After the EU has eased regulation on using cricket flour in food, it has caused a storm on social media in Lithuania. Fears that people will be forced to eat insects without knowing it are quite unfounded, food regulators assure.
A cricket farm in Kaunas District exports about two thirds of its production, selling only one third domestically.
The founders of the farm, called Achetaos, were interested in crickets as a new and alternative food of the future.
“We sell to factories that produce something further from the powder. And we make our own products,” says Donatas Glušauskas, director of Achetaos, showing some of them. “These are bread rolls with cricket flour, we have now launched three different flavours of crisps. And we also sell the flour to people, end users, who use it at home for baking or shakes.”
Crickets fully mature in about one to one and a half months. There are 11 companies in Lithuania with permits to breed them.
Fried crickets taste like nuts or sunflower seeds. They are very high in iron, twice as much as beef, and contain 65 grams of protein per hundred grams.
Since this year, amendments to the so-called New Food Catalogue have entered into force in the EU. They introduced a new supplier of cricket flour on the market and allowed it to be used more widely for bread, biscuits, pasta, beer, soups, meat substitutes and other products.
“As crickets and other insects are treated as a novel food in the EU, they are subject to stricter requirements,” explains food inspector Deividas Kalinauskas of the National Food and Veterinary Service. “There are clear limits on how much of it can be added to another product.”
The new rules, however, sparked a flood of online conspiracy theories in Lithuania, with people expressing fears they could end up eating crickets without being aware of it.
Some have been posting about supposed health hazards from chitin, a substance found in cricket flour. “There is very little truth to that,” assures Kalinauskas.
The European Food Authority’s risk assessment states that chitin acts as a fibre to aid digestion and is not a health hazard.
For some people, however, insect protein can cause allergic reactions.
“For people allergic to crustaceans, molluscs or dust mites, this information will be available on product labelling and will be clearly visible,” assures Kalinauskas.
Fears that cricket powder will replace traditional flour are also largely unfounded, he says. It is a niche product and is unlikely to become mass-produced anytime soon.
“For the time being, production itself is quite expensive,” according to Kalinauskas.
And when it comes to cultural habits of eating some things and not others, those often change, says Rimvydas Laužikas, a researcher of gastronomic culture.
“Historically, we have not eaten insects, perhaps with one small proviso that they can sometimes get into our food without us being aware of it,” he says.
And that is not just an incidental fly in our soup. For instance, carmine, used for food colouring, is extracted from insects.
And new dishes, ingredients or technologies that people either accept or reject have been coming along all the time, adds Laužikas.
“The introduction of insects in food is one of those innovations that I would be neither happy nor sad about. It is just one of those things that happens in gastronomic culture,” he says. “And then the culture – the eaters, the makers, the growers of food – will decide whether they like it or not.”
“We’ll have an answer to this is a question a hundred years from now,” Laužikas adds.
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