Can cinnamon-infused crickets save the Rust Belt?

Just after 8 on a cloudy October morning, Cody Schultz is off to work, slicing through America's definitive post-industrial squalor, a two-mile drive that weaves past a sad museum of abandoned homes and steel factories sprouting weedy windows and the broken doors of a lost past.

"Take a right instead of a left and you find yourself in some pretty nasty stuff," he says.

In place of its former glories, Youngstown, Ohio, rolls out a catalog of luminescent pawn shops and nail salons and dark corners where the unbusy huddle in shadows. Schultz, 27, is just young enough, just idealistic enough to believe that what he does when he gets to work will someday change what he sees along his way.

His scraggly beard, his Eminem skullcap, his yen for the first-person shooter video game "Borderlands" should fool no one. This is not some slacker looking to dodge the 40-hour week. Schultz is a cricket farmer, joining two other Wisconsin-bred millennials this summer in a Youngstown warehouse to create Big Cricket Farms, which they say is the first in the U.S. to produce the insects for human consumption. Crickets are "in" in 2014, as in nachos, cookies, pesto and, for braver foodies, in butter and garlic, sautéed whole.

Deciding where to let his freak food flag fly, farm founder Kevin Bachhuber scouted the most needy of urban settings, not simply for the economic incentives that distressed areas offer. (Monthly rent on the 5,000 square-foot warehouse is a mere $1,300.) He wants the bug startup to inspire others to join in a Rust Belt revival, to come to build their own job-creators and repaint the gloomy landscape.

The farm's website dedicates its effort to the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, repair of the world. What better spot than Youngstown, the once-mighty steel capital hard by the Mahoning River, a population of 65,000 burdened with a 36 percent poverty rate and identified last year by the U.S. Census Bureau as one of the nation's fastest-shrinking cities.

With a firm grip on the coffee he purchased at the local Sunoco, Schultz pulls into the parking lot of his business. He hurries through the front office, past a bowl of "I Love to Eat Bugs" buttons, and into the heart of the operation. In a cavernous room, made warm and humid, are two black incubator tents and an array of white fiberglass-reinforced plastic bins where upwards of 350,000 crickets eat, pray, love.

Each female can produce up to 3,000 eggs. Six weeks after the eggs hatch, the segmented arthropods are ready to be frozen, their temperature slowly lowered in two phases so the kill is more humane, and shipped out to customers. One thousand crickets constitute a pound that can cost up to $15. They're healthier than beef -- half the fat and one third more protein -- and more versatile in the kitchen, Schultz says.

While their standard diet of grains and veggies gives the crickets a nutty sweet-corn taste, future plans call for the intermittent addition of spices such as oregano and cinnamon for chefs who want a head start on pre-seasoning.

The lilting grind of the cricket chorus almost buries Schultz's greeting as he enters. "Hi there," he calls to his assistant, Luana Correia, 21, a volunteer worker. She has news no cricket farmer wants to hear: There's death in a cricket house, bin 14.

Tiny five-week-old bodies of Acheta domesticus -- the European house cricket, considered the tastiest of the 900 known species -- lie lifeless at both ends of the two-by-eight-foot container. In the stacked layers of cardboard egg-crating (cricket high-rises), there are signs of life, but not many.

By now, his two partners have arrived. Bachhuber, 30, the slender and inquisitive founder whom Schultz describes as the brains behind their foray, and Jaci Ampulski, 29, who met Bachhuber on a dating site back home in Wisconsin and holds the title director of operations. A radio inside the room plays cheery alt-rock ballads, but the mood is somber.

"This is what agriculture is," says Bachhuber. "It's a death of a thousand cuts."

Schultz uses a vacuum and a vinegar-water solution to get out the grime. With further inspection, he figures maybe half of the few thousand crickets in bin 14 have survived.

Then Bachhuber's voice rises, "Damn beetle!"

The larder beetle has made its way into the bin. The six- legged bad boy is not the cause of death. Instead, it ferrets out death with the sobering acuity of the Grim Reaper, he says. "It'll drill through tin to get to corpses."

The tension notches up. Correia, a Cape Verdean student working in exchange for credit toward a visa, has identified at least two other bins that show dead crickets. It's time for a meeting.

All four adjourn to the parking lot, where they squat on railroad timbers. Bachhuber lights a cigarette and quickly the talk goes to the only question that matters: How did this happen?

Schultz's thin face is focused on the ground as he thinks. Turns out, he revels in moments like this.

He grew up the younger of two brothers in the central Wisconsin city of Stevens Point. He attended the University of Wisconsin, where he found what he was meant to do -- a discovery made not in the classroom. He repaired computers on the side, and he became obsessed with how machines work and why some won't. He began to see problems as "fun puzzles," and a tinkerer was born.

After more than three years of college and about a semester shy of a political science degree, he dropped out to pursue his passion. His father, a retired radiologist, and his mother, a financial auditor, were not happy. But they knew he would find his niche, he said.

"I had a slacker phase," he says. "But something eventually clicked: If I want stuff out of life, I'll have to go out there and do stuff."

He went to work for Golden County Foods Inc., a Plover, Wisconsin, company that makes frozen potato-and-cheese dishes and other products for restaurant chains.

Schultz left after four years to join a friend in Crystal Falls, Michigan, helping him automate his hydroponic gardening business with the aid of a 3-D printer. He also began conversing on Facebook with Bachhuber, whom he met through a college friend, and both decided his talents would be invaluable in getting Bachhuber's vision of an urban cricket farm off the ground.

Schultz joined him last June for a 33 percent equity stake and $400 a week.

At the parking-lot meeting, the partners conjure a list of what might have caused the crickets to die: insufficient heat, inconsistent humidity or chemicals in the city water supply.

Schultz remains calm. "We'll figure it out," he says.

Six weeks later, in early December, the problem-solver has delivered on his word. While never pinpointing one cause, Schultz and company respond to several. More heaters and humidifiers are installed. A system that works on the principle of reverse osmosis filters impurities from the water. And the current cricket census? More than two million of the tasty little critters and counting -- a crop surge any farmer would call a success.

"If it can happen in Youngstown," Schultz says, "it can happen anywhere."