The Food of the Future Right Under Our Toes
Story by Jess Brown
AUSTIN—Maite Aizpurua smiled as she bit down into a crunchy, dry-roasted cricket. She
reached for another from the handful of Aspire-brand, spicy jerk flavored crickets she held in
her lap.
“They’re really good in smoothies,” Aizpurua said, in between
bites. “It tastes like peanut butter and it gives it a thick
consistency, which I really like.”
Aizpurua is an aspiring chef. Wanting to cook using ingredients
that are more sustainable and also nutritious, she has been
experimenting with various cricket products in the kitchen.
“I used to be a vegan, and I was very worried about getting all of
Maite Aizpurua casually snacks on a
dry-roasted cricket while attending an
informative Little Herds talk hosted by
the Austin Public Library and its “Talk
Green to Me” sustainability series.
the nutrients I needed, you know the iron and calcium,” Aizpurua
said. “I was doing all of the artificial meats, and I’ve found that this is a great alternative.”
Just about 80 percent of the world eats bugs as a staple in their diet. The United States remains
in the minority that does not, but those cultural taboos that we hold against eating bugs may
slowly be changing.
The production and consumption of crickets and cricket flour is a growing trend in Austin,
Texas. Citing their nutritional health benefits and the sustainable farming practices used to
produce them, many believe it could be a viable solution to feed the world’s ever-growing
population while reducing our carbon footprint.
“No one is saying it’s a silver bullet,” said Robert Nathan Allen, founder of Little Herds, a
nonprofit company focused on educating the public on the consumption of crickets. “But it’s
one piece of a really complicated puzzle that we’ve got to get figured out.”
Allen has been behind the cricket movement in Austin since the beginning. Three years ago his
mom somewhat jokingly sent him a video of people eating bugs, and Allen said it was like a light
bulb went off in his head.
“The video talked about the health benefits, the environmental benefits, the cultural relevance,
you know the sheer number of people around the world that already eat insects—we’re kind of
the weird ones,” Allen said. “And it talked about the idea of abstraction, turning them into a
powder and incorporating them into the foods we already know and love. I thought it was
brilliant.”
So he started doing as much research as he could online. He contacted entomologists,
scientists who study bugs, and began asking questions. What Allen found was an online
community of chefs, scholars, entrepreneurs, a few bloggers, and a cookbook author that were
all getting behind the idea of incorporating bugs into their diet.
Allen felt that Austin would be the perfect place to grow this idea further. He took all that he
learned, and started his own nonprofit, Little Herds, in 2013. Run entirely by volunteers and
funded by public donations, the organizations travels everywhere from schools to festivals to
museums and farmers markets, educating people on the idea of farming crickets for human
consumption.
“The response was overwhelmingly
positive,” Allen said. “As you know
there is always something going on in
Austin, and so it was great for us.”
Allen has since passed his executive
A typical display put on by Little Herds includes various edible
insect products.
director role onto Dan Von Pasecky, but
he still volunteers with Little Herds
regularly and now works for Aspire, East Austin’s cricket warehouse, where the insects are
raised and then processed either as whole, dry-roasted crickets or milled down cricket flour.
One reason that crickets have really taken off compared with some other edible insects is that
the infrastructure for farming them is already in place. Crickets are commonly raised for lizards
and other exotic pet food and used as fishing bait.
Allen said the process is all natural and environmentally sound. No hormones or chemicals are
used on the crickets. They are fed a diet of organic vegetable compost. When the crickets are
full grown and ready to be turned into food, they are flash frozen and then cleaned.
“Crickets can basically be grown anywhere. They like dark, crowded spaces,” said Leah Jones,
co-founder of Crickers, an Austin based company that makes
crackers using cricket flour. “People always say, ‘Are your
crickets free range?’ and I’m like, they don’t actually like that.
So no, but they do eat a really healthy diet and they have nice
living conditions.”
Crickers is one of two companies in Austin that purchases the
cricket flour from Aspire to produce their own consumer
product. They found out about entomophagy, the human
consumption of insects as food, through Little Herds.
A bag of classic sea salt flavored Crickers
cricket crackers. While not currently for
sale, Jones and her business partner are
working on scaling up their production
process to meet the consumer demand.
For Jones, the most compelling fact about farming crickets is the little amount of water that is
required. It would take 1,000 times more water to produce the same amount of protein from
cattle. Besides using less water, cricket production also emits fewer greenhouse gases than
production of other comparable sources of protein like cows, chicken and pigs.
And to address Aizpurua’s concerns about getting enough calcium and iron, crickets do contain
higher amounts of the two minerals per 100 grams than chicken, beef and pork, along with
comparable amounts of protein.
“The cool thing about crickets too is that they start to take on the flavor of what you’re feeding
them,” Jones said. “So if you feed your crickets lemon and garlic, you’re going to have a nice
lemony-garlic, crunchy cricket.”
So far the company sells three different flavors of the cricket crackers—classic sea salt,
rosemary garlic, and everything cracker. They are paleo-friendly and dairy, soy and gluten-free.
Jones and co-founder Megan McDonald hope to expand their product line to include cricket
cookies in the near future.
Hopper Foods, another Austin based company, is producing high protein, paleo granola. People
on the paleo, or caveman diet, focus on eating only meat, nuts and berries and limit
carbohydrates, dairy and other processed foods. Like Crickers, Hopper Foods also uses the
Aspire cricket flour, along with local Texas honey and dried fruit to sweeten their product.
“We try to source local ingredients everywhere possible,” co-founder Jack Ceadel said. “If there
is a Texas option, we will always choose it.”
Ceadel also works for Global Water Intelligence, which brought him to Austin four years ago
from the United Kingdom. Ceadel’s primary focus is on water consumption and that ultimately
led him into the cricket business.
“Obviously, we know Texas is in a drought, and the U.S. is in a drought,” Ceadel said. “And I
came across a report and I was just amazed by the water consumption numbers that were
involved in the farming of other types of protein.”
Ceadel said they have had a lot of
success with their granola
products, which are sold locally at
Wheatsville Co-op and
In.gredients. They can also be
ordered online, along with the
Aspire cricket flour and whole,
Hopper Crunch granola for sale on shelves at Wheatsville Co-op.
Available in cranberry & almond, cacao & cayenne, and toasted coconut
for $10.99 a bag.
dry-roasted crickets.
For now, Crickers and Hopper Foods are the only two companies in Austin producing ready-toeat cricket products. However, there are a handful of progressive restaurants, including Dai
Due, Odd Duck and La Condesa, which are experimenting with cricket entrees.
Jesse Griffiths, chef at Dai Due, said they will be serving crickets in a salad on the menu in a few
weeks once tomatoes come back into season.
“People get all freaked out about them,” Griffiths said. “But really it’s just food. Aspire
contacted us, and we had worked with other insects in the past—corn worms and snails if you
want to count them—we’re just very focused on serving any food we can find around here
that’s good. It doesn’t really matter what it is.”
While the cricket industry may remain niche for now, Aspire, Hopper Foods, Crickers and Little
Herds are hoping to change that.
“The majority of companies in the U.S. are using the cricket flour with the hopes that in the
next couple of years it will become mainstream,” Jones said. “We’ll see cricket flour products
on our grocery shelves, and then it might not be so weird to open up the freezer and see a bag
of frozen chicken and a bag of frozen crickets that you can toss into your stir-fry. That’s the
goal.”