The best part about it is the complete lack of association with crickets, amirite?
âYou do know that bar is made from bugs, right?â
âNah, âcricketâ is just some kind of euphamism.â
I think itâs great, but wasnât sure why because I also felt that highly-processed energy bars that could just as easily have been made with pea proteins were probably bad for you and a poor use of living animals.
But i worked out why I thought it was great from the first sentence in that link:
Exoâs mission is to normalize the consumption of insects. Insects are a far more sustainable food source than poultry, fish or meat and have just as much nutritional value. For their first product Exo has created a delicious protein bar from cricket flour.
Highly-processed cricket protein is weird, but eating more crickets and fewer pigs and cows is great. If this is a step in that direction, then itâs a good step.
Really nice and simple packaging. I like the fact that they arenât trying to make the cricket ingredient into some visual pun, or joke, or something kitschy. Hope they donât load the bars with too much sugar though, a lot of protein bars tend to have way too much.
Protein bars based on CricketâŚ
Does it sometimes take two days to eat them?
I donât love the idea of the packaging looking like one big nutrition label. but oh well. could be worse.
The irony is that the majority of people who will dismiss crickets as a food source have probably eaten (and enjoyed!) shrimp and lobster at some in their lives.
Thatâs not lost on me. I constantly call out all aquatic arthropods as âbugs that live in the seaâ.
I saw a competitor of theirs on Shark Tank earlier this year. http://chapul.com/
Yeah yeah you use some alternate method of making your flour. You didnât answer my question though: How does it taste?
That packaging makes it look like itâs going to be one of those utterly tasteless health bars that seems designed to make you lose weight by turning food into a boring chore. Health info front and center. No sense of playfulness whatsoever. And by the way, hereâs a bit of technical detail on how we made the bars, itâs more environmentally sustainable. There technically are flavors, but it doesnât really matter which bar you grab, they all taste the same.
Thatâs what that packaging says to me. Also: where are the fruit flavors? If Iâm going to eat one of those bars, I almost always go for the fruit one, since itâs pretty hard to sap all of the flavor out of a dried cranberry. You certainly get more flavor out that than a bit of nut powder.
Have you ever tasted cricket flour??? Probably just so delicious that fruit would only spoil the intense yum.
You can really taste the chitin!
Just like any animal protein, youâll still need to raise plants to feed the little critters. Anyone with a garden cricket problem knows how much they eat, and thatâs just the natural varieties. Just wait until we get genetically-modified super-crickets stimulated with growth hormone to produce big olâ bodybuilder hopper legs. Those suckers will take out the nationâs whole kale supply when they stray from the cricket ranch.
No worries, though. Now that hemp is legal in a few places in the country, weâll be able to get hemp seeds (they taste like tiny pine nuts) cheap, and the protein problem (which isnât nearly as big a problem as non-vegans think) will be solved.
Are crickets vegan? I wouldnât think so, but I donât have the big book of Vegan rules to consult so I canât be sure. I thought vegans just ate beans and coagulated soy to get protein.
Jiminy!
the main reason is quality of protein, without the need to highly process. whole ground cricket flour with no effort made to process or isolate and concentrate the proteins, has a better amino acid profile and more protein then pea or soy protein isolates. That and insect/animal proteins arenât chained the same way or locked in carbohydrate matrix, so they donât deplete the brush border enzymes in order to be made usable. The chemical structures are bio-available without complex enzyme intensive digestion.
donât get me wrong, i eat my fair share of beans and peas, and was vegan for 9 years, so iâm not against plant based diets, but there is a huge difference between protein quality, concentrations, and bio-availability between plant based proteins and insect and animal based proteins. It is a mistake to only look at the amino acid profile after the proteins are broken down. When you look at how the are bound, which enzymes are need to break those bonds, and how easily they are uptaken by the body for use, there is a very wide gap in difference. It takes a minimum of four times the energy and a ton of enzymes (which replenish at varying speeds) to get plant based proteins broken down to the same amino acids compared to animal proteins. during my early vegan days i believed the dogma that protein was protein and that we had too much anyway, once i started studying the bio-chemistry of it i had an eye opening revelation that those assumptions were very far from the reality. Fortunately the human organism can sustain itself on vast variety of food sources, our adaptability is no small part of our success story. In fact we might even be too successful 
!
Yes, but they are very efficient converters of those food sources. The amount you feed them versus the protein and nutrition profile you get is an order of magnitude more efficient then higher animal species, such as cows or chickens. Plus they can eat scraps that do not take away from the food chain, parts of plants that we wouldnât use for food regardless.
Exactly which kingdom to you think the class insecta falls under?
That said, I donât have any especially strong moral qualms about eating insects. They feed on me all the time.
fair enough, point taken, reply edited. i sometimes forget how large the Kingdom Animalia branch is. thanks for the correction.
does this mean i can call animal control the next time iâm being swarmed by mosquitoes? 
âYes help, iâm being bitten all over by wild animals!!!â
Are crickets vegan? I donât think you need the big vegan rule book to answer that, but, no, they are not. One easy rule of thumb would be that anything with eyes is definitely not vegan. Fortunately, loads of foods have protein, aside from beans. Nuts, seeds and grains are all high in protein, and most fruits and vegetables have some.
