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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1181452
46 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER 2019 STEWART STICK It was the low carbon footprint aspect that inspired Meeru Dhalwala to try to become the Parmentier of insect protein 10 years ago—but it proved a tough trend to set. "Climate change is my No. 1 issue," says the co-founder of Vancouver's Vij's restaurant empire. "I was tackling this in my work and thinking, All right, how does the restaurant industry contribute to climate change, and what can I do to be proactive?" In 2008, Dhalwala came across a New York Times article that compared eating insects to riding a bicycle and eating steak to driving an SUV: the first improves health and reduces pollution, while the latter does the opposite. "That really hit me, and I thought, Well, that's it," she says. Dhalwala began experimenting with crickets, ordering her first batch from a bemused lizard-food producer in Washington (after researching what they were fed—apples—and conducting extensive food safety tests, which revealed the bugs were less bacteria-prone than chicken). Her first dish was a cricket paran- tha, a kind of flatbread. "I roasted them with some spices and oil, then cooled them and ground them up into a f lour. And it was gorgeous, just beautiful," Dhalwala recalls. She put the paranthas on the menu at Vij's, and the media went wild— newspaper coverage across North America, interviews on Nightline. But in the restaurant? Crickets. "For all the talk, no one was ordering them," Dhalwala says. On a typical Saturday, she moved about a dozen paranthas, compared to 40 beef or 60 lamb orders. Prepar- ing the crickets was labour-intensive, and after two years she took them off the menu. She tried again in 2011 at her Rangoli restaurant, going a step further by serving a pizza topped with whole roasted crickets. That f lopped big-time—not only did no one want to eat it, but the press trig- gered a wave of hateful and even rac- ist emails, threatening to turn her in to the health department and accusing her of serving cockroaches. The disheartening response took the joy out of the experiment, and Dhalwala shelved her attempt to normalize insect protein in Vancouver. "Nobody was ready for it," she says. "No one was ready to see the real bugs on that thing." But the lid of the insect jar was loosened, if only a little bit. Since then, edible bugs have hopped up in forms aplenty: some gimmicky—at restaurants in Victoria as a one-week promotion for a locally produced documentary; an eat-if-you-dare sprinkling on poutine or candy apples at the PNE—but some less so, such as the President's Choice protein powder that became widely available through Loblaws stores last year. And now crickets are even creep- ing in again as the real bugs on pizzas, at places like the Hooded Merganser restaurant in Penticton. A G R E AT HOP F OR WA R D Not long after Dhalwala's doomed original cricket pizza experiment, a 2013 United Nations report on insect protein caught the attention of Sydney Koby, a baker at Lucky's Doughnuts in Vancouver. Koby, a self-described "learning and research nerd" who has a geological engineering degree from Queen's University, was struck by the data: insects require vastly fewer resources to produce than beef, they can have twice the amino acids and 30 times the vitamin B12, and, as a bonus, they are high in protein, cal- cium, magnesium and zinc. (A more recent study published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry showed that crickets' iron content is not only double that of beef but also more absorbable.) "I had been an on-again off-again vegetarian for years, because I strug- gled with the impact the meat indus- try has on the environment," Koby recalls. "I read that document, and it seemed to make so much sense. It was just a matter of introducing it in the right way." Koby looked for a Canadian sup- plier and found Entomo Farms—a then-new industrial-scale cricket producer in Norwood, Ontario. She ordered her first batch of crickets and began "playing around," using friends and family as her test market. After a few flops (like Dhalwala, she started with spiced whole bugs but faced the same ick-factor barrier), Koby found that baked foods incorporating cricket powder made for an easier introduc- tion. In late 2017 she launched Bite Snacks, a line of cricket energy bars, each containing the equivalent of 20 to 30 bugs. The bars are produced locally, at a facility in North Vancouver. "I tend to make decisions and jump right into things," Koby says. "It was quite naive of me to quit my job and do this. But I think being naive helps in starting a business—you have to be a bit crazy." A four-week boot camp program hosted by Vancouver Farmers Mar- kets in 2018 helped her refine her products, and today Bite flavours like Chocolate Chirp and Jiminy Ginger can be found in about 20 natural food stores across B.C., and, as of last April, on Amazon.ca. "I talk to people and hear, Oh, there are so many opportunities to use cricket protein. Why aren't you seeing it more in the grocery stores? And it's like, well, someone has to do it" –Sydney Koby, founder, Bite Snacks ANYONE FOR CRICKET? Ontario producer Entomo Farms sells its insect powder in B.C.