How Crickets Can Solve the Pending Food Crisis

A 2014 study by Belgium’s Ghent University found that nearly 20 percent of meat-eaters are ready to try insects. That’s good news for Daniel Imrie-Situnayake, cofounder of cricket-farming incubator Tiny Farms, who believes insects are just an infrastructure away from shaking up the food industry. This February, a round of seed funding (Arielle Zuckerberg—Mark’s kid sister—pitched in) helped get them going in a former car factory in San Leandro, California. "We want insects to be cheap; they’re sustainable and taste good," said Imrie-Situnayake as he geared up for Tiny Farms’s first harvest. The company seeks to patent its farming technique, which it will lease to would-be bug farmers in scalable units. "You don’t have to be a crazy startup if you want to produce cattle or corn, but you do if you want to farm crickets. That doesn’t make sense. We really see cricket farming as a huge opportunity. They’re efficient in turning feed into protein, and straightforward to farm."