TREND ALERT: Adding Bugs into Your Milkshakes

I watch for these trends so you don’t have to and my latest find is … delicious?

Apparently the HOT NEW TREND is adding bugs into your food, at least according to ABC News. “The trend of bug-infused bites continues to swarm restaurant menus across the country, with the latest entrant appearing at a fast food chain.”

To be fair, I haven’t seen this in my neck of the woods but I live inside the Washington, D.C., beltway and things are a little different here. Washington insiders don’t eat bugs, we eat caviar and champagne because we live in BOOMTOWN.

However, if you live anywhere near the chain Wayback Burgers (they have 100 locations in the U.S. and Argentina), you can order up a delicious cricket milkshake. The chain will debut “a cricket protein-laced shake on July 1 that is Oreo Mud Pie in taste but infused with Peruvian chocolate-flavored cricket powder for an alternative energy boost.”

YUM? Is that an Oreo or a cricket leg? No matter.

An alternative energy boost? What’s wrong with protein powder or some extra caffeine?

Maybe you are hesitant to order up an insect-laden refreshment because you don’t want to see bug parts floating around in something you plan to ingest. Not to worry. “There won’t be big pieces of cricket floating in your shake or anything,” Gillian Maffeo, director of marketing for Wayback Burgers. “We use a protein powder that looks very similar to whey powder. So it’s ground up cricket and you wouldn’t even know the difference if you were drinking it, quite honestly.”

At first the cricket-infested dessert was part of an April Fool’s joke. I actually thought this headline might be from The Onion. But the prank was wildly successful:

“We received such a great response, we decided to call up an organic cricket protein vendor and test it out at one location in East Meadow, Long Island, in New York,” Maffeo said. “There ended up being lines of people, camera crews, and everyone loved it. It just happened so fast and so sudden. So we decided to roll out an official version at all locations beginning July 1.”

And it’s a hot commodity! “Initially, we thought that we’d get a lot of backlash but the trend right now is that bugs are making their way into foods,” she said, noting the appearance of burgers, energy bars, flours and other recent products to the market. “It’s definitely a hot commodity.”