Eating insects
Imagine tucking into your food to find out there are insects in it. Not accidentally, but because the company making the food decided to put them in. It could soon become a reality, as the idea of eating insects continues to make waves amongst food manufacturers.
Roberts, a UK-based bakery brand, have put these ideas into practice with their Crunchy Cricket Loaf, which might soon be available in British grocery stores. More well-known for manufacturing conventional loaves of bread, they’ve turned to insects in their latest experimentation.
To make the bread, crickets are dried and ground up before being mixed with flour to create a ‘cricket flour’ of sorts. It’s then baked into loaves and reportedly has something of a crunchy texture. Just over 330 crickets are used in an average loaf, but with billions of crickets in the world, there’s virtually a never-ending supply of the critters to create an abundance of bread.
It’s safe and healthy too – Eat Grub provide the flour, and it’s sourced from a farm that has a Grade A BRC food safety certificate. Meanwhile, the bread contains more protein than usual loaves, as well as more antioxidant power than even orange juice, and plenty of chitin, vitamin B12 and vitamin C. It’s also low in fat, so crickets are ideal to be used in the making of bread.
Around the world
Eating insects is still fairly niche in the US and Europe, but it might be becoming slightly more common as people try to become more eco-conscious. Around two billion people worldwide consume insects, and Eat Grub have been active for over six years, promoting the eating of insects in the UK.
Roberts consider themselves to be a ‘next generation’ bakery and do plenty of experiments with the bread that they sell – and the Crunchy Cricket Loaf is just the next product set to be released by the company, who are on the lookout for their next project.
If you’re interested, the loaves are being baked to order – maybe we’ll see cricket bread across the Atlantic soon too? Let us know if you’d try It surely beats having a rat in your bread…
