Crickets Are Apparently The New Healthy Snack

WSJ- Mohammed Ashour, the chief executive of a Texas company called Aspire Food Group, thinks he has identified the subject of America’s next great culinary reversal. He believes the day is coming when the nation’s snacking masses will open their kitchen cabinets and reach for a $2.99 bag of insects—specifically whole-roasted crickets, which Aspire now manufactures in five flavors including Texas BBQ, sea salt & vinegar and sour cream & onion.

It remains to be seen whether Americans will set aside staples like popcorn, peanuts and energy bars for half-inch arthropods whose dead, black, beady eyes are staring back at them.

Dear Donnie,

I wanted to alert you of a recent nutritional development here in America. It appears that the bizarre practice of snacking on insects is no longer unique to the bustling, lawless streets of Beijing. I’m not sure whether your Whoa That’s Weird! series influenced this trend, but I can tell you that I don’t like it one bit. Grasshoppers are meant to be eaten by spiders, birds, snakes, and rodents; humans are meant to eat food. Somewhere along the line, this distinction became confusing, so a group of dickheads started a company to produce grasshoppers as though they were potato chips. Texas BBQ, salt and vinegar, and sour cream and onion-flavored grasshoppers are being produced, as we speak, for mass consumption.

Is this what the world has come to? Was Man Vs. Wild that good? They justify this disgusting, heinous snack by touting its nutritional statistics: “packed with protein,” they say. “Full of complex carbohydrates; a low-calorie snack.” To that, I would remind these bandits that crickets are insects, with wings and an exoskeleton they shed once they reach adulthood. If I were to head into a meadow with a net, lift up a log, and sprinkle Cool Ranch Dorito dust onto the swarm of creepy crawlers hiding underneath, would I be a snack-maker? No, I would be a dickhead.

Don, I support your consumption of insects while in China. But please do not bring that communist madness back to our golden shores. Today it’s crickets. Tomorrow it’s earth worms. Next week, it will be dogs, and a year from now, our children’s school lunch boxes will be full of human meat. I won’t stand for it; this stops now.

Frank