Emergency shelters are mainly designed to provide protection. But the Cricket Shelter, by New York-based design studio Terreform ONE, provides an additional benefit: "We thought we could combine shelter and food," says co-founder Mitchell Joachim, 44. The modular structure contains 224 22-litre chambers for producing edible crickets - the insects being an increasingly fashionable source of dietary protein. "We created a multilayer structure based on their life cycle," says Joachim.
Terreform ONE, which specialises in environmentally-friendly projects including future city plans and tree-houses, created the shelter for the nonprofit Artworks for Change. Built into the walls are "sex pods" for breeding, and seven birthing pods, where female crickets lay their eggs. After hatching, the crickets move through tubes into the mesh-lined living habitats, where they grow until ready for harvesting.
"We'd get about 50,000 crickets within six weeks," says Joachim. Designing the shelter had its challenges. "If they have too many friends near them, the crickets go into a frenzy and swarm," says Joachim. "We killed thousands of them by accident." However, the finished structure, he says, is far more humane than traditional sources of edible insects - typically large industrial farms in countries such as Thailand.
"There has been interest from big cricket farms," he says. After harvesting, the crickets are ground up into powder. Terreform has collaborated with local food entrepreneurs in Brooklyn, and is exploring ways to spin the design into its own company. "This is a giant trend in cuisine," says Joachim of sustainable entomophagy. "I'm looking at making cricket bagels."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
