You Are What You Eat

Who doesn’t love the convenience of a granola bar for an on-the-hill snack? They make great chairlift energy boosters and they pack lightly for those long days of touring. But like with most of the food we consume, it can be a struggle to make sure what we are eating is not only good for our bodies but also good for the environment.

Ideally, we would all live in a world where we had time to make nutritious homemade on-the-go snacks with well sourced ingredients, like these Hemp Protein Bars from My New Roots, but chances are if you are opting for granola bars for the convenience factor then the time it takes to throw these together is time you don’t have.

So what’s out there? Well, Clifbar has been striving to uphold sustainability standards for over a decade while Vega has been working towards staying green with a net-zero carbon footprint. Whereas, Larabar sold out to General Mills back in 2008, a big red flag for anyone interested in supporting sustainable food systems. But more recently, a hot new bar known as the Chapul bar is gaining increasing popularity among eco-foodies. These bars rank seriously high on the sustainability scale for a secret ingredient that is packed with protein, requires a low level of resources for production and can be harvested quickly and efficiently.

So what is this holy ingredient? Crickets.


If you dare try them, it helps in knowing that the bugs have been dried, ground into a flour and combined with fun flavours such as peanut butter and chocolate and coconut, ginger and lime. Good for you, and good for the environment. Whether or not they are palatable is up to you to find out.

By AI Blog contributor: Lucy Lynch