Bugged by David MacNeal

Author:David MacNeal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Nine

Dining with Crickets

Drive south on California’s I-405, get off at Sherman Way, hang a right, head two blocks into the mini warehouse district, and you’ll arrive at Coalo Valley Farms. Unlike your average agricultural landscape, the farm is surrounded by cinder-block walls, garbage bins, shattered beer bottles in the street, and razor-wire fencing with a roll-up dock door. It’s a 20-minute walk from Van Nuys Airport—not far from the Laserium where my high school friends and I would smoke weed from cored apples. A group of New Englanders in their twenties, some walking around shirtless, some bearded, tend to Coalo Valley Farms. Their CEO wears a Shih Tzu topknot. But it’s in 3,000-square-foot facilities like this that the future food industry is taking shape.

“We’re a cricket farm in, uh, the San Fernando Valley,” says Peter “Mama Bear” Markoe, the company’s chief operating officer. He wipes sweat from beneath a dirty baseball cap as we begin the tour.

Viewed from afar, this setup for rearing crickets—solely for human consumption—is reminiscent of indoor cannabis cultivation. (Even their packaging—small jars and vacuum-sealed foil baggies—reminds me of cannabis products.) Hydroponic Gorilla grow tents, erected as large black cubes, have been “repurposed” into climate-control houses for raising crickets. Water from a koi-fish tank streams into a table containing a shallow rock bed. The flowing water then fertilizes mung beans, their roots sprouting through burlap on top of the rocks. The biomimetic aquaponic system doubles as filtration.

“What we found is it’s a great way to recycle water [during California’s] drought and organically grow food ourselves,” says Markoe. “The fish waste provides all the nutrients needed for the plants to grow in record time.”

The fresh spinach, alfalfa, and watercress is fed to about 100,000 crickets, which collectively weigh about 45 pounds alive and 10 pounds once the mature little Jiminys are dried and milled into powder. And then the crickets can be mixed into, say, a protein smoothie—drinks these farmers have prepared for students at the nearby Granda Hills Charter High School, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and for senior citizens at gardening clubs. “It was cool too,” Markoe adds, “because traditionally older folks are not too open to things like that.”

Since Coalo’s arrival, eating insects—a worldwide practice1 known as entomophagy—has made some local impact within the San Fernando Valley.

On the wall hangs a framed 2015 cover image from local magazine Ventura Blvd. It features Coalo Valley Farm’s tie-dye-shirt-wearing, hiking-sandaled cofounders who crowdfunded the venture via Kickstarter and repurposed the San Fernando Valley location several months earlier. A colorful poster made by UCLA students hangs by some hydroponically grown buckwheat grass with painted cartoon bugs and the glittered tenet: “Treat yo self … to Insects!” Inspired by the protein-producing operation, the students made a food documentary (and a cappella song) called Coalo-fornia Dreaming. These new-age farmers might just convince a small portion of Americans to do what four-fifths of the world already does with nary a wince: eat bugs.

Westerners show a growing interest in entomophagy despite the “yuck” factor.

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