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“cricket pasta” made from 20 per cent cricket flour. The company’s Chinese branch has also launched a silkworm flour-based crisp snack called Bella Pupa (which last year won the Food and Beverage Innovative Forum’s Most Innovative Food award), capitalising on the 500,000 tonnes of silkworms farmed in China each year. The company says nutritionally silkworms have twice
as many essential amino acids as pork and chicken, and ten times the zinc and magnesium values of milk. In an interview with CNBC, Bits x Bites founder
Matilda Ho said she believes China could be a catalyst for the entomophagy industry. “Our view is that China has a real opportunity to kick off insect food adoption on a wide scale because cooked insects can be found in many ethnic cuisines across the country,” she said. “But having a cultural linkage isn’t enough; we have to make the product tasty, nutritious, convenient and affordable.” She added: “With China’s talent, fast technology
adoption, and risk capital, having a healthy good food innovation ecosystem can have dramatic and lasting impact on food sustainability. We’re just at the beginning to shape this movement.”
bus ine s s tr a v el ler .c om
Nutritionally, silkworms have twice as many amino acids as pork and chicken
While the commercial entomophagy
sector gears up for growth, restaurateurs are delving into the gastronomy of insect cuisine. In 2008 René Redzepi, head chef at Noma (consistently voted the world’s best restaurant), set up non-profit Nordic Food Lab together with gastronomic entrepreneur Claus Meyer to explore food diversity and the concept of “deliciousness”. A project dedicated to insect gastronomy led to a portfolio of 125 recipes and around 20 publications including investigations into the taste,
scent, texture and production of insects for dishes like bee larvae ceviche, termite toast, fermented sauces made with grasshoppers, wax moth larvae and ant gin, to name a few. Noma was one of the pioneers of “haute” insect
cuisine, serving up live ants with crème fraiche at the restaurant’s 2012 pop-up at London’s Claridges, while at its Mandarin Oriental Tokyo 2015 pop-up, “live” shrimps (killed with a spike to the brain and served still twitching) were covered in dead ants to give the crustaceans a citrusy flavour. Other upmarket
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