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Founders of future-food start-up Aspire, Mohammed Ashour, 29, and Shobhita Soor, 26, reckon the answer is way more radical: bugs. Edible insects, explains Ashour, are an amazing, if icky, source of “nutrient-dense and resource-efficient food” that he reckons could be a game-changer for the world’s food security.


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Aspire co-founders Mohammed Ashour and Shobhita Soor are named in the Forbes 30 under 30 for social entrepreneurship. Aspire brings jobs and nutrients to people in Ghana via micro-farms of palm weevil larvae, a popular local food. Rural community members are taught to raise the natives insects that, within four weeks, can be sold or eaten among their families. Aspires vision won them the 2013 Hult Prize.
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Advocates are working to change mindsets so that eating insects moves beyond being a one-day-a-year oddity to being a commonly accepted practice. With a flurry of activity in the past couple of years, the movement is, well, starting to have legs. And Austin is in the center of the action, with one of the nation’s first cricket farms, a couple of cricket-based snack food startups, an edible insect nonprofit organization and several local restaurants with insect offerings.
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Believe it or not, Aspire Food Group has been raising crickets in brooders, turning them either into a flour, a smoothie, a cracker, or into something else once they have grown from eggs to adults. This is how the future of food revolution will look or taste- like
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A handful of companies in the U.S. are teaching themselves how to raise the insects for human consumption—and hoping that American diners will like the result.
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Eating bugs makes sense nutritionally, the insects are protein and iron rich, Allen said. Bugs also use less land, water and produce fewer emissions than traditional livestock, he said.
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The Hult Prize has completely flipped our understanding of serving communities in resource-limited settings. The idea that food insecure urban slum residents are best served by for-profit businesses would have been unthinkable not too long ago (it still is, in some circles). To some, charities and NGOs are the default, no-brainer, go-to institutions to address social challenges. Yet, most charities and NGOs are by definition not financially self-sustained.
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Cricket: it's what's for dinner.

Social entrepreneurship, the creation of new ventures with a social purpose, takes many forms, from clean energy start-ups to initiatives aimed at improving early education. Several new social ventures are taking a different tack and hoping to push along a nascent trend, promoting the eating of insects as good for the planet and for people.
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And the $1 millionHult Prize for the best start-up idea that secures food for undernourished slum-dwellers goes to... a group of five students from Montreal, Canada, who want to grow, process and sell edible insects.

Unconventional? Maybe to North Americans. But roughly 2.5 billion people are already eating insects seasonally around the world, according to data from the United Nations.
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