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Crunch Time: Insects Are Not Going to Save Us Recent bankruptcies suggest the edible insect bubble could soon burst

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Adult black soldier flies mating on a green leaf. The insects are tail to tail and joined by the male's penis.

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Cover artwork; a bowl of reddish rice, possibly with tomato, scatterd with a few darker black soldier fly larvae and a green parley or coriander leaf.If only we could get over our squeamishness, insects can save the planet, banish hunger, protect the rainforests and reduce the climate catastrophe. At least, that’s what article after article tell us as they sing the praises of feeding our food waste to insects like the larvae of the black soldier fly. Insects can grow 5000-fold in 12 days, producing prodigious quantities of protein in less than 100th the space of soya beans.

There’s just one fly in the ointment, so to speak. Most of the food that insects are fed isn’t waste at all, and after absorbing large amounts of investor cash, some of the biggest companies have gone bust. Dustin Crummett, executive director of the Insect Institute, shared his many reasons for saying that eating insects will not save the planet.

Notes

  1. Dustin Crummett is executive director of The Insect Institute. His paper: Is turning food waste into insect feed an uphill climb? A review of persistent challenges.
  2. If not food or feed, how about “valuable raw materials for various industries”?
  3. Here’s the transcript. You can thank the donors, and become one yourself.
  4. Cover photograph from designer Katharina Unger’s Farm 432 concept, “a fly-breeding device for home use that continually collects fly larva as a protein source for less squeamish diners”
  5. Banner photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim from Wikimedia shows black soldier flies making more black soldier flies.

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3 Comments

  1. Aaron Davis

    There’s just one fly in the ointment, so to speak. Most of the food that insects are fed isn’t waste at all, and after absorbing large amounts of investor cash, some of the biggest companies have gone bust. Dustin Crummett, executive director of the Insect Institute, shared his many reasons for saying that eating insects will not save the planet.

    Crunch Time: Insects Are Not Going to Save Us – Eat This Podcast by Jeremy Cherfas

    Many years ago, I remember eating a bag of crickets cooked in oil and garlic in Phnom Penh. I have always wondered about the prospect of insects ever since. This is clearly not the case.

    The discussion of feed used to develop insects reminded me about Johann Hari’s discussion of processed food in his book Magic Pill:

    Thirty years ago, it took twelve weeks for a factory-farmed chicken to reach its slaughter weight, but now it only takes five to six weeks. Broiler chickens are three times higher in fat today than they were when I was born, and the standard factory-farmed turkey now has such an obese chest that it can barely stand up.

    So how did they do it? It turns out it was partly by restricting the animals’ movement—lots of them can’t even turn around in their cages. But even more importantly, they totally transformed their diets. If you feed a cow the whole food it evolved to eat—grass—it will take a year longer to reach its slaughter weight than if you feed it something different: a newly invented kind of ultra-processed feed, made up of grains, chemicals, hormones, and antibiotics. Because the animals don’t like the taste of this fake food, the agricultural corporations often add artificial sweetness to it—Jell-O powder is popular, especially with a strawberry-banana flavoring. When you mix a sweet-tasting formula like this into their processed food, lambs will rapidly add 30 percent to their body weight.

    If you deliberately want to make an animal fat, you take away what its ancestors ate and give it an ultra-processed and artificially sweetened replica instead. In other words—Big Agriculture does to animals precisely what the processed food industry is doing to us and our children every day.

    Source: Magic Pill by Johann Hari

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  • 💬 Jeremy Cherfas

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