From National Public Radio, April 2:
Heard on All Things Considered
From 4chan to international politics, a bug-eating conspiracy theory goes mainstream
In mid-March, a far-right Dutch member of parliament named Thierry Baudet tweeted "WE WILL NOT EAT THE BUGS" accompanied by a photo of himself holding a microphone in one hand and pouring golden mealworms out of a bag in the other....*****....In recent years, however, this aversion has fused with an amorphous and shapeshifting conspiracy theory in which a shadowy global elite conspires to control the world's population. For those who espouse the theory, eating bugs isn't just a matter of disgust, or questioning the impacts of climate change. It's framed as a matter of individual freedom and government control.....*****....When Europeans first sailed to what is now the Americas, they encountered Indigenous people who included insects in their diet and reacted with revulsion. Diego Álvarez Chanca, who sailed with Christopher Columbus on his second voyage, wrote in a letter: "They eat all the snakes, and lizards, and spiders, and worms, that they find upon the ground; so that, to my fancy, their bestiality is greater than that of any beast upon the face of the Earth.""There was very much an idea that you are what you eat back then. And so the Europeans felt they needed European foods," says Lesnik. "There is very much a worry that if you ate the Indigenous foods, you would become a savage."....
....Clarification April 3, 2023
This story has been updated to note that Nic Carter, in addition to being acryptocurrency promoter is also an investor and partner in a venture capital fund.
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