Eating Insects
There’s this Irish designer, Lara Hanlon, who started a food blog about insects. Cricket protein bars, ant-flour cupcakes, grasshopper stews. It sounds like a stunt until you think about the actual numbers: a couple billion people already eat insects without much fuss. The UN has been making noises about this for years—eat bugs, they say, it’s efficient. They’re right. Crickets use a fraction of the feed and space that cattle need for the same protein. One breed of cricket produces as much protein as a cow but needs maybe a tenth of the resources. We in Europe just decided that insects were disgusting, so we built our entire food system around that single cultural revulsion.
I looked through some of her work and got it immediately. Not the novelty angle—nobody cares that you ate a bug once, watched a video, tried a recipe. But the logic underneath. We’ve spent the last decade admitting that industrial meat is unsustainable. Everybody knows it. Beef is expensive to produce, hard on the planet, and we eat too much of it. But we’re still not really changing our habits. There’s a solution sitting right there—cricket flour, mealworms, farmed insects—and it doesn’t require us to be moral or righteous or to signal anything. Just practical. Just different.
The weird part isn’t eating insects. It’s that this took us so long to get here. What’s actually disgusting is what we’ve been eating all along, and we’re all just… okay with it.
I’m probably not buying crickets tomorrow. But I’m aware now that my objection isn’t rational. It’s just conditioning, and conditioning doesn’t hold much weight when you’re looking at a future where your current food choices get harder and harder to defend.