Tracy Renkin, journalist

First published August 11 2018 in the TasWeekend magazine (The Hobart Mercury)

Insect ice cream. Crusty mealworm bread. And corn chips made from ­insects. These could be Tasmania’s next culinary delicacies, with Rebel Food Tasmania close to supplying restaurants with its farmed insects.

The Derby-based start-up is still in the research and development phase, but its executive ­director Louise Morris says the early signs are positive – with 100 per cent of people who have tasted her crunchy critters saying they’d eat them again. And why not? Two billion people around the world already happily eat insects. Indigenous Australians have always done it. Insects are high in protein. And they can taste good, too.

The only thing holding back Australians from embracing insects as food is that many of us think it’s disgusting.

“The eek factor was something we thought was going to be a huge hurdle,” says Morris. “But every time someone has actually tried it, they’ve said I’d do this again and more regularly.”

Morris, a former campaign advisor to former federal Greens leader Christine Milne, has been snacking on insects for more than a decade. Her motivation for growing insects for food came about after she started thinking about how to reduce produce wastage on farms. She now feeds the thousands of crickets, mealworms and ’roaches that she keeps in an insulated shipping container in her backyard with organic fruit and vegetable waste she picks up (often free) from surrounding farmers.

This week they’ve been munching their way through blemished and bird-picked nectarines and peaches, cabbage leaves, zucchini, brassica greens and milk curd. Morris says the insects take on the subtle flavour of what they’ve been eating in the last few weeks of their life. They also love the sugars of wine marc, which makes them put on weight quickly.

“They eat ridiculously well, which makes for better tasting bugs for people to eat,” she says. “During pumpkin season and the apple season, there was a detectable sweeter edge. Wine marc was an absolute winner for plumper, sweeter crickets, while coffee grounds with mustard leaf is still a reliable foundation feed for giving a spicy edge.

“We’re incredibly lucky ­because we have a growing number of farmers here who are transitioning to organic or pesticide and chemical-free and still have a lot of stuff they can’t sell. We can only use stuff that doesn’t have pesticides on it because otherwise, the insects would be dead.”

Morris says even she was surprised by how well her whole ­insects and treats made from crushed bugs have been received by restaurant chefs and taste-testers at pop-up food events.

Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmanian restaurants have all given her critters the thumbs up. “They are saying we would love your whole crickets and whole mealworms because they are stacking up well to what we’ve tried before.”

Last November, the Quartermasters Arms bar Elizabeth St in Hobart used all three of her insect types in a pop-up dinner they called Bugs and Drugs. Restaurateur Stuart Addison says working with Morris’s insects was an incredible privilege. “It was just amazing,” Addison says.

“I feel that bugs just cannot be overlooked. It’s up to us as restaurateurs to really be leaders in this area, so it was a no brainer to do the dinner.” The menu ­included whole-cricket tacos, eggplant wedges in a tempura-like batter made with crushed wood-roach flour and mealworms done in a few ways – including as garnishes.

In December, a Hobart Toastmasters group tried her crickets as part of a presentation on the future of food and new ways to farm, and Morris says the conservative audience couldn’t get enough. “Once they had a taste, they were like ‘we’d actually do that again, that was surprisingly good’,” she says.

“So I think the eek factor is much less of a problem than we thought it would be. We over-estimated how hard it was going to be to get past that first barrier. I think it’s just shifting that cultural norm.”

Morris says another tip is to cook insects properly rather than just deep-frying them.

“Something that small, deep-fried, is just going to taste like oil,” she says. “[But] well cooked and well presented – because we eat with our eyes – people were really open to it.”

Insects can be pan-fried, boiled, sauteed, roasted or baked with oil and salt. They can also be ground and dried into flour and used for bars, breads and cookies, crackers and cakes. “I’m really enjoying doing a lot of cricket-flour inclusions into baked goods like our three-c protein balls with cherry, cricket, coconut and almonds and cricket-flour chocolate cake,” Morris says.

She’s also looking at insect chips similar to corn chips.

“The slight nutty flavour of a warm, crusty mealworm bread is pretty good,” she says. What about a slab of it with cricket-flour crusted brie? ”It is unbelievably good. It’s creamy, rich with a nutty edge and stronger flavour to the crust. We think it’s a winner. Mealworms have a slight cheesy end taste to them which rounds off dishes beautifully. The surprise of the cooking experiments has been using woodies (wood cockroaches), they are umami powerhouses. A little bit goes a very long way.”

Rebel Foods Tasmania is collaborating with Tasmanian business Meru Miso, which makes Japanese condiments – to make fermented insect garam. Morris says they’re hoping the first samples will be ready mid-year. “The bugs are made into a paste which has a really strong taste,” Morris says. “Fermented products are great with insects because there is a lot of bang for your buck and each species has a slightly different flavour.

“Tasmania is ripe with great people who have the space and growing culture of collaboration to do things a bit differently.”

Morris says it has been interesting to sit back and watch what people say and do when they are presented with professionally prepared insects. “It’s the best focus group work in terms of seeing how open younger people are to eating insects – and, hilariously, older people. So up until six years old, they are up for anything, and early teens good. Late teens, if there’s a bit of pressure, it can be a little bit like ‘ooh’ until someone says ‘I’ll do it’ and then they all do it. And then sort of 40ish can be a little bit slow on the uptake, and then older folk are like ‘yeah, bring it, I will give it a go, I’ve been to wherever and I’m always up for something new’.”

Rebel Food Tasmania grows insects in a shelved, vertical garden system with lots of plastic tubs stacked on top of each other. The shipping container is alive with the constant chattering of chirpy house crickets – the Acheta domesticus, which can be eaten whole as a bespoke bug or used in dishes in its ground and dried flour form. It is also home to randy mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) – the larval form of the mealworm beetle, which breeds prolifically. And there are also wood cockroaches (Parcoblatta pennsylavica) – or, as they are marketed, roaches.

All the bugs Morris is growing are protein powerhouses, but she says it’s simply their good taste that is the selling point. “Let’s not fall into the trap of calling them ‘hashtag superfood’ or ‘food of the future’,” she says. “I am not focused on selling it as a superfood because I’m highly aware of superfoods having a habit of being super one week and then people moving on the next. Bottom line: they actually taste good.”

Morris is a founding board member of the Insect Protein ­Association of Australia, the industry body that makes sure folk growing insects for human consumption are doing it by the book. She’s hoping it will only be a few months before she’s ­offering her well-fed insects to restaurants and cafes. She says the insect-interested chefs who actually understand how to cook the bugs and “don’t just fry the shit out of them” will then become brand ambassadors for insect-eating.

“People should be able to head along to maybe one of the great Mexican restaurants in Hobart and have some cricket tacos or maybe a bit of cricket tequila,” Morris says. “I’d love to see in the next few months that you can go to some of our great restaurants in Hobart and be able to find on the menu an insect dish which comes from Rebel Food Tasmania and actually sample it cooked by someone who understands good food, understands good flavouring and really promotes insect protein as a tasty, interesting ingredient that is something that can be incorporated into food really easily.”