Fancy ice-cream made out of macerated worms? It turns out that Israeli students didn’t mind a bit.
Food technologists at the Technion in Haifa developed the ice-cream when searching for cheap, protein-packed food for older people.
They tested it on students — who, admittedly, will eat almost anything if it’s free — in two groups.
One group knew the ice-cream was protein-loaded, the other that the base ingredient was worms. Surprisingly both groups gave their ice-creams the same score — and, by the way, voted the product delicious.
The ice-cream is the latest brainwave from the Technion laboratory of Colombian-born food technologist Professor Uri Lesmes, who is dedicated “to finding healthier food solutions, to keep healthy people healthy”.
Technion 4
The fake falafel
He gives me a still-in-development snack to try, part of a project with Gat, which makes Prigat juices. Each bite-size piece has a kind of wheat outer and a tahini and cocoa interior.
The snacks are due to be tested on a group of Norwegian senior citizens next year, and the crunchiness is aimed at stimulating the brains of older people.
Famously, Lesmes’s lab devised a food item for which initially there seems no good reason — fake falafel — as a result of a European university competition after a commercial enterprise invited solutions to introducing more algae into the human diet.
“Our team decided to go for falafel. But algae turn black when exposed to heat. No one wants to eat a black felafal. So they had to find ways to make their falafel crispy, tasty, and still have the algae in it.”
The team succeeded — and won the competition. “It was completely viable, commercially, and there was a side sauce of tahini which also contained algae.”
Lesmes tells me proudly that most of his students are female. “They truly have brilliant minds and it’s a privilege for me to be able to give them tools to extract the most out of their capabilities.”
Beer bottles line his shelves. Students get a budget to brew their own beer and the final product is drunk at an end-of term party.
