You Eat with your Eyes
When I learned that Fazer, a Finnish Bakery, planned to be the first commercial bakery to sell insect bread to the public, I had to try it.
Fortunately, Professor Beth Choate, in my department, is an insect ecologist who finishes her class every year with an insect meal. She gave me some cricket flour.
Before you lose your appetite, consider the fact that on average, every 50 grams of flour (about 1.7 ounces) contains 75 insect parts. Makes some sense, really. Only fields that have been sprayed to death with thick coatings of insecticides are completely free of insects when harvesters take grain. Thus, you have always been eating insects, with the approval of the FDA, pretty much with all your food. You just don't know it.
I wanted to see if students would be able to tell the difference between cricket bread and a bread made with buckwheat flour that looked nearly the same.
Just to prove you eat with your eyes check out these two loaves and notice how much more appetizing they appear because you can make believe the 75 insect parts in every 50 grams of flour aren't really there.
Fortunately, Professor Beth Choate, in my department, is an insect ecologist who finishes her class every year with an insect meal. She gave me some cricket flour.
Before you lose your appetite, consider the fact that on average, every 50 grams of flour (about 1.7 ounces) contains 75 insect parts. Makes some sense, really. Only fields that have been sprayed to death with thick coatings of insecticides are completely free of insects when harvesters take grain. Thus, you have always been eating insects, with the approval of the FDA, pretty much with all your food. You just don't know it.
I wanted to see if students would be able to tell the difference between cricket bread and a bread made with buckwheat flour that looked nearly the same.
Two of these loaves were made with 15% cricket flour (about five times what Fazer uses, but I didn't know that until after I made the breads) and two were made with the same percentage of buckwheat flour.
Can you tell which one has the higher protein content because it contains ground crickets?
Does this help?
I'll tell you that this one is buckwheat bread with a few whole crickets laid on top. It is the darker, more rotund, shorter loaf and is at the top of the photo of the sliced breads above. Could you eat it if it were touched by crickets but didn't have crickets in it?
This one has crickets in it and on it. Students actually preferred the taste of cricket-flour bread. It was definitely more sour than the buckwheat loaf.
So how far would you go? I made this sandwich and ate it.
And then I convinced Rachel to try crickets straight up.
Just to prove you eat with your eyes check out these two loaves and notice how much more appetizing they appear because you can make believe the 75 insect parts in every 50 grams of flour aren't really there.
A very large loaf of whole wheat.
A dense Scandinavian sourdough rye coated with pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds.
Comments
Post a Comment