Bugging Denmark

Edible insects are the food of the future. They are sustainable, healthy, and they taste great. At Bugging Denmark, our mission is to gently introduce edible insects as an integral part of our culinary and cultural everyday life. To this end, we have established what is currently the country's only urban cricket farm, producing edible insects in the Northwestern part of Copenhagen. By introducing a simple but efficient setup for rearing insects we hope to establish a model that can be copied at communities and in homes all over the country as well as abroad. We believe that large-scale insect farming is part of our future food production. Rather than repeating the mistakes of the past, we aim to make insect farming as sustainable as possible as fast as possible. This entails using sustainable feed sources instead of more traditional, commercial feed. In the collaborative effort we have named the Urban Ecosystem, we are optimizing Insect farming to an urban environment by using the many hidden resources of the city to drive insect rearing. Thus, together with like-minded collaborators, we wish to convert what was previously considered waste products into valuable resources. As such, left-overs from beer and juice production are now being used as feed at our farm. The end-goal is to produce carbon neutral protein for human consumption. In Bugging Denmark, we wish to empower communities to take the challenges of sustainable development into their own hands. Instead of the constant dire warnings of the fast approaching foodapocalypse, we provide a set of simple tools to nudge our food consumption patterns in a more sustainable direction. As part of this outreach, we offer courses and give presentations on edible insects and insect farming. Edible insects pique our curiosity and stimulate our creativity, both in the kitchen and in our everyday lives. As a novel contribution to our society, they force us to reconsider what constitutes food and thus challenge some of the central dogmas of our society. Once one learns to question this particular dogma, one also becomes more prone to question other dogmas that were once considered set in stone. They open our eyes, force us to view the world with more flexibility and therefore hold the power to be a transformative power in society. Since insects are a new phenomenon in Western culture, no social class, ethnicity, religion or age group has a natural ownership over them. With edible insects, everyone starts out on an even footing. They are a generator of equality. We therefore use edible insects to welcome people from all branches of society into a green movement. Edible insects are a source of social as well as environmental sustainability and, until proven otherwise, we believe their potential is endless.