Baking with Cricket Flour – Food of the Future

This term Year 9 Geography students have been undertaking their most exciting unit Food for the Future and have been exploring new and innovative ways to tackle food security. Part of this unit is looking at the adoption and barriers of new sources of protein such as cellular meat and insects.

This Year’s Cohort were tasked with the challenge of investigating the perceptions of student and staff attitude towards insects as a food source through an experiment. Students in year 9 classes did a class experiment where they had to blind taste test a regular corn chip and a cricket corn chip as a model before planning and implementing their own experiments. From there, students were divided into groups and planned an experiment which involved baking two samples:

• Sample A – contained regular flour
• Sample B – contained cricket flour

From there, with a consent form and survey they asked members of the school community to see if they could taste the difference between the two samples. Here is the snapshot of the results from the Year 9 students:

• “Oh my gosh, everyone is saying they like my cookies better, even though they’re made from cricket flour. Not everyone could tell which one had cricket flour, it was about 50:50.” – Carla Najadek
• “On a blind tasting, people were convinced there was a difference even when they sampled both of the plain ones.” – Stephanie Skilton
• “I got a massive ego boost because everyone said mine were better even though they had the cricket flour, but most people couldn’t tell.” – Ava McClean
• “A lot of people can’t tell without them looking different but some people say there is a slight aftertaste difference.” – Alice van der Stel
• “Having burnt biscuits seemed to bother people more. All the descriptions from surveys were about the quality of the cooking not the cricket flour itself. People just rushed the reading of the ingredients and consent not realising they were eating insects till after, sometimes.” – Stephanie Keo
• “A lot of people tried to guess the cricket one but regularly got it wrong. People often seemed to guess based on which one they preferred the flavour from but it was not an accurate guide.” – Isabella Vangestel

None of this would have been possible without the support and guidance of the Year 9 Geography Team: Tom McCosker, Polly Meadow and Bronwyn Peace.

We look forward to continuing to support your daughter’s study of Geography in 2025.

– Danielle Rodrigues
Head of Department – HSIE

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