Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones and the unbridled excitement of weekend plans that start with Jam According to Daniel at the farmers market and end with the penultimate episode of White Lotus. Tsunami.

Last edition was all about how “upcycled” foods like these banana bites and plantain chips can hit the Climate Trifecta ( ✅ planet, health, money). I guess I’m a hungry bean these days because this week is also all about food, but this time of a less palatable sort. The good news is you won’t have to eat it.

Like any self-respecting millennial couple, G and I moved into a house with a big yard so that we could expand our family — not with kids — but with a dog. 

And yet, we’ve been here for almost a year now and every time we see an adorable dog on the CSPCA website, the same conversation happens: 

“Olive/Stormy/Misty looks so cute! Should we go over tomorrow and visit?” 

“Yes, 100 percent.”

“Oh wait. Actually isn’t your mom/my best friend/your old college roommate/my long-lost shipwrecked twin coming into town this weekend?”

“Shit. We should probably wait until they leave before we get a puppy.”

And that has gone on for eight months.

All of which means I don’t have a dog to conduct friendly Hot Bones experiments on (yet). So last weekend, Nixie, my parents’ absolutely unhinged lab, had to pinch hit as our HB taste-tester for Jiminy’s, the dog treats made from bugs. 

Jiminy’s, Jiminy Cricket, get it.

Recently I’d read an interview with Jiminy’s founder and CEO, Anne Carlson, which absolutely blew my mind. It actually came out in 2022 but feels just as interesting now. Here’s the highlight reel:

In the interview, Carlson also mentions she decided to go all in with insect-based dog food and treats because even if you can convince someone to eat a cricket-based snack, that’s like less than 10% of their daily intake. With dog food, that’s basically 100% of their daily intake (minus any gutter bananas).

All this seemed almost too good to be true — better for the planet, good for dogs’ health, plus fodder as a great cocktail party conversation starter. I was curious if dogs thought this was as good of an idea as I did.

Nixie is unusual in that she’s a lab and she has no interest in food. She has brunch around eleven — after her food has been soaking in its own juices for a few hours — she doesn’t come when called even with treats at hand, and she doesn’t drool when I open a bag of chips. 

I blame this on the fact that she was blessed to live in the canine golden years of Covid lockdown — born into a life where there’s no assumption she won’t be fed, but meanwhile why not snack on this deer haunch while I wait for my pedicure and belly rubs.

The only food product she seems to remotely enjoy is her evening Greenie, which is ostensibly a dental chew but in the same way that Hubba Bubba prevents plaque psoriasis. Nixie expects the Greenie to be propped on her dog bed like an after-dinner chocolate during turndown service, and my parents happily oblige.

So I pitted Greenie vs. grubs.

1 Greenie to the left of her bed, 3 Jiminy's dog treats to the right.

The reviews in every article about Jiminy’s I’d read this past week extolled how much dogs loved the bugs. Even Reddit was in favor (“our dogs ate it like it was the greatest thing they’d ever tasted”). So I could have put money on the fact that Nixie would forsake her first love and go with the grubs.

She ate the Greenie. Then she ate the grubs. Then she lay down in her bed and sighed as if she’d ever worked a hard day in her life.

Nixie! We talked about this! Don’t you know the importance of a clean narrative arc in a 1,500-word newsletter edition? You were supposed to show the HB dog lovers that they too can try insect-based dog food with their pets.

She scratched her nose with her front paw and sighed again.

Listen, doggo. What’s your larger strategy here? What do your taste buds say? Use your words.

And then not instants later, G looks at my dad and says, “Tom I’ll pay you thirty dollars to eat one.”

He ate two. Free of charge.

“They’re pretty good.”

Honest to god he ate another.

“So what do they taste like?” G asked. 

Before I tell you his description, I need you to know his palate descriptors should be taken with a cubic meter of salt. This man once dropped half a bratwurst on the ground, watched it roll across the earthen floor of an Alpine brewery — from the German side to the Swiss side —  before excusing himself to fetch the gritty sausage and finish it off. “Unashamed” as G would later recollect.

“Earthy, substantive,” he said, looking at the Jiminy’s bag. “Robustly earthy.”

And Jiminy’s branding is so good that even those of us who don’t enjoy floor brats and gutter bananas might be convinced these are human treats. All the more so when you look at the ingredients list: pumpkin, peanut butter, carrot, so far so good, dried black soldier fly larvae … oats, potatoes, we’re back on track.

Name-wise, dried black soldier fly larvae is a tough pill to swallow and they should definitely just go by their nickname “grubs” from now on. But hey, if Nixie the picky eater will try them (even if they’re not her immediate first choice), then these grubs doing something right. 

I don’t want to jump-scare you, so I’m just going to put a tiny photo of what the grubs actually look like before they’re spruced up into treats.

More importantly, look how happy Nixie was after eating a handful more grubs the next morning.

Here are a few practical details when you’re ready to get into bugs.

Where to buy Jiminy’s: I got a pack of three different flavors at Chewy.com here. You can also order them directly from Jiminy’s website, which also has a fun eco-calculator. For example, since crickets and grubs use a fraction of the water livestock requires, Nixie could save 30,146 gallons of water by eating insect-based dog food for a year.

Competitors: Plenty. Yora seems to be the dueling boutique brand.

Cost: The 3-pack of treats cost $28, or roughly $9 for a pack. A bag of cricket dog food runs a little over $20, without pricing in subscription discounts. 

Not having a pet, I have no frame of reference here, but that seems slightly high. However, I’d argue that all pet-related pricing feels somewhat irrelevant when “spas for pets” is a successful business model.

Cat equivalent: Yes! Not by Jiminy’s yet, but there’s a comprehensive article here.

Since we haven’t gotten a dog yet, G and I are thinking about getting a big potted plant or tree for our back patio.

The cool thing about potted plants is you can kind of “zone down” and get plants that typically only work in warmer climates, because you can bring the pots inside (or in a garage) during the winter.