Selects: Are crickets the future of food?

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

0:31on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. I hope you're having a great weekend so far. Do you want to know about crickets and how you can sustain yourself on them? Well, then listen to this episode, Are Crickets the Future of Food? And this is from September 7th, 2017. I hope you enjoy it all over again.

0:57Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:07Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh W. Chuck Clark. There's Charles Malcolm Bryant. And there's Jerry the Wiz rolling. That sounds like an Aaron Cooper poster gone bad. Yep. Already. Yeah. Maybe we'll have like the swirly face, like the weird people in Jacob's Ladder. It's funny. we had a office visitor a couple weeks ago and I don't think you were here. In fact, I know you weren't here because you would have been in here. But there's our great stepbrothers. The movie Stepbrothers, for those of you out there, there's a promo of John C. Reilly and Will Farrell with an Olin Mills type posed photograph.

1:50And Aaron Cooper, our buddy from Kansas who does our great Photoshop stuff, made us into, I was John C. Rowley and you were Will Ferrell. And the guy came in and was looking around and was like, oh man, these are great. And he went, oh, look at that. And he went, that looks like, I don't know, it looks like it could be like something like the movie Stepbrother or something. And I said, oh, that's exactly what it is. Yeah. I tried to make him not feel bad. That was nice of you. That was very gracious of you as a host. Yeah, like he didn't quite zone in on all of them were us. I gotcha. You should have like clapped loudly beside his ear.

2:31Man, I had a little scary thing today. What happened? If I may, this is kind of part PSA. This has nothing to do with cricket farming. Okay. But we're getting our basement waterproofed because for 13 years it's been leaking water like really bad. So much so that we have mold now. Oh, yeah. Black mold? Yes. Oh, no. We're also getting mold remediation done at the same time. Man. So needless to say, that's a fun, fun way to spend a lot of money. Mm-hmm. But I come home today, and my carbon monoxide alarm is going off. Oh, man. Because these yahoos are using a gas-powered concrete saw in our basement.

3:14No. And it's like full-on saying, you know, get out of the house. And my animals are in there. Oh, man. And I just happened to go home after I went to a coffee shop to study because I needed to grab something. But, like, I literally could have come home to dead animals. Man. And dead workmen in the basement. Yeah, those guys, too. Wow, I'll bet they're not the sharpest tacks in the box anymore. It was weird, man. And they were down there. I mean, not only did they not have on so much as a dust mask for the gas, but, like, concrete dust is really dangerous, too. They're like, I don't care. I've got Obamacare.

3:52It was so weird, man. And just it freaked me out to the point where Emily, she wanted to, like, fire the guy. He wasn't even there, like, you know, the foreman or owner of the company. His subs were there? Yeah, and she wanted to be like, man, if he doesn't understand that this is dangerous. And he said, you know, open up your windows. It'll be clear in 15 minutes. And it took two hours for that alarm to stop going off. Oh, my gosh. Wow, that is really scary. It was really bad, man. And I was out on my deck basically for the rest of the morning until I came in with my dogs and my cat in a crate.

4:25Man, that's like how some people commit suicide. I know. You know? Yeah. And these guys are just doing it gratis for you. Yeah, it was weird. Yeah, anyway, so I'm slightly shaken. Yeah, I'll bet. I'm glad you made it, man. You look good. You look okay. Thank you. You look healthy. Your pallor isn't gaunt. I think you're okay. I just got to calm down here. The sound of the crickets on our miniature cricket farm here are soothing me at least. I know. They put me to sleep. I'm glad we set that up. That was pretty good. That was one of our better segues, sadly enough. Thanks. Yeah, we are talking crickets, aren't we?

5:05Yeah, we covered entomophagy. I meant to look up when, but it seems like a long time ago. Right. And that's eating bugs and insects. But this is focusing specifically on crickets because by all accounts, they seem like sort of our best bet at trying to get something like this going in America for real. Yeah. I mean, they're pretty easy to raise. They don't require much space. You can set up your own cricket farm at home. and really we should say the point of all this, the whole reason anybody would want people to start raising crickets at home is because the, well, the earth is about to collapse and our food supply is in real danger, right?

5:56So I've got some stats for you, Chuck. Okay. So meat consumption per capita has increased into the developed world. Actually, it's doubled in the last 30 years. Wow. And that's thanks in no small part to the rise of the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, who have huge, massive populations. And as they entered the capitalist global economy, have generally become enriched. And the more money they have, the more meat a civilization tends to consume, at least these days, right? Yeah. So that doesn't seem bad in and of itself until you look into what kind of resources it takes to actually raise meat.

6:40So you ready for this one? I don't know. I'm afraid. To produce one pound of meat. That's a half a kilo, basically, of meat. Is this beef? Beef, sorry, yeah. it requires about 2 ,400 gallons of water. I've heard stuff like that before. Which is like absolutely nuts. Even when you consider that not only are you watering the cow, you're also watering the crops that you feed to the cow. So there's double water consumption. But one of the reasons cattle, beef requires so much water is because you only consume 40 % of the cow. So 60 % of the water is going to sustain parts of the cow you're not even eating, right?

7:28So there's a lot of wasted water, even if your water delivery system is 100 % efficient, right? That's just water. 51 % of the greenhouse gases that are emitted on planet Earth come from animal agriculture. Yeah. 51%. And one third of the world's adequate or high quality cropland has been lost to erosion or pollution in the last 40 years. Now, that's a huge problem, whether we are all vegetarians or not, because we're talking cropland. But we use way more cropland to feed our livestock than we do to feed ourselves. Something like 56 million acres of land are used to grow crops in the United States to feed animals.

8:15Four million are used to grow crops for human consumption. So there's a lot, a lot of resources that are used up just from meat-based diets, right? A lot of people say, well, just go to plant-based diets. And other people say, you can't get enough protein from plant-based diets, which apparently is not true from what I'm seeing. Other people are saying, fine, you want some protein, I got something for you. And it's crickets. Yeah, I'm kind of, well, not surprised, but it goes to show you the population boom if meat consumption has increased that much in the face of probably more vegetarianism and veganism than ever before, too, you know?

8:57Well, that's kind of heartening. Like, if there does seem to be, I guess if societies follow... Yeah, I'd like, we should, I mean, we've been dancing around doing episodes on vegetarianism and veganism for a while, so we should probably tackle that at some point. All right. I'm kind of curious about the history because it seems like in the, like, probably since the onset of America until, and then I'm talking off the top of my head here, but until probably the 90s, it seemed like everybody was just like meat, meat, meat, meat, meat. Well, there's a, I mean, it's definitely associated with wealth, right?

9:38If you can afford to eat a nice steak, it kind of indicates you have a certain amount of status in your society, right? Well, like the 50s, it seems like they would eat steak for lunch. Right. And I can't imagine a steak for lunch that seems so indulgent. Yeah, I think it is. You know? Yeah. Like, yeah, just give me the 20-ounce ribeye for lunch. Right. It's just, I don't know. I can't imagine that. And three martinis. I don't argue with that part. That is pretty indulgent. Three martinis and a 20-ounce ribeye for lunch. I mean, that was Don Draper, you know? Yeah. I never saw that show. I know.

10:15I never saw it. It's available. Where? Is it out there, really? I thought they erased it all. Yeah, they did. They said, that's it. It's done. Uh-huh. Didn't he go become a lumberjack at the end? No, he did not. Oh, okay. Oh, that's Dexter. Oh, man. I know we talked about the ending of that show. Crazy. I actually never saw the end of that one. Oh. You just told me about it. Yeah. I think you saw it to yourself just to watch the finale. Okay. So this dude, Kevin, how would you pronounce that? Bach Huber. B-A-C-H, which is fine. That's clearly Bach. And H-U-B-R, you just don't often see two H's side by side.

11:01No. So anyway, Kevin Bach Huber. Nice. is a dude that is kind of championing, well, not kind of, very much championing this movement. In 2007, he went to Thailand and tasted crickets, deep fried crickets. And he's from California, and he was like, hey, this is really good. He said far out. They've been doing this. In Thailand, since the late 90s, the king established a big growing program for crickets and cricket farms. Education in schools, like, you know, This is a good way to get protein in your diet. And he said, I think this is the direction America should go, and I'm going to get in on the money side of it.

11:46Yeah. Like the farming of it. Apparently it's a$20 million industry already. Not bad. No, it isn't. And we should say that Bach Huber is one of several people who are into this, the idea of cricket farming, commercial cricket farming. Yes. and he's definitely one of the OGs for sure. His business was the first to get approval to sell crickets as food in the United States. He got FDA approval because the cricket industry actually is kind of old. Well, it's not too old, but I saw anywhere between 50 and 70 years old in the U.S., and they were raised to, say, feed fish for commercial fish farming or to grind up as a protein supplement for livestock feed.

12:33So people have been raising crickets for a while or to feed to reptiles to sell them to pet stores. Yeah. So there was an established infrastructure of cricket farming. But making the transition from selling it to feed to cows or fish or snakes to selling it to people to eat directly, that was a big step. and Bockhuber was the first one to take it in the U.S. I should just say, the reason I point out he's just one of many is because this HowStuffWorks article was basically like, here's my report on Kevin Bockhuber's TED Talk. Sort of. You know? Yeah. I think he definitely deserves credit because he's leading the charge, but so are other people as well.

13:20Yeah, he's woven throughout this thing, though. Yeah. And, you know, if you listen to the Entomophagy episode, episode? No, it's episode. we pointed out then, and it bears repeating, that America is new to this, but I think it was Canada and the United States and Western Europe are literally the only places on Earth that don't consume insects as a regular part of their diet these days. So this article kind of says the standard 80 % of the world regularly consumes insects as part of their diet. I saw that there's a food and agriculture organization, the UN organization report said something. It was more like about a third of the population rather than 80 percent, maybe like 30 to 35 percent, which is still significant.

14:11Yeah, that's a big difference. It is. And in the West specifically, the idea of eating bugs is not it's not commonplace. Right. And I actually saw a pretty good explanation for why. Like 13 of the 14 large livestock animals that are domesticated are found in Eurasia and made their way over to the Americas. Right. And those things, those animals provide not just meat, but also things like milk, clothing, everything, basically. So since these what you would call Western countries had access to these domesticated animals, they never needed bugs as a food source. And then secondly, since they were raising domesticated animals, by definition, they had a sedentary agricultural lifestyle, which meant that their exposure to bugs was bugs as pests.

15:15Right. So not only were bugs not edible, they were something that were just undesirable on their face. Oh, sure. So that led to the—it closed the door on bugs being eaten by Westerners. And so that came to be filled by a sense of disgust, which is a basic human emotion, but it's the only one that's culturally bound, which means you learn what is disgusting from your cultural group. Yeah, for sure. But that also means you can unlearn it too. Well, if Big Cricket has anything to do with it. Why don't we take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk about a UN report that kind of changed a lot of things about four years ago.

16:11Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one person billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

16:46I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:22All right. So I promised you a UN report. 2013, there was a big kind of sea change. I don't know about sea change. It was the beginning. Beginning of a sea change. They issued a report called Edible Insects, colon future prospects for food and feed security. And it was basically just championing entomophagy and all the benefits that surround it, like how nutrient dense crickets and other insects are, the fact that it's socially sustainable, economically viable and friendly, environmentally friendly. And it kind of, you know, kind of paints it as like, hey, this, this is the future, or it could be part of the future at least, of getting protein into, you know, Americans.

18:14Right. And the report itself didn't focus exclusively on crickets, but crickets feature prominently in the report. They're the star. It was about bugs in general and eating bugs in general. And it made a pretty big splash. I remember when it came out. It really hit the news cycle pretty hard. But it also caught the attention of that Bockhuber guy, who said, all right, I think I'm going to get into this, because he'd already been exposed to eating crickets in Thailand, and then when that UN report came out, he, I think, began his startup here in the States, his commercial cricket farm startup. Yeah, it's funny.

18:51They put in this article that it was the most popular document in the history of the UN. Yeah, I didn't see that anywhere. I think he said that at his TED report. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, it definitely made a splash. I'll give him that for sure. Yeah, he spoke at a TEDx Youngstown, Ohio, because that's where he's based. That's where his company is. Right. And I guess he just made up his own TEDx, probably. Right. All right, so let's talk about crickets. Well, all insects in particular are very rich in protein, like we've talked about. They have a lot of healthy fats, a lot of zinc, a lot of iron, a lot of calcium.

19:30and there's something called, I guess, efficient animals. Well, yeah. I mean, this is when vegetarians and vegans are, like these kind of terms make their skin crawl, I'm sure. But the kind of efficiency you get out of raising and killing and eating an animal is on a spectrum. And, you know, from cows, like you talked about, it's probably the worst, I would guess, don't you think? Right, right. Right. The animal itself is efficient at converting food that you feed it into stuff that you can get from it. Yeah. So like you said, not a lot of the cow is used to eat. No, it's like 40 % of a cow is edible and digestible.

20:14And I think the chicken is about the most efficient animal protein right now. Right. Nothing like crickets. So there's two different things here, right? Right. So you've got efficiency in nutrient conversion, which is say, like if you eat an apple, you can convert, you know, X amount of the energy available in the apple into, you know, energy for yourself. Metabolism, right? And poop. Right. Yeah. But poop is waste. So that stuff wouldn't count toward efficiency. It would actually subtract from your efficiency and lower your efficiency. If you ate an apple and used every bit of it and it produced zero poop, you would have 100 % efficiently converted that apple into useful energy, right?

20:58And that'd be a weird apple. It would be. It'd be a magic apple and you wouldn't need a poop chute. But instead you do because there is no such thing as 100 % efficiency in any animal, right? Right. But some are better than others, like you were saying. And with a cricket, it's something like they're like 12 times more efficient at converting food into usable energy or stored, in this case, stored protein, right? Yeah. So for every kilogram of live cricket weight, which is a pretty substantial amount of crickets, but kilogram to kilogram or pound to pound, it just takes 1.7 kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of live crickets.

21:42Not bad. For a cow, it takes 10 kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of beef. Very inefficient by comparison. So if you take the fact that it doesn't take much feed to produce a biomass of crickets, and that crickets are 80 % edible and digestible compared to the cow's 40 % edible and digestible, then you really have a, if you're just going pound to pound or kilogram to kilogram, and much more nutrient-dense, much more efficient, and then therefore much less wasteful animal that you could eat. Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that crickets are cold-blooded, so they're very much more efficient at converting that feed into protein.

22:29And crickets aren't even the most efficient insect. No, no. I'm not sure which one is, actually. I think mealworms are pretty efficient. You just said that because you're eating a mealworm. Right. Well, I have a mealworm farm I was going to ask you to buy in on. Oh, really? Uh-huh. All right. In my pocket. See? Gross. Is that a mealworm farm in your pocket? It is. My pocket mulch. So, like we mentioned, Mr. Bach-Ruber is, if he's not German, he should be. Kevin Bach-Ruber? I think he's Irish-German. maybe. It's spelled K-V-N though, so we're just inserting vowels for him. Right, like D-N-C-E. What's that?

23:20It's this band. Probably a young person's band? I believe so. No wonder, I don't know. But he is one, I think they're about, and this has probably changed even since this is written, about 25 or so cricket startup farms here in the United States. Yeah, I couldn't find the current number. Yeah, let's just say at least 25. Okay. Although I'll bet they go under pretty quick. You think so? I could see, I could see losing your shirt on cricket farming right now. It's so, it's just so early and the, the market is so not there and the, the stuff they're producing is so expensive. Well, and their output right now is still really small, um, in the, in the early years here.

24:04But, But, you know, the dream for him and all these cricket farmers is that one day it will, I don't think they have designs that will ever be like in some parts of the world where it's on every menu and every restaurant. But they would certainly like to see cricket snacks in grocery stores and menu offerings in some of the more wacky hipster restaurants. Right. At least. Yeah. Do you watch Shark Tank? Oh, you know I do. Okay, so did you see the one with Rose Wang and Laura Desario? I've seen them all. Okay, so you saw the one with chirps. They're cricket-based snack product chirps. I want to try it.

24:45I do, too. I'm not an adventurous eater, as you know, but I would totally try fried crickets and things. That doesn't gross me out for some reason. No, and I would try it as well. I don't know if you remember or not, but when we did that locust thing for Science Channel, It's like the second time it's come up this month, weirdly enough. They made fried locusts, and I refused to eat them. And it wasn't because I was grossed out. It was because I was sure that I was going to have some sort of weird allergic reaction to them. Oh, right, because they're shellfish, right? Yeah, yeah. And I would have had to have been like, you know, life flighted somewhere to a hospital and would have missed my flight home.

25:26That is the only reason I didn't eat them. It had nothing to do with disgust. But in that UN report, they address allergies and they said that it's actually exceedingly rare that somebody has an allergic reaction to an arthropod. Yeah. Or to an insect, I should say. But the reason why I thought so is because, yeah, I had had like a shrimp blow up once. Right. And I just was not about to roll the dice on that. Not for what Science Channel was paying us. Well, I think it's very funny that you, I remember your shrimp years in that you had an allergic reaction to shrimp, but you wanted to eat shrimp so bad you started to eat shrimp a little bit just to see if you could eat shrimp.

26:15Yeah, shrimp chips. Yeah. Which use real shrimp powder. It's like a, I think, Japanese or Korean or Chinese delicacy. But now you can eat shrimp, right? Yeah, I did immunotherapy and now I'm fine. I can eat shrimp all day long. I just love that you were so dedicated to eating shrimp. Yeah, I love shrimp, man. Good shrimp, like seasoned with Old Bay, just simple stuff. Oh, man, so good. This is a great time to bring up one of my big pet peeves. Okay. I know that cooking with shrimp heads and tails on increases the flavor quite a bit. Does it? Yeah. Okay. Which is why they do it. Um, but it's one thing if you get an appetizer with like the, the, uh, the, like a prawn with the head left on or something.

26:58But if you like, I get pasta dishes sometimes. Oh yeah. That have like heads and tails on them. If there's a fork involved, you don't want to have to put your fork down and take the head and tail off. No, like you literally have to dig them out of the pasta, take the head and tail off and then put them back in your food. Right. Which is just, I don't get why restaurants do that. Like, maybe cook it in there and then take it off for us. So I ran across a reason probably why. All right, let's hear it. There's something called chitin, which makes up the exoskeleton of bugs, but it also makes up the shells of crustaceans as well.

27:34And chitin, supposedly, if you don't have an allergic reaction to it, chitin is apparently good for, it's said to be good for weight loss. digestion aids in digestion allegedly and I think it has something to do with your blood pressure too and in other countries non-western countries I think they prescribe chitin quite a bit as like a dietary supplement and I saw one study that said yeah it had a little bit of an effect a little more than placebo but not clinically significant but it was just one study so I'm curious if chitin actually does have an effect, but it's possible they're saying you should eat the whole thing.