Cricket Farm

Visit an open air, functioning cricket farm, housed inside a former street vendor’s hotdog cart… only at Open Source!

As urban farming becomes increasingly technology-driven, and good food becomes increasingly expensive and rarefied, Jude Tallichet and Adam Chad Brody of Party Crickets are committed to focusing on farming design and practice that is down to earth and accessible. Over the course of the installation, visitors will be able to learn cricket-based recipes, as well as how to build their own cricket farm at home. Tallichet and Brody will also play live outdoor concerts along with the cricket’s chirps (hopefully drowning out the adjacent Prospect Expressway!).

“We want to inspire people to get crickets in their hearts AND on their plates. Throughout the installation, our main question will be one that food production frameworks rarely ask : how can we connect to the living creatures that support our very existence with beauty, empathy, and intersectionality. How can we gain back that humanity that we have lost in our contemporary food systems? We believe that raising insects for food is a panacea for the mounting catastrophes that our planet faces. Insect are widely consumed in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but as Western norms have taken root, so has insect eating diminished. Over the last 20 years, there has been increased interest in insect-eating in Europe and the U.S., but it has happened almost exclusively in the world of gourmet foods. We believe that our very relationship to our food has to become more active, accessible and less consumer-driven, in order to make a leap into an enduring cultural shift.”

Cricket Farming principles
A home for crickets inspired by their natural habitat, where they have access to water, food, and a place to lay their eggs
A structure where the crickets can easily and humanely be harvested
Easy observation of the crickets, allowing for an appreciation of their life cycle and behaviors.
A structure that can be transported and used as a living instrument for “cricket concerts,” where the crickets sing their songs and we accompany them with music
Housing materials that are free from toxins, with the understanding that people will be eating the crickets
A structure that uses materials that are recycled, reclaimed, and have a small environmental footprint
A structure that is easily made, inspiring viewers people can make their own cricket farms
A structure that is fun, accessible, and engaging

Jude Tallichet and Adam Chad Brody’s collaborative project, Party Crickets, is a multidisciplinary cricket farm that explores entomophagy, micro-agriculture, ecological art, music, education and activism. Crickets are at the center of all of this, and since 2016 they have bred, raised, and harvested hundreds of thousands of these charming insects. They believe that artists should be involved with creating new food systems that tackle climate catastrophe through expansive creativity, interspecies solidarity, collective agency, strangeness and bountiful generosity. Tallichet and Brody have presented their project in public lectures, workshops, cooking demos in libraries, schools, and museums. In addition to raising crickets for food, the duo perform concerts with them. In these cricket concerts they attempt to take their project into unexpectedly expressive places while maintaining the main focus on ecological direct action. Before becoming professional artists, both Tallichet and Brody had significant experiences in farming, which profoundly shaped the way that they think about animals, their containment, and our consumption of them. Tallichet worked at a cattle ranch in Montana and Brody spent two summers in Scandinavia on organic cow, sheep, and pig farms. As Party Crickets has explored different models of cricket farms, they have built environments that consider the importance of humans experiencing stewardship of the living things that they will eventually eat. As urban farming becomes increasingly technology-driven, and good food becomes increasingly expensive and rarefied, they are committed to focusing on design and practice that is down to earth and accessible. Party Crickets aims to inspire people to get their hands on the crickets, their hearts in the crickets, and–finally–the crickets on their plates.

Tallichet and Brody began farming crickets in 2016 as a collaborative creative project that combined our interests in sculpture, urban farming, social practice, design and environmental / social justice. Eating crickets offer environmental and health benefits which far surpass conventional livestock and even many kinds of vegetable protein. Over the last three years they have built seven models of cricket farms in our homes in Queens and Brooklyn and fed hundreds of people their home-raised crickets. They have presented their farms, and played music with the crickets, at The Free Library of Philadelphia, Children’s Museum of The Arts, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The National Gallery of Fine Arts in Jordan.

Saturday, August 1st, 2020 Cricket Concert