The house cricket (Acheta domesticus) as a novel food: a risk profile
By X. Fernandez-Cassi, A. Supeanu, M. Vaga, A. Jansson, S. Boqvist, Ivar Vågsholm. Journal of Insects as Food and Feed, 2019
92 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Novel foods represent sustainable alternatives to traditional farming and conventional foodstuffs. The house cricket (Acheta domesticus) is considered as one of the most promising reared insects due to their attractive nutritional profile and lower feed conversion ratio compared to other animals. However, putative health hazards associated with consumption of crickets have previously not been investigated. The present study assesses the risks of A. domesticus reared in closed systems controlled by the implementation of hazard analysis and critical control points and good farming practices. Due to the novelty of the topic, data scarcity has been a limiting factor, hence comparative evidence from closely related species belonging to the order Orthoptera (e.g. grasshoppers, locusts, and other cricket species) have been included. The present risk profile identified as main hazards: (1) high total counts of aerobic bacteria; (2) presence of spore-forming bacteria post thermal processing; (3) accumulation of cadmium and other heavy metals; and (4) a possible increase of allergenic reactions due to exposure to insects and insect derived products. Important data gaps regarding edible crickets and their safety as novel foods have been highlighted in the future perspective section, representing aims for future research. Identified data gaps include: (1) farming conditions of the insects being studied; (2) data on the impact of thermal processing of the products prior to consumption; (3) fungal communities and mycotoxins-producing fungi in reared crickets; and (4) heavy metals not fully assessed (chromium, aluminium and arsenic) and other chemical hazards produced during processing (i.e. heterocyclic aromatic amines, acrylamide). The present risk profile explores food safety risks related to consumption of A. domesticus, thereby constituting an example of chemical and microbial hazards risk profiling on edible insects, covering rearing to consumption.
Subfields: Genetics, Insect Science, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ba6303c629046a0874faf27be91d61ebaf5d137
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Citations in the corpus
- Food Security, Safety, and Sustainability—Getting the Trade-Offs Right (2020, background): “Assessment of Different Options for Reducing Food Loss and Waste The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (2019) has described a hierarchy of options for reducing food losses and waste (Figure 1), that aligns well with the goals of sustainability. Mourad (2016) compared the approaches”