Big Cricket Farms, of Youngstown, Ohio, opened six months ago. It is the first (and, so far, only) farm in America to raise crickets exclusively for human consumption. The farm, which was founded by Kevin Bachhuber, is housed in a formerly abandoned warehouse in the Rust Belt city. Inside, several hundred white reinforced fibreglass troughs sit on the floor, housing between three thousand and four thousand crickets each.
For a meat eater accustomed to choosing free-range over battery chickens, the sight of a seething, twitching mass of brown legs and antennae on the floor of Big Cricket Farms raises a tricky question: Are these crickets happy living in a fibreglass trough? How would one even know?
“That’s one of the things that’s so great about crickets,” Harman Johar, the founder of the food-cricket company World Ento, told me. “They don’t need music or rubdowns or anything.” According to Bachhuber, crickets have only a few basic requirements for feeling safe and at home: an ambient temperature that hovers between eighty and ninety degrees Fahrenheit, ninety per cent humidity, and some cardboard or egg cartons to climb on. Overcrowding can cause stress—the sign to watch out for, Bachhuber said, is cannibalism—which is why he houses no more than four thousand insects in each four-foot-square trough. Filtered water and an organic grain-based diet, supplemented with occasional cabbage and parsley, round out the amenities.
Whereas pasture-raised chickens and cattle require costly special fencing, the smooth walls of cricket troughs are sufficient to keep the insects from escaping. As an additional precaution, Bachhuber sprinkles a thin layer of diatomaceous earth, which is harmless to humans but kills bugs on contact, in front of the warehouse’s doorways. “There have been one or two large escapes from the pet-food farms,” he told me, “and all that happens is that the local bird population quadruples.”
Designing cricket housing and foiling cricket escapes are just a few of the challenges that Bachhuber has had to address. As Dana Goodyear wrote in the magazine, in 2011, the American bug industry is still in its infancy and doesn’t have the advantage of the well-developed, highly regulated, and economically efficient pathways from farm to table that more conventional protein sources have. But there are at least thirty insect-focussed startups in North America that are betting that the Times was onto something when it declared crickets to be the next quinoa. San Francisco’s Bitty sells chocolate-chip cookies made from cricket flour; Chapul, in Salt Lake City, and Exo, in Brooklyn, sell cricket protein bars; and Boston’s Six Foods is offering cricket chips (or “chirps”) for pre-order. Bottled cricket juice, for cocktails, is even available, thanks to Critter Bitters, in New York City.
But if crickets are to become a true food craze they will also require something much less glamorous than a trendy startup: a supply chain. As yet, there are no U.S.D.A. standards for cricket farming, slaughter, or quality. Instead, the edible cricket supply chain is being forged by a tiny handful of “ento-preneurs.”
Take another uncomfortable issue that ethical meat eaters face: how livestock is slaughtered. At Big Cricket Farms, the “harvest,” as Bachhuber delicately calls it, happens on site. Farm workers carry the mature crickets’ troughs into a walk-in freezer, causing the bugs to go into suspended animation, an evolved response to cold temperatures. Once the bugs are unconscious, the temperature is lowered by another couple of degrees, which kills them. “It’s actually how I want to go,” Bachhuber says. Compared with the deaths that larger livestock face, it’s a peaceful-seeming process. Bachuber told me that, because of his Jewish upbringing and because he believes that humane slaughter improves the quality of the meat, “It’s a really, really high priority for me to make sure they have a pleasant process of dying.”
In the twentieth century, because of improvements in transportation and food preservation as well as to the growing demand for urban hygiene, the livestock and meat-packing industries were pushed out of cities and into remote towns in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Nebraska. The cultivation of “mini-livestock” (a term popularized by Florence Dunkel, the editor of the Web site Food Insects Newsletter) offers the interesting possibility of bringing industrial-scale farming back to cities. Big Cricket Farms holds nearly six million crickets in a compact, urban setting, raising and slaughtering them without a single complaint from the next-door neighbors. According to Bachhuber, the operation is still growing: the downtown warehouse could eventually hold as many as twenty million crickets, yielding more than six tons of protein powder a month.
The supply of protein has shaped cities, from the drovers’ roads that became London’s main roads to Chicago’s stockyard-fuelled growth and the more recent transformation of New York’s meatpacking district into a fashion and dining destination. The reintroduction of mini-livestock farming and slaughter into the twenty-first-century city would undoubtedly have its own influence on the built urban environment: shrunken supply chains, revitalized warehouse districts, and in-store cricket mills. Bachhuber hopes that the ability to operate insect farms within cities might even also tempt a younger generation to enter the farming business.
Despite the bureaucratic challenges involved (for example, developing the H.A.C.C.P. food-safety protocols and traceability systems that the U.S. law requires), both Bachhuber and Johar clearly relish the task of inventing an entire industry from scratch. Toward the end of our conversation, Bachhuber began discussing the possibilities of improved cricket feed. Small-scale studies have shown that by replacing grain with skim milk and brewer’s yeast can create cricket Arnold Schwarzeneggers, while feeding the crickets carrots for several days before harvest gives them a faint carrot flavor. Bachhuber’s most ambitious vision, however, concerns something he learned as a dinosaur-obsessed kid: back in the Jurassic Period, when the oxygen content of Earth’s atmosphere was much higher, he told me, even dragonflies were a foot long. “It’s cost-prohibitive,” he said, “but I’m really curious about what would happen if you tinkered with the atmospheric mix.”
Johar also dreams of giant crickets. He plans to launch a breeding program early next year. Just as we have bred chickens for bigger breasts, he plans to select for crickets that reach maturity faster and convert feed to mass even more efficiently. But he draws the line at the kind of artificial insemination that takes place within the yield-obsessed cattle industry today. “Hell no,” he said. “I assure you, I will never allow us to descend to that point. I’m not going artificially inseminate crickets. I’ll quit and get that marketing job back in my college hometown before I let it come to that.”
