And now you understand the place to search out cricket protein bars at Comedian-Con.
Erin Carson/CNET
Within the press room at San Diego Comedian-Con, early Thursday night, it is snack time.
Effectively, for me not less than. On the threat of spoiling my dinner, I am digging into a really specific kind of protein bar — the sort that is going to energy me by means of my final story of the day, in additional methods than one.
The bar, brown and moist, is supposed to style like peanut butter and strawberry jelly. In fact, biting in you’d assume that is all that was in it. However together with the actual strawberries and bits of peanut, this bar additionally accommodates crickets. Cricket powder to be exact.
Now, I am not sitting right here consuming a cricket protein bar as a result of I hate conference meals that a lot.
It is truly in promotion of the upcoming TBS tv sequence Snowpiercer. Snowpiercer is a tv adaption of a comic book (it was additionally a film in 2014) slated for 2020. The present takes place a couple of years after the world has develop into a frozen wasteland. A prepare carries what stays of humanity, and even within the apocalypse there is a disparity between the parents within the fancy entrance of the prepare and those barely getting by within the again.
And by barely getting by, we’re speaking about subsisting off nutrient bars of jellied cockroaches.
Happily, the protein bar Comedian-Con goers can decide up from one among a number of merchandising machines is nothing like that. Tragically, it is not made with cockroaches. It is also fairly good — dense, chewy, a bit crunchy, the strawberry lends a contemporary word, and it would not style like, effectively, crickets.
Mmm… crickets.
Erin Carson/CNET
As for the concept of subsisting on protein bars, I get it. After I arrive on the Snowpiercer sales space on the expo flooring at four:30 p.m. PT, I’ve eaten two caramel toffee sea salt bars and nothing else all day lengthy. The world may not have frozen over, however these are, nonetheless, meager instances on the meals entrance within the midst of a 130,000-plus particular person conference with fully an excessive amount of to absorb.
To get the cricket bar, you go as much as a merchandising machine with an enormous touchscreen, and enter your e-mail handle, watch a brief video from Snowpiercer, and down drops a cricket protein bar in a black wrapper with blue and white lettering.
Scarfing down a bug bar is not only a promotional stunt. The bars come from the Aspire Meals Group, an organization based mostly in Austin, Texas that raises crickets for human consumption. Aspire’s been on a mission to coach individuals about how edible bugs like crickets are oftentimes greater in iron, protein, calcium and the like, and are additionally a extra environmentally sustainable supply of vitamins than meat. And since Snowpiercer is actually coping with the aftermath of local weather change, Aspire CEO and co-founder Mohammed Ashour thinks it is a level price underlining.
“The present talks a few dystopian future the place on account of lots of social collapses, you find yourself on this world the place there’s this asymmetry in how diet and wealth and abundance and alternative is distributed,” Ashour mentioned. That is not merely science fiction. “We’re utilizing great quantities of assets to supply diet energy at an unbelievable environmental value.”
Can swapping out steak for some crickets hold us all off the apocalypse prepare? That is still to be seen, however Ashour is hoping Comedian-Con’s attendees will think about it.
And hey — not less than it is not cockroaches.
