Breakout Stars of SXSW ECO 2013: The Edible Cricket and 3D Food Printing!
We’re living in a food-oriented society right now, with more people seriously interested in food than ever before. So it shouldn’t come as much surprise that the breakout stars of the third year of South By Southwest Eco Conference at the Austin Convention Center were the edible cricket and 3D food printing!
At the Monday panel Hunger Solutions: Feeding 10 Billion People baked goods made with cricket flour were distributed by Austin non-profit Little Herds to the eager audience, and received with great enthusiasm from the crowd.
The “Little Herds” cricket-food selection at SXSW Eco included: banana nut muffins made with cricket flour, cricket carob treats and straight up crunchy crickets. I was surprised to find that I personally found the straight up cricket to be the tastiest of the offerings!
Below, Little Herds offering cricket snacks at the panel:
The crickets–which I was told were grown and processed from a human grade cricket supplier in Louisiana– had a nice nutty crunch. If they were on sale, I’d buy them as a low fat, high protein snack.
“Little Herds” also had a booth at the trade show, which was talked about a lot on Twitter during SXSW Eco.
The other food thing that everyone was talking about at SXSW Eco was 3D printed food!
Inventor/hacker Pablos Holman — talked about the future of printed food, and noted that in the future it may be possible to customize food for individual dietary needs. He also said that the 3D food printer might be a step towards solving our problem with food waste and spoilage. (One often-cited fact at the conference was the assertion that 40 percent of the food produced in the USA is thrown away.)
In the trade show, inventors were showing off a hacked a 3D printer that had been modified to print out a mini-pizza in about 10 minutes.
Lacking FDA approval, They couldn’t give out the pizzas, which they were finishing with a heat gun.
Another food topic running thru SXSW Eco was how much food we throw away.
Doug Rouch, former president of the Trader Joe’s grocery store chain talked about the recovered food store he’s putting in in Dorchester, near Boston.
He also talked about how little most sell-by and expiration dates mean, and how food is edible far past the “best by” date.
Rouch explained that expiration dates on packaged food are a suggestion of when they might be best by, not a law limiting sale or consumption!
