How One Grad Student Hopes to Build Resilience in the Food System With Insects
Helen McSherry Craig displays a handfull of edible beetles and a beaker of cricket powder.
Image Credit: Kimbra Cutlip
It’s just after 9 am on a Friday morning when Helen McSherry Craig reaches into a cabinet in the corner of her office and pulls out a plain white bag, about as big as a family-sized chip bag, but it looks heavy and dense. She opens it and holds it out cautiously.
“If you're willing, you can take a smell,” she says as a rich, earthy aroma fills the air.
"At the State Fair, people said it smelled like peanut butter, chocolate, or coffee.”
All were wrong. The light brown powder is actually ground soldier fly larva.
Helen is a PhD candidate in the University of Maryland Department of Entomology, and the larva powder is part of her research into the possibility that insects could be a sustainable, cost-effective, environmentally friendly feed source for dairy cattle. The sniff test plays a role in her effort to understand if consumers will accept the idea.
“I grew up in the same society that we all grew up in,” she says. “So, I understand the aversion to insects as food. I grew up thinking, don't eat that. That's dirty.”
But Helen’s opinion about insects has shifted as she gradually evolved from a meat-eating high-school student learning about her carbon footprint and the food system, to a vegan college junior working in Professor Bill Lamp’s Entomology lab at UMD.
“I was already thinking about the impact of what we eat on our carbon footprint, and then I just got more and more exposure to insects in that lab,” Helen explains. “I found a paper about insects as dairy cow feed, and then I kind of went down the rabbit hole of insects as food and feed in general.”
Today, Helen slips cricket protein powder into her morning oatmeal, and laughingly calls herself an “ento-vegan,” who eats no meat or animal products aside from insects. She now sees them as a viable source of protein that could help feed not only livestock, but the world’s growing population of people.
That’s why she keeps a box of edible insects in her office to show at demonstrations and outreach events. “There are over 2,000 edible insects,” she said, riffling through an assortment of little bags containing marble-sized beetles with hard black shells and cricket-like things with spindly legs. “It’s the legs that freak most people out,” she says, explaining that many insects come in powders or flours, which makes them more accessible and easier to incorporate into feed and recipes.
These tiny, crusty critters, she argues, are an underused resource. High in protein and fat, they can be raised using far less water and land than conventional protein sources. They can thrive on organic waste streams like discarded foods, compost, and even manure. They introduce diversity that can add resilience to food systems, which are increasingly vulnerable to climate extremes. She points to the 2012 drought, when prices for corn and soybean meal—the backbone of dairy cattle feed—spiked so high that farmers across the country took heavy financial hits. Insect powders could have offered an alternative that farmers didn’t have then.
Helen’s research focuses on black soldier fly larvae as one of those options. She’s studying everything from their impacts on cow health and cow burps, which are a major source of the greenhouse gas methane, to the downstream impacts of adding them to feed.
For example, she is working with Drs. Jim MacDonald and Dale Johnson in the Department of Agricultural Resource Economics to understand the economic benefits and potential barriers for farmers. And she is conducting consumer surveys with Dr. Jen Shaffer in the Department of Anthropology to learn whether people are comfortable drinking the resulting milk.
“It’s about the narrative,” she says. “Some people say they don’t know what cows eat now, so it doesn’t matter, but others may be more hesitant, especially if you ask if they would feed it to their children.”
Helen embraces that tension between the science, and the storytelling, around eating bugs. On the one hand, insects already appear in food systems across the world, especially in equatorial regions. On the other hand, the idea feels new and unsettling to many Americans. So she’s trying to understand how what people already know affects what they are comfortable with. Her preliminary studies have shown that the more insects people can name, the more comfortable they are with the idea of insects in animal feed.
She believes that introducing insects into animal food may help shift the narrative and serve as an entry point to seeing insects as human food. And when they’re ready to take that next leap, Helen will be there with ideas. She has already worked out some recipes that incorporate things like soldier fly larva fat as a replacement for oil or butter, and dried bamboo worms, which she insists add a nutty crunch that works well on top of brownies. Her creations have included cornbread, brown sugar chai cookies, cinnamon coffee cookies, banana bread, and guacamole.
But Helen's goal is not to convert everyone to eating insects. Rather, she wants to normalize insects as a viable food source that increases global sustainability and resilience. To help shape the narrative, Helen has built and delivered outreach programs with help from the UMD Sustainability fund, taking her edible insect demonstrations to the Maryland State Fair, county fairs and Extension events. She is also working with Professor Qin Wang from the Department of Nutrition and Food Science and UMD’s dining services to bring an accessible insect-based treat, like cookies or a brownie, to UMD students along with educational materials. And, they are seeking a UMD DoGood Grant to develop a series of workshops that teach the history of insects as food and feed and how they can be incorporated into today’s modern diet.
“Whether you want to eat them or not, that’s up to you,” she says. “It’s not that we have to eat them. It’s that once you understand they’re viable, accessible, and sustainable, it just feels like a natural progression.”
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Helen's research is supported by the Maryland Agrciultural Experiment Station and the UMD Sustainability fund.
