Cricket powder: the unusual ingredient being added to school dinners in Madagascar

School dinners are being given an unusual twist in Madagascar - ground-up crickets are being added to dishes as a way of combating malnutrition.

For the past month, cooks at the Filles de Marie Auxiliatrice school have been adding cricket powder (crickets cooked and ground) to koba – a kind of loaf made from rice flour, peanuts and sugar – a snack it serves to pupils twice a week.

“I liked it,” says Eliane, 13. “They told us it was made with crickets and I didn’t think twice about it: I’ve already eaten cockroaches and locusts.” Her friend Lina, 12, agrees. “It was good,” she says, “but I don’t know what a cricket looks like.”

The initiative, part of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) school feeding programmes, aims to alleviate the malnutrition that is prevalent in much of Madagascar, where nearly half of children under the age of five suffer from stunting.

Crickets are something of a superfood - they comprise around 60 per cent protein and are a rich source of minerals and vitamins such as iron, zinc, copper, magnesium and selenium. They are also incredibly versatile as they can be eaten sweet or savoury, and fried or ground into a powder to add to yoghurt, sauces, rice and so on.

The powder is produced by Valala Farm, the brainchild of a collaborative of entomologists and conservationists. They believe that  insect protein in Madagascar can both  help to alleviate malnutrition and protect biodiversity by stopping people from eating endangered species such as lemurs.

Although insects are widely eaten in the country, their consumption is usually opportunistic, says Brian Fisher, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences, one of the project’s leads.

“When you ask children whether they eat insects, they often say no. But dig a little deeper and they’ll say, ‘oh yes, I ate a couple of locusts on the way to school.’ They’re snacks, not meals cooked by their mother, but they’re an important part of their diet,” he says.

There is a growing interest in exploring alternative protein sources such as insects. A major study in the Lancet earlier this year warned that the world’s current diet is unsustainable, with people in richer countries eating far too much meat, which is both unhealthy and damaging the environment. And people in poorer countries are not getting enough nutrients.

Crickets have a much lower environmental footprint than animal sources of protein requiring much less feed than chickens, pigs and cows.  They also take up a fraction of the space. In Valala Farm’s facility in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, around one million crickets live in a room measuring around 100 square metres.

Although this species is native to the highlands of Madagascar,  the crickets are reared and processed according to protocols that were developed by Entomo Farms in Canada, the largest producer of insect food in North America.

The process was tweaked and adapted “but the idea was not to reinvent the wheel and get straight into production”, says Andrianjaka Ravelomanana, an entomologist and Valala Farm’s production manager.

The insects are fed on corn and lay their eggs in humidified cotton balls. After six weeks they are killed with carbon dioxide before being washed, mashed, slow-roasted and ground and packaged, all in a large immaculate kitchen.

“We have to go the extra mile to show people that it’s a refined product that is well prepared and controlled. Because people could find crickets anywhere in the bush,” says Dr Ravelomanana.

Valala Farm currently produces around 100kg of live crickets per week, which yield about 65kg of powder. “We can only meet about 10 per cent of our demand,” says Dr Fisher. “If we could produce two tons tomorrow, we would sell it.”

Dr Fisher and his colleagues plan to open a new facility in the near future to increase their production tenfold.

Their biggest market for the time being is humanitarian assistance. The south of the country has been teetering on the edge of famine since 2015 because of a severe drought; donors such as the UN’s World Food Programme, USAID and CRS are providing emergency food relief.

“People in the south eat a lot of insects, so [the cricket powder] wasn’t much of a stretch,” says Joshua Poole, country representative of Catholic Relief Services, whose idea it was to introduce cricket powder to schools.

Valala Farm’s next customers, the urban working class and emerging middle class, are likely to be fussier. The only place the team has encountered resistance is in the capital, where eating insects isn’t as commonplace as in the countryside.

Catholic Relief Services and Valala Farm organised a tasting before starting the school meal programme to show school staff, parents and children how cricket powder could be prepared.

“People were hesitant, but once the first couple of kids started, it was a gold rush and it was all gone really quickly," said Mr Poole.

For Dr Fisher, this is what it comes down to: “Why do you think people keep coming back to it? Because it tastes so good.”

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