Blue cord? Worms and crickets could soon tickle French palates

In a box-like building on an outlying industrial estate in Burgundy, punnets of Alphitobius diaperinus - otherwise known as the little mealworm - are fattened by robots and then cooked, dried and processed into protein-rich powder and oil.

This is the headquarters of Ÿnsect, a French company that builds the largest insect farm in the world, to open at the end of the year in anticipation of what the French company believes will be a surge in demand for a healthy alternative to meat.

Today, most of the petroleum products and protein powder it produces outside the town of Dole in the Jura is used in pet and fish feed. However, since the European Food Agency (EFSA) gave provisional approval to mealworm-based proteins for human consumption earlier this year, some are being made into 'bug burgers' or used in bars. cereals, protein shakes, pasta, granola and other nutrients. -rich foods.

"It can be made to look like ground beef and even made into sausages," says Ÿnsect co-founder Antoine Hubert. "It's ethically good, it's good for the planet and it also tastes good." Ÿnsect - the dots above the Ÿ are meant to represent insect antennae - indicates that his new 480,000-square-foot, 120-foot-tall farm outside Amiens in northern France will begin the production early next year and will produce more than 200,000 tons of insect-based ingredients a year.

The start-up, founded in 2011, plans to have 1,000 employees and a turnover of £450 million by 2025. It is looking for partners in the UK with the aim of building an insect farm across the Channel.

Walking around the Ÿnsect farm, picking up handfuls of wriggling worms, Hubert says it takes pioneering and entrepreneurial thinking to tackle the problem of feeding the growing world population, which the United Nations predicts will reach 9.7 billion by 2050, without destroying the planet or depleting its resources.

Mealworms – fed, watered and cooked at the precise moment before the larvae metamorphose into beetles – are disease resistant, high in protein and low in fat. They don't require a lot of space. Unlike crickets and flies, two possible food alternatives for insects, they do not jump or fly.

Hubert called on philosophers from the Sorbonne to reflect on the ethics of their production and well-being. Student thinkers concluded that the cultivation of mealworms had more in common with the cultivation of mushrooms and the cultivation of vegetables in hothouses than with the raising of cattle and poultry.

"They don't have a brain in the strict sense of the word, says Hubert. "We know that they have a reflex reaction and that they communicate and build st smart...