Bayesian Investor Blog

In my quest for a diet that more closely resembles what we evolved to eat, I tried eating some insects.

Fluker’s Gourmet Canned Mealworms are ok, but the taste isn’t memorable. The texture is interesting, but hardly a reason to eat them again. They’re sold as pet food, and labeled not for human consumption. That might mean too much bacteria, but cooking should kill those. Could they have pesticides? Maybe, but insects are usually what pesticides kill, so it would be odd to use pesticides to grow them.

I tried some insects from Hotflix, which markets them as candy. All seem to be coated with varying amounts of sugar. The “chocolate covered insects” are mostly packaging, and have an ingredient list that includes hydrogenated oil but no chocolate. The various flavors of Larvets are better – mostly insect with only a small amount of sugar, spices, and artificial flavor or color. The spices make them taste fairly good, but the price per gram makes them too expensive to be a reasonable source of significant nutrition, and the artificial additives make me consider them less safe to eat than the bugs sold as pet food.

It seems like there ought to be a way to get affordable healthy nutrition from insects, and I’ll keep looking occasionally, but we probably need more demand for economies of scale to make that practical.