Are crickets the new lobster? The case for eating insects

Travellers who have purchased a preflight snack at Cibo Express, the chain of airport markets, may have noticed an unusual addition to the energy bar section this year: Exo protein bars, which each contain about 40 ground-up crickets.

It's not a standard preflight snack, but "they're flying off shelves," said Brenda deBuono, who is in charge of buying packaged foods at Cibo. "We were not expecting the movement we've seen." Witnessing the demand firsthand has so fortified deBuono's faith in the power of insect food that the chain last month added Chirps to its shelves — tortilla chips made from cricket flour.

That flour generally is produced by farming crickets, then freezing, boiling, and roasting them, then grinding the insects into a powder. Each pound of flour contains 3,000 to 5,000 crickets, according to Canadian cricket company Entomo Farms.

Exo says its protein bars, made with cricket flour, are an "intelligent first step towards normalising the consumption of insects, which will in turn have enormous global impact."

It's still early days for bug consumption in the US, although an estimated two billion people around the world already have insects in their diet, from waterbugs and silkworm moth larvae in China to grasshoppers in Mexico.

Some think Americans will develop a taste for creepy-crawlies, just as we learned to enjoy other foods we once scorned. In 1876, the lobsters that were abundant along the coastlines of North America were still being used as fertiliser for farmland; in Eastern Canada, "they boil them for their pigs, but are ashamed to be seen eating lobster themselves," wrote the essayist John Rowan at the time. Lobster shells inside a house would be seen as evidence of "poverty and degradation," he said.

So could the day come when people see our aversion to eating bugs as an unenlightened cultural oddity of our time?