Never been more excited to do anything in my whole life.

OK. Head first, that's the way they say to do it.

Oh, the head's coming off.

I just ate a bug head.

It's too crunchy.

It's nutty, very chewy.

Yep, got that exoskeleton.

Bottom's up, literally.

I can't.

Hey, smart people.

Joe here.

Bugs.

When I say that word, what comes to mind?

Probably not restaurants or your next home-cooked meal.

When most people think about bugs and food, they think about, I don't know, health code violations?

Certainly not eating them.

But there are some people out there trying to change that, for some really good reasons.

I recently flew to Long Beach to attend a big bug banquet, where a bunch of talented chefs are turning insects into fine dining.

I've heard that insects are the food of the future, but I wanted to know why-- and maybe try some-- which is why I am at a feast where every dish on the menu features edible insects.

And since it's a holiday feast, I invited a couple of my friends.

I've got Kyle Hill from YouTube's Because Science.

Hey, Joe, thanks for having me.

Excited to eat some bugs?

Ho, ho, ehhh... OK. And she literally wrote the book about edible insects and human evolution, Julie Lesnik, anthropologist from Wayne State.

Hello.

Bring on the first dish.

OK, what's in this?

MAN: OK, so you got a corn flour tostada that's made with about 20% grasshopper flour, a little bit of black ant adds kind of like a citrus salt component.

That's gonna add a zing.

What is this-- why do these ants have this zingy citrus flavor?

It's a chemical defense mechanism, so they actually have formic acid, and they'll like spit the formic acid and it throws off their enemies.

And it didn't work too well for me.

JOE: All right, let's try it.

And I see what you did with the shrimp.

They're arthropods, just like insects.

This is awesome.

This is really good.

I love this.

I'm getting some of that zing now.

The formic acid is different from citrus.

It's a little pop.

None of this is screaming insect to me.

It's all used really well and really smartly.

And it definitely has one of the strongest flavors in all the bugs we're going to try.

For being so small and being so potent, well done ants and chef.

Aly, you have a kitchen full of bugs.

How did you get into having bugs in the kitchen, eating bugs, getting other people to eat bugs?

I was in Mexico for a public health project, and I had a taco with tapalinas-- or grasshoppers-- and that was delicious.

I started blogging, met bug people, fell in love, and took off from there.

Is there a scientific reason that people don't eat bugs?

People all over the world do eat bugs.

I think from our viewpoint, we think eating bugs is weird.

But we're actually the odd ones.

So is there something that lets you predict whether or not some part of the world will or won't have bugs as part of their diet?

The number-one predictor is latitude, how close you are to the equator.

So part of the reason why we don't like seeing bugs in our kitchen is that we seal off our homes.

But when you live in the tropics, you have a very different relationship with bugs.

What you see is that people have the bugs that they know are harmful, the ones that are helpful, and the ones that are delicious.

It is a natural food source.

It gives you so many nutrients.

It's almost silly to ignore it.

People have these innate reactions when they see creepy crawly things.

Is that any influence on whether people will choose to eat this stuff?

So the disgust reaction, like, the churning stomach, the gag reflex-- it's real.

It's a real emotion, but the emotion is learned.

So this is not a an innate biological fear of bugs.

Yeah, it's like a neophobia.

But we've changed that, one crunchy bite at a time.

Actually, surprisingly delicious.

What delicious dishes do you have for us?

I have sauteed green beans with garlic and mealworms, and then on the platter here, I have mini pecan tarts with crickets.

I can see the crickets.

It's going to be in my body soon.

It's not a meal without a meal worm.

I mean, that's amazing.

If you didn't tell me that bugs were in it, I wouldn't have known, which I guess, is a compliment?

This is amazing.

So good.

This one looks really good.

You said this one was mine.

That was the one that was-- There's a lot of visible crickets happening on this one.

OK, I'm going in.

Are you sure there's crickets in here?

Yeah, the other flavors work really well.

The sweetness kind of mixes with the nuttiness.

They blend so well with the other flavors.

It's really jumping into my mouth here.

I wanted more acts of that thorax.

I give that a 2 out of 10.

Come on.

But I give this another 10 out of 10.

How many people on Earth around the world regularly consume bugs?

I think the estimate is that at least a billion people are eating bugs today, right now.

JOE: Is that changing?

We have such a negative attitude about eating bugs, and so it's actually permeating in globalized society.

So people who rely on eating bugs as a very important part of their nutrition, if they start looking at what we do and then they feel stigmatized if they eat those bugs, our negative reactions are harming them.

That's the thing that makes me the most sad, is I do this on Instagram and platforms and I get asked, oh, how many times were you dropped on your head?

Like this is presented in a nice way, and we're working on educating folks.

But I do see that same phenomena.

It's amazing how our opinions about what progress is, it starts painting bugs as savage and primitive.

And that goes all the way back to a colonial history.

So Columbus, when he encountered people, they were eating bugs.

These people were painted as primitive and savage, and animal-like.

And so then the entire European continent's like, I don't want to be thought of as primitive or savage.

And so then eating bugs was just-- Taboo.

Was disgusting, taboo.

If we here can get on board with eating bugs, then the world can go back to their natural resources.

Ooh.

So this is like a loaded potato.

There is a grasshopper butter, which I cooked the potatoes in.

Also, with furikake and spiced grasshopper.

Here, this one's for you.

Thank you.

I kind of want to pop the whole thing in my mouth at once.

That's what I'm doing.

OK.

I mean, the bug is perfectly executed.

I can have a little crunch from the worm on top.

It's not jumping out and going, I'm a worm potato.

I like grasshopper butter, which I didn't know I would say.

Yeah.

How do you milk them?

Well, anything would-- anyway.

You know, bug eating doesn't quite have the right ring.

Is there a technical term for this?

Entomophagy.

I got an exoskeleton in my teeth.

Bring on the next course.

Ooh.

There's a lot going on here.

There's a lot going on.

We have several dishes to choose from.

The first is mashed garlic on cauliflower with mealworms.

And what's in the cookies?

They are crickets.

We call those chocolate "chirp" cookies.

Chocolate chirp-- Oh, it's so good.

Try the mashed potato first?

The textural mix is wonderful.

Very good-- the nuttiness of the mealworm, it's really nice with the cauliflower.

Everything else is very kind of smushy and then you add that, you get the crunch.

Just like with the other ants, I'm just getting a little bit of citrus pop.

Which is perfect with the avocado.

It is just providing that texture, that additional flavor, like any other ingredient.

And you can start to retrain your brain kind of to associate this not as something that's disgusting, nothing like that, but something that's food-food.

It's funny, because when we talk about edible insects, people think of it like eating it raw off the ground or something.

And that's not how people around the world eat it.

It's an ingredient.

Do you want to try the cookie?

That's just a delicious cookie.

That was really good.

That is chirpin' delicious.

It's amazing.

10 out of 10.

Now what this just needs is a little bit of cold cricket milk.

You can't milk a cricket, Joe.

Stop trying.

Cockroach milk is a thing, though.

No.

Wait a second.

So we have established that bugs are delicious, but are they nutritious?

Yeah, they're basically little vitamins.

And they contain a bunch of macro and micronutrients that you wouldn't get from just eating the rib of a cow.

You are eating the whole thing of the bug, and you're getting all those healthy fats.

So where you would eat avocados or almonds or salmon, you could eat a mopane worm and get those really good healthy fats.

That is the most millennial food in the world, mopane worm toast, can you imagine?

And everything's very bio-available too, so that means your stomach can absorb it a bit more.

So these sound in a lot of ways like nature's perfect multivitamin, and they even come in pill form.

One thing with the bugs, though, depending on which bug you eat, you get a different nutrient profile.

With chimpanzees, who our closest living relative, they have fashioned these tools to extract termites from the mound.

And the termites they're getting are the soldiers, and they're really protein-rich.

And they doing that on purpose?

Yeah, so chimpanzees are frugivores.

Most of their diet comes from fruit.

And so for a large-body chimp, they have to supplement some protein in their diet.

That's amazing that they're using this like an actual literal vitamin shop out in nature.

So when we go kind of down the branches of human evolution to about two million years ago, we're working with the genus Australopithecus, and we actually have evidence that they were also eating termites.

The australopithecines were likely doing with these bone tools, is digging into the termite mound to access fatty-rich termites instead of the protein-rich termites.

Like larva?

Yes.

I call it a pat of butter.

Delicious insect butter.

It is just straight-up fat.

OK, so why would they be after fat?

Australopithecine brains are about 20% bigger than chimpanzees, and our brains run on fat.

All the fatty acids are so important for developing our brains and for keeping them functioning properly.

So I can go and find basically any restaurant in America, and I'm going to find plenty of fat in my diet.

But if you're walking around in Africa, you're early human, you just don't have these sources of fat.

So this would've been a key nutrient they can't get anywhere else?

Yeah, so when we think about humans and what makes us so unique is how large our brains are.

And so over the millions of years of evolution since our last common ancestor, our brains have been getting gradually bigger and bigger.

And so one thing we know that must mean is that they must have been getting fat in their diet.

But when you hunt animals on the landscape, they're very lean-- anybody hunts deer knows that venison is a very lean meat.

Having a source of fat in their diet could have provided enough of a surplus so that brains could get bigger back in our human evolution.

Yeah.

What do you call this?

It's cricket sourdough.

It's bread, it's bread.

It's bread.

It's bread.

This loaf is about 10% ground-up crickets into this, replaced from the flour.

Oh, that smells amazing.

The other one is cricket salt with chili powder and honey.

That's one I can smell.

I need to try that.

It's amazing.

I want to eat this every morning, ants and all.

The ants with the herbs in the butter-- again, that formic acid zip, the zing, the zest.

Yeah, I see what anteaters are raving about.

Well, always think about with bears.

So bears have giant claws and giant teeth, but what they do is they go dig for termites and ants.

They could kill anything, but they go after bugs.

All bark, no bite.

Yeah.

Actually, they bite very hard.

Don't play with bears.

Yeah, this is definitely high-end bug gourmet.

Next dish, please.

Ooh, bug pie.

We have a mushroom, chickpea pecan and herb cricket tart.

Why don't you give me one of the smaller slices?

Just a sliver?

Not for the bug reason, just like I'm watching-- Because we're all very full?

Yes, I'm full of a lot of bug bread, and legs, and wings, and compound eyes.

Do you think this could go the way of sushi?

I mean, just imagine what sushi must have been like a couple of generations ago when it was so weird.

Like, oh my God, raw fish?

Now you can buy it the gas station.

For dishes like this, you really don't realize bugs are in it.

And that's the point.

The only real way we're going to get people en masse to take up this kind of diet choice is if it is as close to normal as possible.

But here we're getting all the same nutrients, it's delicious, crickets are far less smart than pigs, and so you just feel a lot better about eating it.

A lot of people talk about sustainability as well.

Bugs are so good on a variety of envirometrics.

You know, they take less space than traditional livestock, great for indoor vertical farming, think feature food, like space travel.

They can reduce our reliance on antibiotics and livestock rearing.

They also are wonderful for biodiversity and for regenerative soil health.

But the two main ones that we always hit on are emissions and water use.

The same amount of crickets, the same amount of beef, it takes 1,000 or so times less water to make the crickets as the beef?

Yeah.

OK, but emissions are a huge part of that too.

We know that agricultural emissions are a big part of our greenhouse gas problem.

You can trace emissions to a lot of different things, from food transport and insects are great for local agriculture.

They have a very effective feed-the-body mass conversion ratio too.

So all that feed that you're giving the cows and the pigs and everything else, a lot of it's wasted.

Some of it in terms of body heat, since they're warm-blooded, but insects are cold-blooded, so you have extremely efficient little systems here turning input to output that's very nutritious.

Environmental reasons aren't the only thing people think about when they're like, what am I going to eat?

Are there other reasons to eat bugs that are not just purely about climate change?

A lot of people are making their dietary choices based on impact on the animals we've been eating.

We don't treat them very well.

Some vegetarians actually really think that insects are a great alternative, because crickets like dark, cramped spaces.

To put them in a bin and raise them, it's not nearly the kind of shock to their system than what we're doing to the mammals.

So from an animal welfare standpoint, eating insects is much more appealing option for a lot of people than eating mammals.

Delicious, nutritious environmentally... sustainableicious.

Is that a word?

Now it is.

It is now.

Final thoughts, what do you think?

This is definitely my best experience with this kind of dish I've ever had.

My previous experiences have just been like, "Hey, try this novelty."

When you're actually using it intelligently, I think it can be as good as anything else.

I'm still eating it.

As someone who really never ate bugs in almost any form that I knew about before tonight, I am blown away.

The way that these were worked in, it's both so artful and just so natural.

Bug eating is not weird.

It's totally awesome.

I've had a lot of bug banquets, but this was superb.

Guys, thanks for coming to this awesome Thanksgiving dinner with me.

I'm thankful for crickets, mealworms and all the rest.

Turns out eating insects isn't that weird for humans after all.

We've been doing it for a long time.

And you know, like most things that you eat, you don't know if you're going to like it until you try it.

As for me, well, I'm a bug eater now.

These chips are made from crickets.

ALL: Stay curious.