as her protein of choice and said, you know, I started cooking them up with the little little butter, onion, little salt, and like with anything, if you put it in a pan with some butter and onion and salt, maybe a little garlic,
it's probably gonna taste pretty darn good.
Yeah, you could cook almost anything with butter, salt and onions and you're fine.
Yeah, even when you hear stories of these creepy cannibal people, Oh yeah, they should cook it in butter. Yeah, with a little salt and the onion and garlic.
Yeah. I think that one guy who advertised on like Craigslist did cannibal. Yeah he saw it with yeah onion, you're right, any I think it was say what he ate penis like that he did. Man, that was a very disturbing case.
Sure, so she says, crisping them in the oven is another besides you know, grinding into powder, cooking him up, like broiling him in the oven.
Don't overcook it.
Olive oil, garlic, salt, Throw him in about two fifty for about fifteen minutes and a little sea salt on top maybe, and you're gonna have a crunchy, delicious, nutrient rich snack.
Yeah. And you want to clean them off too. If you're cooking them from raw, they're bugs. That's it's something you want to do.
What do you do just like wash them in a calendar?
I guess so, yeah, But I think like if they're already prepared, you're probably okay. Because one of the big things that that like back Huber did by getting f day approval, like now you can't just raise crickets on just anything, like they have to be fed food that is okay for humans to eat too, which is something that the cricket farming industry is running up against because one of the big things proponents are saying is like, man, you could raise crickets, if you had large scale cricket farms,
you could raise crickets on food waste, and if you if you do that, not only are you like raising your crickets, you're also getting rid of food waste. You're composting basically, right, Yeah, composting, that's the way you say it. But apparently that day is like now you can't feed things food waste and nut job. You're gonna eat it eventually, So there's big rules against it. But that I think they're trying to chip away at that as well.
Yeah.
I remember being alarmed when I briefly worked in the chicken industry when I found out that a lot of chicken feed is made from chickens.
Yeah not okay, Yeah, that's not right. So I saw in I think Popular Science, they had a little nutrition facts thing for crickets. It's so cute. They said, for one hundred grams of crickets, you're looking at about one hundred and twenty one hundred and twenty one calories. Okay, You've got about five and a half grams of carbs, Okay, twelve point nine grams of protein. That is substantial, Yeah, seventy five point eight milligrams of calcium and nine and
a half milligrams of iron. That's also pretty substantial. Just from one hundred grams, I think they estimate that's about twenty to twenty two crickets.
Like a handful and a half. Yeah.
Nice, that that's pretty good. And the idea that if you are just raising crickets yourself, you can feed them your own kitchen waist, Yeah, and then eat the cricket yourself. There's also right right, there's also very low barriers to entry into cricket farming. So if you're if you're not a wealthy person and you need to make some extra money, you could conceivably raise crickets yourself and then sell them at market too. It's like podcasting exactly exactly. I think
that's it. I got nothing else, all right, Well, it's cricket farming. Everybody, go make it happen. And in the meantime, you can look up this article on HowStuffWorks dot com. And since I said that, it's time for listener maw.
I'm going to call this Kevin Spacey's accent explained. Oh and before I read this, there is a House of Cards spoiler spoiler.
Alert to that.
Hey, guys, just listen to the episode on accents. I'm happy you brought up Kevin Spacey's sent from House of Cards because I have a theory. Spacey plays a character Frank Underwood, grew up poor in Gaffney, South Carolina, but then went on to the Citadel in Charleston and created a persona that eventually lands him president. His accent does not sound like a bad attempt at the r less old money Charleston accent, but I think it fits the character.
Instead of a twangy, ar full accent that he'd have from Gaffney, Spacey's playing Frank Underwood, who was playing someone with noble Southern roots, and that's why it sounds fake. Am I giving Kevin Spacey too much credit? Possibly? But being from Greenville, South Carolina, enjoyed dissecting his Carolina accent, And actually I don't have much of an accent myself, except with words like lawyer and oil.
Jerry just laughed.
Because my brother, who's ten years older, trained it out of me when I was very young. He said he didn't want people to underestimate my intelligence because of our accent. He had correct me every time I would say things like turn the light zone instead of trying the lights on, or naked instead of naked.
If you're saying naked, macha with a length of drive bamboo and say again, say it again.
I sort of wish I sounded more like the rest of my family. But what a considerate thing for my big brother to have done when he was a teenager. Seriously, and that is from Mary Jean Murphy.
That was pretty great. Mary Gene, your brother is a little social engineer, isn't he.
I like that?
And thank you also for the spoiler about Kevin Spacey becoming president on House of Cards. If you want to get in touch with us like she did, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and as always, joined us at our home on the web, stuff Youshould Know dot com.
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