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Almost a billion people are born every decade, and all of those people want a juicy hamburger
just as bad as you.
Only problem is, we're running out of farm land.
That's where your favorite lab rat comes in, as we challenge him to teach us how humans
in the future may live with an all-bug diet.
Alright InfoFans, the show is clearly running low on covid-friendly ideas, and maybe they
took inspiration from one of my wilderness survival challenges, but now they've got me
on an all-insect diet for seven days.
At least I got to pick my insects to eat, which let me tell you- doesn't really help
much.
Here's the thing, I have no idea what kind of insect foods there even are, so I had to
do some research online for a sort of daily meal guide.
The show turned me on to edibleinsects.com, which is more than happy to provide all your
delicious insect needs, and I made Infographics pay dearly for this challenge with some primo
grade crickets, meal worms, and even scorpions plus a few other surprises.
I bet some of you are practically retching already at the idea of an insect diet, but
truth is, it's kind of all protein to me.
Now the girlfriend on the other hand... well.
Let's just say she about flew back home to stay with her parents for the duration.
I had to very carefully explain that the insects were already dead- I think all of you know
just how well she does with creepie crawlies.
So how'd my bug diet go?
For breakfast every day I decided that even for me my first meal of the day would have
to be a little easy to get down.
There's a sort of 'sticker shock' when you open up a delivery box full of recently dead
insects that still look, well, like insects.
So I bought some cricket protein powder which is exactly what it sounds like- the ground
up dust of thousands of crickets: their cricket wives, cricket children, cricket parents,
and cricket grandparents.
Honestly, cricket protein tastes just as terrible as any regular protein powder on the market.
To make it edible I mixed it with with various fruits into a nice smoothie each morning,
and threw in some flax seeds because... honestly, I don't know.
The girlfriend puts flax seeds in every breakfast item ever and swears by them, but I'll be
damned if I know what flax seeds honestly do for you.
Chicks love flax seeds though, so into the smoothie they go.
At that point my daily breakfasts tasted, well, like a smoothie.
Honestly you could start using cricket protein powder right now and not taste a difference
between that and any other protein powder.
Smoothies famously leave me feeling rather hungry though, so I was very concerned about
lunch, because I couldn't seriously consider that insects would be enough to leave me satisfied
like a nice, juicy burger.
I was wrong.
Alright, lunch time was my first real challenge in downing my all insect diet, because now
the food actually looked like, you know, insects.
I'm a fan of lettuce wraps of all kind, so I got myself a nice head of butter lettuce
and a box of dead crickets for my first lunch.
You can actually buy yourself a pound of crickets for about $40, which sounds like an outrageous
price until you consider the absolute bonkers amount of calories and protein packed into
each tiny dead cricket body.
100 grams of crickets contains almost three times the protein of an equal amount of moo
cow beef.
It also has less saturated fat- though not by a lot to be honest, and way more carbohydrates.
Just two tablespoons of these bad boys contain a whopping 90 calories, so everyone touting
the insect diet hopefully eats in moderation because these bad boys will get you fat pretty
quick.
So I roasted my crickets in some butter, salt, and pepper, then squeezed lime juice on them
and ladled them onto lettuce cups.
By this point the girlfriend looked absolutely green in the face, and she dry heaved the
first time she saw the crickets sizzling on the pan.
Because, of course, nobody goes in and plucks off their tiny little heads or legs and stuff
before packaging- you get the whole cricket and these things look like they were killed
just yesterday.
Like I said, serious sticker shock content.
I took a bite of my first lettuce cup and the girlfriend actually rushed out of the
room dry heaving when several dead crickets spilled out of my lettuce cup as I sunk my
teeth in.
You know what?
Crickets taste... earthy?
I don't know.
I've eaten one or two in the wild before during some of my survival challenges or when doing
wilderness survival training, but I never really had enough to get a real 'taste' of
them in my mouth.
There is a lot of crunching though, which was oddly satisfying but also served to remind
me that I was eating a mouth full of bugs.
What was really annoying was the way their tiny little legs get stuck in between your
teeth, and their antennas kind of get left behind when you swallow.
You ever have a hair in your mouth?
It's a lot like that, and you end up spitting out bug antennas for a half hour after you're
done eating.
Immediately after my first lunch I went to try and get a kiss from the girlfriend, but
she was having absolutely none of that.
I chased her around the house and tried to pin her down but she slipped away and locked
herself in the bedroom.
She made it very clear there'd be no kissing this entire week.
Other lunches throughout the week included even more crickets, which honestly are kind
of limited in the ways you can prepare them.
Seems like roasting them is pretty much it, the key is in pairing them with something
complimentary.
Not pasta.
Believe me, insects do not go well with pasta- but I'd find out about that soon enough.
Other lunches included black ants, which you can also buy by the boat full.
I sizzled them up with some peas and carrots, honestly ants kind of just took the place
of rice in my meals.
The real piece de la resistance however came on Friday, my last lunch of the challenge
in which I treated myself to... tarantula.
Now, ants and crickets are pretty economically priced, but tarantula is basically the filet
mignon of the insect world.
I ended up billing the show $20 for two tarantulas, which had to be flown in from Thailand directly
and cost a whopping $30 in shipping charges.
Also, they took two weeks to get here so I ordered them well in advance of this challenge.
Ok, my tarantula lunch ended up being an expensive disaster.
Let me explain.
First, I don't know if you knew this, but I am not a bug cuisine master chef.
I have done some very rudimentary research and just kind of winged it with my preparation
of most of my meals.
So, for instance, I had no idea you were supposed to remove the abdomen from the tarantula,
and believe me, you want to remove the abdomen from the tarantula.
I cannot explain the horrors I experienced biting into a big, fat, tarantula abdomen.
Hey, I figured that's where all the meat was.
I was wrong, that was where all the terror was.
Think overstuffed jelly donut, exploding outwards on your face, only not delicious jelly at
all.
Just... disgusting bug guts jelly.
Also, I didn't know you were supposed to singe off the tarantula hairs.
Some tarantulas use those fine hairs as defensive weapons, so imagine how wonderful it felt
to have a bunch of them get stuck in my throat.
Alright, mistakes were made, but I battered and fried my tarantulas up following a recipe
I found online.
This was pared with some nice plum sauce, then lightly salted.
You know how I've been talking about sticker shock throughout this episode?
Well, nothing compares to the sticker shock of a full-grown tarantula sitting on your
plate.
Unless it's two full-grown tarantulas sitting on your plate ready for you to chomp down.
When the girlfriend saw it she actually got light headed and I thought she was going to
faint.
She promptly walked out of the kitchen, she couldn't even bear to watch me eat these eight
legged freaks.
So how'd they taste?
Well, I feel like I have the palette of a potato farmer sometimes, because honestly,
it was kind of bland to me.
Like unseasoned chicken.
Unlike most of the other bugs I had this week though, the meat was actually kind of chewy,
especially the legs.
I'll admit though, I couldn't do it- eating dead spiders the size of my palm was just
too much.
Alright, for day snacks throughout my week I actually got a bunch of insect bars, which
is basically what it sounds like.
They're sort of like granola bars but way edgier, with crickets and meal worms and other
unidentifiable creepy crawleys mixed in there.
They're mashed up enough that you really can't tell what you're eating, and the addition
of vanilla or nuts, or chocolate basically masks any insect taste.
Again, another good way to ease yourself into a bug diet.
Another surprisingly tasty snack was chocolate covered scorpions, though sadly they did not
have their stingers and were kind of tiny.
I was hoping for a scorpion as big as my hand, but though I heard you can get them they're
also pretty expensive.
Dinner is my favorite meal of the day, but my first dinner would end in disaster.
Now, maybe I still have some of my youthful child-like wonder in me, but when I thought
about insect diet, I immediately thought about worm spaghetti.
I mean honestly, what could go better together?
Well, sadly, you can't really get long worms unless you just buy a case of nightcrawlers
from a bait shop, but even that seemed like too much for me.
So I settled for smaller meal worms, and basically fried them up with olive oil, some rosemary
and thyme, and dumped them into a pot of spaghetti.
This was a mistake.
The slippery consistency of the spaghetti did not compliment the crunchiness of the
meal worms in the expected way.
It just sort of made me think of big fat nightcrawlers in my mouth- or maybe I just had that image
already because I was originally thinking about them.
Either way, this was the only meal the whole week where I legitimately heaved and almost
barfed.
The whole thing went into the trash, absolutely no thank you.
I did find a recipe online for a Bee-LT, which immediately sold me because puns are life.
Turns out, you don't actually get adult bees, which I guess makes sense, and instead you
get bee larvae when you order a bag of edible bees.
Now, preparing this was kind of tricky.
First I sauteed the larvae in butter with a few drops of honey, then mixed them with
egg white, and put the whole thing back in the pan to solidify it.
Now I had a sort of bee-steak held together by egg white, so I flopped that on top of
some lettuce and tomato and boom, my very first bee-LT ever.
The girlfriend was far less delighted at my creation than I was, honestly at this point
in the week she was basically queasy and green every single day.
How'd it taste?
Listen, I knew going in that once this challenge was over I wasn't going to be turning to an
insect diet.
Literally none of these meals were going to make it into my real life meal plans.
Bee larvae may have changed my mind.
These chubby little things basically live their whole lives in honey- it's all they
eat.
So not only are they plump, but when you bite into them they have a very nice sweet taste.
It's like candy but not as sugary or overly sweet- honestly, it's just right.
I loved this so much that I actually roasted more of these bad boys up, in honey of course,
then dusted them with some sea salt and stuck them in a bag for a fantastic snack.
Out of all the bugs I've eaten, these things are definitely staying.
Well, that is if I can get the girlfriend to come around to it.
She has really suffered through this whole week, to the point that she was non-jokingly
thinking about staying with a friend after the third day.
She's been nauseated at basically every meal, and we quickly had to start eating apart which
I really didn't like because sitting down to a meal together is one of my favorite things.
I told her about the bee larvae, and she was not having it.
I think she just needs time away from seeing me cooking up all kinds of bugs and worms
every day of the week, maybe in a month or two she'll come around.
But you should be buying bee larvae like yesterday, because trust me it's pretty much aces.
Now go check out Eat Only What I Catch For 72 Hours!
Or click this other video instead!