Look, at Jersey Girl, we tend to favor a vintage aesthetic. Our office desks may be repurposed 50s longboards. We may have extra wide parking spaces for all of the classic Chevelle's and Thunderbirds our team of hotheads drive to work. We like a good, old-fashioned burger for lunch, smothered in a mix of ketchup and Jersey Girl Original.
Except, what’s this? Sometimes, there’s a chance that burger isn’t quite ground beef. Sometimes, like all those nostalgic Summer nights cruising down the shore, those nights sound tracked by a symphony of chirps, our burgers are full of crickets.
Okay, not really. I, at least—and I think I can speak for many of my colleagues—haven’t eaten a cricket burger.
But we should. For our health. For the environment. For the sake of trying something truly vintage, we should.
In fact, humans eating crickets predates those 50s longboard desks (which we really don’t recommend…very difficult to balance anything on a freshly waxed and polished surface) by 10,000 years. Early hunter-gatherers often ate insects to survive. Millions of years before them, Australopithecus likely ate insects to survive.
So, what? We’re evolved. We couldn’t possibly eat insects, right? Firstly, plenty of modern countries across all continents currently have crickets and other insects as a significant part of their national cuisine. Now, of course, there is a good chance that much of the audience reading this resides in the United States.
Well, guess what, you eat bugs. Sort of. What has an exoskeleton, a multitude of legs, and scavenges for food? It’s not crickets (well, it is, but I’m making a point); it’s shrimp. It’s lobster. Crustaceans are, without being in the same genus, effectively insects of the sea. So, why the hesitation to eat crickets?
Maybe that argument fails for you. Sharing traits doesn’t suddenly negate the creepy-crawlies that come from seeing a cricket hop wildly and unexpectedly out of a dark corner. Many of us have been conditioned to view bugs as anything but food.
But crickets are actually one of the most nutritious proteins available (with more protein per weight than most meat), one of the best for the environment (it doesn’t take all that much land or water to farm crickets), and a novel way to help get a handle on a growing global hunger crisis. Over two billion people already supplement their diet with crickets and other insects. We might as well scale.
But if you’re ever staring down a plate of cricket or scorpion kababs and thinking “I can’t do this,” we recommend packing a bottle of Jersey Girl hot sauce to spice up your diet while you…spice up your diet.