they're eating the bugs!

the many-legged moral horror-show of insect farming

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"So," said a fly, as he paused and thought
How he had just been brushed about,
"They think, no doubt, I am next to nought—
Put into life but to be put out!

"Just as if, when our Maker planned
His mighty scheme, He had quite forgot
To grant the work of his skilful hand,
The peaceful fly, an abiding spot!

"They grudge me even a breath of air,
A speck of earth and a ray of sun!
This is more than a fly can bear;
Now I'll pay them for what they've done!"

— from “A Fly’s Revenge”, by Hannah Flagg Gould

I.

There is a swarm of insect puns I’m getting ready to bug/ant-agonize you with, but hopping in with those would bee a mistake. As tempting as it is to make light of glow-worms, make hay out of hay flies, or belittle the littlest of bees, my topic today is serious.

Right now, an unfunny thing is happening. An unfunny thing is happening and I want you to be aware of it. More than that, when you’re done reading, I want you to consider liking and sharing. I don’t usually write about important things, but this really is important. If there’s even a kernel of truth in what I’m saying (or rather, in what I’m regurgitating: these thoughts have been thought before, by much sounder thinkers than me) then a conversation needs to be had. By liking and sharing, you’ll help get this information in the hands of the right people (the ‘right people’ being, realistically, open-minded rich people who can afford to donate money to noble organizations like the Insect Institute, and people of consequence in food, media, and government.)

The children’s writer Mort Walker said that “laughter is the brush that sweeps away the cobwebs of the heart”. A cute saying, Mort, but cobwebs were spiders’ homes, and a wriggling fly might be stuck in one.

II.

Meet Moo Deng:

Source: The Black Soldier Fly: The Star of Insect Farming

Moo Deng is a demure little black soldier fly I pulled from Google Images. I named her after the viral hippo, to whom the resemblance is nothing short of uncanny.

Black soldier flies like Moo Deng have been called the stars of insect farming. They eat organic waste, reproduce rapidly, don’t transfer diseases or parasites, don’t attack crops, don’t bite, don’t sting, and their larvae are packed with high-quality protein. Yum scrum! Each year, at least 200 billion of them are reared for food and feed.

Black soldier flies aren’t the only insect species we farm intensively, though. Other insects—mealworms, crickets, etc.—are turned into mouth-watering food like this:

A delicious platter of mealworms. (Source: Allan’s Pet Centre).

There’s a reason Beetlejuice is a film and not a beverage. With the exception of Tucker Carlson, who, it turns out, quite likes crickets when dipped in chocolate¹, Western consumers are pretty averse to eating bugs. Finding a worm in your apple is bad, says the median Westerner. Finding half of one in there is worse.

As a result, the share of farmed insects eaten by humans is miniscule. The bulk of it goes to other animals in the form of pet food, chicken feed, aquafeed and the like.

For many, insect farming is the bees knees. According to its cheerleaders, insect farming is a great replacement for fishmeal and soy meal. Fishmeal is bad because its production leads to overfishing, and soy meal has a hand in deforestation and human rights abuses. Insect protein—some claim, their insides chirping with crickets—is the ideal substitute, and you should all invest in it at once!

Problem: right now, insect protein is too expensive to compete with fishmeal and soy meal, and there are substantial barriers to its becoming competitive in the near future.

Another much-touted up-side to insect farming is its low carbon footprint, relative to gassier protein sources like beef. However, as the Insect Institute’s Dustin Crummett pointed out in a recent letter to The Guardian:

[I]t is true that crickets have a lower environmental impact than conventional meat. However, nearly all foods have a lower environmental impact than conventional meat. The trick is not finding something more environmentally friendly than meat, but rather finding something consumers will eat instead of meat.

Most consumers do not want to eat farmed insects, and when they are sold as food, they often come in the form of products like baked goods, pasta or flour, which compete not with meat but with foods possessing comparatively low environmental impacts. A Rabobank report described the share of farmed insects consumed by humans as “negligible”.

Most farmed insects are instead fed to other animals. Recent peer-reviewed research, which I co-authored and which is published in the journal Sustainable Production and Consumption, shows that companies rearing insects at scale generally rely on materials that could be fed directly to other animals or used by other sectors, and, due to practical challenges, this is not likely to change in the future. Instead of saving the world, insect farming mostly adds an inefficient and expensive layer to the food system we already have.

Rather than forcing insects on a wary public, resources would be better devoted to alternative proteins such as plant-based or cultivated meats that have the potential to transform our food system while avoiding the consumer acceptance and animal welfare concerns mentioned in the article.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dustin Crummett.

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III.

Now, the Million Dollar Question: do insects feel pain?

That’s a tough one. There are around 1.4 billion insects for every human on Earth, and up to 10 million different insect species—more species than there are sequels to American Pie. So obviously we can’t study all of them, or generalise from the behaviour of one insect species to all 10 million.

That said, we have studied some insects a great deal, especially fruit flies—and the evidence we have is disturbing.

I’m no entomologist by any stretch. In fact, the last time I falsely claimed to be an insect researcher on a public bus, the driver lost control of the steering wheel in a fit of mirth and crashed us into a circus supply shop. Luckily, my nose-first collision into the wall was cushioned by a spherical red sponge, which I wear to this day as a reminder that pretending to know things I don’t is clownish.

That said, I have been doing some reading. To date, the best and biggest literature review is Gibbons et al.’s 2022 paper, “Can insects feel pain? A review of the neural and behavioural evidence”, which reviews over 350 articles. Gibbons and her co-conspirators considered the evidence for insect sentience along eight criteria: nociception, sensory integration, integrated nociception, analgesia, motivational trade-offs, flexible self-protection, associative learning, and analgesia preference.

While there was, in many cases, a paucity of evidence—shame, shame!—there was, apparently, no good evidence that any insect failed on any of the eight criteria. The positive evidence is summarised on these helpful charts, which show how confident the researchers were about how different types of insects scored on each criterion. (The white boxes with diagonal lines indicate very low confidence, on grounds that entomologists have been fucking lazy as fuck and failed to do enough research.)

Blattodea (cockroaches, termites), Coleoptera (beetles), Diptera (flies, mosquitoes), Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps, sawflies), Lepidoptera (butterflies, moths), Orthoptera (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers). This table is an adapted version of Table 11 on page 49 of the original paper; figure credited to Sajedeh Sarlak.

When cells are split for a criterion, the left cell indicates the first juvenile stage (immediately after egg hatch) while the right cell indicates the last juvenile stage (the last stage before metamorphosis/adulthood).  Blattodea (cockroaches, termites), Coleoptera (beetles), Diptera (flies, mosquitoes), Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps, sawflies), Lepidoptera (butterflies, moths), Orthoptera (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers). This table is an adapted version of Table 12 on page 50 of the original paper; figure credited to Sajedeh Sarlak.

This might not look impressive, but the amount of green is concerning. Given the sheer number of insects on insect farms, the fact that there’s even a decent chance that these critters feel pain makes intensive insect farming extremely morally risky.

But insect farms are lovely places!, I hear you say. If I were a sentient creature the size of a rice grain, I’d absolutely love to live on one!

If that was you I just heard, then you clearly haven’t bothered to read section IV of my article, and I’m mad at you.

IV.

Intensive insect farms, by and large, are not lovely places. If I were a sentient creature the size of a rice grain, I would absolutely not like to live on one, not even if you took out a subscription to my blog in exchange:

The three insect species that are farmed the most are black soldier flies, mealworms, and crickets. Little crickets with cricket families. Here is how our insect farms—located mainly in Thailand, France, Canada, South Africa, China, and the United States—treat their so-called product:

I. Black soldier flies

Due to a misreading of a 2002 paper, which said black soldier flies don’t need to eat to mate and reproduce, a myth became widespread that black soldier flies don’t need to eat full stop. As a result, it’s standard practice in the industry not to give the adult flies any food, meaning they’re starved until the moment of slaughter. Though the larvae are fed, the food is often low in nutrients, and padded out with wood shavings or wheat bran in an effort to reduce moisture (this safeguards the larvae from drowning, but it reduces the nutritional value of the food even more, with a corresponding hit to their mortality rate.)

Then—without anaesthetic—Moo Deng and her siblings are slaughtered via a range of questionably nice methods. These include boiling, ovening, asphyxiation, air freezing, sand roasting, roasting in the sun, shredding, and grinding.

II. Yellow mealworms

In a paper published this year in the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed, Barrett et al. discuss fifteen welfare concerns about the mass-production of yellow mealworms. Among the most pressing are the extremely high density with which the mealworms are often packed together, which breeds cannibalism and spreads diseases; the protein-deficient diets the larvae are often reared on; the light they’re often exposed to during handling, which could be causing significant distress; and the fact that they’re cooked, shredded, and frozen without any anaesthetic. (For a sense of scale, over 300 billion mealworms are reared annually.)

III. Crickets

Roughly the same sad story applies to crickets. A 2024 paper by Rowe et al.—the first species-specific paper of its kind—reports similar concerns of widespread cannibalism, disease, and slaughter by freezing, boiling, and convection baking.

V.

Fortunately, there are plenty of laws governing how insect farmers can treat their insects.

Just kidding! Ask Siri for a sound effect to represent the number of insect welfare laws on the books worldwide, and she’ll probably play you *crickets*.² (This is technically an exaggeration [there are regulations protecting bees in Germany, for example] but only a very slight one. Regulation-wise, there’s virtually nothing standing between my microwave and a million unanaesthetised mealworms.)

There are obvious reasons why insect welfare isn’t the leading cause of our day. Though there’s decent evidence than many species of insects can suffer, the evidence isn’t as strong as, say, the evidence that chickens can suffer. (Then again, that evidence hasn’t changed our farming habits much, either.) Moreover, apart from Moo Deng, most insects are small and weird-looking, so we’re intuitively biased not to care about them.

Not all insects are small. See, for instance, the majestic Giant Stick Insect.

There’s a reason I’m treating this so light-heartedly. I doubt we’ll ever, as a species, empathise with insects much, or feel aggrieved when they suffer by the trillions. For that reason, I’m not going to regale you with emotive language—you probably won’t feel it, and understandably so.

The only way to persuade people to care about insect welfare, I suspect, is by pure, cold-hearted reason. If if you can’t get the man on the Clapham Omnibus to care about insects emotionally, you can at least talk him into admitting that the moral principles he endorses in other contexts commit him logically to opposing our current treatment of insects, even if their plight leaves him cold emotionally.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably the kind of abstract thinker who’s open—at least in principle!—to embracing weird or unintuitive ideas, simply because they seem right on refection. If so, the following chain of reasoning may do the trick:

(*clears throat, puts on youth pastor voice*)

Pain is bad, even when the sufferer is little larger than a lentil. As Dr. Seuss would’ve said if he’d read this article and agreed with it, etc., “a feeler is a feeler, no matter how small”. Nor does it matter terribly that insects can’t think about their pain. As Matthew Adelstein has argued, pain’s “badness resides not in other things it causes or in one’s higher-order thoughts about it but instead in the raw feel of the experience”:

Though an insect cannot think about the cosmic injustice of its mistreatment, neither can a baby or a person with a severe mental disability. Yet it is bad when babies and the mentally enfeebled are mistreated, for they can suffer.

Nor does the fact that insects aren’t intellectual geniuses mean their pain doesn’t matter morally: pain feels bad even when you can’t do clever shape-rotation, master multiple languages, or figure out that clicking subscribe might win you the grand prize of one million dollars!³:

So, pain is bad, and there’s a good chance many insects feel pain, including the ones we’re baking, boiling, freezing, roasting, and shredding en masse. Pain is bad, and more of it is worse. Given the scale of insect farming—just over a trillion insects are farmed each year—this may be, by the numbers, one of the worst things humans are doing.

What’s there to do? It’s hard to imagine insect welfare crawling into the political mainstream: if voters don’t care about the mistreatment of cute animals, like adorable piggy wiggys, it’s hard to picture them waving ‘Justice for Grasshoppers’ signs outside Parliament. (Other signs might include: “Insect Farming—That’s Just Not Cricket!”, “Be Kind, Don’t Grind!”, or “Hands Off Moo Deng!”.)

In the United States—a major hub of insect farming—there might be some chance of piggy-backing on the stupider portions of the Right, which sees the rise of insect farming as a sinister plot by the World Economic Forum to force hard-working Americans to “eat the bugs!” instead of patriotic American beef.

On the American left, it’s hard to see what would drive progressives to get on board. Some are vegan, I guess, so they could be persuaded in principle. (For some reason, the only mainstream Democrat I can see hopping on the insect train is Ezra Klein. In a time when the Democratic Party has launched a full-blown War on Weirdness, who else would be that kooky and detached?)

Outside of the US, though, I haven’t the foggiest. If anyone knows how to spearhead a successful insect welfare campaign in Thailand, the comments section is all earwigs.

The best thing you can do, probably, is donate to groups like the Insect Welfare Research Society or the Insect Institute. Why not give them something to smile about?

Finally, for reasons of the famous Butterfly Effect, you should give this essay a boost! I know you want to…

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1. When the crickets are dipped in chocolate, I mean to say, not when Tucker Carlson is dipped in chocolate. (Also, fun fact: in the video linked, Carlson also says, and I quote, “I’ll put anything in my mouth”!—I leave that for subsequent historians to interpret.)

2. Note: the Siri thing has not been tested.

3. I.e., you’re smart enough to know that this event has a non-zero probability.