Now Aldi is weighing up whether to stock products by Yum Bug, which make the insect recipe kits.
Yum Bug founders Aaron Thomas and Leo Taylor, both 28, are competing against other start-ups to get their product on the supermarket’s shelves.
The duo were picked from hundreds of applicant’s to appear on Channel 4’s ‘Aldi’s Next Big Thing’ tomorrow.
Awesome!! I hope they sell them in Europe too.
Lol your profile picture and username suits this comment well.
I’m all for adding more food to the food supply but I would avoid eating lots of highly processed insect powder. It grosses us out for a reason. If it doesn’t taste mildly edible raw or slightly cooked it’s probably not good for the body in large doses.
I’m sure it’s healthier than beyond meat. But I think I would rather just be a vegetarian if I had to choose between bugs or grains + dairy.
I’ve eaten silk worms and they were pretty gross even with lots of sauce and stuff. Not something I would want to eat daily.
Wasp larva I hear taste really good raw (like shrimp) if you are brave enough to get them.
I think I would rather feed the bugs to a chicken, let them process the insect first then i’ll eat the chicken.
Hahaha, exactly, give me all the insects!
I personally dislike the taste of raw chicken.
I have not tried silk worms myself. The closest insect I have tried is the ‘chiniquil’ or ‘maguey worm’, which is fine raw but I do prefer it cooked. I eat them by themselves or in tacos:
I think escamoles (fancy ant eggs) have a very special taste and you can eat them similar to rice, except that they are super high in protein.
In the amazon I tried the palmetto weevils in a skewer, those are absolutely delicious, they are usually prepared like this, and the taste is kind of like chicken:
We also snack on chapulines, which is not so healthy if they are fried, but definitely healthier than chips because of their high protein content:
You say that you prefer to eat a chicken that has processed the insects already, but that is much more inefficient than eating the insect directly - a lot of the energy is wasted as it goes up the food chain.
Personally, I always found it very strange that people have an aversion to eating insects. For me it is pure irrationality, and an example of a cultural trait that is not based on any logic whatsoever. There is nothing inherent in insects that makes them gross. To be fair though, I might be a bit on the extreme side of the naturalist spectrum, so I understand that my views will not resonate with the average person 😄
If you eat raw chicken you want to eat it fresh and with the skin. Not month old chicken you get at the grocery. I personally like the taste. Not as much as raw beef but it’s ok. I eat raw beef raw beef liver, raw milk, raw eggs pretty often.
Insects often have a pretty intensely awful taste. LIke really bitter. I’ve bitten into apples right off a tree that turned out to be filled with bugs and the taste was like hell on my tongue. Like someone ate cheese tacos with to much hot sauce and shat in my mouth.
The chickens work as filters. It’s easier to get parasites from eating crickets than chickens eating the crickets. And waste is only waste if it was going to something more valuable. I consider myself pretty valuable. And the chickens help keep a yard pest free and help to fertilize it. So it’s not really wasteful if the chickens are serving more purpose. Your more broad point about being able to feed more people by using insects would have to be true though. Eliminating any source of food from any part of the food chain would decrease output.
Bugs will also have full form vitamin A, D, B 12 and so on. So I don’t have anything against them. Especially in traditional forms like you included here.
It’s like bug powder and highly processed bug burgers that I’m worried about. There is no long term data on consuming it.
I think the same way but also with raw meat. I just think the fear isn’t always irrational. I think it’s evolved. Cock roaches gross me out. And for good reason they are filled with parasites. Maybe that is a evolved defense.
I’m also into primal eating. Which would include eating raw meat, blood, seasonal fruit, honey, bone marrow. Just trying to emulate what our ice age ancestors ate. Most of human history was during a time where mega mammals were everywhere.
I’m sure they ate certain insects when times got tough so i’m cool with it.
In this I am probably being as irrational as those who I claim to be irrational about insects! The reason why I don’t like raw chicken is probably because I associate it with the taste of a poorly cooked chicken. So, biting into a chicken that I think will taste one way and then suddenly feeling a cold raw taste - combined with someone telling me that I can get sick.
I do feel the same with salmon though - and yet I like salmon sashimi a lot - so I would probably like raw chicken too if I tried it in the right context.
The acid in that scenario might have come from the apple itself, as apples will produce acid as a stress response when infested.
With ‘waste’ I meant the waste products (poop) and the metabolic energy used by the chicken. Generally the food chain is about 10% efficient - so to get 1 kg of usable consumable macros from chicken, they have to eat about 10 kg worth of usable macros from crickets. It is more complicated than just ‘efficiency’, as nutrients also get transformed, but from cricket - > chicken I don’t think the transformations are worth it. Unlike plant -> animal, where the animal concentrates protein.
I am not so sure about the parasites. I think it would be difficult for a parasite to infect crickets and humans. Chicken <-> human transmission seems more likely.
Yeah, exactly, I am guilty of this
You can always grow your own
I would like to! I have been looking into it. One thing I find problatic is that the life cycles can be long and complicated. Usually we eat the larvae and the adults fly, need space, and can have very specific reproductive needs. In the case of ant eggs, for example, the ants require large amount of underground space to build their colony.
I do plan on trying. I have bred a few insects in the past (crickets for my lizard and fruit flies), but not enough to eat in a meaningful way.