Brian Sironi and Giulia Tacchini have designed a set of biscuits made with increasing amounts of cricket flour. The project takes a gradual approach: each biscuit is stamped with a number to indicate how much we are consuming of an ingredient that we might think is unpalatable.
While in Asian cooking, eating insects is an established part of food culture, Western consumers still find the idea relatively unpleasant. Integrative Biscuits allows people to embrace a different culture in three simple steps: we can start eating a biscuit which is 10% made of this flour, then move to one containing 30%, and finally step beyond the threshold to consume 70%.
The Food and Drugs Administration estimates that we eat about 500g of insects each year in prepackaged foods. Integrative Biscuits contain very little in comparison: less than 1g of cricket flour in the 10% biscuits, 3g of flour in the 40% and 5g of flour in the 70%. Introducing insects into food could also contribute to the creation of a different global food model, replacing unsustainable intensive farming methods with an alternative source of protein.
Read our blog post on Grey Goose: Iconoclasts of Taste, featuring insect food brand Ento, for more on this idea. Homebuildlife subscribers can see our interview with designer Brian Sironi here.
