How the Worm Has Turned!

We were told we were all going to be eating mealworms and drinking cockroach milk, but now it seems we won't... maybe

“No dystopian picture of a climate-ruined planet is complete until you’ve been put off your lunch,” says a new opinion piece in Bloomberg.

Whether it’s the grubs farmed by Dave Bautista in Blade Runner: 2049 or Charlton Heston in Soylent Green yelling that food is being made from “people,” there are few things that provoke as visceral a reaction as the prospect that ecological disaster might force you to eat something gross.

But what’s different about this piece is that, far from pushing bugs as the “food of the future” for humans, as most advocates of insect-farming on a mass scale do, author David Fickling tells us that insect farming could actually be the food of the future for livestock. And that, in turn, could mean that we end up eating more, not less traditional animal protein.

Suddenly, it seems, we’re a long way from the insect-farming discourse we’re accustomed to: miles away from bald, turkey-necked men from Mitteleuropa telling us “You will eat the bugs!” from the stage at Davos and puff pieces—in publications like Bloomberg—claiming that “cockroach milk” is a new superfood that’s five times as nutritious as cow’s milk, and we’ll all be pouring it in our covfefe in no time.

Just what on earth is happening?