When I share my Angevine Middle School CAP class student action project topic with people, the first question I hear is, “How did these kids come up with this?” You see, the topic is alternative proteins, and that includes entomophagy – or including insects and arthropods as part of the diet. That is a hard topic for many people to swallow (pun intended).

It was hard for some of our students at first, too. However passionately you feel about global warming, water issues and land use, changing your diet is hard to do. When they learned through Mark Bittman’s Ted Talk that livestock production is second only to energy production in greenhouse gas emissions, they saw a way that they could actually make a difference as young individuals. These students saw how trying new foods and making better day-to-day choices could help the world.

Also, eating and trying new things is fun and social, so they planned to hold a tasting café and exposed others to some of the new things they were trying. We searched out recipes we could modify and tested them in our homes, then we cooked them all together in the school kitchens. After that we invited other classes and people from the community to join us for a presentation and a tasting. A huge vat of stir fried rice with tofu was devoured in about fifteen minutes. And one kid liked the cricket flour brownies so much, he ate nine of them!

We realize that we need to take our message of how diet makes a difference to the environment to a broader audience. So we have YouTube videos on how to make our vegan rice dish and BugBite Brownies. We want you to challenge yourself to try something new, so check out our video and get your chef on! Oh, and if you are looking for cricket powder, we’d like to recommend Rocky Mountain Micro Ranch who raise the crickets locally. They came to our class for a presentation and tasting and generously donated the cricket powder for our recipe.

Written by CAP class instructor, Erin Angel

Many thanks to Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO), The Larrk Foundation, PeyBack Foundation, our donors, and our partners for making this program possible and a big thank you to Rocky Mountain Micro Ranch for their partnership and support!

See photos from our class and action project here!

See video made by students below!