Edible Insect Dinner

During my final year of Uni, I worked on a research project examining dietitian’s knowledge attitudes and practices of entomophagy aka eating insects! While my dietitian brain was getting excited about the nutritional pros of whole and processed bugs, my chef brain started ticking along with how you make insects 1. Delicious and 2. Acceptable. This process was a lot of fun and during my final presentation, I fed (or attempted to feed) my co-students a fried cricket and mealworm lavosh canape!

Fast forward to Wednesday night, @Dannyelle Formosa, @Nicole Senior, @Jane Marriott, and myself sat down to dinner hosted by The Powerhouse Museum where edible insects took centre stage! This dinner was part of their monthly Western Sydney Food Producers program and featured Circle Harvest. Circle Harvest is Australia’s pioneering edible insect farm and was established by Skye Blackburn, an entomologist and food scientist in 2007.

The event was hosted by Misc. Restaurant within Parramatta Park, and it was great seeing insects being served up in a hospitality setting. Many of the dinner guests had already tried insects (roughly 75%). There was great atmosphere with Skye from Circle Harvest, the MC, offering up great information focusing on the history of Circle Harvest foods, sustainability, nutrition, uses of insect farming within the circular economy, and the normalisation of insects as a food source.

While we had a great time and had some amazing discussions, I did feel that from a culinary standpoint the menu was lacking and did not showcase the breadth of uses for whole and powdered insects. With many dishes having insects as just a garnish, rather than insects as an ingredient, i.e. the pasta dish having meal worms sprinkled on top, as opposed to incorporating cricket flour into the pasta. This was explained to me that the hosts wanted the edible insects to be as accessible as possible for the uninitiated. While I agree with the sentiment, the consumer not able to see identifying attributes (such as legs or whole insects) makes the food more so accessible via the reduction of initial squeamishness and “ick” factor.

While there is still work to be done in terms of culinary innovation and public perception of eating insects, events such as this reinforces the importance of championing novel (new and different) foods. The spotlighting of edible insects as accessible and appealing to the first-time tasters, with the view of future integration into mainstream cuisine, is a positive step forward.