After being cooped up and immobile for the past few blizzardous months and one too many brews at March Madness games, it’s time to start getting back on the whole healthy living wagon. Spring is finally here, after all! It’s the season of rebirth, for both you and Mother Earth. And fortunately, Harvard-spun Six Foods has a way to help both parties.
Six Foods wants to introduce a new ingredient into your diet that promises to give you a boost and the world’s precious resources a break: Bugs. And believe it or not, they already have the lead chef at famed local eatery, Sofra Bakery, on board.
Before you start imagining slurping down grubs Survivor-style, the startup has plenty of perks that come with snacking on such foods to share. Not only do bugs pack tons of lean protein, they also help reduce the carbon footprint. Dried crickets, for example, are 60 percent protein compared to beef, which is only 26 percent protein. What’s more, farming insects instead of animals could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent, explained co-founder Rose Wang.
Wang is one of the three young women from Harvard’s Class of 2013 responsible for Six Foods. She, Laura D’Asaro and Meryl Natow began buzzing about the idea in fall 2013. D’Asaro, who has been an on-and-off vegetarian her whole life, blasted out an email including an article on on the merits of eating bugs to her two friends. As fate would have it, the self-proclaimed “really adventurous” Wang was in China at the time, and had tried eating scorpion for a few days before. "It tasted like shrimp. It was like, 'this tastes good, why haven't we been eating bugs all along?" said Wang.
The twenty-three year old co-founders realized they were onto something at a Harvard Innovation Lab pitch contest back in the fall. To go along with Six Foods’ presentation, “we made 40 baby mealworm lettuce wraps. Two hours later … there were only five left,” said Wang. (And yes, they ended up winning the contest.)
The product that the crew has received the most praise for, however, are Chocolate Chirp Cookies: essentially your classic chocolate chip cookies, but made with cricket flour. Though Six Foods mostly buys the flour from distributors now, the entrepreneurs created their own powder from the grounded up, stick-legged insects in the beginning.
As one might expect, “there were, and are, a lot of mistakes and weird moments,” said Wang, laughing. “But we learn from them.” The Six Foods squad seems to have seen it all, from D’Asaro strolling up to Wang’s birthday party with a boxful of live, noisy crickets to a test kitchen experience in which the girls forgot to freeze the bugs before popping them in the oven. The cookies ended up “clumpy,” but beyond that, damage was minimal. “Insects don’t have pain receptors, so technically, from our perspective, they don’t feel anything,” shared Wang.
Helping smooth out the kinks in the test kitchen are Geoff Lukas is the Chef de Cuisine at Sofra Bakery and Harvard Law JD candidate and vegan chef Jason Qu. “Cooking’s definitely an art form. The more we do it, the more we get the hang of it,” said Wang.
Six Foods is planning on launching a Kickstarter in April. “We want to prove that it can be done on a larger scale … we want to get our message out there.” The biggest hurdle, however, is changing human behavior, which means ditching bugs’ creepy, crawling stereotype. But Wang, in true psychology major form, has a plan:
The belief people hold is that insects are gross, but if they’re eating insects, their belief and their actions don’t match up. That causes distress. The theory [of cognitive dissonance] goes that the easiest one to change is the belief. So, if you change your belief, you’re saying, maybe, ‘I eat insects because I care about the environment, and I care about my health’ … Maybe they'll also turn their lights off next time they leave the house. It’s bigger than just eating bugs, it’s making a big impact.
Come this time next year, you may be putting down those nachos for a bite of a six-legged snack.
