Yesenia Gallardo: Save the planet, eat an insect

While crick­ets, grubs and insect eggs might not top your list of snack foods, they pop up in cui­sine around the world, and they just might be the key to a green­er plan­et.

“It just makes a lot of sense,” said Yese­nia Gal­lar­do, a TEDxSalem speak­er, envi­ron­men­tal­ist and insect entre­pre­neur.

“The sus­tain­abil­i­ty and the nutri­tion is there.”

Insects are ener­gy effi­cient, so they con­vert what­ev­er they eat to mass much more quick­ly, she said. For exam­ple, it takes two pounds of feed to get one pound of food from insects com­pared to 25 pounds of feed for one pound of beef, she said. There are sim­i­lar sav­ings in water and land.

Gal­lar­do under­stands that insects aren’t for every­one. For those will­ing to try, it seems that crick­ets are the eas­i­est to stom­ach.

“I don’t think they’re the most deli­cious insect out there,” she said. “They are the gate­way bug.”

An even eas­i­er sell might be sam­pling pow­dered insects, which are added to ener­gy bars, chips, cook­ies and oth­er snack foods.

Eat­ing insects wasn’t a gas­tro­nom­ic stretch for Gal­lar­do, a Salem native. She spent her sum­mers in Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co, and many of the region’s dish­es include insects. One pop­u­lar dip, made with ant eggs, tastes like bacon-fla­vored mush­rooms, she said.

She used to raise crick­ets in an indoor micro-farm. She sold her tiny, tiny live­stock to food man­u­fac­tur­ers, but it was too hard to cli­mate con­trol the space.

Now the Yale Uni­ver­si­ty grad­u­ate is work­ing a dif­fer­ent angle: crick­et poop. Not for food, but for fer­til­iz­er. It’s a renew­able resource that doesn’t deplete nat­ur­al ones strain­ing under the demand for soil amend­ments.

“It has so much poten­tial,” she said.

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