I ate insects so you don’t have to

I once saw my cat eat a daddy longlegs in a single grotesque bite. It was exactly as unedifying as you’d imagine, and I thought slightly less of him from that day forth. And that’s saying something, given that this is the same animal that mistook my bathtub for a litter tray on three separate occasions.

But now I’m very much on his level and – SPOILER – there’s a good chance that you will be too, at some point. The headline of this piece – “I ate insects so you don’t have to” – is actually a bit of a lie. If you’ve got a few more decades left in you, there’s every chance you might have to eat bugs at some point, thanks to a burgeoning population of carnivores and climate change.

The trouble with meat

Our current farming methods aren’t sustainable, and we’re going to have to eat a lot less meat or consider drastic alternatives. One of those is eating insects, which can be farmed incredibly quickly, take up a limited amount of space and are pretty damned nutritious. Conspicuous by its absence on that list, you may notice, is the phrase “great tasting”. That’s the beauty of the trading standards act.

At New Scientist Live this weekend, I had a chance to taste the future for myself. On Thursday I walked past the stand, took a few photos of the delicacies available (“BBQ bamboo worms”, “Chilli flavour chapulines”), and I choked. Figuratively, that is. I’ve volunteered for some unusual things so I can write about them later (iPad life drawing, stripping off to retrieve a drone and having laser eye surgery, to name but three), but seeing these bowls of insects laid out like crunchy nibbles at the world’s creepiest party left me feeling unspeakably anxious. Perhaps it’s because the stand was run by a pest-control company.

That company is Rentokil, and the people running the stand – or Pestaurant as they call it – were completely open about it being more about PR than seeking a Michelin star. But it’s PR with a serious point: “Two billion people around the planet supplement their diet with insects on a day-to-day basis. They’re very high-protein, low in calories, high in vitamins and minerals – so they’re actually very good for you,” the man co-running the stall tells me.

I know from listening back to the transcript of our conversation that I spent 20 minutes at the Pestaurant. In that time, I ate eight species of bug, interspersed with a lot of small talk while I tried to put off sampling the next course. “It’s not as bad as everyone thinks,” the lady laying out the mealworm flour brownie at the other end of the table chimes in. “People put it off and put it off, and then they eat them and they’re like ‘oh is that it?’”

The most important meal of the day

Suitably buoyed, I tuck into what was to be my breakfast for the day: a small helping of buffalo worms. She’s right: there’s nothing to this. “It’s like eating grain, really, isn’t it?” I say, confidently turning to the next course: a handful of meal worms, more typically used to feed chickens and as fishing bait in the west.

I’m slightly perturbed by the way these specimens seem to wriggle on the spoon, but I’m told that these are definitely dead: they’re freeze-dried and shipped from the Netherlands. These, too, crunch with very little resistance, revealing an earthy flavour that’s hardly spectacular, but none too off-putting. Given my fear going into this, this feels like winning the gastronomic lottery.

Everything is going great until I hit the BBQ bamboo worms. The lady behind the counter tells me they’re a bit like Wotsits in texture, but the overpowering nature of the BBQ seasoning – imagine a significantly more concentrated BBQ mini cheddars taste – leaves me wondering what kind of flavour they’re trying to hide. That, combined with the gritty post-crunch texture forces me to gag for the first time, but I manage to avoid getting the ExCeL Centre’s cleaners involved.

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I’m on to black ants. “The same species you’d find outside your house,” I’m told, which doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence. I pick up a small handful and am immediately struck how furry they seem. I’m told they’re like “insect caviar” as I gingerly place a couple in my mouth, and find myself gagging for a second time. They have a really unpleasant acidic flavour, and are extremely bitter despite their small frame. My guide puts that down to the formic acid they produce, but I can safely say the experience has ensured that I will never end up scooping up a handful for a snack.

I was told that the insects were arranged from easy to difficult, so the fact that numbers #3 and #4 had left me gagging were giving me serious doubts about the Werther’s Original-sized june beetles on the end of the table (“the bigger they are, the longer they take to chew”). Nonetheless, I was given some hope by the flying termites, which were… fine. “That was nothing, really,” I confidently say after hunkering down on a couple. Slightly gritty, and a little husky, but okay. Like the other insects, they have a slightly earthy aftertaste.

If I were to award any of the insects with the coveted “Alphr Recommended” award, it would be the leaf-cutter ants. “You’ve probably seen nature documentaries where you’ve seen ants cutting away at leaves, and then they carry them across a bridge to build their nests,” my guide tells me as I poke around the bowl looking for one that doesn’t seem too intimidating. “These are the queens of those species. So they are bigger than worker ants. Those bulbous things you can see are the abdomen on them.”

“We’re onto the ones with heads now.”

We eat these together, as one of my guides hasn’t sampled their charms yet, but is immediately a fan: “I could eat these with a beer,” he muses. And yeah, they’re as close as anything I have that morning comes to tasty – the aftertaste reminding me of pistachio nuts. “I believe in Mexico they eat these like popcorn,” explains my guide. As I clear my palette with a bit of water he adds, “we’re onto the ones with heads now”.

Listening back to the tape, I can hear this is when I really start buying time with unnecessary conversation: I really don’t want to eat the chilli-flavoured chapulines. I comment that for the most part, there hasn’t been that much difference between the insects. “All insects are pretty much made up of the same sort of protein. You’ve got the chitin, which is the outer exoskeleton. The soft stuff is on the inside essentially, but because all of these have been dehydrated, that’s all you’re left with: just a little protein packet,” my guide explains.

I can buy time no longer, so pop the chapuline into my mouth. It’s strongly flavoured, but not identifiably chilli – in fact, it tastes like something that has sat in the cupboard for a while and managed to absorb the scents of an entire spice rack.

Then I’m face to face with the locusts – and I mean that quite literally. It’s a choice of biting off its head, Jelly Baby style, or starting with the other end and getting a mouthful of papery wings. I dig around the bowl for a prize specimen, but “they all pretty much look the same,” I’m reminded. I finally crunch down on it, and it’s okay. No gagging, just a variety of textures and the same nutty, earthy flavour.

I can’t, however, bring myself to eat the june beetle. “We had an 18-month-old child the other day, and he popped a june beetle straight in his mouth and sucked it for 30 seconds,” my guide says. Children, he reckons, are happy to put anything in their mouths, and explains that perhaps it’s our Western parental wrist-slapping that makes us so squeamish. “There’s no mental block in Eastern culture,” he explains.

It’s a bridge too far for me, despite how open-minded I’ve managed to be up to this point. I put it into my bag for a takeaway snack later. “Maybe have it with a coffee or something,” my guide suggests. So far, my coffee date with the dead june beetle has yet to materialise, and it should probably get the message soon enough: it’s not me, it’s definitely him.

So when meat becomes too expensive for the majority of us, will I be happy enough with crunching on insects? To be honest, it’s not really a substitute – they’re more like bar snacks than a full meal. Maybe sign me up for the lab-grown meat instead, but as food more generally? They’re okay. None of them tasted so delicious I’m actively looking to order some in, but only a couple really left me retching.

And given my fear going in? I’ll take that.