As with any food source, there are countless ways to cook and eat insects.
Crickets. Photo: Nordic Food Lab, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Cookies and cakes with insect flour are becoming popular - they pack in a lot of protein.
One increasingly popular product is flour – roasted crickets or grasshoppers ground into powder form, which can be used just like flour in both savoury and sweet foods. You can buy this online in various countries. For more information on regulations around edible insects, see here.
Termites. Photo: BUGS the film
Sweeties are also a popular way to consume insects. You can now buy giant leafcutter ants coated in Belgian chocolate in department stores like Selfridges. Or lollipops with fragrant ants inside. Cookies and cakes with insect flour are becoming popular too – they pack in a lot of protein, unlike standard confection which is mostly just sugar and fat. This makes cakes with insect protein particularly good as a snack whilst hiking.
These products are confined to the ‘novelty’ sections, perpetuating the idea that insects aren’t really ‘proper’ food. It seems likely that as entomophagy becomes more widespread insects will move from being seen as a gimmick or protein supplement to a real and diverse food source.
And that’s the attitude towards insects that you’ll see presented in this section of BUGSfeed that will hold a number of recipes treating insects as real food, as an independent ingredients that needs to be treated in an independent fashion - and in different ways to different outcomes. At times these recipes will be easily accessible everyday takes on how to utilize insects, and at other times they’ll be the advanced experiments of gourmet chefs.
