Yes, you should be eating bugs for breakfast

Entomophagy—the act of eating insects—is hardly new. For thousands of years, people around the world have eaten bugs. Today, an estimated 2 billion people eat bugs as a regular protein source. Crawlers like beetles, caterpillars, ants, grasshoppers, crickets, and termites are commonly eaten by people in countries like Mexico, China, Thailand and Ghana. 

Despite that, billions of others don’t see a grasshopper and think yum. But maybe they should. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that global agricultural production will have to grow by 70 percent to feed our planet’s swelling population, which is expected to top nine billion by 2050. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that food production and distribution contribute to between 21 and 37 percent of our total global greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing food demand will only intensify that trajectory.

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Insects, on the other hand, require just a fraction of the natural resources, including land and water, that animals like cows, chickens, and pigs need. Plus, farming insects emits next to no pollution. By comparison, farming insects produces 80 times less methane than cows. In terms of water usage, producing one pound of beef demands 1,850 gallons of water. One pound of chicken needs 500 gallons of water. But a pound of crickets? Just one gallon.

Eating insects is also tied to a growing list of health benefits for humans. Bugs are rich in protein, fats, vitamins, and minerals like iron, magnesium, and zinc. A Polish study published in 2021, which looked at the nutritional value of 100 grams of edible insects versus 100 grams of meat, found that meat—ranging from beef sirloin to chicken breasts—had a lower protein content than edible insects and both meat and insects were rich in the nutrients considered essential for the proper development and functioning of the human body. The study concludes that the widespread use of insects in the human diet could help solve our global malnutrition problems.

Across Europe and the US, there’s a growing (albeit, small) market of insect food companies. You can buy oatmeal made from cricket flour, put cricket protein powder in your smoothies, or snack on ground-up cricket crackers. The FAO has forecasted that the market for edible insects could be worth over $6 billion by 2030.

“We’ve seen a lot more consumers be more open to insect products. There’s a big shift in most people’s initial reactions. It’s gone from ‘That’s gross’ to ‘That seems weird, but if someone wants to eat it, OK,’” says Robert Nathan Allen, who goes by RNA, founder of Little Herds, an Austin, Texas-based non-profit focused on supporting the use of insects for food as an environmentally and economically viable source of nutrition. “People are more open to new foods, they’re more likely to eat ethically, with their bodies and the environment in mind. Sushi took decades to go from strange and unusual to exotic and luxurious to normal and commonplace.”

RNA says that over the past decade, a lot of insect food start-ups have come and gone. “There’s this hype cycle—a wide variety of companies get media attention, have successful crowdfunding campaigns, some get investments,” he says. “But moving from hundreds of units to hundreds of thousands of units, that’s a space that few companies have been able to get to.”

“I feel hopeful that we’ll get there. There’s an easy comparison to sushi in the ’90s. People were grossed out by the idea of eating raw fish, but now, sushi is everywhere.”

- Clare Whetzel

This brings us back to that college student at a farmers’ market, trying to convince people not to get grossed out by the idea of eating bugs.  

Clare Whetzel has been an entrepreneur from the beginning. As a kid, she used to sell rocks that she collected on hikes by the river to her mom. When she was 13, she started collecting feathers from the roaming chickens in her neighborhood and making feather earrings. She sold the earrings door-to-door to her neighbors. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Whetzel transferred to Colorado’s University of Denver. She took her first entrepreneurship class at DU in 2021 via Zoom while remote learning from her parents’ house in Sacramento, California. The class assignment was to come up with three original business ideas and pitch them to the class. The students would then form groups around the best ideas in the class.

Whetzel had listened to a podcast about the future of food and had been intrigued by the idea of grasshoppers as a smart source of nutrients. So, in her class, she pitched insect-based meal delivery boxes, like those fresh-food dinner kits that come in the mail, only made with bugs. Her professor’s advice: “Scale down and specialize, then expand later.”

In May 2021, Whetzel entered a DU business competition centered on start-ups addressing sustainability. She pitched the idea of taking mealworm powder—a more sustainable source of protein—and injecting it into everyday food that Americans might actually eat.  She won the contest and earned a $1,000 grant, which she used to buy ingredients to try out different foods made with bug powder.   

In her parents’ kitchen last summer, she tried making mozzarella sticks, breakfast patties, and macaroni and cheese—all made with bugs. “My mom would taste anything, but my dad and brothers weren’t so thrilled,” Whetzel says.

She started with cricket flour, then tried grasshoppers, beetles, ants, and tarantulas. (“The tarantulas were way too creepy and expensive,” she says.) Finally, she settled on organic dehydrated mealworms, which she found via an online supplier and then ground up into a powder using a coffee grinder. “Unlike some of the other bugs, mealworms didn’t have a taste or a strong smell,” she says.

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Mealworms have traditionally been used for pet food, but in January 2021, the European Food Safety Authority announced that dried yellow mealworms were safe for humans to eat, too.

In June 2021, Whetzel made peanut butter and chocolate granola, mixed with mealworm powder. Some extended family who were visiting sampled it and loved it. “You’re onto something,” they told her.

She named her company Illegal Oats because she wanted to convey that this food is disruptive—it’s breaking traditional rules. She makes the granola in the kitchen of DU’s innovator’s garage, a maker’s space for students. Whetzel also raises her own mealworms—to varying success—and she recently got introduced to a Colorado-based woman who, as a hobby during retirement, started farming mealworms and is soon going to supply her with the worms she needs for her granola.

So, can insect food be profitable? “That’s a really good question,” Whetzel says. “At first, I didn’t even give a thought to the idea that this business could fail. Maybe that was quarantine boredom,” she says. “But it’s hard to know how much people value eating insects, or if there’s enough of a market. I’m surprised at how open people are to the idea. There are enough early adopters that I hope others will start to catch on.”

Food culture can shift, and once-novel foods have certainly proven they can become mainstream. Aside from sushi, you need only look to lobsters—bottom feeders once fed to prisoners, now a delicacy. Or blue cheese, covered in mold yet served on many a charcuterie platter. “If we can normalize eating bugs enough to have it in restaurants and at grocery stores, that will be huge,” Whetzel says. “Right now, it’s still a novelty.”