“WAITER, there are beetle larvae in my tortilla.” “Yes sir, they’re good for you.” At least, that’s what food scientist Ana Barba de la Rosa thinks. Her aim? To provide a cheap source of protein and fatty acids for Mexico’s poorest people.
“The idea is that every family has these larvae at home, in an environment they know to be clean,” says Barba de la Rosa, head of a team turning out the unusual tortillas at the Potos’ Institute of Science and Technology in San Luis Potos’, some 400 kilometres south of Monterrey.
You won’t find Barba de la Rosa’s recipe in any cookery book. But this is how it goes: buy larvae of the yellow mealworm beetle Tenebrio molitor at the local pet shop—in Mexico they’re sold as fish food or bait. Spend a month or two fattening them up with scraps of wheat, oatmeal and vegetables until they’re 2.5 to 3.5 centimetres long. Then boil them in water and dry them out in the oven before milling to a powder. Add 1 gram of powdered grub to every 14 grams of wheat or maize flour, and make a tortilla in the usual way.
Advertisement
“They’re very nice, much tastier than normal,” says Barba de la Rosa. “They had a much softer flavour.” And all 18 unsuspecting volunteers who tried the tortillas without knowing beforehand about the new ingredient agreed. “They all said they liked it much better, and were very surprised when we told them what was in it,” she says.
More importantly, the powder adds vital balance to an otherwise inadequate diet. Almost 60 per cent of the dry body weight of each beetle is protein. They are also rich in fatty acids vital for nerve and brain growth and maintenance, plus essential amino acids. “This is a way of supplementing their diet,” she says. It would only cost about $3 to produce a kilogram of larvae.
Ironically, the beetles and their larvae are a major pest in Mexico. They devastate silos of stored grain and flour, reducing harvests by as much as half.
But won’t people be too squeamish to eat them? It’s unlikely, says the inventor. Mexicans have been eating insects for generations. They commonly mix caterpillars with chilli and garlic, for example. “I had it once, and it’s a weird sensation to chew the insect, but I prefer the tortilla supplemented with larva powder,” she says.
Other insect-based delicacies from Mexico include jumiles, which are pungent brown beetles, honey ants, escamoles (ant roe), ahuahutle (the eggs of water worms) and maguey worms.
But would such dishes tickle the palates of people in richer countries? Barba de la Rosa says that Europeans are more likely to give it a try than North Americans, particularly the French. “If the French eat snails, why not insects?” she asks.
- More at: Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (vol 50, p 192)
