Would I Eat a Snack Bar Made of Crickets? Sure!

Posted By elissa on Jul 8, 2012 | 1 comment

Particularly because the snack bars discussed in this article are made from cricket flour.

A new energy bar made primarily from ground-up crickets is now ready to order, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Chapul bars are made from baked crickets that are then ground up into a powder and mixed with other ingredients. The process is derived from the Aztecs, who commonly included crickets as part of their regular diet.

You won’t have to worry about biting into an errant leg or carapace shard thanks to the grinding process, and so far Chapul produces two varieties of the bar – peanut butter and chocolate, and Thai-inspired coconut, ginger and lime.

Chocolate? Say no more! Chocolate can make anything taste good, and the lack of antennae, legs or other obvious “parts” is an obvious “plus.”  😉

Under the circumstances, I’d try one even if they were just novelties. But the cricket bars are more than a gimmick: they’re a serious attempt to “mainstream” the consumption of insect protein for environmental reasons. According to Chapul founder Pat Crowley:

In the summer of 2011, intrigued by Dr. Marcel Dicke’s TED talk on entomophagy, I started exploring the potential of insect protein as a solution to the overconsumption of freshwater in our industrialized agriculture sector, which consumes as much as 92% of all freshwater we (humans) use around the world. The numbers are striking…insects convert grain and grass into edible protein as much as 10 times more efficiently as cows and pigs, and are both rich in key nutrients such as omega-3 acids and low in fat to boot. And so, the math is simple – if we shift even a small fraction of our protein consumption to environmentally friendly, healthy (and tasty!) insects, we can reduce the huge amount of water which irrigates the massive, mechanized farms which exist solely to feed the 300 million head of cattle and 1.4 billion pigs mankind slaughters every year. Enough change here at home, and one day the mighty Colorado might just reach the sea again.

I’m a sucker for a good cause, so I’m rather sorry I missed this particular Kickstarter project (donors get to be the first to try the bars). Guess I’ll just have to wait until the site store is officially “open.”