Selects: Are crickets the future of food?

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Speaker 9 Hi everyone. I hope you're having a great weekend so far.
Do you want to know about crickets and how you can sustain yourself on them? Well then listen to this episode.

Speaker 9 Are Crickets the Future of Food? And this is from September 7th, 2017. I hope you enjoy it all over again.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 9 Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh W.
Chuck Clark.

Speaker 9 There's Charles Malcolm Bryant.

Speaker 9 And there's Jerry the Wiz rolling. That sounds like an Aaron Cooper poster gone bad.
Yep. Already.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 We will have like the swirly face, like the weird people in Jacob's Ladder. It's funny, we had an office visitor a couple weeks ago and I don't think you were here.

Speaker 9 And in fact, I know you weren't here because you would have been in here. That's right.
But there's our great stepbrothers. You know, the movie Stepbrothers, for those of you

Speaker 9 out there, there's a promo of John C. Riley and Will Farrell with

Speaker 9 an Olin Mills type, you know, posed photograph.

Speaker 9 And Aaron Cooper,

Speaker 9 our buddy from Kansas, who does our great Photoshop. stuff,

Speaker 9 made us into, I was John C. Riley and you were Will Farrell.
And the guy came in and was looking around and I was like, oh man, these are great. And he went, yeah, look at that.

Speaker 9 And he went, that looks like, I don't know, it looks like it could be like something like the movie Stepbrother or something.

Speaker 9 And I said, oh, that's exactly what it is. Yeah.

Speaker 9 I tried to make him not feel bad. That was nice of you.
That was very gracious of you as a host. Yeah, like he didn't quite zone in on all of them or us.

Speaker 9 I got you.

Speaker 9 He should have like clapped loudly beside his ear.

Speaker 9 Man, I had a little scary thing today.

Speaker 9 What happened? If I may, this is kind of part PSA. This has nothing to do with cricket farming.
Okay. But

Speaker 9 we're getting our basement waterproofed because for 13 years it's been leaking water like really bad.

Speaker 9 So much so that we have mold now. Oh, yeah.
Black mold? Yes. And we're also getting mold remediation done at the same time.
Man. So needless to say, that's a fun, fun way to spend a lot of money.

Speaker 9 But I come home today

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 my carbon monoxide alarm is going off oh man because these yahoos are using a gas powered concrete saw in our basement no

Speaker 9 and it's like full on saying you know get out of the house and my animals are in there so oh man like and i just happened to go home after i went to a coffee shop to study because

Speaker 9 I needed to grab something, but like I literally could have come home to dead animals. Man.

Speaker 9 And dead workmen in the basement. Yeah, those guys, too.

Speaker 9 Wow, I'll bet they're not the sharpest techs in the box anymore. That was weird, man.
And they were down there.

Speaker 9 I mean, not only did they not have on so much as a dust mask for the gas, but like concrete dust is really dangerous too. They're like, I don't care.
I've got Obamacare. It was so weird, man.

Speaker 9 And just, it freaked me out to the point where Emily, she wanted to, like, fire the guy.

Speaker 9 He wasn't even there, like, the, you know, the foreman or the owner of the company. Subs Subs were there.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and she wanted to be like, man, if he doesn't understand that this is dangerous, and he said, you know, open up your windows. It'll be clear in 15 minutes.

Speaker 9 And it took two hours for that alarm to stop going off. Oh, my gosh.
Wow. That is really scary.
It was really bad, man.

Speaker 9 I was out on my deck basically for the rest of the morning until I came in with my dogs and my cat in a crate.

Speaker 9 Man, that's like how some people commit suicide. I know.
You know? Yeah. And these guys are just doing it gratis for you.
Yeah, it was weird.

Speaker 9 Yeah, anyway, so I'm slightly shaken. Yeah, I'll bet.
I'm glad you made it, man. You look good.
You look okay. Thank you.
You look healthy. Your pallor isn't gaunt.

Speaker 9 I think you're okay.

Speaker 9 I just got to calm down here. The sound of the crickets on our miniature cricket farm here are soothing me at least.
I know. They put me to sleep.
I'm glad we set that up. That was pretty good.

Speaker 9 That was one of our better segues, sadly enough. Thanks.

Speaker 9 Yeah, we are talking crickets, aren't we? Yeah, we covered entomophagy. I meant to look up when, but it was seems like a long time ago.
Right. And that's eating bugs and insects.

Speaker 9 But this is focusing specifically on crickets because, by all accounts, they seem like sort of

Speaker 9 our best bet at trying to get something like this going in America for real. Yeah, they're, I mean, they're pretty easy to raise.

Speaker 9 They don't require much space.

Speaker 9 You can set up your own cricket farm at home.

Speaker 9 And really, we should say the point of all this, the whole reason anybody would want people to start raising crickets at home is because the

Speaker 9 well, the earth is about to collapse and our

Speaker 9 food supply is in real danger, right? So I've got some stats for you, Chuck. Okay.

Speaker 9 So meat consumption per capita has increased into the developed world. Actually, it's doubled in the last 30 years.

Speaker 9 And that's thanks in no small part to the rise of the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, who have huge, massive populations. And as they entered

Speaker 9 the capitalist global economy,

Speaker 9 have generally become enriched. And the more money they have, the more meat a civilization tends to consume, at least these days, right? Yeah.

Speaker 9 So that doesn't seem bad in and of itself until you look into what kind of resources it takes to actually raise meat. So you ready for this one?

Speaker 9 I don't know.

Speaker 9 I'm afraid. To produce one

Speaker 9 pound of meat, that's a half a kilo, basically, of meat. Beef?

Speaker 9 Beef, sorry, yeah.

Speaker 9 It requires about 2,400 gallons of water. I've heard stuff like that before.
Which is like absolutely nuts.

Speaker 9 Even when you consider that not only are you watering the cow, you're also watering, you know, the crops that you feed to the cow. So there's double water consumption.

Speaker 9 But one of the problems, one of the reasons cattle, beef requires so much

Speaker 9 water is because you only consume 40% of the cow. Yeah.
So 60% of the water is going to sustain parts of the cow you're not even eating, right?

Speaker 9 So there's a lot of wasted water, even if your water delivery system is 100% efficient, right?

Speaker 9 right yeah that's just water 51 of the greenhouse gases that are emitted on planet earth come from animal agriculture yeah 51 percent and um

Speaker 9 one-third of the world's adequate or high quality cropland has been lost to erosion or pollution in the last 40 years now that's a huge problem whether we are all vegetarians or not because we're talking cropland but we use way more cropland to feed our livestock than we do to feed ourselves, right?

Speaker 9 Something like 56 million acres of land are used to grow crops in the United States to feed animals. 4 million are used to grow crops for human consumption.

Speaker 9 So there's a lot, a lot of resources that are used up just from meat-based diets, right? A lot of people say, well, just go to plant-based diets.

Speaker 9 And other people say, you can't get enough protein from plant-based diets which apparently is not true from from what i'm seeing um

Speaker 9 other people are saying fine you want some protein i got something for you and it's crickets yeah i'm kind of well not surprised but it goes to show you the population boom if

Speaker 9 meat consumption has increased that much in the face of probably more vegetarianism and veganism than ever before too, you know? Well, that's kind of heartening.

Speaker 9 Like, if there does seem to be, if I guess if societies follow. Yeah, I'd like we should, I mean, we've been dancing around doing episodes on vegetarianism and veganism for a while.
So

Speaker 9 we should probably tackle that at some point. All right.
I'm kind of curious about the history,

Speaker 9 because it seems like in the, like,

Speaker 9 probably since the onset of America until

Speaker 9 and then I'm just I'm talking off my off the top of my head here, but until probably the 90s,

Speaker 9 it seemed like everybody was just like, meet, meet, meet, meet, meet, meet.

Speaker 9 Well, there's a, I mean, it's definitely associated with wealth, right? If you can afford to eat a nice steak, kind of indicates you have a certain amount of status in your society, right?

Speaker 9 Well, like the 50s, it seems like they would eat steak for lunch. Right.
And I can't imagine like

Speaker 9 a steak for lunch that seems so indulgent. Yeah, I think it is.
You know? Yeah. Like, yeah, just give me it, give me the 20-ounce ribeye for lunch.
Right. It's just, I don't know.

Speaker 9 I can't imagine that. And three martinis.

Speaker 9 I don't argue with that part.

Speaker 9 That is pretty indulgent. Three martinis and a 20-ounce ribeye for lunch.
I mean, that was Don Draper, you know? Yeah. I never saw that show.
I know. I never saw it.

Speaker 9 It's available. Where?

Speaker 9 Is it out there, really? I thought they erased it all. Yeah, they did.
They said, that's it. It's done.

Speaker 9 Didn't he go become a lumberjack at the end? No, he did not. Okay.

Speaker 9 Oh, that's Dexter.

Speaker 9 Oh, man. I know we talked about the ending of that show.
Crazy.

Speaker 9 I actually never saw the end of that one.

Speaker 9 You just told me about it. Yeah, I think you still owe it to yourself just to watch the finale.
Okay.

Speaker 9 So this dude, Kevin.

Speaker 9 How would you pronounce that? Bachuber.

Speaker 9 B-A-C-H, which is fine. That's clearly Bach.
And H-U-B-R. You just don't often see two H's side by side.
No. So anyway, Kevin Bachuber

Speaker 9 is a dude that is kind of championing, well, not kind of, very much championing this movement. In 2007, he went to Thailand and tasted crickets, deep-fried crickets.

Speaker 9 And he's from California, and he was like, hey, this is really good. He's so far out.
They've been doing this.

Speaker 9 In Thailand since the late 90s, the king established a big growing program for crickets and cricket farms,

Speaker 9 education and schools. schools, like, you know, this is a good way to get protein in your diet.
And he said, I think this is

Speaker 9 the direction America should go. And I'm going to get in on the

Speaker 9 money side of it. Yeah.
Like the farming of it. Apparently, it's a $20 million industry already.
Not bad. No, it isn't.

Speaker 9 And we should say that Bach Huber

Speaker 9 is one of several people who are into this,

Speaker 9 the idea of cricket farming, commercial cricket farming.

Speaker 9 um and he's definitely one of the ogs for sure his business was the first to get approval to sell crickets as food in the united states you got fda approval because the the cricket industry actually is kind of old well it's not too old but i saw anywhere between 50 and 70 years old in the u.s

Speaker 9 um and they're raised to say feed fish for commercial fish farming or to grind up as a protein supplement for um livestock feed.

Speaker 9 So people have been raising crickets for a while or to feed to like reptiles to sell them to pet stores. Yeah.
So there was an established infrastructure of cricket farming,

Speaker 9 but

Speaker 9 making the transition from selling it to feed to cows or fish or snakes to selling it to people to eat directly. That's that was a big step.
And Bach Huber was the first one to take it in the U.S.

Speaker 9 I should just say the reason I point out he's just one of many is because this House Stuff Works article is basically like, Here's my report on Kevin Bach Huber's TED talk,

Speaker 9 sort of, you know, yeah, I think just he's he definitely deserves you know credit because he's leading the charge, but so are other people as well. Yeah, he's woven throughout this thing, though.

Speaker 9 Yeah, um, and you know, if you listen to the Entomophagy episode, episode,

Speaker 9 no, it's it's episode.

Speaker 9 Um,

Speaker 9 we pointed out then, and it bears repeating, that America is new to this, but I think it was like Canada and the United States and Western Europe are literally the only places on earth that don't consume insects as a regular part of their diet these days.

Speaker 9 So I saw, so this article kind of says the standard 80% of the world regularly consumes insects as part of their diet.

Speaker 9 I saw that there's a food and agriculture organization, the UN organization report said something, it was more like about a third of the population, so rather than 80%, maybe like 30 to 35 percent, which is still significant.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's a big difference. It is.

Speaker 9 And in the West specifically, the idea of eating bugs is not, it's not commonplace, right?

Speaker 9 And I actually saw a pretty good explanation for why.

Speaker 9 Like 13 of the 14 large livestock animals that are domesticated are found in Eurasia and made their way over to the Americas.

Speaker 9 And those things, those animals provide not just meat, but also things like milk,

Speaker 9 clothing, everything, basically.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 since these what you would call Western countries had access to these domesticated animals, they never needed bugs as a food source.

Speaker 9 And then secondly, since they were raising domesticated animals, by definition, they had

Speaker 9 a sedentary

Speaker 9 agricultural lifestyle, which meant that their exposure to bugs was bugs as pests.

Speaker 9 So, not only were bugs not edible, they were something that were just undesirable on their face. Oh, sure.
So, that led to the

Speaker 9 it closed the door on bugs being eaten by Westerners.

Speaker 9 And so that came to be filled by a sense of disgust, which is a basic human emotion, but it's the only one that's culturally bound, which means you learn what is disgusting

Speaker 9 from your cultural group. Yeah, for sure.
But that also means you can unlearn it too. Well, if big cricket has anything to do with it,

Speaker 9 why don't we take a quick break? And we're going to come back and talk about a UN report that kind of changed a lot of things about four years ago.

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Speaker 9 All right, so I promised you a UN report.

Speaker 9 2013, there was a big kind of sea change. I don't know about sea change.

Speaker 9 It was the beginning. Beginning of a sea change.

Speaker 9 They issued a report called Edible Insects Colon, Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security.

Speaker 9 And it was was basically just championing entomophagy and all the benefits that surround it, like how

Speaker 9 nutrient-dense crickets and other insects are,

Speaker 9 the fact that it's socially sustainable,

Speaker 9 economically viable and friendly, environmentally friendly. And it kind of, you know, kind of paints it as like, hey,

Speaker 9 this is the future.

Speaker 9 or it could be part of the future at least of getting protein into, you know, americans right and uh the the report itself didn't focus exclusively on crickets but crickets feature prominently in the report they're the star it was about it was about bugs in general and eating bugs in general um and it was it made a pretty big splash i remember when it came out like it really hit the news cycle pretty hard but it also caught the attention of that box huber guy who said all right i'm gonna I think I'm gonna get into this because he'd already been exposed to eating crickets in Thailand.

Speaker 9 And then when that UN report came out he I think began his startup here in the states of his commercial cricket farm startup yeah it's funny they had they put in this article that uh it was the most popular document in the history of the UN yeah I didn't I didn't see that anywhere I think that was he said that at his TED report yeah yeah but um yeah

Speaker 9 It definitely made a splash. I'll give him that for sure.
Yeah, he spoke at a TEDx Youngstown,

Speaker 9 Ohio, because that's where he's based. That's where his company is.
Right. And I guess

Speaker 9 just made up his own TEDx, probably.

Speaker 9 All right. So let's talk about crickets.

Speaker 9 Well, all insects in particular are very rich in protein, like we've talked about. They have a lot of healthy fats.
Yeah. A lot of zinc, a lot of iron, a lot of calcium.

Speaker 9 And there's something called,

Speaker 9 I guess,

Speaker 9 efficient animals.

Speaker 9 Well, yeah. I mean, this is when vegetarians and vegans are, like, these kind of terms make their skin crawl, I'm sure.

Speaker 9 But the kind of efficiency you get out of raising and killing and eating an animal is on a spectrum.

Speaker 9 And, you know, from cows, like you talked about, it's probably the worst, I would guess, don't you think?

Speaker 9 Right, right. The animal itself is efficient at converting food that you feed it into stuff that you can get from it.
Yeah. So, like you said, not a lot of the cow is used to eat.

Speaker 9 No, it's like 40% of a cow is edible and digestible. And I think the chicken is about the most efficient animal protein right now.
Right. But nothing like crickets.

Speaker 9 So there's two different things here, right? So you've got

Speaker 9 efficiency in nutrient conversion, which is say like if you eat an apple, you can convert, you know, X amount of the energy available in the apple into, you know, energy for yourself.

Speaker 9 metabolism, right? And poop. Right.
Yeah, that, but poop is waste.

Speaker 9 So that stuff wouldn't count toward efficiency it would actually subtract from your efficiency and and lower your efficiency if you ate an apple and used every bit of it and it produced zero poop you would have 100 efficiently converted that apple into useful energy right and that'd be a weird apple it would be it'd be a magic apple and you wouldn't need a poop chute

Speaker 9 um but instead you do because there is no such thing as 100% efficiency in any animal, right? But

Speaker 9 some are better than others, like you were saying.

Speaker 9 And with a cricket, it's something like they're like 12 times more efficient at converting food into usable energy or stored, in this case, stored protein, right? Yeah.

Speaker 9 So for every kilogram of live cricket weight, which is a pretty substantial amount of crickets, but kilogram to kilogram or pound to pound, it just takes 1.7 kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of live crickets.

Speaker 9 Not bad. For a cow, it takes 10 kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of beef.
Very inefficient by comparison.

Speaker 9 So if you take the fact that it doesn't take much feed to produce a biomass of crickets, and that crickets are 80% edible and digestible compared to the cows, 40% edible and digestible, then you really have a,

Speaker 9 if you're just going pound to pound or kilogram to kilogram, and much more nutrient nutrient-dense, much more efficient, and then therefore much less, much less wasteful animal that you could eat.

Speaker 9 Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that crickets are cold-blooded, so they're very much more efficient at converting that feed into protein. And

Speaker 9 crickets aren't even the most efficient insect.

Speaker 9 No, no, huh. I'm not sure which one is actually.

Speaker 9 I think mealworms are pretty efficient.

Speaker 9 You just said because you're eating a mealworm. Right.

Speaker 9 Well, I have a mealworm farm I was going to ask you to buy in on. Oh, really? Uh-huh.
All right. How much? In my pocket.
See?

Speaker 9 Is that a mealworm farm in your pocket? It is.

Speaker 9 By pocket mulch.

Speaker 9 So, like we mentioned, Mr. Bachruber is,

Speaker 9 if he's not German, he should be. Kevin Bachruber.
I think he's.

Speaker 9 He's Irish German, maybe. It's spelled KVN, though, so we're just inserting vowels for him.
Right. Like D-N-C-E.

Speaker 9 What's that? It's this band. Oh, okay.

Speaker 9 Probably a young person's band? I believe so.

Speaker 9 No wonder I don't know.

Speaker 9 But he is one that I think they're about, and this has probably changed even since this is written, about 25 or so

Speaker 9 cricket startup farms here in the United States. Yeah, I couldn't find the current number.
Yeah, let's just say at least 25. Okay.
Although I'll bet they go under pretty quick.

Speaker 9 You think so?

Speaker 9 I could see losing your shirt on cricket farming right now.

Speaker 9 It's just so early.

Speaker 9 And the market is so not there, and the stuff they're producing is so expensive. Well, and their output right now is still really small

Speaker 9 in the early years here.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 the dream for...

Speaker 9 For him and all these cricket farmers is that one day it will it will I don't think they have designs it will ever be like in some parts of the world where it's on every menu in every restaurant, but they would certainly like to see cricket snacks in grocery stores and

Speaker 9 menu offerings in some of the more wacky hipster restaurants. Right.
At least. Yeah, did you do you watch Shark Tank? Oh, you know, I do.
Okay, so did you see the one with Rose Wang and Laura Desario?

Speaker 9 I've seen them all. Okay, so you saw the one with chirps.

Speaker 9 They're cricket-based snack product chirps. I want to try it.
I do too.

Speaker 9 I'm not like,

Speaker 9 I'm not an adventurous eater, as you know, but I would totally try fried crickets and things. That doesn't gross me out for some reason.
No, and I would try it as well.

Speaker 9 And do you, I don't know if you remember or not, but when we did that

Speaker 9 locust thing for Science Channel, it's like the second time it's come up this month, weirdly enough.

Speaker 9 They made fried locusts and I refused to eat them. Right.
And it wasn't because I was grossed out. It was because I was sure that that I was going to have some sort of weird allergic reaction to them.

Speaker 9 Oh, right. And I would have, right? Yeah.
Yeah. And I would have had to have been like, you know, life-flighted somewhere to a hospital and would have missed my flight home.

Speaker 9 That is the only reason I didn't eat them. It had nothing to do with disgust.

Speaker 9 But in that UN report, they address allergies and they said that it's actually exceedingly rare that somebody has an allergic reaction to an arthropod

Speaker 9 or to an insect, I should say.

Speaker 9 But the reason why I thought so is because, yeah, I had had

Speaker 9 like a shrimp blow up once. Right.
And I just was not about to roll the dice on that. Not for what Science Channel is paying us.
Well, I think it's very funny that you

Speaker 9 I remember your shrimp

Speaker 9 your shrimp years in that you had an allergic reaction to shrimp.

Speaker 9 But you wanted to eat shrimp so bad, you

Speaker 9 started to eat shrimp a little bit just to see if you could eat shrimp. Yeah, shrimp chips.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 Which use real shrimp powder. It's like a, I think, Japanese or Korean or Chinese delicacy.
But now you can eat shrimp, right? Yeah, I did immunotherapy and now I'm fine.

Speaker 9 I can eat shrimp all day long. I just love that you were so dedicated to eating shrimp.
Yeah, I love shrimp, man. Good shrimp, like seasoned with old bay, just simple stuff.
Oh, man. So good.

Speaker 9 This is a great time to bring up one of my big pet peeves. Okay.
I know that cooking with shrimp heads and tails on increases the flavor quite a bit. Does it? Yeah.
Okay. Which is why they do it.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 it's one thing if you get an appetizer with like the

Speaker 9 like a prawn with the head left on or something.

Speaker 9 But if you like, I get pasta dishes sometimes

Speaker 9 that have like heads and tails on them. If there's a fork involved, you don't want to have to.
put your fork down and take the head and tail off.

Speaker 9 No, like you literally have to dig them out of the pasta, take the head and tail off, and then put them back in your food.

Speaker 9 Right. Which is just, I don't get why restaurants do that.
Like, maybe cook it in there and then take it off for us.

Speaker 9 So I ran across a reason, probably, why. All right, let's hear it.
There's something called chitin, which makes up the exoskeleton of

Speaker 9 bugs, but it also makes up the shells of crustaceans as well.

Speaker 9 And chitin, supposedly, if you don't have an allergic reaction to it, chitin

Speaker 9 is apparently good for

Speaker 9 it's it's said to be good for weight loss, yeah. Um,

Speaker 9 digestion, it aids in digestion, allegedly. Um, and I think it has something to do with your blood pressure, too.
And in other countries, non-non

Speaker 9 non-Western countries, I think they prescribe chitin quite a bit as like a dietary supplement.

Speaker 9 Um, and I saw one study that said, yeah, it had a little bit of an effect, a little more than placebo, but not clinically significant. But it was just one study.

Speaker 9 So I'm curious if chitin actually does have an effect, but it's possible they're saying you should eat the whole thing. Well, that's what I was going to say.
Oh, the shell. What?

Speaker 9 I mean, I don't know. They could also just be a fat, lazy chef, you know?

Speaker 9 Well, I mean, I'll eat a soft-shell crab till the cows come home,

Speaker 9 but I'm not eating a shrimp tail.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it sounds gross. Well, it's just not like

Speaker 9 they don't soften up enough, you know?

Speaker 9 But if you think about it, though, if you're eating a fried cricket or something you're eating the whole thing shell and all antenna well yeah but I thought that's in the in the soft shell crab zone so you ate the shell of the soft shell crab yeah that's what you're supposed to do that's what it is I don't know that I've ever had soft shell crab oh my friend is that like a blue crab no I think it's a special kind of crab oh uh that has parents must love it very much

Speaker 9 I might be wrong. I think it's a special kind of crab, and then you prepare it with the shell.
But I think the shell is soft to begin with, though. I don't think it's just from cooking,

Speaker 9 but uh, like a spider roll is one of my favorite sushi rolls-that's soft-shell crab.

Speaker 9 Okay, yeah, I thought that was crab, like spelled with a K, like fake crab. No, no, that like the little legs are coming out of the end, and everything.

Speaker 9 That's why they call it a spider roll because it looks like little spider legs. I'll try that.

Speaker 9 And then, uh, like a soft-shell crab sandwich is, I mean, you open the bun, and there's just like this crab staring at you, yeah, going, how's it going?

Speaker 9 You're going to eat me in a second, aren't you?

Speaker 9 Oh, I'm getting hungry now. You want to take a break real quick?

Speaker 9 Well, quickly before we just should mention that they did get a deal on Shark Tank

Speaker 9 with Mark Cuban for chirps. Right.
We're contractually obligated to mention Mark Cuban. That's right.
We get our kickback coming.

Speaker 9 I would try chirps for sure. If the chirps people are out there listening and you want to send us some chirps, I will try them up.
All right. So let's take that break.
Okay.

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That's public.com/slash SYSK.

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Speaker 15 You won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs.

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Speaker 9 So, Chuck, we said,

Speaker 9 I think I said that one of the things that's holding this industry back right now is that it's so expensive,

Speaker 9 the products they're making.

Speaker 9 There's something called cricket flour, which is ground-up cricket meal, basically a protein powder made from crickets, right?

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 it's anywhere from like $35 to $50 a pound for it. Yeah.
It's very expensive. A lot of money.
But it's really ironic because crickets require so much less

Speaker 9 space and food and water

Speaker 9 and electricity. It's apparently the labor force that is the most expensive thing of any commercial cricket farm because

Speaker 9 it's just hard to find people who can do that, even though it's not exactly hard. It's just there's a lot of trial and error going on.

Speaker 9 So, from what I saw, it's the labor force that's that's eating up most of the

Speaker 9 revenue or profits from

Speaker 9 cricket farming. Well, finding all those tiny people, those three-inch people,

Speaker 9 it's not easy. But there are startups also that

Speaker 9 are trying to sell like home cricket kits too. Yeah.
Because that's part of the whole idea where if you're going to get people to supplement their diet, well, just let them grow them at home too.

Speaker 9 So should we talk a little bit about this, the farming? Yeah. So crickets live about seven weeks.

Speaker 9 I mean, that right there shows you a big difference between that and like the beef industry. Sure.

Speaker 9 So during that seven-week life cycle, they have three different environments that they reside in.

Speaker 9 And they basically live and hang out on what they call cricket high-rises, which are little egg cartons. Yeah, I saw that

Speaker 9 they have tried all sorts of different material and they keep going back to egg cartons. For some reason, crickets just love hanging out on egg cartons.
Well, who doesn't?

Speaker 9 And what they eat is, because I was kind of wondering that, they eat grain-based feed, organic grain-based feed,

Speaker 9 fruits and vegetables. And

Speaker 9 some of them will reach that breeding stage. Some won't.
And if they do, they're going to lay a lot of eggs, like

Speaker 9 several thousand eggs a mommy cricket will lay in her lifetime. Yeah, so many eggs, in fact, that they...

Speaker 9 they typically just throw most of them out.

Speaker 9 Like they'll keep some to grow a new generation from, but there's just so many that are just tossed out because they don't have the capacity yet to grow them. Yeah.

Speaker 9 So that, you know, they're, I think Bach Huber put it like he could be drowning in eggs if he's not careful. Drowning in cricket eggs.
He probably wakes up every night sweating.

Speaker 9 But recurring dreams. He probably really does wake up every night from the cricket chirping.
Oh, I never really thought about that. That must be nice, actually.
Yeah, it can be.

Speaker 9 So they like hot, humid environments, or at least warm, depending on your definition of hot it's hot to me 85 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit with about a 40%

Speaker 9 humidity level yep and the whole process from soup to nuts or from eggs to chirps is about 56 days yeah

Speaker 9 roughly yeah and if you you can do this yourself at home you just need basically two terrariums you need to put them near heat because that is substantial 85 to 95 degrees is hot way hotter than you're going to keep your house.

Speaker 9 So you do need like a heat lamp of some sort and you need water, a source of water too. Those are the two most important things with raising crickets.

Speaker 9 And the reason you have two terrariums is because in the one where you have like the 30 initial crickets, say,

Speaker 9 you're going to put a dish of soil and that's where they're going to lay their eggs. You want to check the soil every day for eggs.

Speaker 9 And when you find eggs, you take that little soil dish out and put it in the other terrarium. And then that's where the eggs are going to grow and hatch.

Speaker 9 And when the crickets hatch, they're fully formed. There's no larval stage, right? They don't go from like a maggot into a cricket.
They're fully formed. They're just much smaller, right? Yeah.

Speaker 9 And according to Aristotle, it's about around here,

Speaker 9 or maybe within the next like week or so, that they're the most delicious. Aristotle? Yeah, Aristotle wrote in his Historia Animalium.
Actually, he was writing about cicadas.

Speaker 9 They're better when

Speaker 9 they're before their last molt. So I guess that wouldn't apply to crickets.
No, it would, because they molt. Do they? They do molt.

Speaker 9 He also said that females taste best after copulation because they are full of eggs. After Aristotle has copulated? Right.
Or after the cricket.

Speaker 9 Instead of a cigarette, you just eat a pregnant female cicada. Try this, baby.
Right. It'll knock your socks off.
I bet Aristotle pillow talk was something else. I hope I don't want to see him.

Speaker 9 You know? Or it'd just be like, oh, yeah. Man, he just keeps going on and on about cicadas.

Speaker 9 So harvesting, I mean, there's no way around it. At some point, like any live thing that you're raising, you're going to have to kill it.

Speaker 9 And instead of like what we see on factory farms with cows and pigs, what you do on a cricket farm is you cool them down and then freeze them.

Speaker 9 And so what happens is they get cold, they start to get a little chilly, their temperature drops, and they go into what's called a diapause

Speaker 9 um sort of a hibernation like state and then pretty much after that they go it is sure is chilly in here and then they're gone and frozen yeah apparently they eventually freeze solid so they spend about 24 hours in the freezer and then they're ready to be sold yeah either ground into say like a powder or baked into a fried snack or sold to somebody else but that's that and i was like do they wake up then if you if you heat them up in a pan?

Speaker 9 But apparently

Speaker 9 after 24 hours and they're frozen solid, they're they're dead. Yeah.
But to them, it's just like going to sleep forever. Yeah.

Speaker 9 What, um, I kind of wonder when I was reading this, I was like, how do vegans and vegetarians feel about eating insects? Supposedly it does not count as vegetarian. Well, it depends on who you ask.

Speaker 9 I didn't get any, like, there is no. official rule book.

Speaker 9 There's not? I don't think so. I'm surprised.
But basically, I just went to a bunch of vegan and vegetarian websites and looked to see what people said.

Speaker 9 And it kind of ranged from, well, sure, I'll eat insects, and this is a much better way to get protein in your body than animals,

Speaker 9 to where other people said, no, it's a living thing, not going to eat it. I get all the protein I need from plants.
If you're eating something

Speaker 9 a live animal, then you're not a vegan or a vegetarian. Yeah, I saw crickets referred to as mini-livestock, all one word.
Yeah. I mean, they are a live, they're a living animal for sure.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 I guess it's a personal choice, it sounds like. Yeah.
Just like, you know, vegetarians eat fish sometimes, too.

Speaker 9 Well, that'd be a pescatarian, right? I guess, but I've met plenty of vegetarians that are like, I'm a vegetarian and I eat fish. Leave me alone.

Speaker 9 And that's an ego. Technically, you're a pescatarian, and then you get punched in the face.
Right.

Speaker 9 So eating crickets,

Speaker 9 some people say it's sort of nutty. Some people say it's a little sweet, like sweet corn.

Speaker 9 I would like to know for myself. I wish we could have gotten our hand on some chirps beforehand.
Yeah. But maybe we can follow up in the future.
We need a big bowl of chirps right here.

Speaker 9 Like, yeah, like we did with

Speaker 9 the Soylent? Yeah, with the Soylent. Soylent.
We'll do a follow-up. Soylent.

Speaker 9 So there's this lady, Daniella Martin, and she has a travel show and a well, it's an insect cooking and travel show called Girl Meets Bug. Very cute.

Speaker 9 And we should say the chirps ladies called crickets the gateway bug. I thought that was kind of funny

Speaker 9 and punny. And Daniela says that she started eating crickets and kind of became fascinated with insects in general when she was in Mexico and Yucatan

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 kind of became, well, I don't think obsessed, but just super interested in this as a as her protein of choice and said you know i started cooking them up with a little little butter a little onion a little salt and like with anything if you put it in a pan with some butter and onion and salt maybe a little garlic it's probably going to taste pretty darn good yeah you could cook almost anything with butter salt and onions and you're fine yeah even when you hear stories of these creepy cannibal people

Speaker 9 it's oh yeah you should cook it in butter butter with a little salt and onion and garlic. Yeah, I think that one guy who advertised on like Craigslist did.

Speaker 9 Yeah, he sauteed with, yeah, onion, you're right. Huh.
Penis, I think it was.

Speaker 9 Say what? He ate penis. He ate like that.
He did. Man, that was a very disturbing case.
Sure.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 she says

Speaker 9 crisping them in the oven is another, besides, you know, grinding them into powder, cooking them up, like broiling them in the oven. Don't overcook it.
A little olive oil, a little garlic salt.

Speaker 9 Throw them in about 250 for about 15 minutes

Speaker 9 and a little sea salt on top, maybe. And you're going to have a crunchy, delicious, nutrient-rich snack.
Yeah, and you want to clean them off, too, if you're cooking them from raw.

Speaker 9 I mean, they're bugs.

Speaker 9 That's something you want to do. What do you do? Just like wash them in a colander? I guess so.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 But I think like if they're already prepared, you're probably okay.

Speaker 9 Because one of the big things that

Speaker 9 Bach Huber did by getting FDA approval, like now you can't just raise crickets on just anything. Like they have to be fed food that is okay for humans to eat too.

Speaker 9 Which is something that the cricket

Speaker 9 farming industry is running up against because one of the big things proponents are saying is like, man, you could raise crickets.

Speaker 9 If you had large-scale cricket farms, you could raise crickets on food waste. And you

Speaker 9 if you if you do that, not only are you like raising your crickets, you're also getting rid of food waste. You're composting, basically, right? Yeah, composting.
That's the way you say it.

Speaker 9 But apparently, the FDA is like, no, you can't feed things food waste, you nut job. You're going to eat it eventually.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 So there's big rules against it, but I think they're trying to chip away at that as well.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I remember being alarmed when I briefly worked in the chicken industry when I found out that a lot of chicken feed is made from chickens. Yeah, not okay.
Yeah, this is just that's not right.

Speaker 9 So I saw in, I think, popular science, they had a little nutrition facts thing for crickets. It's so cute.
They said for a hundred grams of crickets, you're looking at about 120, 121 calories. Okay.

Speaker 9 You've got

Speaker 9 about five and a half grams of carbs,

Speaker 9 twelve point nine grams of protein. That is substantial.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 um 75.8 milligrams of calcium okay and nine and a half milligrams of iron that's also pretty substantial just from 100 grams i think they estimate that's about 20 to 22 crickets um like a handful and a half yeah nice that is that's pretty good and and the idea that if you are just raising crickets yourself you can feed them your own kitchen waste yeah and then eat the crickets yourself

Speaker 9 There's also, right, right. There's also

Speaker 9 very low barriers to entry into cricket farming. So if you're

Speaker 9 if you're not a wealthy person and you need to make some extra money, you could conceivably raise crickets yourself and then sell them at market, too. It's like podcasting.
Exactly.

Speaker 9 Exactly.

Speaker 9 I think that's it. I got nothing else.
All right. Well, it's cricket farming, everybody.
Go make it happen.

Speaker 9 And in the meantime, you can look up this article on howstuffworks.com. And since I said that,

Speaker 9 it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 9 I'm going to call this Kevin Spacey's Accent Explained. Oh, and before I read this, there is a House of Cards spoiler.
Spoiler. So alert to that.
Hey, guys, just listened to the episode on accents.

Speaker 9 And I'm happy you brought up Kevin Spacey's accent from House of Cards. Because I have a theory.

Speaker 9 Spacey plays a character Frank Underwood who grew up poor in Gaffney, South Carolina, but then went on to the Citadel in Charleston and created a persona that eventually lands him president.

Speaker 9 His accent does not sound like a bad attempt at the R-less old money Charleston accent, but I think it fits the character.

Speaker 9 Instead of a twangy R-full accent that he'd have from Gaffney, Spacey is playing Frank Underwood, who is playing someone with noble southern roots. And that's why it sounds fake.

Speaker 9 Am I giving Kevin Spacey too much credit? Possibly. But being from Greenville, South Carolina, I enjoyed dissecting his Carolina accent.

Speaker 9 Actually, I don't have much of an accent myself, except with words like lawyer and oil.

Speaker 9 Jerry just left. Because my brother, who's 10 years older, trained it out of me when I was very young.
He said he didn't want people to underestimate my intelligence because of our accent.

Speaker 9 He would correct me every time I would say things like, turn the lights on.

Speaker 9 instead of turn the lights on or naked instead of naked. Yeah.
If you're saying naked. naked.
Smack them with a length of dried bamboo and say again. Say it again.

Speaker 9 I sort of wish I sounded more like the rest of my family, but what a considerate thing for my big brother to have done when he was a teenager. Seriously.
And that is from Mary Jean Murphy.

Speaker 9 That was pretty great, Mary Jean. Your brother is a little social engineer, isn't he? I like that.

Speaker 9 And thank you also for the spoiler about Kevin Spacey becoming president on House of Cards.

Speaker 9 If you want to get in touch with us like she did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyushouldknow.com.

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Speaker 9 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 13 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 12 Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 9 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.com/slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.
That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 14 Paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 14 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds, and a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 14 Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

Speaker 15 You won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 Is your child having conversations you never imagined?

Speaker 16 Are they learning without realizing it?

Speaker 1 It's not a tablet. It's not a toy.

Speaker 18 It's Miko Mini Plus, the AI-powered companion that turns curiosity into endless learning.

Speaker 1 Hear the future of playtime. Meet the extraordinary Miko Mini Plus, only at Costco.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.