The college’s catering department paired with UK supplier of edible insects, Crunchy Critters, to distribute items such as cricket biscuits, buffalo worms and mopane worms.
Bill Brogan, catering and conference manager at St John's College, said: “While many people still feel queasy at the thought of eating a plate of beetles or a deep-fried grasshopper, in many other cultures, ‘entomophagy’ – the practice of eating insects – is already normal. In fact, insects form part of the traditional diets of an estimated two billion people.”
The aim of the event was to talk about the environmental and nutritional benefits of eating insects. Issues including a growing world population and the demand on water and land rearing livestock requires were discussed at the session.
Brogan added: “We’re not going to start serving insects to students at dinner, but we do want to encourage new thinking about the challenges that we are going to face when it comes to how we get our food. However it is likely to take more than ethical reasoning to persuade large numbers of people to tuck into wok-fried grasshoppers, roast cicadas, or mescal worm tacos.”
During term-time, St John’s College serves 1,400 meals every day. In 2015, it became the first Cambridge College to receive a two-star award from the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Food Made Good programme.