A Question Bugging Many Of Us....

[ecosophia]

Why are the corporate elites so fixated on the notion that the rest of us ought to eat bugs? Insects and other arthropods aren't that efficient as a means of turning other substances into human food, and there are plenty of other ways to produce good nourishing protein for human consumption, reaching from rice and beans (and other plant based foods) to intensive aquaculture and small livestock such as rabbits and pigeons. All of them are better sources of human food than the deep-fried cockroaches the World Economic Forum and its equivalents insist everyone else ought to eat. (You know as well as I do that they're going to keep chowing down on filet mignon, while insisting that everyone but them ought to do without.)

So what gives? Are they simply longing to be able to sneer at the rest of us as "bug eaters"?  Is it some kind of weird Freudian obsession on their part? Did some clever charlatan sell them on the idea? Inquiring minds want to know. 

I'm interested in serious answers. On the other hand, I'm just as interested in funny answers. The whole bizarre "You vill eat ze bugs" fixation among the corporate elite is worth understanding, but it's also worth laughing at...

Comments

Back in the day

[degringolade]

I realize this is probably not what you want to hear, but I really have no problem with the eating bugs thing.

I spent time in SE Asia in the long ago and found out when I was really hungry that the locals do eat bugs as a sort of delicacy. I was hungry enough that I was able to discover that they were actually quite tasty.

Fast forward 25 years and I was spending a lot of time doing technology transfer to a factory in Thailand. The roadside stands in the country were selling deep fried insects (i especially like the crickets, not so much the scorpions) along with barbered frogs and other "repulsive" things.

I tend to look at protein as protein. Eating insects is as old school as anyone could hope for.

I don't see the issue

If you want, I can post pictures.

Truly, they taste pretty good.

[violetcabra]

Personally I think it's remarkably sinister.

Consider:



and:



To my mind, it seems to establish those who eat insects --- presumably the poor --- as subhuman. It reminds me structurally in this sense of many of the early Nazi laws targeting Jews, specifically those that banned them from public baths on account of contamination.

[(Anonymous)]

JMG, can you change the picture to a cricket or grasshopper? I have a cockroach phobia.

—Princess Cutekitten

[tritumi]

Crickets seem to be the bug of choice the chosen have chosen for the masses.

i have eaten crickets. They are available here in the finer food basements of the finer department stores. I believe they are roasted and treated with a slightly sweet sauce. Crunchy, as you might expect, and for the uninitiated always an opportunity for amusement at their reaction.

The chosen intend for crickets not to be eaten in their natural shape, however. There is no additional profit in anything that cannot be processed and doped with additives, flavorings, preservatives, chemical enhancements sold as nutritional benefit, then shaped into mouth pleasing forms and colored to eye pleasing shades suitable for enticing advertising campaigns.

As to the why? I am surely not the first to note the chosen elite's obsession with bugs as the purest evidence that our overlords are, in fact, lizards, if not in body, most certainly in presence.

[(Anonymous)]

I can see a few reasons:

1) The parts of the world that white people come from are not home to "delicacy" bugs, while for entirely ecological reasons, regions where brown and black people come from have relatively large, meaty and apparently tasty bugs. Because white people are inherently bad, in the corporate worldview, and brown or black people inherently good, therefore eating bugs is good.

2) Bug farming is not practical on the home scale, unlike cooking dry rice and bean or aquaculture/rabbits/chickens/mammals. A meal of cricket burgers offers an opportunity for corporate profits that rice and beans or home-raised tilapia filets doesn't.

3) Bugs can only be farmed in high-tech bug dystopias. Although plenty of mammals, fish and birds are farmed under similar conditions, bug farming is impossible without total control whereas a cow, chicken or tilapia can be raised more humanely. Therefore, bug farming is very appealing to the Creepy WEF Man Mindset as the society they envision is a human bug farm.

4) Not admitting that we're poor now - instead of simply giving up the beef burgers and having whatever the Mexican equivalent is, we still eat animals, but in a much more sophisticated, climate friendly way.

5) Right now the US exports lots of beef to China, and imports pea proteins, which it uses to make fake meat. Perhaps the goal is to maximize American beef and pork exports at the expense of domestic consumption, and the environmental angle is just an excuse.

Justin

[grandswamperman]

Well, I would say that it’s because our self-proclaimed betters obviously need all of the dwindling supply of beef to keep their superior overlord brains functioning at peak efficiency…but I don’t want to get disappeared, do I?

[(Anonymous)]

I should add that I find the term "plant-based" entirely idiotic when applied to foods. The only foods that aren't plant based are organisms that ultimately live on chemosynthetic bacteria from ocean vents. A carrot, a beyond meat burger, and a steak are all made out of plants. If you want to play word games, the carrot is the only plant based option out of those three, as the frankenburger and steak depend on a chemical plant and a cow, respectively. So unless you're an eccentric millionaire who lives on ocean vent fauna, you eat a plant based diet.

And secondly, I eat meat, dairy and eggs, and yet most of the calories I ingest are from plants that have not seen the inside of an animal or a fake meat factory. I would die much faster if the plants I eat were removed from my diet than the animal flesh and secretions!

Justin

Re: Back in the day

[weilong]

It's sort of a tradition here in Japan to send the kids out into the rice paddies in the summertime to collect grasshoppers (locusts?), which are then fried and cooked with a sweet/salty sauce. It's a nice snack, for sure, and makes use of what would otherwise be a pest. I'm not sure I would want to eat bowls full of them every day, but I don't mind a little now and then.

[methylethyl]

Well, if they next promote hair shirts and desert living... perhaps they're trying to immanentize the eschaton by creating the conditions for the next John the Baptist to emerge, or something.

On a practical level, I'm miffed. Did we seriously spend years banning peanuts from airplanes, schools, and other places because a tiny minority of people are seriously allergic to them... only to turn 360 and actively promote foods that are equally allergenic? I mean, people who are allergic to shellfish tend to also be allergic to crickets and other bug type things. I think what we did with peanuts was serious overkill, but still... we did it. What's different now?

The really morbid side of me wants to bust out the popcorn and wait to see what the response is from the "eat ze bugs" people, after the first few cases of "kid with shrimp allergy died because nobody realized there were crickets in the Protein-Plus Snacky Nubz".

Weirdly, if you follow a regenerative, nature-mimicking model instead of a CAFO model, large herbivores are one of the *most* efficient ways to convert sunlight into protein.

I live near a pasture, and when the cows are in the near field, I wake up to them mooing, and it's the most wonderful alarm clock imaginable. The world needs more of that, not less.

I think the real reason they're so fixated on bugs is that they relate to them better than to any big, warm-blooded animal that's content to eat grass and loaf in the shade, in a beautiful symbiosis with grass, birds, and soil biota. When they see bugs, they see something voracious, inscrutable, striving, and repellant to most normal people... and that's something they can relate to.

Re: Back in the day

[violetcabra]

If I may, I also have no problem personally eating insects --- grasshoppers taste like lobster to me, and they also turn red upon cooking. If tasty insects were in large numbers in my garden, I would likely eat them, without much more self-consciousness than eating that other arthropod, the lobster. That said, even with my er expansive gourmanderie I find the elite obsession with eating insects sinister.

Re: Back in the day

[(Anonymous)]

I agree.

When i was in Thailand, they enjoyed termites as a treat. i grant i tried them more as a dare but they WERE actually quit good and i went back for more while my companion begged off. though i have to admit the wings can get stuck in your teeth which is annoying. :-)

What i want to know is why "the west" has such a problem with the idea. Shoot you can buy them on Amazon for crying out loud. Buy some and try some. :-)

But, i do get the point of JMG's question and i think it may be a power trip (as suggested by JMG) manifesting the "elites" squeamishness. therefore if you eat them (because you have too??) then that makes you untermensch.

~Wolf

Re: Back in the day

[homeopathic_meditations]

I vouch of this, crickets are pretty good.

The problem I think the elites have is, they look at people like us, they look at people who would never agree to turn vegan and think: "cha-ching! Flying car anyone? I bet I can make money out of this too".

This is as likely to work out as the flying car thing, and for the same reasons. You cannot make successful bug-burgers, not because you cannot make a patty out of bugs, but because the thing that motives meat eaters and the thing that motivates bug eaters are not the same, and there's enough gap between the two to make a good trade off impossible.

The problem I think many ecosophians have with elite-promoting-bug-eating is that they have had their confidence in authority so utterly broken that they can no longer stop from attributing to malice what is perfectly explained by stupidity. They have been so... shall we say conditioned, to see perfectly eatable food as gross, that they cannot stop thinking about Bill Gates twitching and curling his non existent mustache while laughing maniacally and saying "You will eat your bugs, and you will like them!!!".

Tastes like tetrapod

[next_migration]

With respect, some insects are known in non-Western cultures to be good food, and the suggestion that that traditional practice be continued in situ or permitted in the West doesn't strike me as some elite conspiracy to steal all the steak. I've had fried grasshoppers and they were good. A little fiddly to eat - you have to eat them one at a time, not by the handful - but slowing down is not a bad thing, and you also have to do that for shrimp and crayfish, which being aquatic and expensive are not considered subhuman. In Madagascar, reportedly, there is a bug that tastes exactly like bacon. The locals are trying to develop methods of farming it. It probably has a pretty high fat content, making it a good choice for supplemental food in a place where people live on rice and suffer malnutrition.

Rice and beans are my number-one go-to protein source as well, but some people cannot tolerate beans in quantity, and they do not contain vitamin B-12. For good health we have to consume some animal products from time to time, or else take supplements. And I would bet you'd have negative things to say about people who live on pills from supplement stores, and how factory-made vitamin capsules won't be available in future, too.

[(Anonymous)]

Theoretically it's possible to give a cricket a "full cricket life" before slaughter, whereas as you move up the biological tree of life - pigeons, rabbits, etc. - tend to live for longer and have higher needs such as friends.

Re: Back in the day

[(Anonymous)]

Me too. I'd rather eat crickets than chicken.

[homeopathic_meditations]

Your hairy friend is in good company. Just look at these dishes!

Seriously, though, I understand that your gringo culture have made you into quite the picky eaters; but I'd appreciate if you would not dehumanize the billions of people who do not share your culinary taboos.

My guess would be bad math

[kenazfilan]

At some Davos seminar some "expert" pointed out that insects make up a great deal of the world's animal biomass, that many insects are high in protein, and that there is a long history of humans eating insects.

All these things are, of course, true. However, it does not follow from them that

1. We can sustainably grow and harvest that insect biomass in sufficient quantity to feed a large population; and

2. That large population would be interested in eating bugs, even if mass-farming is feasible.

Since the people who are pushing insect farming have no intention of eating the bugs themselves, #2 never occurred to them. And since governments and NGOs will happily throw money at insect farming as "green agriculture," they have no real incentive to take their plans off the drawing board/proposal stage.

On the Dissident Right, "Eat the Bugs" has become a rallying point because this is such a beautiful example of our Bureaucratic Overlords behaving in spectacularly clueless fashion.

Cow farts

[homeopathic_meditations]

One possible reason I have though is a very loopsided take on the real problems with factory farming. Basically, it is dogma among the PMC that cows are farting us to death. See exhibit A: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/5-reasons-cow-farts-matter-and-could-destroy-the-w/

I lack the time to dive into the nonsense and pick up the kernels of truth, but this ideas have been around for a long time. IIRC, I became exposed to them by Michael Pollan's book "The Omnivore Dilemma". It is true that modern husbandry has a huge carbon footprint, but that has more to do with the modern than with the husbandry. Of course, agrobussiness have well funded public relations and lobbying efforts and traditional food production does not, so guess who takes the blame.

Ideally, from a PMC point of view, everybody (else) should turn vegan. If meat production (and they seem to extrapolate from "industrial beef" to "all meats ever" for purely ideological reasons, or maybe because they cannot tell the difference) was cut down drastically, then maybe all other extravagant uses of fossil fuels could remain the same and we (the PMC) would be able to have our cake and eat it too. The problem is those deplorables apparently do not like to eat our perfectly feasible vegan diets... so a plan B must be enacted.

Plan B is, substitute meat by bugs. They came with this idea by watching Discovery Channel and National Geographic, much as a child comes to the idea of tying a towel to his neck and jumping from the roof after seeing Superman on TV. It is likely to work about as well because bugs are not a substitute for meat, they are their own foodstuff category with its own rules and limitations. But hey, they tried to sell you those soy burgers. What did you expected?

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I see two comments already, one for and one against. This whole bug eating fascination seems to be coming from the conviction our 8 billion strong population will need additional sources of protein and since we're running out of room for the usual critters such as cattle, pigs etc and fish stocks in the oceans are crashing due to overharvesting that the only thing really left is bugs. This Guardian article gives the usual argument for insect eating.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/may/08/if-we-want-to-save-the-planet-the-future-of-food-is-insects

'Saving the planet' seems to be the rationale for all this bug hoop-la, a favored topic for the elite. None of their other efforts to get us to 'save the planet' while they just sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor without lifting a finger themselves doesn't seem to be working, so now it's bugs.

But I honestly don't anticipate bugs really ending up on the menu, at least for westerners anyway. With the Long Descent already in motion, there will be the accompanying drop in population which will obviate any attempt or need for large scale insect domestication.

And the only milk I drink right now comes from a cow. Anything of the buggy variety will definitely come up later. :P

JLfromNH/Indigo Grimy Gorgon

They recognize the problem but...

[team10tim]

I think the issue is that the elites recognize a number of problems but are unwilling or unable to make the changes needed to address them so we get weird half measures like this bug craze.

This particular problem is about agricultural practices and carrying capacity. The elites know that a bunch of unsustainable inputs go into agriculture and that the biosphere is in trouble:

https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth

Livestock outweighs wild birds and animals by a factor of 10. 0.1 billion tons of livestock and .007 billion tons of wild animals and 0.002 billion tons of wild birds.

The industrial farms that produce most of that livestock are going to have problems procuring the necessary inputs as peak oil and resource depletion progress. So, rather than moving to a more sustainable and decentralized approach like backyard gardens, cooking beans and rice at home, and raising rabbits they are going for a centralized industrial system of processed insect protien. I'm sure that they think it will require fewer inputs.

It is very similar to the electric car issue. Running low on liquid fuels would be best addressed by walking, biking, and trains and canals, but TPTB are pushing electric cars because they are identical to our existing system except that they run on solar power, hopium, and fairy dust instead of oil. They still lug a ton of metal along with each driver on an expensive network of roads at a huge energy cost.

A lot of the problems are known. For example the German military put out the Bundeswehr report in 2008 or 2009 on peak oil. They stated that the energy situation in Europe would become so dire that they could not even estimate the risks to German security by 2030. The military leaked it in 2009 to raise awareness and 6 months later they published it.

Fast forward to 2022 and their green energy production with status quo infrastructure is not adequately adressing a gas shortage and they appear to be going along with the US plan to dismember Russia and divvy up the remaining resources.

It's like they went to a venture capital firm and said "we have a huge list of serious problems. What solutions can you offer us that don't require us to change in any way"

[(Anonymous)]

My take is that it's a way to be clever tech savvy and humiliating to subordinates all in one. It's a classic gimmick. If people expect me to deliver oh okay but you'll pay for expecting us to run a society where everyone has protein...let them eat bugs. It also allows them to ape Asian models and deprive western people groups of status foods like bacon and chittlings and hamhocks...cant have crackers and such like growing their own food and living high on the hawg. Next they'll get uppity w a BBQ. It just shows what they think vividly...squabs are too good for ya. Bugs it is. Id eat insects too wild caught but keep in mind they'll be producing them on wastewater plant food or something and using it to prove their system is trademark ingenious
- Celadon

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe because they don't realize that us commoners would be able to do something like that, and are afraid that if they don't find a way to keep the masses fed, we may turn around and eat them. After all, Eat the Rich, had become a very common refrain.

Regards,

Syfen

[(Anonymous)]

My gut sense when I think back to first hearing about it is a sort of xenophilia (sinophilia & whatever the word for "African-philia). Holding up in high regard customs of the "other" that American elites have previously oppressed. So to my mind it seems to fit with the open-borders, welcoming-all-others and anti-racist/reparations themes.

But it also works as a shibboleth, doesn't it? Only 1/5th to 1/4th of Americans are willing to eat bugs, so it's a perfect sword by which to divide the wage class from the salary class. And create a hoop for the salary class to jump through.

Bob

[claire_58]

It's probably little Billy G.'s revenge against the schoolyard bullies who tormented him as a nerdy child. As the world's richest man he can try to make the whole world pay . . .

[(Anonymous)]

The Ken & Barbie "Safe Picnic" video. I know you don't do video, so I'll tell you it's funny, and they get served a big grasshopper at the end. Under 3 min. Clearly connects the covid theater with bug eating. July 10, 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHlc2y_vrFE