Excuse Me, There’s a Cricket in My Stir-Fry: Getting Over the Ick of Eating Insects
If someone says they have butterflies in their stomach, they’re usually referring to a stomach-churning sense of anxiety deep in their belly. But now, they might instead be talking about what they’ve just had for lunch.
On 8 July 2024, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) approved 16 species of insects for consumption in Singapore. Crickets, grasshoppers, locusts, mealworms, silkworms and even a species of honeybee are now creeping and crawling their way onto our supermarket shelves, supplement counters and restaurant menus as you read this.
There are caveats, of course. Businesses that wish to import, cultivate or transform insects for human consumption or as animal feed for food-producing animals need to adhere to the SFA’s new insect regulatory framework.
Rules in the bug-eating playbook state that insects cannot be harvested from the wild and must be cultivated in a controlled environment. Also, no contaminants may be introduced to them during farming or processing to ensure that they are safe to eat.
Why Are We Eating Bugs Now?
The approval of insects for consumption in Singapore is in line with a longstanding push by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) promoting insects as a cheaper, more sustainable protein source for a growing world population.
Besides containing lots of high-quality protein, amino acids and vitamins, what makes insects so desirable as a food source is their better-than-average feed conversion rate, requiring only a fraction of the feed that cows, chickens and sheep eat for the same amount of protein.
This also means that farming insects isn’t just more economically efficient due to the bugs’ shorter life cycles and quick reproduction rate, but more environmentally friendly too, as it results in fewer greenhouse gases. It also needs less water and space compared to conventional livestock agriculture.
This last bit is especially salient for Singapore, as more than 90 percent of our food is imported, leaving us vulnerable to global food supply chain disruptions. The farming and import of insects can help us diversify our food sources, improving our food resilience even as we work toward achieving the “30 by 30” goal, where 30 percent of our nutritional needs are produced locally by 2030.
Bugs Have Been on the Menu Worldwide for a Long, Long Time
But if the thought of substituting black field crickets for the blood cockles in your char kway teow is making you go bug-eyed, here’s some food for thought — the practice of eating insects has been around for tens of thousands of years.
Since prehistoric times, human hunters and gatherers dined on bugs to survive in between hunts. Then came the ancient Romans who turned insect foraging into bona fide feasts by roasting locusts and grasshoppers for the banquet table. A special delicacy was the beetle larvae, fattened on a diet of flour and wine before being served to the Roman elite.
You can find out more about the history of bug-eating in Edible Insects and Human Evolution by Julie J Lesnik, author and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. In her book, she details how insects played into the diets of our distant hominin ancestors, tracking their evolution all the way to modern society.
Get the book here: eBook
Many People Still Eat Insects Today
Even now, insects are eaten in many countries around the world, forming part of the traditional diets of at least two billion people. While bugs are consumed in both North and South America as well as Africa, the continent of Asia is buzzing ahead in entomological epicureanism. It accounts for more than 900 edible bug species out of the 2,200 worldwide recorded in the study, with countries like Thailand, India, China and Japan leading the way in consuming the most types of insects.
Examples of insect-driven gastronomy in Asia include deep-fried bamboo worms, red ants and even scorpions on skewers at Thai street markets, along with inago no tsukudani — or grasshoppers boiled in soy sauce, sugar and mirin, Japan’s most common insect dish.
For more on the subject, read insect researcher Joshua Evans’ On Eating Insects: Essays, Stories and Recipes. The book contains essays on the cultural, political and ideological significance of eating insects with tantalising bug recipes — complete with descriptive tasting notes.
Get the book here: Physical Book
Getting over the Ick Factor
However, there’s no getting over the fact that chomping down on six-legged critters can be icky for the unseasoned “insectivore”, due to some combination of fear and disgust responses triggered deep within our human brains when we spot an insect near our plate — let alone, on it.
Just telling yourself that the insects brought into Singapore have been regulated, tested and approved wouldn’t be enough to convince ourselves that eating them wouldn’t hurt a fly (figuratively).
There are a few ways you can do this: First, you can build up your appetite for insects by starting with tinier morsels, before building up to the more adventurous winged and legged bugs.
Next, try incorporating them into familiar dishes — think mealworms hidden in an omelette or tossed into a fiery mala stir-fry. This will help you get used to the taste of your chosen critter and more importantly, used to the idea of eating insects.
Finally, if all else fails, you can always try de-bugging — as in, consuming insects in an alternative form, such as insect-based protein powder or snack bars. You’d be getting all the benefits of nutritious bugs, without having to pick locust legs out of your teeth.
Maybe then, you’d be able to well and truly say that edible insects are the bee’s knees.
Food sustainability is just one pillar of the broader sustainability movement. You can discover more sustainability-related content through NLB’s LearnX Sustainability, where you’ll find resources, programmes and sustainability communities across themes such as green technology, sustainable fashion, and the green economy.
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