Beautiful bug biscuits to tempt the squeamish

[Nipuna]

(Images: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty)

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This is a cookie-making machine with a difference. Designer Susana Soares and a team of food scientists and engineers have designed a 3D printer that makes biscuits from insect flour.

Just follow the recipe: grind up bugs and mix with icing butter, cream cheese or water to form the right consistency to go through the 3D printer's nozzle. Choose your favourite biscuit design and print out your snack: an exquisite morsel ready for cooking.

The installation asks whether by turning edible insects into intriguing forms, we could overcome the typical Western aversion to snacking on creepy-crawlies. Elsewhere, insects are on the menu for an estimated 80 per cent of the world's population, for the good reason that they have high nutritional value. Down just four grasshoppers and you'll get as much calcium as a glass of milk; by weight, dung beetles contain more protein than beef.

Watch the tabletop printer at work at the Insects Au Gratin exhibition and workshops, running until 5 May at the Wellcome Collection in London.

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