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Insects & Wine - Cambridge Science Festival event

3/21/2019

Yesterday we ran our fifth tasting event since starting the venture Insects & Wine. Insects & Wine is a non-profit venture run by Chris Kaplonski (Anthroenology) and I, with the help of Charlotte Milbank and Danielle Bradford. We aim to show people the stories behind sustainable insects and wines, while giving an all-round enjoyable sensory experience tasting them!

Last night we were hosted by the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute (UCCRI), Cambridge Global Food Security (CGFS) and Thirsty Cambridge, as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

Here's our team (right to left: Danielle Bradford, Jacqueline Garget from CGFS, Chris Kaplonski, me, Charlotte Milbank and Hawa Siddique from UCCRI; image from @GlobalFood_Camb):

Last night we launched a brand new menu! We took grasshoppers and crickets - two closely related species of insect - from three very different parts of the world: Japan, Canada and Mexico. These were from Tsukahara Chinmi, Eat Grub and Merci Mercado. We also had a bonus course of after-dinner mealworms courtesy of Minus Farm in France. The latter two (Merci Mercado and MinusFarm) are EntoTrust certified - so they've been subject to an evaluation of the quality fo their products in terms of food safety, and the sustainability of their business in terms of having a low environmental footprint and fair employment practices, and have gained certification on this basis.

For the three courses, we created recipes that we hope reflected some of the flavour combinations popular in their countries of origin. We paired them with low-intervention organic wines. Here are some photos of the insect menu:

Of course, the really memorable thing about the evening was the atmosphere - it was very vibrant, & I had a lot of fun. One of the most enjoyable things about these events, for us, is meeting everyone who comes along. We tend to get a crowd that is fairly diverse in ages and nationalities, and people tend to be open-minded and optimistic. I feel like I always come away with lots of new ideas.

If you were one of last night's guests, thank you, & I hope it was a good evening for you as well. As we said last night - all feedback/comments are more than welcome, both good and bad!

The nutritional role of chitoumou (edible caterpillars) in daily diets

3/21/2019

In my final field season in Burkina Faso in 2017, Sioned Cox joined me both as my field assistant and to do a fascinating study of her own, looking at the nutritional role of caterpillars in the diets of women. This formed the basis for her undergraduate dissertation in Biological Anthropology, and together we wrote it up into a research paper for publication in the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed. It’s a brilliant study that represents a lot of hard work - Sioned worked with women in three different villages and conducted 64 very detailed interviews, confirming every food and drink item consumed in the past 24 hours, and then calculated the nutritional value of all individual snacks, drinks and meals.

Her most important result was that daily diets that contained caterpillars were richer in protein and calcium than those that did not. Here’s the data to show this:

Sioned also found some interesting additional results, such as the surprising discovery that despite a much-cited belief that Mossi people do not eat caterpillars and Dioula do, there was no effect of ethnicity on caterpillar consumption in our sample. This suggests that the Mossi, many of whom migrated from Northern Burkina Faso in the past few decades, have by and large adopted local regional food habits. There were of course exceptions to this, but it’s interesting in light of the many people I encounter who don’t believe it possible for a population to change its food habits very quickly. In this case it seems that’s exactly what has happened!
For the full paper please see the JIFF website.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this study, particularly: the women of Soumosso, Koba and Larama in Burkina Faso, our local consultants Poda Nambepierre, Madou Ouattara and Momoni Ouattara who helped us to refine our methods, our local translation assistants Bertine Some and Sanou Asfietta, and fellow Cambridge student Charlotte Milbank from the Department of Geography, who helped Sioned conduct the interviews.

IFW Plenary 2018: The nutritional role of edible insects

3/21/2019

Here are the slides from my talk at IFW18 (Insects to Feed the World international conference 2018). They contain information that was at the time unpublished - but it’s been published now, so I’m able to share it!

Insects to Feed the World 2018

5/21/2018

The second international conference on insects as food and feed, Insects to Feed the World 2018 was held in Wuhan, China, last week, bringing together 278 people from 40 different countries.

It was a great experience, and I feel really lucky to have been a part of it. This post is a short overview of some of the topics I found really interesting - click here for a full book of abstracts.

A photo of the conference banquet, taken by Jeff Tomberlin, a member of the international advisory board and one of the conference organisers

At the conference, we heard about many different types of insect, from many parts of the world. As one of the keynote speakers (Komi Fiaboe, representing Segenet Kelemu, Director General of ICIPE, Kenya) put it, ‘diversity is key’. He was talking about insects in an African context, but the same sentiment applies to the world as a whole.

Using insects as food, feed and even as medicine, is not a new thing. Primates eat insects, and use them medicinally; the chickens and fish we now farm on industrial scales became the species they are now by feeding on insects. So, we can say with confidence that using insects in these ways is a key part of our evolutionary past (a topic covered in more detail here).

But what is new is how we choose to use this wealth of information and innovation.

Komi Fiaboe's keynote Conclusions and Recommendations

John Kinyuru's work bringing cricket farming to Kakuma (200,000 ppl) and Dadaab (250,000 ppl) refugee camps in Kenya

One exciting new frontier mentioned was the use of cricket farming to empower people living in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, as a source of both livelihoods and nutrition. This initiative was described by John Kinyuru in his keynote. Other examples of insect farming used to a similar purpose were presented several times during the conference, including: Amy Franklin, who spoke about Farms for Orphans, which shares the knowledge and technology needed for farming palm weevils in orphanages in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Daniel Ambuhl, who spoke about a project run by the congolese biologist Augustin Konda, who is developing methods for farming edible Saturniid caterpillars to improve food security, also based in the DRC.

Photo of training by Farms for Orphans, via Foodtank - https://foodtank.com/news/2018/03/farms-for-orphans-insect-farming-democratic-republic-congo/

Another major theme in the conference was the use of insects to process waste - a really important topic, given that 1.3bn tonnes of food produced is lost or wasted every year. The main player here is the black soldier fly Hermetia illucens, which can convert all kinds of waste products to usable protein. Black soldier flies are already being reared on an industrial scale all over the world, using automated, cutting edge technology. The outputs of these farms are fly larvae that can be fed to chickens and fish. This takes the pressure off both agricultural land - 33% of which is used for animal feed - and marine resources - 90% of which are now overfished or fully depleted. The frass from the farms is used as fertiliser, meaning that nothing goes to waste.

The black soldier fly, a tiny species with a huge potential for making our food system more sustainable

Professor Meyer-Rochow giving his keynote on insects as medicine

Yet another exciting direction in the field is the potential pharmaceutical properties of insects. Professor Meyer-Rochow gave his keynote on this topic, and presented us with an overview of all the insects used in traditional medicine worldwide. While some of this may be superstition parading as "common sense", Meyer-Rochow made a very good point when he said that “not all common sense makes sense... but we as scientists should examine what makes sense and what doesn’t”. At the conference, a couple of examples of research into insects as medicine included a poster by Ishikawa et al, which presented evidence that ingestion of grasshoppers and crickets reduced stress levels in laboratory mice, and another poster by Kipkoech et al looked at the potential use of insect chitin as a prebiotic to promote gut health.

For my part, I presented a plenary on the nutritional role of edible insects, chaired a plenary featuring my colleague Kenichi Nonaka from Japan, and, with John Kinyuru from Kenya, co-hosted two sessions on the topic of Decolonising Entomophagy. But I’ll write about all of that at a later date!

Many thanks to everyone who was a part of this conference, and I look forward to next time…IFW2020!!

Very hungry FOR caterpillars? On edible insects and food security

4/21/2018

Yesterday was our departmental seminar. I presented a poster, and I chose to focus on one of the chapters of my thesis: caterpillars and food security.

This matters a great deal to me because it's one of the most important concerns for the people I work with in Burkina Faso.

Although, when I say 'food security' I think I probably mean 'financial security', and I believe it's crucial to realise what this really means and the the toll that it takes. As far as I understand from the people I've spoken to and shared my life with during fieldwork - It's not just about hunger. It's about the anxiety that comes from having to decide whether to send your child to school or get them to work in the fields so you have a better harvest next year. It's about the exhaustion of having to walk several kilometres to a mill laden with grain, and walk back with your milled grain, collecting dry wood as you go, to light the fire over which you'll cook the day's meal. It's about the resignation you feel when you decide that yes, you'll use agrochemicals, because then you know you'll get a good harvest this year - even though you've been told by friends that the soils will suffer as a result and your harvests will get poorer and poorer.

Anyway! Let's set this - and the topic of caterpillars and food security - in a broader context:

The image above sets the background to our study.

We chose a mixed methods approach to this question, and here's a summary of those methods:

The results are being prepared for submission for peer-reviewed publication, so I wont include them in full here. But, here are our main findings:

During caterpillar season, people collect and eat a lot of caterpillars!
Overall protein consumption is significantly higher during caterpillar season
During caterpillar season, women perceive their households to be more food secure

Exciting stuff! And we've more data to analyse, so there's more to come...based on the above findings and the data that support them, we came to the following conclusion:

People in this region look forward to caterpillar season as a time of relative prosperity.
Caterpillars are widely appreciated as food: many say that caterpillars are their ‘favourite meat’.

We found that caterpillars make a significant seasonal contribution to food security among
women in rural southwestern Burkina Faso, both as a source of income and a source of food.

We hope that in fostering a greater understanding of the caterpillars – their importance to people,
their place in the diet, their ecology and their impact on the wider ecosystem – this research
project will support those who collect, eat and sell them.

I hope this has been an interesting read and please do be in touch if you've any questions or comments. Finally and importantly, a huge thank you to all who helped with this project (below - and I must add: all credit to Eric Carle for the beautiful illustrations, taken straight from The Very Hungry Caterpillar), and, of course, the references cited!

Edible caterpillars are brilliant & important & so are the people who collect them

4/11/2018

The title of this post is a summary of a talk I’m giving today! It's a departmental seminar day, so I'm presenting some results from one chapter of my thesis. (The actual title is "Effects of defoliation by the edible caterpillar Cirina butyrospermi on yields of maize and shea" but I don't think that's quite as catchy.)

Here’s an edited version of the talk, which covers a bit of my fieldwork in the past two years:

This is what we want to do - to feed the world sustainably

Of all the people i know, I’m on the naive and optimistic end of the spectrum, but even i cant look at this image without dying a little inside.

Because this is the exact opposite of what we’re doing.

The current global food system is overrun with problems. Our growing population and growing demand for protein are fuelling widespread environmental degradation and species extinction, public health epidemics such as malnutrition, obesity and heart disease, and exacerbating economic inequality between producers and consumers.

So how does conservation fit into this context? We want food - and we want to save wild species. How can we best do this?

There are many ideas out there, but the one that inspired me to do this research was that of edible insects. Insects, we’re told, have a low environmental footprint, are nutrient rich, and are a highly valued resource currently controlled by some of the world’s poorest people.

Some edible insects are wild-harvested, some are farmed. Yet others are present in existing agricultural systems - and are harvested as a by product.

I felt like these by-product insects were particularly interesting - we’ve sort of been semi farming them for thousands of years, because we’ve been propagating their food source across large areas of land. We’re living in an era of accelerating agricultural intensification and the disintegration of traditional food cultures - what does this mean for semi-farmed edible insects?

I chose to do my fieldwork in Burkina Faso, West Africa, because this is a country in which many of the problems facing the global food system are really acute - widespread destruction of habitat to clear land for agriculture, prevalent malnutrition among those who produce the food. Also, they have one particular edible insect that really intrigued me!

As the satellite image above shows (thank you Google maps), the agricultural fields in Burkina Faso are filled with trees, and the vast majority of the trees are shea trees. Shea trees produce nuts that can be ground and churned to make shea butter, a product that’s used in cosmetics and confectionary worldwide. The nuts fetch high prices at market and it’s Burkina Faso’s third biggest export crop. It’s been called ‘women’s gold’, because the shea nuts are traditionally a crop that is harvested by women.

The most dominant crop that’s grown in the fields is maize, which is the dietary staple in the region. Men are traditionally responsible for the maize crop, although in practice both women and children often contribute a lot of the physical labour.

So, the agricultural system in southwestern Burkina Faso can be most accurately described as maize- and shea-dominant agroforestry.

The reason for my excitement when i first heard about this potential study system was the insect that eats the leaves of the shea tree. It’s an edible caterpillar, collected in large numbers (as you can see from the above photo) and sold in huge quantities at markets.

African edible caterpillars are delicious, fascinating creatures. Many of them are highly seasonal, but very abundant when in season. However, the vast majority are only found in forest environments. This was the first time i’d ever heard of an agricultural system that had edible caterpillars. Looking into it, i found papers that referred to the caterpillar as a ‘pest’ of shea. i had endless unanswered questions, and decided a pilot trip would be necessary to try and understand which of my questions would be most relevant to those living in the region.

Methods

Farmer interviews & consultations
In 2016 I spent a couple of weeks visiting villages and interviewing men and women whose primary income source was smallholder farming. I consulted them about their priorities, and it was clear that one of the most important questions to people here was: what are effects of defoliation by caterpillars on yields of shea and maize?

I decided to ask this as the driving research question for one of the chapters of my thesis.

Following pilot interviews, I randomly selected a sample of 45 households, stratified by household size, all of whom owned at least 1ha of maize. I selected three shea trees in each field - also stratified by size. I did approx 14 months of fieldwork in 2016-17.

Field data collection
In 2016 I collected observational data on shea tree defoliation and the growth of maize plants under and outside of tree canopies. In 2017 I repeated this data collection and also collected data on the abundance of shea nuts and the weight of maize cobs relative to plant height.

Field experiment
In 2017, in collaboration with two farmers, I conducted a field experiment: we planted two rows of maize (30 plants each row) and applied caterpillar faeces as fertiliser to one of the rows. We then measured the growth of each plant and weighed the eventual harvested cobs.

The image above shows a typical landscape in the midst of caterpillar season. All the trees are shea trees - but some look like they're dying. They're not dying! They've just been stripped of their leaves by a lot of very hungry caterpillars..

Results

The results of observations and experiments have been surprising, and as ever, I wish I had another year or so to collect more data!

I can’t publish the graphs that accompanied here because they’re being submitted for peer review, but here’s a summary of my results:

There was no significant relationship between the extent of shea defoliation and the abundance of shea nuts on trees the following year. Given the extent of defoliation, this is really surprising.
in 2016 there was less difference in maize height underneath trees with more defoliation, suggesting that defoliation does help crop growth. However, the same trend was not observed in 2017.
Plants that are fertilised with caterpillar faeces grow taller - there's a significant height difference from Day 50 onwards - but there was no significant difference in maize cob weight.

What does this mean?

Overall, my first conclusion is that caterpillars aren’t a ‘pest’ in the conventional sense – and what I mean by this is that there is no evidence that they cause any harm to yields of either shea or maize.

Secondly, it looks like defoliation by caterpillars may assist maize growth, probably due to light and/or fertilization of the soil by caterpillar faeces - but more data is needed to verify this. 2016 may have been a false positive; 2017 may have been a false negative.

Finally, the field experiment results do suggest that there may be a positive impact of caterpillar faeces on maize productivity – but again, more data is needed.

So, let’s return to the first image, & the problem that made me start this study.

I think I can say something new about this now, for what it's worth:

In West Africa, edible caterpillars aren’t a pest insect.

They might even help fertilize the soil that produces the staple crop.

In order to build a more sustainable food system we need to do more research, and when we do so, we need to listen to the farmers to whom this matters most.

Thank you for reading! And thanks to those who made this study possible:

Can eating insects really reduce our ecological footprint and save wild species?

4/6/2018

I was asked by The Ecological Citizen to write an opinion piece answering this very question. And I was really excited to do so.

Why? Because it's an important, complex question, and like all good questions, there are no easy answers. It's also an exciting journal to write for - new, peer-reviewed, and established in the hope of being "a catalyst for radical, egalitarian, compassionate, unifying change".

And with a limit of 500 words and just five references, I knew it'd be a challenge - and a useful exercise in really thinking it through.

Here's the article. And here's the conclusion I came to (paraphrased):

Yes, insects are potentially more ecologically sustainable* than other animal protein (beef, lamb, poultry, fish etc).
But to realize this potential, we need legislation and policy that prioritize reduced ecological impact (e.g. through the use of food waste as feed, the preservation of habitat, and the regeneration of wild nature in reclaimed land)
For now, I think that a plant-based diet – perhaps with the occasional insect- or poultry-based treat – remains the most ecologically sustainable* choice.

*A note on sustainability: This article focused on ecological sustainability. For broader sustainability in the food system, we also need to think about how to combat structural inequality, empower producers, improve animal welfare and control antibiotic use.

An article for the Independent - and a list of great blogs!

3/22/2018

I wrote an article for the Independent, all about whether giving up meat and eating insects might save the world... here it is, please do take a look.

I also submitted a list of blogs as part of the article, but the didn't make the cut...so here they are!

If you're keen to read more about edible insects, please check these out (& let me know if I've missed any):

Bugburger – Tech Stack Manager Anders Engström on the rise of edible insects in Sweden and worldwide (Swedish/English)

Bugible – Entrepreneur Aly Moore on edible insect products and events in North America

Bugsolutely - Bugsolutely founder Massimo Reverberi on edible insect news worldwide

EntomoCentral - Media correspondent Justin Butner writes about all things edible insects, including a new series of posts titles 'Edible Insect Experts on...'

Entomology Anthropology - Anthropologist Dr Julie Lesnik on edible insects and human evolution

Entomove - Insect marketing manager and consultant Florian Nock on edible insects, farming and nutrition

EntoNation - More a comprehensive website than a blog, EntoNation also features a newsletter and podcast on edible insects. Check it out for articles on farming, cooking, thinking about - and enjoying! - insects as food.

EVO Conversion Systems LLC - Company EVO Conversion Systems on black soldier flies and their ability to convert waste into protein.

Ilka Taponen – Process Development Manager Ilka Taponen on the emerging edible insect industry in Finland and the rest of Europe (Finnish/English)

Les Criquets Migrateurs - Chemist Annie Ruelle-Sanguine and Agronomist Sebastien Collin on their adventures eating insects around the world (French)

Marwa Shumo - Postdoctoral Fellow Marwa Shumo on her work on edible insects in Kenya and Germany

Slices of Blue Sky - Blogger and engineer Marc Rumminger on current topics in insects as food

The Future of Edible Insects – Incredible Foods brand owner Mark Nagy on the challenges faced by insect-eating entrepreneur

The Insect Hunter - Food and Nutrition researcher John Kinyuru on his own experiences collecting and eating insects

An eggciting discovery in Cambridge

3/18/2018

'Insects are a delicacy!' is a phrase I've heard a lot and said myself, but I can see why it might be hard to believe.

If your first and only taste of insects is something deep-fried or freeze-dried, you might well be skeptical.

So here's an example of a edible insect - hopefully available in a store near you - that just might change your mind.

First, a little background: This, below, is the view from my window. I'm writing up my PhD results, holed up in an inverted snowglobe (Cambridge), and fresh edible insects seem like a distant, inaccessible luxury.

But a few days ago, everything changed. I went to my local Asian supermarket. As I was browsing and dreaming of warmth and miso, I spotted this on the shelves:

I'd never heard of Kai Mod Dang, but I know an insect dish when I see one! Served with sliced lime and pickles - what could they be? I turned the tin around and read with barely disguised glee: "RED ANT EGGS 25%, SALT WATER 75%'.

OK, not great ratios, but 25% is more than 0%, and the price - 5.45GBP for 400g - felt like a bargain.

I bought a couple of tins, enjoyed the shop owner's reactions to my purchase ('You eat these? Good! These are good!'), and headed home.

I've only ever had Mexican ant eggs before - we sauteed them in a little butter and folded them in blue corn tortillas. Called 'escamoles', they were one of the most delicious insects I've ever eaten. But perhaps Thai ant eggs would be different?

I turned to Twitter for help. Suddenly I had quite a few recipe ideas - I'd have to buy a few more tins!

That was a month ago, and I've only managed to try one of the suggestions so far. But it was definitely worth it. We had dinner guests, one of whom was our landlord, Geoffrey Roughton. I told him excitedly that I planned to cook ant eggs especially in his honour, and he did a very good job of showing his enthusiasm. He's very interested in insects as a potential alternative to meat, but he's always telling me that the key is in the preparation. I hoped that these ant eggs - and the recipes from my helpful Twitter friends - might just be flavoursome enough to win him over.

I drained the salt water off and we both sampled a tiny ant egg. Salty, creamy, and no discernible 'metallic' taste from being kept in a tin.

I sauteed them with a tiny scoop of plant-based 'butter'. Here's a photo:

They have eyes! Tiny black pinprick eyes. And some of them already have legs, too.

With wasp larvae in central Japan, the best quality selection would contain both larvae (no discernible ant/wasp form) and pupae (fully formed, but without a chitinous exoskeleton - like tiny white ghost versions of adult ants). They say this gives a more interesting texture and flavour. Perhaps the same is true of ants?

These ants certainly had a lot of both. They were a bit salty, but otherwise creamy, savoury and very moreish. Geoffrey sprinkled them liberally on his pasta, so I think he agreed. I'll definitely be trying them again, perhaps with another recipe next time.

Meanwhile, if you're based in a climate that's very much lacking fresh insects right now, I recommend checking out the six-legged delicacies that your local Asian supermarket might have on offer!

"Sophisticated & whimsical, elegant & messy"...

1/21/2018

As the days got darker back in 2017, we decided to brighten things up a little with a slightly esoteric event - a sustainable insects and wine tasting evening!

The event was held at Trinity College, Cambridge, and tickets sold out fast.

Using sustainably harvested insects courtesy of a family business in Japan* we laid out a selection of canapes, each matched with a different pair of wines...

For a description of the event and one person's reflections on tastes and pairings, see this fantastic blog post by Sioned Cox. Her description of the evening as "sophisticated & whimsical, elegant & messy" perfectly sums up the event and hopefully most of my life.

Here are some more details about the insects we used, and the canapes we prepared:

The event was a collaboration between
Insects & Wine
Anthroenology
Cambridge Food Security Forum
Trinity College Wine Society
Tsukahara-chimni

*admittedly the air miles involved are not so sustainable...but until we have certified producers sustainably harvesting delicious wild-caught insects closer to home, this is the option I'm leaning towards. Happy to discuss other options, though!