Sustainable, efficient, and "slightly nutty" — what it's like to eat insect burgers

Katharina Unger remembers the first time she decided to eat an insect.

"I was shaking," she says. "It took me a day to bite into my first grasshopper."

That was a few years ago. Now, Katharina – an industrial designer from Austria – says she eats insects regularly. And she's working on a plan to get others to do the same. Her company Livin Farms is crowdfunding a countertop insect farm called Hive. The device lets users grow mealworms as a food source in their own kitchens.

Katharina sees mealworms as a more efficient and sustainable alternative to industrially-produced meat.

"It just struck me how efficiently they could be raised," she explains. "They can be raised in very small spaces. They can be grown on waste materials, on spent grains and some vegetable scraps from the kitchen. And they produce way less CO2."

Katarina says insects are probably already part of your diet. You just might not know it. "We do eat 500 grams of insects already per year in our everyday food. It's in our frozen vegetables. It's in soups. And in juices. And it's in chocolate, too."

The Hive is designed to fit into most kitchens, and looks a bit like a storage unit. Working their way through a series of trays, the mealworms go through their entire growth cycle, finally dropping into a "harvest area."

Once the system is up and running, Katharina says users can harvest between 200–500 grams of mealworms each week.

But… how's the taste?

"It's relatively neutral, but slightly nutty," Katharina says, noting there are many ways to prepare mealworms. "You can fry them. We recently made burgers. With around 100 grams of mealworms, you can make about four burger patties. They taste really delicious. But you can also make them crispy, and have it as a snack. You can eat them sweet, in desserts, with chocolate for example."

For Katharina, this is about more than the taste, or the nutritional value insects provide. It's also about understanding where her food comes from. "I grew up on a small organic farm in Austria, on the border to Hungary. The production of meat, and of food, was really an everyday thing of my childhood." Katharina wants more people to have the kind of direct connection to their food she had growing up.

Beyond sustainability or the future of food, Hive is a story about the power of design.

"Almost everybody has had some experiences in the past with insects, be it positive or negative," Katharina says.

"It's exciting how design can change perceptions."