Welsh food firm hopes children will get the bug for eating insects
IF THE idea of eating insects is a little too Bush Tucker Trial for your taste, we’ve got news for you – you already are!
According to Pembrokeshirebased Bug Farm Foods, on average, you eat 250g of insects each year in products such as pasta, cakes and bread. It is just not worth the energy to remove every fragment of insect when harvesting crops.
Like chocolate? Well, you may be eating up to 60 fragments of insects in every 100g of chocolate and, whenever you eat a fig, you are eating remnants of the fig wasp that pollinated it.
Bug Farm Foods is run by husband and wife team; entomologist (insect scientist) Dr Sarah Beynon and chef Andy Holcroft. Together they’ve developed a new generation of insect-based foods to help tackle issues of sustainability in the food chain.
The pair had been running the Grub Kitchen for a few years before launching Bug Farm Foods in 2017.
Their aim is to create sustainable and delicious food from their base in St Davids and you can even visit them at The Bug Farm visitor attraction and Grub Kitchen: the UK’s first full-time edible insect restaurant.
But why eat insects? More than two billion people around the world eat insects regularly (and on purpose).
Edible insects are a staple part of the diet in 80% of the world’s countries. Deep-fried locusts are an everyday delicacy in countries such as Thailand, while chapulines (Mexican red grasshoppers) are a favourite snack in South America.
The West is slowly waking up to insects as a sustainable food source with entomophagy (practice of eating insects by humans) becoming a hot topic in popular culture.
Countries such as the Netherlands and USA are currently at the forefront of the modern entomophagy revolution.
Andy and Sarah believe that we cannot continue to eat the way that we do today. In 2013, a report was published by the UNFAO urging us in the West to adopt the practice of eating insects as a sustainable food source.
By 2050 there will be almost 10bn people on Earth and, to feed them all, we will require 70% more food, 120% more water and 42% more crop land.
By 2050 some predictions indicate meat production will double and, to meet current environmental targets, impacts of livestock on the environment will need to reduce significantly compared to what they are today.
In short, there is a global need for alternative protein sources, and insects are packed full of the stuff!
Bug Farm Foods products include Cricket Cookies (flavours include choc chip and mocha chilli crunch) and Buffalo Biscuits (featuring buffalo insects, with the current flavour on the shelves being spiced orange and laverbread) as well as various insect powders and whole insects, for use in recipes outlined on its website for dishes including grub granola, cricket crepes, very easy bug brownies and even honey and miso fried locusts.
Bug Farm Foods’ products are stocked in farm shops and delis across the UK and, as of last September, Bug Farm Foods got a rather high-end stamp of approval following the announcement that their products would be stocked by Selfridges, a significant industry nod to the Welsh brand considering the cache attached to the internationally-acclaimed store, whose discerning food and drink buyers are particularly hard to impress.
And just in time for 2020 was the newly-launched insect and plant protein VEXo that can be used in a similar way to traditional mince, while reducing saturated fat by 70-80%.
The launch of VEXo is the cornerstone of the brand’s flagship project for 2020, which will see the launch of Bug Farm Foods’ VEXo Bolognese into schools.
For the past two years, Sarah and Andy have been working alongside Cardiff Metropolitan University and Food Centre Wales in order to develop VEXo designed specifically for schoolchildren.
Bringing in expertise from Dr Verity Jones at the University of the West of England, a specialist in sustainable futures and education, they investigated children’s changing perceptions of entomophagy.
The study, funded by Welsh Government and Innovate UK’s Small Business Research Initiative, found