Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. I hope you're having a great weekend so far.
Speaker 2: Do you want to know about crickets and how you
Speaker 2: can sustain yourself on them? Well, then listen to this
Speaker 2: episode Are Crickets the Future of Food? And this is
Speaker 2: from September seventh, twenty seventeen. I hope you enjoy it
Speaker 2: all over again.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
Speaker 3: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh W Chuck Clark.
Speaker 3: There's Charles Malcolm Bryant, and there's Jerry the Wiz rolling.
Speaker 1: That sounds like an Aaron Cooper poster gone bad. Yeah already.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll have like the swirling face like the weird
Speaker 3: people in Jacob's Ladder.
Speaker 1: It's funny.
Speaker 2: We had a office visitor a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 2: and I don't think you were here, And in fact
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 1: You weren't here because you would have been in here, right.
Speaker 2: But there was a there's our great step Brothers, you
Speaker 2: know the movie Step Brothers.
Speaker 3: For those of you out here out there, there's.
Speaker 2: A promo of John c Riley and Will Ferrell with
Speaker 2: as like a with an Olin Mills type uh, you know,
Speaker 2: post photograph and Aaron Cooper or our buddy from Kansas
Speaker 2: who does our great photoshop stuff, made us into I
Speaker 2: was John c. Rally and you were Will Ferrell. And
Speaker 2: the guy came in and was looking around and was like,
Speaker 2: oh man, these are great and look at that, and
Speaker 2: you know that looks like I don't know, it looks
Speaker 2: like it could be like something like the movie Step
Speaker 2: Brother or something that.
Speaker 3: Said, oh, that's exactly what it is. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I tried to make him not feel bad.
Speaker 3: That was nice of you. That was very gracious of
Speaker 3: you as a host.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like he didn't quite zone in on all of
Speaker 1: them were us.
Speaker 3: We should have like clapped loudly beside his ear. Uh.
Speaker 2: Man, I had a little scary thing today, How if
Speaker 2: I may. This is kind of part PSA. This has
Speaker 2: nothing to do with cricket farming.
Speaker 3: Ok, but.
Speaker 2: We're getting our basement waterproofed because for thirteen years it's
Speaker 2: been leaking water like really bad.
Speaker 1: Someone so that we have mold now.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, black mold, yes, and oh no.
Speaker 1: We're also getting mold remediation done at the same time.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 2: So, needless to say, that's a fun, fun way to
Speaker 2: spend a lot of money. But I come home today
Speaker 2: and my carbon monoxide alarm is going off because these
Speaker 2: yahoos are using a gas powered concrete saw in our basement. No,
Speaker 2: and it's like full on saying, you know, get out
Speaker 2: of the house, and my animals are in there, so oh, man,
Speaker 2: Like and I just happened to go home after I
Speaker 2: went to a coffee shop to study because I needed
Speaker 2: to grab something. But like, I literally could have come
Speaker 2: home to dead animals, man and dead workmen.
Speaker 3: And yeah, yeah those guys too. Wow, I'll bet they're
Speaker 3: not the sharpest tax in the box anymore.
Speaker 1: That was weird man. And they were down there.
Speaker 2: I mean, not only did they not have on so
Speaker 2: much as a dust mask for the gas, but like
Speaker 2: concrete dust is really dangerous too.
Speaker 3: They're like, I don't care. I've got Obama care.
Speaker 1: It was a.
Speaker 2: Weird man, and just it freaked me out to the
Speaker 2: point where Emily she wanted to like fire the guy.
Speaker 2: He wasn't even there, like the you know, the foreman
Speaker 2: or right owner the company. Yeah, and she wanted to
Speaker 2: be like, man, if he doesn't understand that this is dangerous,
Speaker 2: and he said, you know, open up your windows, it'll
Speaker 2: be clear in fifteen minutes and it took two hours
Speaker 2: for that alarm to stop going off.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, Wow, that is really scary.
Speaker 1: It was really bad. Man.
Speaker 2: I was out on my deck basically for the rest
Speaker 2: of the morning until I came in with my dogs
Speaker 2: and my cat in a crate.
Speaker 3: Man, that's like how some people commit suicide. I know,
Speaker 3: you know, yeah, and these guys are just doing it.
Speaker 3: Grottis for you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It was weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah, anyway, so I'm slightly shaken. Yeah, I'll bet. I'm
Speaker 3: glad you made it. Man. You look good. You look okay,
Speaker 3: Thank you. You look healthy. Your pallor isn't gaunt. I
Speaker 3: think you're You're okay.
Speaker 1: I just got to calm down here. That the sound
Speaker 1: of the crickets on our miniature cricket farm here for
Speaker 1: soothing me.
Speaker 3: At least I know they put me to sleep.
Speaker 1: I'm glad we set that up.
Speaker 3: That was pretty good. That was one of our better segues.
Speaker 3: Sadly enough.
Speaker 1: Thanks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we are talking crickets, aren't we.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we covered entomophagy.
Speaker 2: I meant to look up when, but it was seems
Speaker 2: like a long time ago, right, And that's eating bugs
Speaker 2: and insects. But this is focusing specifically on crickets because
Speaker 2: by all accounts, they seem like sort of the our
Speaker 2: best bet at trying to get something like this going
Speaker 2: in America.
Speaker 1: For real.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're I mean, they're pretty easy to raise. They
Speaker 3: don't require much space. You can set up your own
Speaker 3: cricket farm at home. And really, we should say, the
Speaker 3: point of all this, the whole reason anybody would want
Speaker 3: people to start raising crickets at home is because the well,
Speaker 3: the earth is about to collapse and our food supply
Speaker 3: is in real danger. Right, So I've got some stats
Speaker 3: for you, chuck. So meat consumption per capita has increased
Speaker 3: into the developed world. Actually it's doubled in the last
Speaker 3: thirty years, and that's thanks in no small part to
Speaker 3: the rise of the brick countries Brazil, Russia, India, and
Speaker 3: China who have huge, massive populations, and as they entered capitalists,
Speaker 3: the capitalist global economy have generally become enriched, and the
Speaker 3: more money they have, the more meat civilization tends to consume,
Speaker 3: at least these days. Right, So that doesn't seem bad
Speaker 3: in and of itself until you look into what kind
Speaker 3: of resources it takes to actually raise meat. So you
Speaker 3: ready for this one.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm afraid to produce.
Speaker 3: One pound of meat that's a half a kilo basically
Speaker 3: of meat, beef, beef. Sorry, Yeah, it requires about twenty
Speaker 3: four hundred gallons of water.
Speaker 1: I've heard stuff like that before.
Speaker 3: Which is like absolutely nuts, even when you consider that
Speaker 3: not only are you watering the cow, you're also watering,
Speaker 3: you know, the crops that you feed to the cow,
Speaker 3: So there's double water consumption. But one of the problem,
Speaker 3: one of the reasons cattle beef requires so much water,
Speaker 3: is because you only consume forty percent of the cow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so sixty.
Speaker 3: Percent of the water is going to sustain parts of
Speaker 3: the cow you're not even eating, right, So there's a
Speaker 3: lot of wasted water, even if your water delivery system
Speaker 3: is one hundred percent efficient, right, Yeah, that's just water.
Speaker 3: Fifty one percent of the greenhouse gases that are emitted
Speaker 3: on planet Earth come from animal agriculture. Yeah, fifty one percent.
Speaker 3: And one third of the world's adequate or high quality
Speaker 3: cropland has been lost to erosion or pollution in the
Speaker 3: last forty years. Now. That's a huge problem, whether we
Speaker 3: are all vegetarians or not. Because we're talking crop land,
Speaker 3: but we use way more crop land to feed our
Speaker 3: livestock than we do to feed ourselves. Right, something like
Speaker 3: fifty six million acres of land are used to grow
Speaker 3: crops in the United States to feed animals. Four million
Speaker 3: are used to grow crops for human consumption. So there's
Speaker 3: a lot, a lot of resources that are used up
Speaker 3: just from meat based diets. Right. A lot of people say, well,
Speaker 3: just go to plant based diets, and other people say
Speaker 3: you can't get enough protein from plant based diets, which
Speaker 3: apparently is not true from what I'm seeing. Other people
Speaker 3: are saying, fine, you want some protein, I got something
Speaker 3: for you, and it's crickets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm kind of all I'm not surprised, but it
Speaker 2: goes to show you the population boom. If meat consumption
Speaker 2: has increased that much in the face of probably more
Speaker 2: vegetarianism and veganism than ever before, too, you know.
Speaker 3: Well, that's kind of heartening, Like if if there does
Speaker 3: seem to be if I guess if societies follow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd like we should.
Speaker 2: I mean, we've been dancing around doing episodes on vegetarianism
Speaker 2: and veganism for a while, so we should probably tackle
Speaker 2: that at some point.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of curious about the history because it seems
Speaker 2: like in the like probably since the onset of America
Speaker 2: until and then I'm talking off my at the top
Speaker 2: of my head here, but until probably the nineties, it
Speaker 2: seemed like everybody who's just like meat, meat meat, meat, meat.
Speaker 3: Well, there's I mean, it's definitely associated with wealth, right,
Speaker 3: If you can afford to eat a nice steak kind
Speaker 3: of indicates you have a certain amount of status in
Speaker 3: your society, right.
Speaker 2: Well, like the fifties, it seems like they would eat
Speaker 2: steak for lunch, right, And I can't imagine, like a
Speaker 2: steak for lunch.
Speaker 3: That seems so indulgent. Yeah, I think it is, you know, yeah, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just give me, give me the twenty ounce Rabbi
Speaker 2: for lunch. Right, It's just I don't know, I can't
Speaker 2: imagine that. But in three martinis, I don't argue with
Speaker 2: that part.
Speaker 3: That is pretty indulgent. Three martinis and a twenty ounce
Speaker 3: Ribby for lunch.
Speaker 1: I mean that was don Draper, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I never saw that show. I know, I never
Speaker 3: saw it.
Speaker 1: It's it's available.
Speaker 3: Where is it out there? Really? I thought they erased it.
Speaker 1: All, Yeah, they did.
Speaker 3: So that's it, it's done. Uh huh. Didn't he go
Speaker 3: become a lumberjack at the end, No he did not. Okay,
Speaker 3: Oh that's dexter.
Speaker 1: Uh oh man. And then we've talked about the ending
Speaker 1: of that show.
Speaker 3: Great, I actually never saw the end of that one.
Speaker 3: You've just told me about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you still to yourself just to watch
Speaker 1: the finale.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: So this dude, Kevin, how would you pronounce that bachhuber bach?
Speaker 2: Which is fine, that's clearly bach and hub r. You
Speaker 2: just don't often see two h's side by side. So anyway,
Speaker 2: Kevin Bachhuba is a dude that is kind of championing,
Speaker 2: not kind of very much championing this movement. In two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven, he went to Thailand and tasted crickets
Speaker 2: deep fried crickets, and he's from California, and he was like, hey,
Speaker 2: this is really good.
Speaker 3: He's been far out.
Speaker 2: They've been doing this in Thailand since the late nineties.
Speaker 2: The king established a big growing program for crickets and
Speaker 2: cricket farms education in schools, like, you know, this is
Speaker 2: a good way to get protein in your diet. And
Speaker 2: he said, I think this is the direction America should
Speaker 2: go and I'm going to get in on the money
Speaker 2: side of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like the farming of it.
Speaker 3: Apparently it's a twenty million dollar industry already. Not bad, No,
Speaker 3: it isn't. And we should say that bach Kuber is
Speaker 3: one of several people who are into this, the idea
Speaker 3: of cricket farming, commercial cricket farming, and he's definitely one
Speaker 3: of the ogs for sure. His business was the first
Speaker 3: to get approval to sell crickets as food in the
Speaker 3: United States. You got FDA approval because the cricket industry
Speaker 3: actually is kind of old. Well it's not too old,
Speaker 3: but I saw anywhere between fifty and seventy years old
Speaker 3: in the US, and they're raised to say feed fish
Speaker 3: for commercial fish farming, or to grind up as a
Speaker 3: protein supplement for livestock feed. So people have been using
Speaker 3: crickets for a while, or to feed to like reptiles,
Speaker 3: to sell them to pet stores.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there.
Speaker 3: Was an established infrastructure of cricket farming, but the making
Speaker 3: the transition from selling it to feed to cows or
Speaker 3: fish or snakes to selling it to people to eat directly,
Speaker 3: that that was a big step. And bach Huber was
Speaker 3: the first one to take it in the US. I
Speaker 3: should just say, the reason I point out he's just
Speaker 3: one of many is because this house Stuff Works article
Speaker 3: is basically like, here's my report on Kevin back Huber's
Speaker 3: ted ted talk sort of. You know, yeah, I think
Speaker 3: just he definitely deserves, you know, credit, because he's leading
Speaker 3: the charge, but so are other people as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's woven throughout this thing though. Yeah. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you listen to the Entomopogy episode.
Speaker 3: Episode no it's it's episode.
Speaker 2: We pointed out then, and it bears repeating that America
Speaker 2: is new to this. But I think it was like
Speaker 2: Canada and the United States and Western Europe are literally
Speaker 2: the only places on Earth that don't consume insects as
Speaker 2: a regular part of their diet these days.
Speaker 3: So I saw, so this article kind of says the
Speaker 3: standard eighty percent of the world regularly consumes insects as
Speaker 3: part of their diet. I saw that there's a Food
Speaker 3: and Agriculture Organization, the UN organization report said something it
Speaker 3: was more like about a third of the populations rather
Speaker 3: than eighty percent, maybe like thirty to thirty five percent,
Speaker 3: which is still significant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a big difference.
Speaker 3: It is, and in the West specifically, the idea of
Speaker 3: eating bugs is not It's not commonplace, right, And I
Speaker 3: actually saw a pretty good explanation for why, Like thirteen
Speaker 3: of the fourteen large livestock animals that are domesticated are
Speaker 3: found in Eurasia and made their way over to the Americas,
Speaker 3: and those things those animals provide not just meat, but
Speaker 3: also things like milk, clothing, everything. Basically, so since since
Speaker 3: these what you would call Western countries had access to
Speaker 3: these domesticated animals, they never needed bugs as a food source.
Speaker 3: And then secondly, since they were raising domesticated animals, by definition,
Speaker 3: they had a sedentary agricultural lifestyle, which meant that their
Speaker 3: exposure to bugs was bugs as pests. So not only
Speaker 3: were bugs not edible, they were something you that were
Speaker 3: just undesirable on their face. So that led to the
Speaker 3: it closed the door on bugs being eaten by Westerners,
Speaker 3: and so that came to be filled by a sense
Speaker 3: of disgust, which is a basic human emotion, but it's
Speaker 3: the only one that's culturally bound, which means you learn
Speaker 3: what is disgusting from your cultural group.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: But that also means you can unlearn it too.
Speaker 2: Well, this big cricket has anything to do with it,
Speaker 2: Why don't we took a quick break and we're going
Speaker 2: to come back and talked about a UN report that
Speaker 2: kind of changed a lot of things about four years ago.
Speaker 2: All right, so I promised you a UN report twenty
Speaker 2: thirteen there was a big kind of sea change.
Speaker 3: I don't know about sea change. It was the beginning
Speaker 3: beginning of a sea change.
Speaker 2: They issued a report called Edible Insects Colon Future Prospects
Speaker 2: for Food and Feed Security, and it was basically just
Speaker 2: championing entomophagy and all the benefits that surround it, like
Speaker 2: how nutrient dense crickets and other insects are, the fact
Speaker 2: that it's socially sustainable, economically viable, and friendly, environmentally friendly,
Speaker 2: and it kind of, you know, kind of paints it
Speaker 2: as like, hey, this is the future, or it could
Speaker 2: be part of the future at least of getting protein
Speaker 2: into you know, Americans.
Speaker 3: Right, And the report itself didn't focus exclusively on crickets,
Speaker 3: but crickets feature prominently in the report.
Speaker 1: The star it was about.
Speaker 3: It was about bugs in general and eating bugs in general,
Speaker 3: and it was it made a pretty big splash. I
Speaker 3: remember when it came out, like it really hit the
Speaker 3: news cycle pretty hard. But it also caught the attention
Speaker 3: of that back Huber guy who said, all right, I'm
Speaker 3: gonna I think I'm gonna get into this because he'd
Speaker 3: already been exposed to eating crickets in Thailand and then
Speaker 3: that when that UN report came out, he I think
Speaker 3: began as start up here in the States of his
Speaker 3: commercial cricket farm startup.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny they put in this article that it
Speaker 2: was the most popular document in the history of the UN.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I didn't see that anywhere. I think that was
Speaker 3: he said that at his ted report. Yeah, yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 3: it definitely made a splash. I'll give him that for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he spoke at a ted X Youngstown, Ohio, because
Speaker 2: that's where he's based, that's where his company is, right,
Speaker 2: and I guess he just made up his own ted
Speaker 2: X probably. All right, so let's talk about crickets. Well,
Speaker 2: all insects in particular are very rich in protein. Like
Speaker 2: we've talked about. They have a lot of healthy fats, Yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot of zinc, a lot of iron, a lot
Speaker 2: of calcium, and there's something called I guess efficient animals.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I mean this.
Speaker 2: Is when vegetarians and vegans are like, these kind of
Speaker 2: terms make their skin crawl, I'm sure. But the kind
Speaker 2: of efficiency you get out of raising and killing and
Speaker 2: eating an animal is on a spectrum, and you know,
Speaker 2: from cows, like you talked about, it's probably the worst,
Speaker 2: I would guess, don't you think, right?
Speaker 3: Right? The animal itself is efficient at converting food that
Speaker 3: you feed it into stuff that you can get from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so like you said, not a lot of the
Speaker 2: cow is used to eat.
Speaker 3: No, it's like forty percent of a cow is edible
Speaker 3: and digestible.
Speaker 1: And I think the chicken is about the most efficient
Speaker 1: animal protein right now, right, nothing like crickets.
Speaker 3: So there's two different things here, right. So you've got
Speaker 3: efficiency in nutrient conversion, which is say, like if you
Speaker 3: eat an apple, you can convert you know x amount
Speaker 3: of the energy available in the apple into you know,
Speaker 3: energy for yourself metabolism, right and poop right yeah, that
Speaker 3: but poop is waste, so that stuff wouldn't count toward efficiency.
Speaker 3: It would actually subtract from your efficiency and lower your efficiency.
Speaker 3: If you ate an apple and used every bit of
Speaker 3: it and it produced zero poop, you would have efficiently
Speaker 3: converted that apple into useful energy, right.
Speaker 1: And that'd be a weird apple.
Speaker 3: It would be a be a magic apple, and you
Speaker 3: wouldn't need a poop shoot, but instead you do. Because
Speaker 3: there is no such thing as one hundred percent efficiency
Speaker 3: in any animal, right, But some are better than others,
Speaker 3: like you were saying, And with a cricket, it's something
Speaker 3: like they're like twelve times more efficient at converting food
Speaker 3: into usable energy or stored in this case stored protein. Right.
Speaker 3: So for every kilogram of live cricket weight, which is
Speaker 3: a pretty substantial amount of crickets, but but kilogram to
Speaker 3: kilogram or pound to pound, it just takes one point
Speaker 3: seven kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of live crickets.
Speaker 3: Not bad for a cow. It takes ten kilograms of
Speaker 3: feed to produce one kilogram of beef. Very inefficient by comparison.
Speaker 3: So if you take the fact that it doesn't take
Speaker 3: much feed to produce a biomass of crickets, and that
Speaker 3: crickets are eighty percent edible and digestible compared to the
Speaker 3: cows forty percent edible and digestible, then you really have
Speaker 3: a if you're just going pound to pound or kilogram
Speaker 3: to kilogram and much more nutrient dens, much more efficient
Speaker 3: and then therefore much much less wasteful animal that you
Speaker 3: could eat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, A lot of that has to do with the
Speaker 2: fact that crickets are cold blooded, so they're very much
Speaker 2: more efficient at converting that feed into protein. And crickets
Speaker 2: aren't even the most efficient insect.
Speaker 3: No, no, huh, sure which one is?
Speaker 1: Actually?
Speaker 3: I think mealworms are pretty efficient.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he just said that because you're eating a meal worm.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, I have a meal worm farm. I was
Speaker 3: gonna ask you to buy in on. Oh really, uh huh,
Speaker 3: all right, in my pocket.
Speaker 1: See is that a meal worm farm in your pocket?
Speaker 3: It is my pocket mulch Uh.
Speaker 2: So, like we mentioned, mister bach Ruber is if he's
Speaker 2: not German, he should be.
Speaker 3: Kevin bach Kruber. I think he's, uh, but he's Irish German.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's spelled kV in though, So we're just inserting
Speaker 2: vowels for me.
Speaker 3: Right like d n C.
Speaker 1: What's that?
Speaker 3: It's this band?
Speaker 2: Okay, probably a young person's band, I believe, so, no wonder,
Speaker 2: I don't know, uh, but he is one of I
Speaker 2: think they're about and this has probably changed even since
Speaker 2: this is written.
Speaker 1: About twenty five or so.
Speaker 2: Uh, cricket startup farms here in the United States.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I couldn't find the current number.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's just say at least twenty five.
Speaker 3: Okay, although I'll bet they go under pretty quick, you think, so,
Speaker 3: I could see I could see losing your shirt on
Speaker 3: cricket farming right now. It's so it's just so early, yeah,
Speaker 3: and the market is so not there, and the stuff
Speaker 3: they're producing is so expensive.
Speaker 2: Well, and their output right now is still really small
Speaker 2: in the in the early years here. But you know,
Speaker 2: the dream for for him and all these cricket farmers
Speaker 2: is that one day it will it will. I don't
Speaker 2: think they have designs it will ever be like in
Speaker 2: some parts of the world where it's on every menu
Speaker 2: and every restaurant. But they would certainly like to see
Speaker 2: cricket snacks in grocery stores and menu offerings and some
Speaker 2: some of the more wacky hipster restaurants, right at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Did you do you watch Shirt Tank?
Speaker 1: Oh? You know, I do?
Speaker 3: Okay, So did you see the one withal was Wang
Speaker 3: and Laura DeSario. I've seen them all Okay, so you
Speaker 3: saw the one with chirps their snack, their cricket based
Speaker 3: snack product, Chirps. I want to try it.
Speaker 1: I do too.
Speaker 2: I'm not like, I'm not an adventurous eater, as you know,
Speaker 2: but I would totally try fried crickets and things that
Speaker 2: doesn't gross me out for some reason.
Speaker 3: No, I and I would try it as well. And
Speaker 3: do you. I don't know if you remember or not,
Speaker 3: but when we did that locust thing for Science Channel,
Speaker 3: it's like the second time it has come up this month.
Speaker 3: Weirdly enough, they made fried locus and I refuse to
Speaker 3: eat them, right, And it wasn't because I was grossed out.
Speaker 3: It was because I was sure that I was going
Speaker 3: to have some sort of weird allergic reaction to them.
Speaker 3: Oh right, yeah, yeah, And I would have had to
Speaker 3: have been, like you know, life flighted somewhere to a
Speaker 3: hospital and would have missed my flight home. That is
Speaker 3: the only reason I didn't eat them. It had nothing
Speaker 3: to do with disgust. But in that UN report they
Speaker 3: address allergies and they said that it's actually exceedingly rare
Speaker 3: that somebody has an allergic reaction to an arthropod. Yeah,
Speaker 3: or to an insect, I should say. But the reason
Speaker 3: why I thought so is because yeah, I had had
Speaker 3: like a shrimp blow up once, right, and I just
Speaker 3: was not about to roll the dice on that, not
Speaker 3: for what Science Channel was paying us.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's very funny that you. I remember
Speaker 2: your shrimp, your shrimp years in that you had an
Speaker 2: allergic reaction to shrimp, but you wanted to eat shrimp
Speaker 2: so bad you started to eat shrimp a little bit
Speaker 2: just to see if you could eat shrimp.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Shrimp chips, yeah, which use real shrimp powder. It's
Speaker 3: like I think Japanese or Korean or Chinese delicacy.
Speaker 1: But now you can eat shrimp, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he did immunotherapy and now I'm fine. I can
Speaker 3: eat shrimp all day long.
Speaker 1: I just love that you were so dedicated to you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I love shrimp man, good shrimp like season with
Speaker 3: Old Bay, just simple stuff. Oh man, so good.
Speaker 1: This is a great time to bring up one of
Speaker 1: my big pet peeves. Okay, I know that cooking with
Speaker 1: shrimp heads and tails on increases the flavor quite a bit,
Speaker 1: does it? Yeah? Okay, which is why they do it.
Speaker 2: But it's one thing if you get an appetizer with
Speaker 2: like the the like.
Speaker 1: A prawn with a head left on or something.
Speaker 2: But if you like I get pasta dishes sometimes, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: that have like heads and tails on them.
Speaker 3: If there's a fork involved, you don't want to have
Speaker 3: to put your fork down and take the head and
Speaker 3: tail off.
Speaker 2: No, like you literally have to dig them out of
Speaker 2: the pasta, take the head and tail off, and then
Speaker 2: put them back in your food, right, which is just
Speaker 2: I don't get why restaurants do that, Like maybe cook
Speaker 2: it in there and then take it off for us.
Speaker 3: So I ran across the reason probably why.
Speaker 1: All right, let's hear it.
Speaker 3: There's something called kiten which makes up the exoskeleton of bugs,
Speaker 3: but it also makes up the shells of crustaceans as well,
Speaker 3: and kiten sup if you don't have an allergic reaction
Speaker 3: to it. Kiten is apparently good for it's it's said
Speaker 3: to be good for weight loss, yeah, digestion. It aids
Speaker 3: in digestion allegedly, and I think it has something to
Speaker 3: do with your blood pressure too. And in other countries,
Speaker 3: non non Western countries, I think they prescribed kiten quite
Speaker 3: a bit as like a dietary supplement. And I saw
Speaker 3: one study that said, yeah, I had a little bit
Speaker 3: of an effect, a little more than placebo, but not
Speaker 3: clinically significant. But it was just one study, so I'm
Speaker 3: curious if kiten actually does have an effect. But it's possible.
Speaker 3: They're saying you should eat the whole thing. Well, this shell,
Speaker 3: what I mean, it's I don't know. They could also
Speaker 3: just be a fat, lazy chef, you know.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I'll eat a soft shell crab till
Speaker 2: the cows come home.
Speaker 1: But I'm not eating a shrimp tail.
Speaker 3: Yeah it sounds gross. Well, it's just not like they
Speaker 3: don't soften up enough, you know. But if you think
Speaker 3: about it, though, if you're eating a fried cricket or something,
Speaker 3: you're eating the whole thing shell and all antenna.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, but I thought that in the soft shell
Speaker 1: crab zone.
Speaker 3: So you eat the shell of the soft shell crab. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's what you're supposed to do. That's what it is.
Speaker 3: I don't know that i've ever had soft shell crab. Oh,
Speaker 3: my friend, is that like a blue crab?
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: I think it's a special kind of crab. Oh that has.
Speaker 3: Parents must love it very much.
Speaker 1: I might be wrong.
Speaker 2: I think it's a special kind of crab and then
Speaker 2: you prepare it with the shell. But I think the
Speaker 2: shell is soft to begin with, though I don't think
Speaker 2: it's just from cooking. But like spider roll is one
Speaker 2: of my favorite sushi rolls, that's soft shell crab.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, I thought that was crab like spelled with
Speaker 3: a cave like fake crab.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: No, that like the little legs are coming out of
Speaker 2: the end and everything. That's why they call it a
Speaker 2: spider roll because it looks like little spider legs.
Speaker 3: And I'll try that.
Speaker 2: And then like a soft shell crab sandwiches, I mean,
Speaker 2: you open the bun and there's just like this crab
Speaker 2: staring at you.
Speaker 3: Going, how's it going? You're gonna eat me in a second,
Speaker 3: aren't you.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm getting hungry now, and you.
Speaker 3: Want to take a break real quick.
Speaker 2: Well quickly before we just should mention that they did
Speaker 2: get a deal on Shark Tank.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, with Mark Cuban for Chirps.
Speaker 3: Right, we're contractually obligated to munch Mark Cuban.
Speaker 1: That's right, we get our kickback coming.
Speaker 3: I would try chirps for sure. If the Chrips people
Speaker 3: are out there listening and you want to send us
Speaker 3: some chirps, I will try them up, all right, So
Speaker 3: let's take that break. Okay, So Chuck, we said I
Speaker 3: think I said that one of the things that's holding
Speaker 3: this industry back right now is that the it's so
Speaker 3: expensive the products they're making. There's something called cricket flour,
Speaker 3: which is ground up cricket meal, basically a protein powder
Speaker 3: made from crickets, right, and it's it's anywhere from like
Speaker 3: thirty five to fifty dollars a pound for it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's very expensive, a lot of money, but it's really
Speaker 3: ironic because crickets require so much less space and food
Speaker 3: and water and electricity. It's apparently the labor force that
Speaker 3: is the most expensive thing of any commercial cricket farm
Speaker 3: because there it's just hard to find people who can
Speaker 3: do that, even though it's not exactly hard, it's just
Speaker 3: there's a lot of trial and error going on. So
Speaker 3: from what I saw, it's the labor force that's that's
Speaker 3: eating up most of the revenue or profits from cricket farming.
Speaker 2: Well, finding all those tiny people, those three inch people, right,
Speaker 2: it's not easy.
Speaker 3: But there are startups also that are trying to sell
Speaker 3: like home cricket kits too, Yeah, because that's part of
Speaker 3: the whole idea where if you're gonna get people to
Speaker 3: supplement their diet, well just let them grow them at
Speaker 3: home too.
Speaker 2: So should we talk a little bit about the farming. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So crickets live about seven weeks. I mean that right
Speaker 2: there shows you a big difference between that and like
Speaker 2: the beef industry. So during that seven week life cycle,
Speaker 2: they have three different environments that they reside in, and
Speaker 2: they basically live and hang out on what they call
Speaker 2: cricket high rises, which are little egg cartons.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I saw that they have tried all sorts of
Speaker 3: different material and they keep going back to egg cartons
Speaker 3: for some reason. Crickets just love hanging out on egg carts.
Speaker 1: Well, who doesn't.
Speaker 2: And what they eat is because I was kind of
Speaker 2: wondering that they eat grain based feed, organic grain based feed,
Speaker 2: fruits and vegetables, and they some of them will reach
Speaker 2: that breeding stage, some won't, and if they do, they're
Speaker 2: gonna lay a lot of eggs, Like you know, several
Speaker 2: thousand eggs a mommy cricket will lay in her lifetime.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so many eggs in fact, that they they typically
Speaker 3: just throw most of them out, like they'll keep some
Speaker 3: to grow a new generation from. But there's just so
Speaker 3: many that are just tossed out because they don't have
Speaker 3: the capacity yet to grow them. Yeah, so that you
Speaker 3: know they're I think back Huber put it like he
Speaker 3: could be drowning in eggs if he's not.
Speaker 1: Careful, drowning in cricket eggs.
Speaker 2: He probably wakes up every night sweating occurring greens.
Speaker 3: He probably really does wake up every night from the
Speaker 3: cricket chirping.
Speaker 1: Oh, I never really thought about that. That must be nice, Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: it can be.
Speaker 2: So they like hot, humid environments, or at least warm,
Speaker 2: depending on your definition of hot. It's hot to me
Speaker 2: eighty five to ninety five degrees fahrenheit with about a
Speaker 2: forty eight percent humidity level yep. And the whole process
Speaker 2: from soup to nuts or from eggs to chirps is
Speaker 2: about fifty six days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, roughly. Yeah. And if you can do this yourself
Speaker 3: at home, you just need basically two terrariums. You need
Speaker 3: to put them near heat, because that is substantial. Eighty
Speaker 3: five to ninety five degrees is hot, way hotter than
Speaker 3: you're going to keep your house. So you do need
Speaker 3: like a heat lamp of some sort, and you need
Speaker 3: water a source of water too. Those are the two
Speaker 3: most important things with raising crickets. And the reason you
Speaker 3: have two terrariums is because in the one where you
Speaker 3: have like the thirty initial crickets, say, you're going to
Speaker 3: put a dish of soil and that's where they're going
Speaker 3: to lay their eggs. You want to check the soil
Speaker 3: every day for eggs, and when you find eggs, you
Speaker 3: take that little soil dish out and put it in
Speaker 3: the other terrarium, and then that's where the eggs are
Speaker 3: going to grow and hatch. And when the crickets hatch,
Speaker 3: they're fully formed. There's no larval stage, right, they don't
Speaker 3: go from like a maggot into a cricket. They're fully formed.
Speaker 3: They're just much smaller, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And according to Aristotle, it's about around here or maybe
Speaker 3: within the next like week or so, that they're the
Speaker 3: most delicious Aristotle. Yeah. Aristotle wrote in his Historia Animalium.
Speaker 3: Actually he was writing about cicadas that they're better when
Speaker 3: they're before their last mold. So I guess I wouldn't
Speaker 3: apply to crickets. No, I would, because they molt?
Speaker 1: Did they?
Speaker 3: They do molt. He also said that females taste best
Speaker 3: after copulation because they are full of eggs after Aristotle
Speaker 3: has copulated, right or after. Instead of a cigarette, you
Speaker 3: just need a pregnant female cicada. Try this baby, right,
Speaker 3: it'll knock your socks off.
Speaker 1: I bet Aristotle pillow talk with something else.
Speaker 3: I don't find it, you know, or it just be
Speaker 3: like ugh, yeah, man, he just keeps going on and
Speaker 3: on about cicadas.
Speaker 2: So harvesting, I mean, there's no way around it. At
Speaker 2: some point, like any live thing that you're raising, you're
Speaker 2: gonna have to kill it. And instead of like what
Speaker 2: we see on factory farms with cows and pigs, what
Speaker 2: you do on a cricket farm is you cool them
Speaker 2: down and then freeze them. And so what happens is
Speaker 2: they they get cold, they start to get a little chili,
Speaker 2: their temperature drops, and they go into what's called a diapause,
Speaker 2: sort of a hibernation like state. And then pretty much
Speaker 2: after that they go it is sure is chili in here?
Speaker 1: And then they're gone and frozen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, apparently they eventually freeze solid. So they spend about
Speaker 3: twenty four hours in the freezer and then they're ready
Speaker 3: to be sold. Yeah, either ground into say like a powder,
Speaker 3: or baked into a fried snack or so old toes
Speaker 3: somebody else. But that's that. And I was like, do
Speaker 3: they wake up then if you heat them up in
Speaker 3: a pan? But apparently after twenty four hours and their
Speaker 3: frozen solid, they're dead.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But to them it's just like going to sleep forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I kind of wonder when I was reading this, I
Speaker 2: was like, how do vegans and vegetarians feel about eating insects?
Speaker 3: Supposedly it does not count as vegetarian.
Speaker 2: Well, it depends on who you ask. I didn't get
Speaker 2: any like there is no official rule book. There's not
Speaker 2: I don't think so I'm surprised. But basically, I just
Speaker 2: went to a bunch of vegan and vegetarian websites and
Speaker 2: looked to see what people said, and it kind of
Speaker 2: ranged from well, sure, ill eat insects and this is
Speaker 2: a much better way to get protein in your body
Speaker 2: than animals, to where other people said, no, it's a
Speaker 2: living thing, not going to eat it. I get all
Speaker 2: the protein I need from plants. If you're eating something
Speaker 2: a live animal, then you're not a vegan in her
Speaker 2: a vegetarian.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I saw crickets referred to as many livestock all
Speaker 3: one word. Yeah, I mean they are a live they're
Speaker 3: a living animal. Yeah, sure, so I guess that's a
Speaker 3: personal choice. It sounds like, yeah, just like you know,
Speaker 3: vegetarians eat fish sometimes too.
Speaker 1: Uh, Well, they'd be a pescatarian, right.
Speaker 3: I guess. But I've met plenty of vegetarians. They're like,
Speaker 3: I'm a vegetarian and I eat fish. Leave me alone.
Speaker 2: And that's when you go technically you're a pescatarian, and
Speaker 2: then you get punched in the face. Right, So, eating
Speaker 2: crickets some people say sort of nutty. Some people say
Speaker 2: it's a little sweet, like sweet corn. I'm I would
Speaker 2: like to know for myself. I wish we could have
Speaker 2: gotten her hand on some chirps beforehand. Yeah, but maybe
Speaker 2: we can follow up in the future.
Speaker 3: We need a big bowl of chirps right here.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, like we did with the soilin Yeah, with
Speaker 1: a soilent.
Speaker 3: Soilent will do a follow up soilent.
Speaker 2: So there's this lady Danny Ella Martin, and she has
Speaker 2: a travel show and a well it's an insect cooking
Speaker 2: and travel show called Girl Meets Bug, very cute, and
Speaker 2: we should say the chirps ladies called crickets the Gateway
Speaker 2: Bug also that was kind of funny and punny. And
Speaker 2: Daniella says that she started eating crickets and kind of
Speaker 2: became fascinated with insects in general when she was in
Speaker 2: Mexico and Yucatan and kind of became, I don't think obsessed,
Speaker 2: but just super interested in this as her protein of
Speaker 2: choice and said, you know, I started cooking them up
Speaker 2: with the little little butter, onion, little salt, and like
Speaker 2: with anything, if you put it in a pan with
Speaker 2: some butter and onion and salt, maybe a little garlic,
Speaker 2: it's probably gonna taste pretty darn good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you could cook almost anything with butter, salt and
Speaker 3: onions and you're fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, even when you hear stories of these creepy cannibal people,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they should cook it in butter. Yeah, with
Speaker 1: a little salt and the onion and garlic.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think that one guy who advertised on like
Speaker 3: Craigslist did cannibal. Yeah he saw it with yeah onion,
Speaker 3: you're right, any I think it was say what he
Speaker 3: ate penis like that he did. Man, that was a
Speaker 3: very disturbing case.
Speaker 2: Sure, so she says, crisping them in the oven is
Speaker 2: another besides you know, grinding into powder, cooking him up,
Speaker 2: like broiling him in the oven.
Speaker 1: Don't overcook it.
Speaker 2: Olive oil, garlic, salt, Throw him in about two fifty
Speaker 2: for about fifteen minutes and a little sea salt on
Speaker 2: top maybe, and you're gonna have a crunchy, delicious, nutrient
Speaker 2: rich snack.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And you want to clean them off too. If
Speaker 3: you're cooking them from raw, they're bugs. That's it's something
Speaker 3: you want to do.
Speaker 1: What do you do just like wash them in a calendar?
Speaker 3: I guess so, yeah, But I think like if they're
Speaker 3: already prepared, you're probably okay. Because one of the big
Speaker 3: things that that like back Huber did by getting f
Speaker 3: day approval, like now you can't just raise crickets on
Speaker 3: just anything, like they have to be fed food that
Speaker 3: is okay for humans to eat too, which is something
Speaker 3: that the cricket farming industry is running up against because
Speaker 3: one of the big things proponents are saying is like, man,
Speaker 3: you could raise crickets, if you had large scale cricket farms,
Speaker 3: you could raise crickets on food waste, and if you
Speaker 3: if you do that, not only are you like raising
Speaker 3: your crickets, you're also getting rid of food waste. You're
Speaker 3: composting basically, right, Yeah, composting, that's the way you say it.
Speaker 3: But apparently that day is like now you can't feed
Speaker 3: things food waste and nut job. You're gonna eat it eventually,
Speaker 3: So there's big rules against it. But that I think
Speaker 3: they're trying to chip away at that as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I remember being alarmed when I briefly worked in the
Speaker 2: chicken industry when I found out that a lot of
Speaker 2: chicken feed is made from chickens.
Speaker 3: Yeah not okay, Yeah, that's not right. So I saw
Speaker 3: in I think Popular Science, they had a little nutrition
Speaker 3: facts thing for crickets. It's so cute. They said, for
Speaker 3: one hundred grams of crickets, you're looking at about one
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty one hundred and twenty one calories. Okay,
Speaker 3: You've got about five and a half grams of carbs, Okay,
Speaker 3: twelve point nine grams of protein. That is substantial, Yeah,
Speaker 3: seventy five point eight milligrams of calcium and nine and
Speaker 3: a half milligrams of iron. That's also pretty substantial. Just
Speaker 3: from one hundred grams, I think they estimate that's about
Speaker 3: twenty to twenty two crickets.
Speaker 1: Like a handful and a half. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Nice, that that's pretty good. And the idea that if
Speaker 3: you are just raising crickets yourself, you can feed them
Speaker 3: your own kitchen waist, Yeah, and then eat the cricket yourself.
Speaker 3: There's also right right, there's also very low barriers to
Speaker 3: entry into cricket farming. So if you're if you're not
Speaker 3: a wealthy person and you need to make some extra money,
Speaker 3: you could conceivably raise crickets yourself and then sell them
Speaker 3: at market too. It's like podcasting exactly exactly. I think
Speaker 3: that's it. I got nothing else, all right, Well, it's
Speaker 3: cricket farming. Everybody, go make it happen. And in the meantime,
Speaker 3: you can look up this article on HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 3: And since I said that, it's time for listener maw.
Speaker 2: I'm going to call this Kevin Spacey's accent explained. Oh
Speaker 2: and before I read this, there is a House of
Speaker 2: Cards spoiler spoiler.
Speaker 1: Alert to that.
Speaker 2: Hey, guys, just listen to the episode on accents. I'm
Speaker 2: happy you brought up Kevin Spacey's sent from House of
Speaker 2: Cards because I have a theory. Spacey plays a character
Speaker 2: Frank Underwood, grew up poor in Gaffney, South Carolina, but
Speaker 2: then went on to the Citadel in Charleston and created
Speaker 2: a persona that eventually lands him president. His accent does
Speaker 2: not sound like a bad attempt at the r less
Speaker 2: old money Charleston accent, but I think it fits the character.
Speaker 2: Instead of a twangy, ar full accent that he'd have
Speaker 2: from Gaffney, Spacey's playing Frank Underwood, who was playing someone
Speaker 2: with noble Southern roots, and that's why it sounds fake.
Speaker 2: Am I giving Kevin Spacey too much credit? Possibly? But
Speaker 2: being from Greenville, South Carolina, enjoyed dissecting his Carolina accent,
Speaker 2: And actually I don't have much of an accent myself,
Speaker 2: except with words like lawyer and oil.
Speaker 1: Jerry just laughed.
Speaker 2: Because my brother, who's ten years older, trained it out
Speaker 2: of me when I was very young. He said he
Speaker 2: didn't want people to underestimate my intelligence because of our accent.
Speaker 2: He had correct me every time I would say things
Speaker 2: like turn the light zone instead of trying the lights on,
Speaker 2: or naked instead of naked.
Speaker 3: If you're saying naked, macha with a length of drive
Speaker 3: bamboo and say again, say it again.
Speaker 2: I sort of wish I sounded more like the rest
Speaker 2: of my family. But what a considerate thing for my
Speaker 2: big brother to have done when he was a teenager. Seriously,
Speaker 2: and that is from Mary Jean Murphy.
Speaker 3: That was pretty great. Mary Gene, your brother is a
Speaker 3: little social engineer, isn't he.
Speaker 1: I like that?
Speaker 3: And thank you also for the spoiler about Kevin Spacey
Speaker 3: becoming president on House of Cards. If you want to
Speaker 3: get in touch with us like she did, you can
Speaker 3: send us an email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot
Speaker 3: com and as always, joined us at our home on
Speaker 3: the web, stuff Youshould Know dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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