Will We All Eat Bugs in the Future?
- Never been more excited to do anything in my whole life.
Okay.
Head first, that's the way they say to do it.
Oh, that head's coming off.
(crunching)
I just ate a bug head.
It's too crunchy.
(crunching)
It's nutty, very chewy.
Yep, got that exoskeleton.
Bottoms up, literally.
(laughs) I can't.
(inquisitive music)
Hey, smart people, Joe here.
Bugs!
When I say that word, what comes to mind?
Probably not restaurants or your next home cooked meal.
When most people think about bugs and food,
they think about, I don't know,
health code violations. (cat screeching)
Certainly not eating them.
But there are some people out there trying to change that
for some really good reasons.
I recently flew to Long Beach to attend a big bug banquet
where a bunch of talented chefs
are turning insects into fine dining.
I've heard that insects are the food of the future,
but I wanted to know why and maybe try some,
which is why I am at a feast where every dish on the menu
features edible insects
and since it's a holiday feast,
I invited a couple of my friends.
I've got Kyle Hill from the YouTube channel Because Science.
- Hey Joe, thanks for having me.
- Excited to eat some bugs?
- Oh (gags).
- Okay.
And she literally wrote the book about edible insects
and human evolution.
Julie Lesnik, Anthropologist from Wayne State.
- Hello.
- Bring on the first dish.
Oh, okay, what's in this?
- [Alex] You got a cornflower tostada
that's made with about 20% grasshopper flower.
A little bit of a black ant as a citrus salt component.
- That's gonna add a zing.
Why do these ants have this zingy citrus flavor?
- It's a chemical defense mechanism,
so they actually have formic acid
and they'll spit the formic acid and it
- Fantastic. - throws off their enemies.
And it thrusts-- - Didn't work too well for me.
(laughing)
- All right, let's try it. - Let's do it.
- I see what you did with the shrimp.
They're arthropods just like insects.
(crunching)
It's awesome.
- It's really good.
- I love this.
- I'm getting some of that zing now.
- Yeah, the formic acid is different from citrus.
It's a little pop.
- None this is screaming insect to me.
It's all used really well and really smartly.
- It definitely has one of the strongest flavors
in all the bugs we're gonna try.
- For being so small and being so potent,
well done ants and chef.
(upbeat music)
Aly, you have a kitchen full of bugs.
How did you get into having bugs in the kitchen,
eating bugs, getting other people to eat bugs?
- I was in Mexico for a public health project
and I had a taco with (speaks Spanish), or grasshoppers,
and that was delicious.
I started blogging, met bug people, fell in love,
and took off from their.
- Is there a scientific reason people don't eat bugs?
- People all over the world do eat bugs.
I think from our viewpoint we think eating bugs is weird,
but we're actually the odd ones.
- Is there something that let's you predict whether
or not some part of the world will
or won't have bugs as part of their diet?
- The number one predictor is latitude,
how close you are to the equator.
Part of the reason we don't like
seeing bugs in our kitchen is that we seal off our homes.
But when you live in the tropics,
you have a very different relationship with bugs.
What you see is that people have
the bugs that they know are harmful,
the ones that are helpful, and the ones that are delicious.
It is a natural found source
that gives you so many nutrients
it's almost silly to ignore it.
- People have these innate reactions
when they see creepy crawly things.
Is that any influence on whether people
will choose to eat this stuff?
- The disgust reaction, the churning stomach,
the gag reflex, it's real, it's a real emotion.
But the emotion is learned.
- This is not an innate biological fear of bugs.
- It's a neophobia.
- But we've changed that one crunchy bite at a time.
Actually, surprisingly delicious.
(upbeat music)
What delicious dishes do you have for us?
- I have sauteed green beans with garlic
and mealworms.
Then on the platter here,
I have mini pecan tarts with crickets.
- I can see the crickets.
- [Kyle] It's gonna be in my body soon.
- It's not a meal - Try and (speaks softly)
- without a mealworm. - everything.
(smooth jazz music)
- That's amazing.
- Huh.
If you didn't tell me that bugs were in it,
I wouldn't have known.
Which I guess is a compliment?
- That is amazing.
So good. - This one looks really good.
- You said this one was mine.
- That's the one that was
(speaks softly) - That one has a lot of
visible crickets
- I know. - happening on this one.
Okay, going in.
Are you sure there's crickets in here?
- The other flavors work really well.
The sweetness mixes with the nuttiness.
- They blend so well with the other flavors.
- It's really jumping into my mouth here.
- I wouldn't more acts of that thorax.
- I give that a two out of 10.
- Come on. - But I give this
another 10 out of 10.
(upbeat music)
How many people on Earth, around the world,
regularly consume bugs?
- I think the estimate is at least 1 billion people
are eating bugs today, right now.
- [Joe] Is that changing?
- We have such a negative attitude about eating bugs
and it's actually permeating in globalized society.
So people who rely on eating bugs
as a very important part of their nutrition,
if they start looking at what we do,
and then they feel stigmatized if they eat those bugs,
our negative reactions are harming them.
- That's the thing that makes me the most sad
is I do this on Instagram and different platforms
and I get asked,
"How many times were you dropped on your head?"
This is presented in a nice way
and we're working on educating folks,
but I do see that same phenomenon.
- It's amazing how our opinions about what progress is,
it starts painting bugs and savage and primitive
and that goes all the way back to a colonial history.
So Columbus, when he encountered people,
they were eating bugs.
These people were painted as primitive and savage
and animal-like.
Then the entire European continent's like,
"I don't wanna be thought of as primitive or savage"
and so then eating bugs was just
- Taboo. - was disgusting, taboo.
If we here can get on board with eating bugs,
then the world can go back to their natural resources.
(upbeat music)
- Oh!
- This is loaded potato.
There is a grasshopper butter,
which I cooked the potatoes in.
Also with furikake and spiced grasshopper.
- Here. - Give me one.
- This one's for you. - Thank you.
- I just wanna pop the whole thing in my mouth at once.
- That's what I'm doing. - Okay.
I mean, the bug is perfectly executed.
I can have a little crunch from the worm on top.
It's not jumping out and going, "I'm a worm potato."
- I like grasshopper butter,
which I didn't know I would say.
- Yeah, how do you milk them?
- Well anything with, anyway.
- Bug eating doesn't quite have the right ring.
Is there a technical term for this?
- Entomophagy.
- I got an exoskeleton in my teeth.
- Bring on the next course.
Oh!
- There's a lot going on here. - There's a lot going on.
We have several dishes to choose from.
- [Ofelia] The first one is mashed garlic
and cauliflower with mealworms.
- What's in the cookies?
- They are crickets.
- We call those chocolate chirp cookies.
- Chocolate chirp cookies.
- Oh, it's so good!
- Thought you'd like.
- Try the mashed potato first? - Mm-hm.
Textural mix is wonderful.
- Very good.
The nuttiness of the mealworm adds really nicely
to the cauliflower.
- Everything else is very smooshy and then you add that,
you get that crunch.
- Just like with the other ants,
I'm getting a little bit of citrus pop.
- Which is perfect with the avocado.
- It is just providing that texture, that additional flavor,
like any other ingredient
and you can start to retrain your brain
to associate this not as something that's disgusting,
nothing like that, but something that's food food.
- It's funny because when we talk about edible insects,
people think of it like eating it raw off the ground
or something and that's not how people
around the world eat it.
It's an ingredient.
- [Kyle] Wanna try the cookie?
- Wow, this is a delicious cookie.
- Really good.
- That's chirpin' delicious.
That's amazing, 10 out of 10.
You know what this just needs
is a little bit of cold cricket milk.
- You can't milk a cricket, Joe, stop trying.
- Cockroach milk is a thing, though.
- No. - Wait a second.
(upbeat music)
We have established that bugs are delicious,
but are they nutritious?
- Yeah, they're basically little vitamins
and they contain a bunch of macro and micro nutrients
that you wouldn't get from just eating the rib of a cow.
You're eating the whole thing of the bug
and you're getting all those healthy fats.
So where you would eat avocados or almonds or salmon,
you could eat a mopane worm
and get those really good healthy fats.
- That is the most millennial food in the world.
Mopane worm toast, can you imagine?
- Everything's very bio available, too.
That means your stomach can absorb it more.
- These sound in a lotta ways like
nature's perfect multivitamin.
They even come in pill form.
- One thing with the bugs, depending on which bug you eat,
you get a different nutrient profile.
With chimpanzees, who are our closest living relative,
they have fashioned these tools
to extract termites from the mound,
and the termites they're getting are the soldiers
and they're really protein-rich.
And if-- - Are they doing that
on purpose?
- Yeah, chimpanzees are frugivores.
Most of their diet comes from fruit
and so for a large-bodied chimp,
they have to supplement some protein in their diet.
- That's amazing that they're using this
like an actual literal vitamin shop out there in nature.
- When we go down the branches on human evolution
to about 2 million years ago,
we're working with the genus Australopithecus,
and we actually have evidence that they
were also eating termites.
The Australopithecines were likely doing
with these bone tools is digging into the termite mound
to access fatty-rich termites instead of the
protein-rich termites. - Like larva.
- Larva, yes.
I call it a pat Of butter.
- Delicious insect butter. - It is just straight up fat.
- Why would they be after fat?
Australopithecine brains are about
20% bigger than chimpanzees and our brains run on fat.
All the fatty acids are so important
for developing our brains
and for keeping them functioning properly.
- I can go and find basically any restaurant in America
and I'm gonna find plenty of fat in my diet.
But if you're walking around in Africa
and you're an early human,
you just don't have these sources of fat.
- Right.
- So this would've been a key nutrient
that they can't get anywhere else.
- When we think about humans and what makes us so unique
is how large our brains are.
So over the millions of years of evolution
since our last common ancestor,
our brains have been getting gradually bigger and bigger.
One thing we know that must mean
is that they must've been getting fat in their diet.
But when you hunt animals on the landscape,
they're very lean.
Anybody who hunts deer knows
that venison's a very lean meat.
- Having a source of fat in their diet
could have provided enough of a surplus
so that brains could get bigger
back in our human evolution. - Yeah.
(upbeat music)
- What do you call this?
- [Renate] It's cricket sourdough.
- It's bread, it's bread.
- It's bread. - It's bread, okay.
- [Julie] That we we got?
Okay it's bread. - Okay, okay.
- This loaf was about 10% ground-up crickets into this
replaced from the flour.
- That smells amazing.
- [Renate] The other one is cricket salt
with chili powder and honey.
- [Julie] That's one I can smell.
I need to try that.
- That's amazing.
I wanna eat this every morning, ants and all.
The ants with the herbs and the butter,
again that formic acid zip.
The zing, the zest.
- I see what anteaters are raving about.
- I always think about with bears.
Bears have giant claws and giant teeth,
but what they do is they go dig for termites and ants.
- I know. - They could kill anything,
but they after bugs. - All bark, no bite.
Actually, they bite very hard, don't play with bears.
- This is definitely high-end bug gourmet.
- [Joe] Next dish, please.
Oh, a pie!
- [Waitress] We have a mushroom chickpea pecan
and herb cricket tart.
- Why don't you give me
- Just a sliver? - one of the smaller slice?
- You just want a sliver?
- Not for the bug reason, just I'm watch--
- [Julie] 'Cause we're all very full.
- Yes, I'm full of a lot of bug bread and legs
and wings and compound eyes.
- Do you think this could go the way of sushi?
Just imagine what sushi must've been like
a couple generations ago when it was so weird.
Like, "Oh my god, raw fish?"
Now you can but them at gas stations.
- Everywhere.
- For dishes like this,
you really don't realize bugs are in it
and that's the point.
The only real way we're gonna get people in mass
to take up this kind of diet choice
is if it is as close to normal as possible.
- But here we're getting all the same nutrients,
it's delicious, crickets are far less smart than pigs,
and so you feel a lot better about eating it.
(upbeat music)
- Lotta people talk about sustainability, as well.
Bugs are so good on a variety of envirometrics.
They take less space than traditional livestock.
Great for indoor vertical farming.
Think future food like space travel.
They can reduce our reliance on anti-biotics
and livestock rearing.
They also are wonderful for biodiversity
and for regenerative soil health,
but the two main ones the we always hit on are emissions
and water use.
- The same amount of crickets, the same amount of beef,
it takes 1,000 or so times less water
to make the crickets as the beef?
- [Aly] Yeah.
- Okay, but emissions are a huge part of that, too.
We know that agricultural emissions
are a big part of our greenhouse gas problem.
- You can trace emissions to a lotta different things
from food transport and insects are great
for local agriculture.
They have a very effective feed to body mass
conversion ratio, too.
All that feed that you're giving the cows
and the pigs and everything else, a lot of it's wasted.
Some of it in terms of body heat since they're warm-blooded
but insects are cold-blooded
so you have just extremely efficient little systems here
turning input to output that's very nutritious.
- Environmental reasons aren't the only thing
people think about when they're like,
"What am I gonna eat?"
Are there other reasons to eat bugs
that are not just purely about climate change?
- A lot of people are making their dietary choices
based on impact on the animals we've been eating.
We don't treat them very well.
Some vegetarians actually really think
that insects are a great alternative
because crickets like dark, cramped spaces.
To put them in a bin and raise them,
it's not nearly the shock to their system
than what we're doing to the mammals.
From an animal welfare standpoint,
eating insects is a much more appealing option
for a lot of peoples than eating mammals.
- Delicious, nutritious, environmentally sustainableicious.
Is that a word?
- Now it is. - I think that's a word.
(upbeat music)
- Final thoughts, what do ya thinK?
- This is definitely my best experience
with this kind of dish I've ever head.
My previous experiences have just been,
"Hey, try this novelty."
When you're actually using it intelligently,
I think it can be as good as anything else.
I'm still eating it.
- As someone who really never ate bugs in almost any form
that I knew about before tonight, I am blown away.
The way these were worked in,
it's both so artful and just so natural.
Bug eating is not weird.
It's totally awesome.
- I've had lot of bug banquets, but this was superb.
- Guys, thanks for coming to this
awesome Thanksgiving dinner with me.
I'm thankful for crickets, mealworms, and all the rest.
It turns out eating insects isn't that weird
for humans after all.
We've been doing it for a long time.
Like most things that you eat,
you don't know if you're gonna like it until you try it.
As for me, well, I'm a bug eater now.
These chips are made from crickets.
(crickets chirping)
- [Group] Stay curious!
- And just one more thing.
I wanna send a huge thank you to my friend Kyle Hill
from the channel Because Science for joining me at dinner.
He makes great stuff, definitely go check it out.
And my friend Emily Graslie from "The Brain Scoop"
also has a really cool video about entomophagy,
eating insects, over on her channel.
Links to all of that down in the description
and as always, thank you to our patrons
for making videos like this possible.
As far as I'm concerned,
you're guests at our family dinner table every day.
We have great perks over on our Patreon page.
Definitely go check them out
and you can even join the ranks
of these Galaxy Brain patrons.
And pass the cricket quiche.
- No, I have all the cricket butter to myself.
- Yeah, where's that butter?
- Yeah, more cricket butter. - Share.
- Give me the cricket, you have to share.
- No!
- Pass the cricket butter, Kyle.
- No, you have to come visit me more often
if you want things from me. - Any pecan pies left?
Any of those tarts?
- Yeah, I want one of those pecan pies.
- Happy Thanksgiving!
- Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.
- Thanks.
