A large spoonful full of sugar ♫ to help you get rid of the bread worm in your mouth.
The bread worms are ground into flour, cooked, and added sugar to make an appetizing "meaty" seasoning. In Chicago, Aug. 24, researchers gave such a presentation at the American Chemical Society's fall conference.
Some insect proteins are a more environmentally friendly alternative than other animal proteins because less site and water resources are required for production. But for people in the United States and other Western countries, eating insects is not widely accepted, and they generally feel that chewing and swallowing bugs is not an appetite-boosting thought.
"Very few people accept to fry a pan of crickets and eat them while they're hot." Julie Lesnik, a biological anthropologist from the University of Detroit Wayne, said. How to make insect-based foods more attractive is the key to making them into the mainstream market.
At the same time, a successful insect food will have a snowball effect on similar foods. "The push for this research is fantastic, because from any point of view, insect food is the next outlet for people to explode after they understand it." Brenden Campbell, an insect farmer in Eugene, Oregon, said. He has been researching bread worms and founded a company called Worm Planet, which includes the production of insect food.
In another previous study, the team of In Hee Cho, a chemist at Won Kwang University in South Korea, analyzed the smell emitted by steamed, roasted, and fried bread worms. Steamed bread worms have a sweet smell, like steamed corn. The roasted and fried bread worms release a taste closer to meat and seafood.
In their latest work, the team pinpointed the point of strength: what ratio of water, sugar and cooking time creates a specific meat flavor. They organized volunteers to experience the experiments and see which ones smelled the most appealing.
By crushing insects or adding them to the spices, as Cho's team did, it can help people be relieved of hesitation when confronted with the whole bug, says Amy Wright, who has written a guide to eating bugs. (For example, she herself has no psychological barrier to this.) She is a professor of literature at Pye State University in Austin, Clarksville, Tennessee, and she has bread bugs in her apartment, which she usually adds to sandwiches and guacamole. )
"There's a lot of stuff that's disgusting, but we've made industrial improvements to that." Lesnik said, "We're seeing insects being used to cook like any other ingredient, and, yes, we're talking about the aroma of the dish... But that's exactly what the engineers at Doritos do. ”