Olympia Yarger: eating insects makes good sense

Olympia Yarger is growing a business that produces insects for human consumption. Would you be on board?

Most of us who’ve worked in the press for a while will attest that one of the game’s great pleasures is meeting fascinating people. Sure, you get to meet plenty of dicks too, but they’re forgotten soon enough. You remember people like Olympia Yarger, the out-and-proud Canberra “maggot farmer”. I’m not sure whether to call Yarger an environmentalist, a waste manager or a farmer; she’s all of that, as well as being a sustainability advocate and entrepreneur.

Yarger produces insects such as crickets, mealworms, cockroaches and Australian green ants; her principal business, for now, is insect protein – the larvae of black soldier flies – as feed for livestock. But she is growing the side of her business that produces insects for human consumption. She will be successful at that, too, because the woman is a force of nature.

Yarger was a guest panellist at The Australian’s Global Food Forum a few weeks back. She made an impression; what she does is inspirational. She takes food waste – responsible for so much landfill methane – and agricultural by-products, such as grape marc from wineries, and feeds it to the larvae which in turn become protein-dense livestock feed.

That’s a good story, but this column is given over to what we eat, not our livestock, poultry and fish. Yarger’s family eats insects several times a week for the evening meal and she wants yours to, too. It’s an important food source in much of the world, after all.

So why should we eat bugs, Olympia? “The reasons fall into two categories,” she says. “One fits the narrative that we’re seeing from consumers today where they want transparency, they want food that’s sustainable, they want food that fits a social or an ethical ethos. And insects fit that. So I use less than 400ml of water per kilo of protein. We can grow 300 kilos of protein per cubic metre. And my electricity bill, for 280 square metres, is about $3.75 a day. So we fit the ethos in protein and production. And they taste good, whether you like the look of them or not.”

But most of us don’t eat insects. “The insect protein industry has domesticated new species; they’ve developed tech to farm these new species. But where we’re missing as an industry is we aren’t really good at putting these products into the market,” she says.

“We deliver them dehydrated; that’s how most insects turn up, roasted or dehydrated, and that’s, to me, the equivalent of turning steak into an Oxo cube. We’ve removed a lot of the flavour [and] texture… How we could eat it better is something that, as an industry, we haven’t developed very well yet.”

Nutritionists give advice based on genetics, the microbes in our guts and variations in our organs’ internal physiology. Is there a nutritionist in my future who will tell me I should be eating insect protein?

“I’m hesitant to go down the nutritional claims path,” says Yarger, “but what we do know is that insect protein generally trends upwards of 40 per cent… And at 400ml of water per kilo of protein, we do have, at the very least, a marketing claim on an impact there. But there hasn’t been enough research into the nutritional benefits for me to make a claim.”

Refreshing honesty. You’ll hear plenty more of Olympia Yarger.