Two Billion People Can’t Be That Wrong
The UN has been recommending insect consumption since 2013—not as a novelty or a provocation, but as a genuine nutritional and environmental argument. Crickets require a fraction of the feed that cattle do to produce the same amount of protein. They need less water, emit less greenhouse gas, and can be raised in spaces that would be laughably inadequate for livestock. The logic is hard to dismiss. The European reaction has mostly been a face pulled somewhere between theatrical disgust and the specific polite silence people use when they think you’ve lost your mind.
About two billion people eat insects regularly—beetles, caterpillars, wasps, ants, various larvae—and have done so across generations without incident. The revulsion is cultural, not physiological. You can train yourself out of it the same way you trained yourself to find fermented fish acceptable or learned to eat something that smells like a wet locker room and costs forty euros at a nice restaurant. The line between food and not-food is more arbitrary than most people want to admit while they’re eating.
Irish graphic designer Lara Hanlon has been working through this with a food blog called éntomo—recipes built around mealworms, grasshoppers, and ants, structured as actual food rather than dare-food. Skewers with proper seasoning. Omelettes. Even cupcakes, which suggests she understands that you normalize something through its least threatening form first. You don’t open with the whole cricket. You open with the cupcake.
I haven’t eaten an insect intentionally yet. But the environmental argument genuinely gets to me—not the nutrition angle, not the trendiness, but the simple fact that we’re running an industrial meat system that devours enormous amounts of land and water and exists in its current form mainly because it became normal before anyone thought too hard about the cost. Crickets seem strange because they’re unfamiliar. Most of what we eat would look equally strange described to someone encountering it cold.