Cheap food is cool.But, uh, how do we make insects part of the mainstream in the US, where we’d much rather spray them with poison than sauté them in a pan? That’s where creative start-ups come in. Earlier this year, a woman named Megan Miller co-foundedBitty Foodsin San Francisco, selling grain-free, cricket-flour-based cookies in flavors like orange-ginger and chocolate-cardamom. She says the cookies are a “gateway product,” meaning their sugary form can help disguise the fact that you’re eating bugs (and the gateway is apparently working, as I’m now on my third cookie since starting to write this article). “The key is turning crickets into something familiar,” Miller says. “So we slow roast them and mill them into a powder that can be incorporated into basically anything.”
