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THEY'RE HEALTHY. THEY'RE SUSTAINABLE. SO WHY DON'T HUMANS EAT MORE BUGS?

Feeding Madagascar: Inside an Edible Insect Farm

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By Aryn Baker
February 26, 2021 9:31 AM EST

Sylvain Hugel is one of the world’s foremost experts on crickets of the Indian
Ocean Islands. So when he received an email from a fellow entomologist in March
2017 asking for help identifying a species in Madagascar that could be farmed
for humans to consume, he thought it was a joke. “I’m working to protect those
insects, not eat them,” the French academic responded tartly.

But the emails from Brian Fisher, an ant specialist at the California Academy of
Sciences, in San Francisco, kept coming. Fisher had been doing fieldwork in
Madagascar when he realized that the forests where both he and Hugel conducted
much of their research were disappearing. Nearly 80% of Madagascar’s forest
coverage has been destroyed since the 1950s, and 1-2% of what remains is cut
down each year as farmers clear more trees to make room for livestock. The only
way to prevent this, Fisher told Hugel in his emails, was to give locals an
alternative source of protein. “If you want to be able to keep studying your
insects, we need to increase food security, otherwise there will be no forest
left,” Fisher wrote.


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His proposal was insect protein. More than two-thirds of Madagascar’s population
already eat insects in some form, usually as a seasonal snack. If there were a
way to turn that occasional snack into a regular meal by making it easily
available, it could help ease pressure on the island’s threatened forests.
Crickets, which are high in protein and other vital nutrients, were already
being farmed successfully in Canada for both human and animal consumption.
Surely Hugel, with his vast knowledge of Indian Ocean crickets, could help
identify a local species that would be easy to farm, and, more importantly,
might taste good?

For Hugel, his scientific curiosity competed with squeamishness. He knew that
crickets were healthy, and that they were high in protein, iron and vitamin
B-12. But the psychological barriers were equally high. He started with a
roasted, salted cricket. It took three attempts before he could relax enough to
actually taste, chew and swallow the cricket. To his surprise, it was good.
Really good. Three years later, he laughs at the memory of his first foray into
entomophagy. “It changed my life,” he says via video chat from his home in
France.

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Insects are now a regular part of his daily meals. He spoons cricket powder over
his morning yogurt, sprinkles larvae over his salads like bacon bits, and fries
up frozen crickets for supper. It also changed the direction of his academic
research. While he is still discovering new cricket species, he now regularly
publishes papers on the nutritional value of edible insects and findings about
best farming practices.

Meanwhile, the cricket farm he helped Fisher launch is up and running in
Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, producing several pounds of ground cricket
meal a day. The protein-packed, fiber-rich powder is now being used by
international aid agency Catholic Relief Services for country-wide famine relief
projects, as well as in school lunch programs and tuberculosis treatment centers
where patients often struggle to get adequate nutrition.

Sylvain Hugel, a cricket specialist, collects specimens in the Menabe Antimena
dry forest area in Madagascar on Nov. 22, 2019.
Andy Isaacson

In June, Valala Farms, named after the local word for cricket, will expand onto
an even bigger campus, with 25,000 square feet dedicated to cricket cultivation
(enough to produce 31,000 pounds of powder each year, or about 551,000 meals),
as well as an educational program to train future cricket farmers. The attached
research center is tasked with identifying which of Madagascar’s 100 or so
edible bugs have the right combination of taste, healthiness and farmability.
“For me entomophagy is the very solution for Madagascar,” says Hugel. “There is
no way to save the forests without taking care of the people who live near them,
and that means giving them food security.”





A SIX-LEGGED SOLUTION TO WORLD HUNGER

In seeking to protect Madagascar’s forests, Fisher and Hugel may have found a
solution to one of the world’s most pressing problems. The United Nation’s Food
and Agriculture Organization [FAO] says that agricultural production worldwide
will have to increase by 70% in order to feed a global population expected to
reach 9.1 billion by 2050. Yet agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of
natural destruction, threatening 86% of the 28,000 species most at risk of
extinction, according to a new report by the UK-based policy institute Chatham
House and the UN environment program.

Demand for animal protein in particular is increasing the strain on the
environment: 80% of the world’s farmland is used to raise and feed livestock,
even though animals only account for 18% of global calorie consumption.
Decreasing meat production, says the report, would remove pressure to expand
livestock operations while freeing up existing land to restore native ecosystems
and increase biodiversity.

There is a sustainable alternative to going meat-free, the FAO says: edible
insects. Grasshoppers, crickets and mealworms are rich in protein, and contain
significantly higher sources of minerals such as iron, zinc, copper, and
magnesium than beef. Yet pound for pound they require less land, water and feed
than traditional livestock. Insect farming and processing produces significantly
lower greenhouse gas emissions. Not only do insects produce less waste, their
excrement, called frass, is an excellent fertilizer and soil amender. Agnes
Kalibata, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ special envoy for the 2021
Food Systems Summit, says that farming insects could provide an elegant solution
to the intertwined crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger and
malnutrition. “Insects are 60% dry weight protein. I mean, honestly, why
wouldn’t we use them?” she says. “But we have to be able to put them in a form
that is acceptable to different cultures and different societies.”

Just as in Madagascar, there are technical and cultural barriers to overcome
before bugs compete with beef (or any other meat) for space on the global dinner
plate. While two billion people, mostly in Africa, Latin America and Asia,
already eat insects, in Europe and North America bugs are more likely to be
associated with filth, not food. But attitudes are starting to change. Canada’s
nationwide grocery chain Loblaws has been stocking locally produced cricket
powder since 2018, and in January the European Union food safety agency declared
yellow mealworms safe for human consumption, allowing producers to sell
insect-based foods throughout the continent. Analysts at Barclays Bank now
estimate that the insect protein market could reach $8bn by 2030, up from less
than $1bn today. Still, that’s a fraction of beef’s $324 billion.



Lemurs in Kirindy Forest, a private reserve along Madagascar's west coast that
has suffered profound deforestation in recent years, on Nov. 23, 2019.
Andy Isaacson

In order to compete, manufacturers will have to figure out how to successfully
market bugs to consumers. The sustainability halo and health aspects may be
enough for some, but are unlikely to work on a wider scale, says Cortni
Borgerson, an anthropology professor at Montclair State University in New
Jersey. “You can’t just say, ‘this source of protein you’ve been eating all your
life? Well you can’t have that anymore. Here’s another source, and it’s got six
legs instead of four.’ That will never work.” The goal, she says by video chat
from New Jersey, should be “to find something that people would rather be
eating, or would like just as much.” In other words, insects have to taste at
least as good as what they are meant to replace.

In the taste stakes, crickets still come up short. Fried and dusted with chili
lime or nacho spice, they don’t taste much different from say, corn nuts or
extra crispy shrimp. In powder form, it has a mild, nutty flavor and is best
used like a protein boost, sprinkled over porridge, stirred into a vegetarian
chili or folded into banana bread batter. Devotees say they can’t get enough,
but even they admit that crickets may have a hard getting past that most damning
of descriptions—a meat alternative. Madagascar, however, has a better contender:
the bacon bug.


A BUG FIT FOR A TACO

Thirteen years ago, while working on her PHD dissertation in Madagascar’s
Masoala Peninsula, Borgerson encountered a problem. Locals in the UNESCO World
Heritage Site were eating lemurs and other endangered animals to add protein to
their otherwise spare diets. In search of sustainable substitutions, she
canvassed residents about other meats they liked to eat. Chicken and pork often
came up, but so did an unfamiliar item: sakondry. When Borgerson asked what it
was, a few of the locals came back with a plate piled high with plump fried
bugs. As a Midwesterner with a rather tame palate, to Borgerson the idea of
eating them was appalling. But her prohibition against refusing a meal soon
kicked in, she recalls. To her surprise, they were delicious, with a taste and
consistency not unlike cubes of pork belly she would fry up back home—“crunchy
on the outside, with that fatty meatiness of bacon in the middle.” Even her kids
like it, she says, “which is saying a lot for American children.”




The villagers loved sakondry, but the bug wasn’t always easy to find. The
solution to stopping lemur hunting, Borgerson realized, was not “four legs bad,
six legs good,” but rather, how to make something the villagers already wanted
to eat easier to get. Sakondry had never been studied, so Borgerson started
working with entomologists like Fisher and local conservation groups to figure
out the insect’s life cycle and feeding habits. Once they discovered the ideal
host plant, a kind of native bean, the villagers started planting it among their
crops and along local pathways. With a ready supply of tasty protein growing
just beyond the front door, villagers had less reason to go to the forest to
hunt. Two years on, says Borgerson, who plans to publish a paper on her
findings, lemur poaching in the area has gone down by 30-50%.

Farming insects is not the only solution for Madagascar’s threatened forests,
says Tiana Andriamanana, Executive Director of the Malagasy conservation
organization Fanamby. Education and stronger environmental protection laws are
equally important. But it’s a start. “We need to consider alternatives. The
number of people in Madagascar, in the world, is growing. We can’t continue to
eat meat at this rate, but we don’t all want to be vegan either.”

Sakondry’s taste profile seems tailor-made for the American palate; Borgerson
recommends it as a filling for in tacos. Yet she is not suggesting that
midwestern ranchers switch from bulls to bugs anytime soon. Instead she is
pointing to what will reduce overall meat consumption globally: not prohibition,
not guilt, but finding alternatives that are equally delicious. “You want to
make it easier for individuals to make the choices that they would rather be
making,” she says. In Masoala, that was sakondry. Other communities and regions
have different preferences and, especially in drought-stricken areas, needs.
That’s where Fisher, the ant-specialist-turned-cricket-farmer comes in.

A staff worker harvesting mature adult crickets at Valala Farms in Antananarivo,
Madagascar on Nov. 20, 2019.
Andy Isaacson

Though he set out to save forests, Fisher’s cricket powder is doing more to
alleviate famine and improve nutrition in Madagascar. His production facility is
in the country’s urban center, far from the forested regions where locals
struggle to find alternatives to hunting and clear cutting grazing grounds. To
really have an impact, he says, farmed insects not only have to be as good as
meat, they also have to be easy to grow, and hyper-local. At the Valala Farms
research center, scientists, biodiversity specialists and entomologists are
working together to identify the most promising edible insects for each climatic
region, and figuring out how to farm them at scale. His goal, he says, is to
develop an “insect toolkit” that can be adapted to local needs, whether it’s
protein powder to address malnutrition, a meat alternative, grubs for a chicken
farm, or something that can turn brewery waste into an additive for depleted
soils. “We are trying to take advantage of 300 million years of insect
evolution,” he says. “We want that whole spectrum in our toolkit so that we can
go and offer solutions wherever we go, in Madagascar and across Africa—wherever
you have poverty combined with malnutrition and biodiversity issues.”




And why stop in Africa — or Earth, for that matter? People are so quick to
imagine themselves going to other planets if things get really bad here on
Earth, he says. “But what would you eat on Mars? You would have to design
systems to produce protein, and insects are the most efficient.” He pauses his
rapid-fire delivery to make a mental note: “I should write a proposal to NASA to
do research on what insect would be the most efficient for converting protein in
space travel.”


THE HATCHING OF A TREND

It may be a while yet before sakondry are sent to space. In the meantime,
entomophagy advocates say a cultural shift is already in the works, particularly
among the young and adventurous urbanites who will be setting food trends for
generations to come. “It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s never going
to 100% replace meat, but those of us who are health conscious and
environmentally aware have already started making that transition,” says
biologist Jenna Jadin, who wrote Cicada-licious, a cookbook featuring cicada
dumplings and other treats, just in time for the 2004 hatching of Washington
D.C.’s 17-year cicada cycle (the next hatching is this summer. Get your skillets
ready).

The cookbook was semi-satirical, penned in part to demystify the phenomenon. At
the time the idea of eating bugs was outrageous. These days, her local organic
grocery store has a whole aisle dedicated to insect products: chocolate-covered
mealworms, cricket pasta, peanut butter-cricket balls and a line of cricket
chips called Chirps. And one of America’s most famous chefs, José Andrés, has
been serving chapulines, sauteed grasshoppers, at his Mexican restaurant Oyamel
since 2004.

Food culture does change. Five hundred years ago, Italians thought tomatoes were
poisonous. In the 1800s, Americans considered lobsters to be trash food and fed
them to prisoners. Few cultures ate raw fish 50 years ago; now sushi is
ubiquitous. Insects are likely to follow the same trajectory, says Fisher, who
suggests salt-roasted crickets served with beer as the ideal “gateway bug.” The
sustainability factor, the health aspects, those are the angles that will make
people want to try edible insects, he says. The rest is easy. “If it’s done
right, they will keep coming back for more, because it tastes really good.”

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