The Year of the Cricket
By Megan Molteni
It’s 4:50 p.m., ten minutes until the post office closes, and Laura D’Asaro is hustling down a side street in Cambridge, Massachusetts as fast as possible while pushing a hand trolley loaded up to her chest with towers of shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes. It’s a trip both hectic and familiar; every day D’Asaro visits the warehouse of her new company, SixFoods, to print out labels and pack up orders of its signature snack chip: Chirps. From there, it’s a short scramble to the gatekeepers of standard shipping and the Chirps are on their way to co-ops, natural food stores and personal residences all over the United States. What gives her the energy to do all the grunt work required of a new start-up while plotting the next great paradigm shift in American eating? Probably the same thing that powers her Chirps — cricket power. Or rather, cricket powder.
The first time D’Asaro intentionally ate a bug was in Tanzania. She was walking down the road when she came upon a woman off to the side selling fried caterpillars. Having been an on-again, off-again vegetarian on account of her opposition to the inhumane practices of factory farming and its environmental impacts, D’Asaro had always found it easy to turn down strange meats on ethical grounds. But she’d never considered how she felt about insects. So because she didn’t have a good reason to say no, she gave them a shot. When she bit down, the taste of lobster flooded her mouth. “All I could think was ‘wow!’” she said, recalling the incident.
When her study abroad program was over she returned to Harvard, but she couldn’t get those caterpillars out of her head. She started researching entomophagy (the eating of insects) and the more she learned the more excited she became. It turns out; you can raise insects quite easily without antibiotics or growth hormones, because they naturally thrive in small, contained spaces in the wild, unlike other domesticated livestock species. And because they’re cold-blooded, crickets and other edible insects can be harvested humanely by freezing. Basically, they get cold, go to sleep, and never wake up. No slaughterhouses or kill floors necessary. All of this was intriguing to D’Asaro. “I kept thinking, ‘Could this be a sustainable protein source that I can feel good about?’”
To read the rest of this story, head on over to The Riveter Magazine.
