Austin Miller - The Cricket Cookbook: A Complete Guide to Adding this Sustainable Protein to your Diet.

In February 2016, we ate our first insects. We were in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the fifth month of a no-itinerary, no-timeline trip through the Americas. The previous fall, we had both quit our international careers because our lifestyles had grown unsustainable. Not only were we frustrated with the large carbon-footprint our jobs demanded, but both our health and our relationship with each other was slowly deteriorating. In fact, we no longer were even living or working on the same continent as each other. We needed a reset. By slowly traveling with no itinerary or end date, we thought we would have the ability to not just relax and spend time together but to also follow any interests we developed along the way. Our dream was to find a project, a project in which we could do together and feel proud.

When we first ate insects, a bowl of grasshoppers in Oaxaca, we had little knowledge of the nutritional and environmental benefits associated with entomophagy, the practice of eating insects, and we were not suspecting that these initial bites would change our lives. Instead, we simply wanted to sample the local cuisine, much like we had on other stops on our journey. Zoe ate her initial bites with alacrity, but Austin struggled with that psychological hurdle many people encounter when first consciously eating a bug.

Figure 2 - Our first insects. Chapulines (grasshoppers) fried with chili and lime. Served with guacamole.

The grasshoppers were deep fried and visibly coated with chili, salt, and lime. Unlike the grasshoppersor Chapulinesavailable for sale in the local markets and on the street corners, these seasoned critters were served with a gaping bowl of fresh guacamole and a small mound of tortillas. Truthfully, there was no way we could ever have tasted the pure, unadulterated taste of insect when served this way. That didnt matter, though, because we had only wanted to eat a grasshopper for the sake of saying we had done so. It was pure novelty. We had little knowledge of any other reason to eat a bugmuch like the knowledge of many of the visitors to our farmers market stand today.

It wasnt until we did a Google search the next day that we found the FAO Report which labels insects the food of the future due to their small environmental and large nutritional footprint. We were blown away. We consequently spent all our down-time studying entomophagy as we traveled throughout the Yucatan, Belize, and Guatemala. By March, we were sold: we all needed to be eating insects. By April, we decided to quit our travels and to start farming crickets.

The rest was a blur. By November, we had moved to Oregon, opened a warehouse, raised a few hundred thousand crickets, and received the first license for a food-grade insect farm in the state of Oregon. We were surprised how easy it was to raise crickets: the population grew exponentially. As two neophytes with no background in insects, we quickly learned that farming crickets wasnt hard but that selling crickets was close to impossible. People werent going to the grocery store each week, looking to buy crickets. Even if people understood the benefits, few had any idea of how to actually prepare crickets. Restaurants had the same issue: the owners loved the benefits of crickets but didnt want to spend all day inventing recipes and convincing customers they should order crickets. Consequently, we were farming way more crickets than we could sell or even give away. We needed to take drastic measures: we needed to eat all our excess inventory.