It is a warm summer afternoon in Finsbury Park, north London, and I am sitting in a restaurant preparing to eat a cricket ball. Fortunately for me, the object on the end of my fork is not five and a half ounces of cork, string and red leather; it’s only a meatball made out of crickets. Either way, it sounds like I just lost a bet.
But the cricket ball is delicious. On the other plates in front of me are a roasted vegetable salad with Moroccan-spiced minced cricket and pasta served with a cricket brisket. I find myself nibbling at all of it continuously, spoiling the photographer’s tidy composition.
The restaurant, Yum Bug, also serves dishes containing whole roasted crickets, but their speciality is transforming crickets into a meat substitute. “The most akin meat actually ends up being something like beef or lamb, just simply because of the taste,” says Yum Bug’s co-founder Aaron Thomas. “But also the look. It’s quite brown.”
In terms of sustainability, however, the comparison between meat and crickets is stark. Against the wall opposite is a framed poster that says: “How many kg of CO2 have you saved tonight eating bugs vs beef? About 10kg. The equivalent of driving from here to Yorkshire.”
We have been told for years that insect protein will eventually form a key component of global food production. Sainsbury’s started selling roasted crickets in 2018 and a 2019 YouGov survey found that a third of Britons expected insect consumption to be commonplace by 2029. There have been suggestions that the edible insect market could be worth $8bn (£6.3bn) by 2030. So why aren’t we all eating bugs already? What is taking so long?
Thomas and his Yum Bug co-founder Leo Taylor began their business selling insect recipe kits online during the pandemic. The feedback they got convinced them that their biggest hurdle was overcoming public resistance to the idea of eating whole insects. “Once we realised that, we tested some of these meat alternatives on our market stall in Brick Lane, then started to get way more traction.”
Along the way, they came to the conclusion that the cricket, rather than, say, the mealworm, would be their gateway bug.
“That’s for a few reasons,” says Taylor. “One is obviously that we turn our insects into a range of meats and what matters in terms of that meat is: what does it taste like? What is the sustainability of that insect? What is the nutrition of that insect? What is the general customer acceptance of that type of insect? And crickets are a really good species for quite a lot of those things. It’s one of the most nutritious – around 70% protein when dried – one of the most sustainable and easy to find, one of the most generally accepted by consumers around the world.”
According to Taylor and Thomas, the alchemy by which crickets are transformed into something indistinguishable from beef mince or braised lamb is more recipe than process. “All of the ingredients you can buy from the supermarket,” says Thomas. “You could make it at home if you had a blender and a mincer, pretty much. It’s relatively simple – we just have a specific blend and way of doing it.”
The Yum Bug restaurant launched a few months ago with a waiting list for tables, but the pair’s plans extend beyond the four walls of the restaurant, which they see as a showcase for their product. They are seeking to get their bug meat into other restaurant chains (it has already made it on to Wahaca’s menu) and ultimately into supermarkets. To that end, they have just released a slick video to court investors.
Their answer to the question: “So where do you get your bugs from?” is surprising: the crickets are delivered to Yum Bug raw, whole and frozen – like prawns – from Lithuania.
“Up until very recently, they were farmed in Cambridgeshire,” says Thomas. “However, UK [cricket] farms at the moment are still in their infancy. Generally, a lot of them come from the reptile pet food trade. They’re not really optimised for human consumption.”
In fact, Yum Bug have found that the much-touted sustainability of insect production depends largely on economies of scale. A cricket farmed in Vietnam, for example, where one facility produces 150 tonnes of insects a week, can have a smaller carbon footprint than one farmed in the UK.
“Transport emissions actually make up a fraction of the total carbon of most protein sources,” says Thomas. “About 5% of the carbon is from the transport. That’s nowhere near enough to make up the difference in the optimisation of the general farm practices.”
Eating insects – AKA entomophagy – has a history stretching back centuries. People in more than 100 countries regularly consume bugs from more than 2,000 species. Most of these insects are still harvested from the wild. Farming on an industrial scale is a recent innovation, but it holds tremendous possibilities for the future of our global diet. Crickets need only to consume about 1.7kg of feed to produce 1kg of food, compared with 4.5kg of feed for a kilo of chicken, 9.1kg for pigs and 25kg for beef.
In 2013, the Food and Agriculture Office of the UN produced a report entitled Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security, which convinced a lot of people not just that insects could be a sustainable source of protein, but that there was a future industry worth investing in.
“It basically sparked the so-called insect revolution,” says Tiziana di Costanzo, the co-founder of Horizon Edible Insects, “which hasn’t really been much of a revolution.”
The report inspired Di Costanzo’s son’s Duke of Edinburgh project, which in turn spawned a family business: giving insect-cooking lessons and farming insects on a small scale in a shed at the end of her west London garden. “We had agreements with a couple of shops here in Ealing and they just gave us their fruit and veg that was no longer sellable,” says Di Costanzo. “Local, zero waste, zero everything.”
Then, she says, came Brexit. The EU had already introduced rules treating insects as a “novel food” requiring a costly process for approval, but the production of certain species was permitted while applications were pending. When the Brexit transition period ended, UK insect producers were left in limbo. Some carried on. Others, like Di Costanzo, gave up. “We didn’t want to take the risk,” she says. “For example, my liability insurance is no longer valid – we can’t cover you any more. That was really the main reason.” Di Costanzo still does her insect cookery classes, but the bugs are sourced from elsewhere.
Adam Banks is the founder of Bugvita, a Lincolnshire-based insect business selling bug snacks including whole roasted crickets, teriyaki crickets, maple-wood-smoked crickets and salt and vinegar mealworms. Until recently, he also ran his own insect farm, but the growth of the business meant he could no longer supply the crickets he needed.
“It got to a point where we were not able to produce anywhere near as many crickets as we had capacity to process,” he says. “The demand was there, but the cost of building the farm to the next level was so high that we explored other options.” Banks now gets most of his insects from the same facility in Cambridgeshire where Taylor and Thomas used to get theirs.
Banks says the main problem of farming on a small scale was inflation. “Just in the time that I’ve been doing it, the cost to produce each kilo of raw product of harvested crickets has about doubled,” he says. “That has to do with energy prices going up, labour costs going up, feed going up … and I think it was already probably not quite cost-competitive with traditional protein sources.”
Investors looking to make cricket farming in the UK pay face an uphill battle. “I think the demand is there, and I think the people are keen to give it a go, but the cost certainly puts people off,” says Adams. “The regulatory situation is just a big pain as well.”
There are four species of insect permitted for sale in the UK by the Food Standards Agency (FSA): house crickets (Acheta domesticus), banded crickets (Gryllodes sigillatus), yellow mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) and black soldier fly larvae (Hermetia illucens). But this is a temporary accommodation while novel food applications for these species, which were all submitted before a December 2023 deadline, are considered. The FSA is overwhelmed with novel food applications – an estimated 75% of them for cannabidiol (CBD) products.
“As it stands, we’re just sort of stuck in this transitional period,” says Adams, who was part of the FSA approval bid for Acheta domesticus, filed on behalf of several businesses by the UK Edible Insect Association in 2021. “It’s still not, strictly speaking, an authorised novel food,” he says. “For larger retailers and companies that might want to make a product using insects, that is off-putting.”
Then there are ethical considerations. Insects may be a sustainable source of protein, but they are still technically meat and the crickets still need to be reared and slaughtered systematically. How does that square with Yum Bug’s potential customer base?
“The first thing to say is we’re not really targeting vegans and vegetarians,” says Taylor. “We’re targeting people who are currently consuming meat and giving them a way better option that still feels like meat and has full animal protein.” That said, there is a growing class of diet known as “ento-veganism”; Aaron Thomas counts himself a member.
“I’m vegan aside from insects,” he says. “But there are also vegans that are vegan aside from bivalves like mussels and clams. And I would say that a larger portion of vegans are OK with eating insects and bivalves than you’d probably expect.”
Mature crickets are harvested by dropping the temperature of their environment, which means they enter a dormant state known as diapause and – theoretically, at least – feel no pain from getting frozen.
“There’s a cost to the food we eat,” says Taylor. “There’s a cost to the avocado that you’re spreading on your toast, a cost to the almonds in your milk. We’re just saying that we feel this is an acceptable point in the spectrum of all the things you could possibly eat.”
The barrier, however, extends beyond public acceptance and into manufacturing. “A dried pasta that is enriched with cricket powder would seem like a great option,” says Adams. “But the vast majority of dried-pasta-making places are vegan-certified and don’t handle meat in their facilities, so they wouldn’t be interested. Things like that make it a bit more restrictive.”
As the afternoon wears on in Finsbury Park, I am still picking at the tom yum kua crickets with lemongrass, lime leaf, coriander and chilli, a recipe developed for Yum Bug by Saiphin Moore, the founder of the restaurant chain Rosa’s Thai. Unlike most of the dishes on the menu at Yum Bug, this one uses whole roasted crickets. They are delicious – crunchy and delicately spiced, a bit like tiny prawns – but they are also extremely identifiable as bugs and therefore not for everyone.
Banks recalls meeting a vegan at a food festival who said to him: “I don’t eat anything with a face.” For an edible insect producer, this formulation is clearly frustrating, but it’s hard not to think that the plate in front of me contains dozens, if not hundreds, of little faces. Best eaten, maybe, with your glasses off.
