Eating Bugs

Like most people, the notion of eating insects grosses me out. Of course we probably eat small bugs or bug parts all the time without knowing it. I read a theory somewhere that vegetarian Indians used to get sufficient protein partially from the bugs they accidentally ate that were in the grains. Before you say […]

Feb 24, 2025 - 08:46

Like most people, the notion of eating insects grosses me out.

Of course we probably eat small bugs or bug parts all the time without knowing it. I read a theory somewhere that vegetarian Indians used to get sufficient protein partially from the bugs they accidentally ate that were in the grains.

Before you say don’t knock it before you try it, I have eaten a “properly” cooked bug before. It was a grub made in a supposedly old regional style in Ecuador—it’s a thing they do for tourists. It tasted kind of like bacon but too fatty for me (don’t get me wrong, I like to eat fats, but mixed into foods not in a chunky format). I’ll stick to vertebrates.

But more importantly, why are some people out there so dead set to reprogram me to like eating bugs?

Well one front seems to be coming from Europe. Recently the EU approved mealworms in food, and they don’t even have to have explicit labeling about the mealworms. (Mealworms are the larval stage of certain beetles.)

Rumor is Europe has regressed on their tech and expertise for preventing insect infestation of grain storage. Instead of trying to solve the problem, they’re just throwing their hands up and saying fine we’ll just process the bugs too.

Kind of frightening anti-progress especially since some people might be allergic to that. And we don’t have enough research to know if eating chitin (a material in insect exoskeletons including larva like mealworms) is just like a fiber that passes through, or if it causes problems in humans, or if it might actually have health benefits. Chitin is a biopolymer, which is funny that there’s probably an interesting Venn diagram of people who are afraid of synthetic polymers—aka plastics—in our bodies but are ok with natural polymers from bugs.

Even without infrastructure deterioration and/or skill loss, there are insecticide issues. Supposedly Europe has banned some of the more powerful insecticides resulting in, of course, more insects staying alive on their plants and grains. Another issue, and I don’t know if Europe has this problem but it’s closely monitored in Australia, is insects rapidly evolving to be immune to pesticides. And when an insect species does gain a resistance, you want to keep it local and not let it spread all over the continent (or world).

So yeah it’s not easy but it seems insane to me that a core part of human world civilization that was solved 100 years ago is now unraveling and some people don’t want to solve root causes. Some people think that un-progress somehow equals “progress”—”yay we’ll just eat worms now we’re so forward thinking!”

The other reason they’re pushing bug-eating on us is, apparently, straight up environmental. Unless you believe that the ultra rich and powerful are scheming to make us “eat ze bugs” for some reason as part of a global new order or something. Certainly it’s a scary notion if it went too far—it could cause a nation to fall off if they only had bugs for protein. Seriously, it could cause decivilization. Early Americans, even the poorest, had massive access to meats including beef and wild game. I think that meat abundance played no small part in early American progress. Super-powered with meat to become a global superpower.

Something really irks me about the people who want us to eat crickets.

The main issue is why are insects the One and Only True Solution to save us? More like in the darkness bind us. Yes a cow pasture makes more methane than a cricket farm. So what? Also note that mixing a certain type of seaweed into cow feed eliminates most of the farting. Regardless, humans need resources. The end point of reducing resources is to just eliminate humans. The opposite of humanism. This is my problem with a lot of “solutions” that end up getting politicized as well, with people pushing them and after they fail or are mediocre they still push them: “we just need to double down this time.” And boy are there so many of examples of those in California.

In solution space, for instance, what about lab grown meat? Well lab-grown meat might be worse for the environment than normal meat. I have hopes it will eventually get there but for all I know maybe the market will never be there. But you’d think that Taco Bell could just switch to lab meat and nobody would know and that would be a huge demand right there.

Regardless of specific solution concepts—and I would never want lab-grown meat to 100% take over conventional meat anyway—we have a big solution space for a big world. Agriculture and climate and all the big things in our world are dynamic systems with many variables. Some subsystems might even be complex and/or chaotic. Side effects have happened and will happen in the future as a result of human actions. Oh us Americans should stop eating hamburgers because a third world country keeps burning down their rain forest to make cow pastures. Well, we didn’t ask them to do that. We can raise cows here in America. But then the other countries will lose money, people need jobs. And so forth.

There’s no clean one-shot solution.

If you want to reduce greenhouse gases from underdeveloped nations then that’s a big issue—but it should not require human food austerity in first world or third world nations. That’s not a solution. It’s literally insane to want to go backwards. We should never do anything that will reverse civilization’s progress. And that takes energy, lots of energy. And as we see with certain countries the past several decades that are trying to catch up, it produces a lot of waste too (which they should be handling better). And it takes access to nutritious foods like meat!

But they’ll tell you we don’t have time! The world will end soon because of global warming! Well actually we know how to cool things off if we want to, we did it last century accidentally. Regardless, there are lots of things we can do and trying to tell cultures to just stop and change arbitrarily and in an anti-humanist, anti-progress manner is crazy.

Anyway, the cricket pushers are basically Luddites with a superiority complex that probably couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag, and I have no patience with their militant buffoonery.