The Mealworm Burger Isn’t Going Away

Switzerland decided in 2017 that mealworms, grasshoppers, and house crickets would be legal for human consumption, and Coop—one of the country’s largest supermarket chains—didn’t wait long. They put insect burgers and insect ground meat on the shelves in partnership with the food startup Essento. Which sounds like a dystopian joke until you actually look at the nutritional breakdown.

Insects are not a novelty food. Around two billion people eat them regularly, across more than 2,000 species. The protein content is comparable to beef. The fat profile looks more like fish or avocado. They’re rich in iron, zinc, potassium, calcium. And the environmental footprint—land use, water, feed conversion—is almost comically smaller than conventional livestock farming. The case for insects as mainstream protein isn’t speculative. It’s already settled in most of the world. Europe is just squeamish.

That squeamishness is real and I include myself in it. I can read the science, accept every argument, and still feel a small jolt of wrongness at the idea of biting into a mealworm patty. The texture is part of it. The legs. The fact that the thing in the bun was recently moving under its own power in a way that a chicken nugget no longer signals. We’ve engineered the animal so thoroughly out of mainstream meat that putting it back in—visibly, unmistakably—feels like a violation of a contract we didn’t know we’d signed.

But that contract is worth interrogating. The disgust is cultural, not biological. It’s already softening in Europe, slowly, and I think in another generation it will look the way our grandparents’ reluctance to eat raw fish looks now: weird in retrospect. Essento even published a cookbook—Grillen, Heuschrecken & Co.—with fifty recipes using insects for everyday cooking. The mealworm burger isn’t a novelty. It’s just early.