Economy

Why crickets may soon jump onto your dining table

crickets

Crickets from Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology’s insect farm. FILE PHOTO | NMG

It used to be that two sorts of people in this part of western Kenya ate crickets: the hungry, and singers who believed consuming the chirping insects would improve their voice.

Times have changed. In recent years the business of rearing insects for human consumption - known as entomophagy - has begun to take off in Kenya.

That’s in part because there is more interest in alternative, sustainable sources of protein as climate change, population growth, and intensive farming and grazing increase pressure on land and water, according to experts at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (Icipe), a Kenyan-based research body.

Former motorbike taxi driver Rogers Oduli used to be sceptic about the six-legged food. Now he works at one of the largest bug farms in Kisumu, the region’s main city.

“These are the pinheads,” he said, lifting the lid on a plastic box of baby crickets to show hundreds of black dots bouncing around on green leaves.

“We give them kale, for vitamins,” he said. Like many his age, 26-year-old Oduli once regarded insects as inedible, and believed eating them was a tradition that had died out with his grandparents. No longer.

After two weeks on the job, he sampled the crickets - which are sold dried and whole in bags, or ground up and used in breads and sweets at the farm shop - and was converted.

“They taste sweet to me, and they’re nice because they’re high in protein and make me feel good,” he said. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates at least two billion people worldwide eat more than 1,900 species of insects. Beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts and crickets are the most popular.

Many insects are nutritious and a good source of protein, vitamins, minerals and healthy fats, the FAO notes. The increased interest in insect-farming comes as global population growth and an expanding middle class have raised per capita meat consumption by 50 per cent over four decades, fuelling fears of a protein pinch. In rich nations, eating insects is becoming less taboo. And in poorer countries - the ones often increasingly bearing the brunt of climate change - startups and charities are reviving centuries-old customs of eating insects, or getting them into diets for the first time.

Over the past five years, a joint Dutch-Kenyan-Ugandan initiative called the Flying Food project has worked to get more than 1,000 people living around Lake Victoria in Kenya and Uganda to become cricket farmers or consumers. The aim is to improve wealth and health in places where farming is already suffering due to land degradation from climate change and overuse, said Kenya coordinator Phoebe Owuor.

“We soon might not have enough soil to even grow food, let alone keep animals, because we have destroyed it,” Ms Owuor said. “In the next 20 to 30 years, we might not even have cows, and we will have to depend on insects.”

Backed by Rafode, a micro-finance institution, the project has provided 100 farmers around Kisumu - and another 100 in Uganda - with a $800 loan each to cover equipment, a starter stock of parent crickets and training over the first year.

Among the farms supported is the one where Mr Oduli works - and another 100 farmers in Kenya will have loans by the end of October, project backers say. The Flying Food project also works to build supply and demand from local markets to ensure success, said project manager Erwin Beckers.

Typically, a farmer can expect to produce eight kilogrammes of crickets monthly, worth Ksh700 ($7) per kilogramme, said Mr Beckers - although yields over the past year have been lower due to disease and flooding.

Andrew Magunga farmed crickets in buckets for years before he joined the project and began to rear in crates what he believes is the food of the future.

“I studied the food chain and realised that soon our lake will be depleted - (and) fish is the main ingredient for our food and animal feeds,” he said.

Mr Magunga earns up to $400 a year harvesting crickets, a job that takes him a few hours each day, and another $1,000 annually working part-time in information technology at a college.