Just stumbled across a website selling Cricket based protein bars. Anyone tried them? I think it is a great idea -but don’t know if I can get past my cultural conditioning.
Saw it on Shark Tank - thought it was pretty gross!
Cricket farming is supposed to be much better for the planet than say beef farming
We have these at our local market – it’s really hard to get past the idea in your head, but it’s kinda like a beefjerky/fruit leather taste/texture. I didn’t mind the cricket part, eventually, but I don’t care for the flavor profile. I think there’s a chipotle, barbecue, and dark chocolate one? And I don’t like any of those, anyway.
No that doesn’t sound like me either. I tend to go for fruity bars. I guess you wouldn’t have any kind of fruity meat bar ( blech)
You’d think the bars would be less expensive - they seem to be about $3 per bar for both brands that google turned up.
I hadn’t even thought about the price
The chili chocolate and Thai lime coconut actually look good to me and I would have no qualms about eating cricket flour. I would eat eggs for protein over a $3 bar, though.
The Insectarium in New Orleans has all kinds of insect snacks to try. I couldn’t taste any new flavor, even when I could see the insect in the food, but I thought it was a hoot. Chocolate “chirp” cookies, salsas and quesadillas with cooked larvae, etc. The seasoned fried crickets tasted so much like barbecue potato chips, I wouldn’t have known the difference.
Do the bars have a lot of protein?
10 grams
for comparison a Luna protein bar has 12g
Do you eat shrimp, crab, and lobster? They are also arthropods. And crickets, at least, aren’t bottom feeders.
Haven’t not tried cricket protein, but would be willing to. I do notice that the “cricket protein bars” also have peanuts and a lot of sugar. I’m not so big on sugar.
“Cricket farming is supposed to be much better for the planet than say beef farming”
It is. It also avoids cruelty problems, at least for me. I don’t think crickets have feelings.
I am a vegetarian, so I wouldn’t be eating these bars, but I would feel bad if the crickets were mistreated. They are living beings too, and I don’t think we know enough about them to know what they do/don’t feel.
Well, watch this and see if you can conclude that plants don’t have the capacity for sensation:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fGBIT4ly-Vs
We may not know much about the “feelings” of crickets but we also don’t know much about the “feelings” of plants, either.
That may be true, but you have to eat SOMETHING in order to survive - to me, insects are like animals - some can even be trained and seem quite intelligent, like cockroaches. So they fall into a category of living beings I would not want to eat.
This suggests that even without peanuts it might not be an allergy-free product:
Snack bars are nasty by default, unless they are made of whole nuts, fruit, and honey.
I’m not for deliberately torturing crickets or anything – but I wouldn’t be so worried about outdoor access and humane slaughterhouses and all of that.
I should have anticipated that there’s a Wikipedia page on the subject:
Wow, is it more humane to kill crickets or plants…LOL.