The good-news pieces are too far and few between, but this is one of them: Kenny Torrella at Vox (via Mother Jones) reports that the bugs-for-food industry is in a death spiral, and things are “collapsing” in grand fashion. [some emphasis, links added]
Feeding us bugs was “supposed to be the future,” a perfect humiliation ritual and solution to decimate what health we have left (water laced with microplastics and synthetic hormones and skies sprayed with a range of chemicals, anyone?) all rolled into one, but the “global market” never showed up:
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.
(I wrote on that Tyson-Protix deal in 2023, an essay which can be found here.)
Now, I thought the bugs-for-food campaign was going to be successful—I’m happy to have been wrong thus far—because I’m well aware that the minds behind the scheme have an absolute arsenal of tools at their disposal to force our hands, and all the money in the world to see it through.
However, I never thought the global market would come to the table willingly, and neither did Andrea Widburg, who quipped: “Bugs are for starving people living marginal existences. We’ll eat them after they make us starve, not before.”
But did they actually expect something different? How is that possible? Save a few self-loathing leftists, who in the First World prefer bugs to filet mignon or a ribeye?
Anyway, this is all well and good that things are going poorly for the WEF crowd. But another nugget in Torrella’s report deserves attention, because it’s a good reminder that “progressive” ideas deserve no consideration or regard.
They really are the most abhorrent group of individuals:
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.
For context, we’re talking about “fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets.”
Do these two individuals lamenting over a filthy little grub’s alleged sentience and supposed “capacity to feel pain” possess the same empathy for the lives of other nascent and developing creatures? Namely… humans?!
Since Torratella works for Vox, I highly doubt it.
Read rest at American Thinker
