LIVINGLIVING
NOT NORMAL EATING
Food and exercise blogger Helen Foster has made some interesting
discoveries recently, having investigated bars made from insects,
sugar-free chocolate, and what her 'Marmite face' looks like.
T
here was much
excitement in Not Normal
Towers this week when
the postman arrived as
one of the packages he
was a carrying contained samples of
Crobar - aka the first product for sale in
the UK made from …….drumroll ……
cricket flour. Yes that's right, our first bug
bar has arrived. Let the insect eating
revolution begin!
I would however defy you to tell it's
made of insects by looking at it out of
the packet. It looks like every other clean
eating nut bar out there. There are no
stray wings, no lurking legs, not even a
stray antenna to act like dental floss. The
reason is that it's not made from whole
insects but a finely milled cricket flour
mixed with things like peanuts, dates,
sultanas, sunflower seeds, goji berries
and cacao to make a bar.
Regular readers will know I'm no
stranger to the bug eating idea and when
you've eaten actual silkworm larvae,
spiders, giant snails etc, a bit of milled
JUST THE TICKET. The cricket flour (right) used in Crobars.
cricket holds no fear. I've also had bug
bars before in the US. I do have to say
though, this one is actually really, really
good - especially the Cacao and Cricket
Flour one. I'd actually go as far as to say
they are nicer than some of the other
natural bars I've tried. If you can get past
the whole OMG I'M EATING BUGS thing.
We should be eating insects as an
alternative protein source to meat (read
more here , but I did learn a few extra
cricket specific facts from the Crobar
team…like 10g of crickets contain your
daily dose of vitamin B12. They have
twice the iron of spinach, and they contain
omega-3 fats too. I'm also strangely
fascinated by the fact that the crickets
used in the flour have, and I quote here,
"been fed a diet or organic nuts and seeds
and fruits to give them a nutty flavour."
Blimey, they eat better than me - but the
bars are super-tasty, so it works.
As for nutrition, you're looking
at a smidge over 180 calories a bar,
there's between 10-13g of sugar (from
fruit sources) and 10g of fat - mostly
unsaturated, so not bad. Peanut and
Cricket Flour is 16.1g carbs, 13.3g sugar
per 40g bar. Cacao and Cricket Flour
is 18g, 10.3g sugar per 40g bar. If you
want to give them a try, you'll find them
in Wholefoods and Nutricentre at £2.29 a
bar. www.gathrfoods.com
Chocolate logic
This blogging lark is really hard. The other
week I had to eat three bars of chocolate
I wanted to tell you about, just to make
sure that all of them were as good as
the first one. You can thank me later for
all my hard research - right now I'm still
trying to run off the effects. The bars in
question are made by a company called
Chocologic and their USP is that they
have between 60-90% less sugar than
normal, comparable, chocolate bars.
continued over