....VP communication and public affairs director Anais Maury told AFN: “The
potential markets for edible insects in human foods may depend on
various factors such as cultural attitudes, regulatory frameworks, and
market demand. But overall, people are more open to incorporating
insects into their diets.”
And mandates. The power of mandates to force behavior change is
immense. We already have our tagline: "When 'nudging' just isn't
enough!"
And will be making inquiries about music rights:
"If you don't eat yer bugs you can't have any pudding,
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer bugs?"
Then folks noticed that insect balls were not on the menu in Davos despite being a Swiss product:
The insect balls represent a healthy culinary
specialty that mixes meal worms with rice, carrots, celery, leeks and a
pinch of chili, said Essento co-founder Christian Bärtsch....
The insect balls are one of two products to be offered to those doing their groceries in the Alpine nation of Switzerland
And the whole halal/kosher question* and the fact that they are bugs and...
From Mother Jones, March 12, 2026:
How the farmed-insect frenzy lost its buzz.
“We have to get used to the idea of eating insects.”
This proclamation came from, of all people, an insect researcher.
Dutch entomologist Marcel Dicke pitched eating bugs in his 2010 TED talk as critical to sustainably feeding a growing human population, because insects have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef, pork, and chicken.
To make his point, he even featured photographs of what might be a
common meal in this bold new future: a stir-fry with mealworm larvae,
mushrooms, and snap peas, finished with a chocolate dessert topped with a
large fried cricket.
Three years later, the United Nations published a comprehensive report that
echoed many of Dicke’s ideas and argued that insects could be a more
eco-friendly food source not just for humans, but also for livestock.
The report received widespread media coverage and helped to trigger a
wave of investment from venture capital firms and governments alike into
insect farming startups across Europe, the US, Canada, and beyond,
totaling some $2 billion.
“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects.”
This money was pouring into insect agriculture at a time when investors and policymakers were hungry for new models to fix the conventional meat industry’s massive carbon footprint. And what’s more disruptive and novel than farming and eating bugs?
You personally might recoil at the thought of eating fried crickets or roasted mealworms, but many cultures around
the world consume insects, either caught from the wild or farmed on a
small scale. And while grubs don’t feature prominently in current paleo
cookbooks, our paleolithic ancestors most certainly ate plenty of bugs.
But the past decade has shown that even if you build an insect farm, the global market may not come. Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.
All told, shuttered insect farming startups account for almost half
of all investment into the industry. “Things have gone from bad to worse
for the big insect factory business model,” one insect farming CEO said late last year in a YouTube video.
And Vox can exclusively report that plans to build a large insect farm in Nebraska—a joint project between
Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat company, and Protix, now the
world’s second largest insect farming company—are indefinitely on hold.
Beyond the financial woes of the insect farming industry, some
philosophers worry about the ethical implications of potentially
farming tens of trillions of bugs for food, as emerging research suggests insects may well have some form of consciousness and hold the capacity to feel pain and suffer.
“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects,” Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who leads the Foundations of Animal Sentience project at the university, told me last year.
But it looks like they may not have too much to worry about. In
spite of the initial hype surrounding the bug farming boom, the insect
agriculture industry has learned just how difficult it is to compete
with the incumbent, larger animal-based meat industry—and that, perhaps,
it never really made sense to try doing so with bugs.
Insect farming is similar
to other types of animal farming. The insects reproduce, and the
offspring are raised in large numbers in factory-style buildings. Many
of the same welfare concerns for farmed chickens and pigs are present on insect farms, like disease, cannibalism, and painful slaughter. In the case of insects, the creatures are killed by a variety of means. They might be frozen, baked, roasted, shredded, grond, microwaved, boiled, or suffocated.
In 2020, insect companies farmed an estimated 1 trillion bugs, and the most commonly farmed species today are black soldier fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets.
While some people might tell researchers they’re
open to adding bugs to their diet, these smallest of animals remain a
novelty food in the US and Europe, as opposed to a commodity capable of
displacing wings or burgers.
“The human food market, basically, has not materialized,” Dustin Crummett, a philosopher and executive director of The Insect Institute—a
nonprofit that researches the environmental and animal welfare
implications of large-scale insect agriculture—told me. “Only a tiny
fraction of farmed insects are used for human food.”
“It doesn’t really make sense to buy chicken feed to feed insects to feed to chicken.”
Ÿnsect wins more time to restructure under court-supervised process; Innovafeed’s US plans ‘very much alive’
The commercial court supervising French insect ag pioneer Ÿnsect as it restructures its operations has extended the observation period until January 12, 2026. Fellow French insect ag firm Innovafeed, meanwhile, says its plans to build a large-scale plant in the US are “very much alive.”
....Roach milk? I'm still having trouble with that picture of the prime
ministers of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Norway eating their
bugs and plankton a couple weeks ago: "Nordics could become 'Silicon Valley' of food" (and Norway goes big on seaweed cultivation)
Please don't
As the bumper sticker says: "Mealworms aren't food, mealworms are what food eats".
Or something.
From EU Observer:
Plankton, seaweed and edible insects were on the menu, when the prime ministers of Finland, Sweden, Denmark,Iceland and Norway
met in Austevoll, southwest of the city of Bergen in Norway on Tuesday (30 May).
