Insects on the Menu: Should Our Skin Be Crawling?

The push to introduce insects to our diets isn’t just a health issue, it’s about consent, too.

Mar 17, 2023

Francesca Havens

On 11th February 2022, the European Union approved the sale of frozen, dried or ground house crickets (acheta domesticus) as suitable for human consumption. Prior to this in 2021, yellow mealworms (T. molitor) and migratory locusts (locusta migratoria) were also approved, while an unaware public was in lockdown. Unsurprisingly, there has been much ado on social media about these matters, as in some countries they are already trialling these ancient foods served in novel format, seemingly especially with school children and with no consultation with parents or society at large.

In the UK, Welsh schoolchildren have been part of a trial experiment to see if insects can become the norm factor, rather than the yuck factor in school meals. In Australia they are being distributed to schoolchildren in appealing packages, looking like crisps. In Poland they are being provided in barquettes in kindergartens, whole, like chips and in Canada, schoolteachers are also making it their business to talk children into it.

So why is it that suddenly, all around the world, in countries that hitherto had no cultural or culinary relationship with insect-eating, there are coincidentally efforts to introduce the notion to somewhat squeamish populations, and specifically through children?

At World Council for Health we decided to investigate whether there is a solid and healthy rationale behind this seemingly sudden craze.

The case for eating insects

The main argument by authorities such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (that have been encouraging this novel diet since at least 2013) is that it will allay climate change, because cricket farms produce less CO2 than cows or other animals reared for meat. We are being told that insects are very good for us, with interesting levels of protein, vitamins, minerals and fats. This would indeed make eating crickets and worms a win-win situation, both for us and the climate, that is if we are on board with the notion of CO2 as a major factor impacting the climate, and not a gas that is essential to life and encouraging plant and human growth every day.

It is important to note that entomophagy – the practice of munching small critters – is practised by peoples around the world, and no doubt has been since humans and insects first coexisted. Approximately 113 countries practice entomophagy. Insects are consumed by about 2 billion people, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with 2,100 species described as edible. The departure from such ancestral practices has no doubt come about in the ‘developed’ nations due to the reliability of other, meatier produce.

So do we want to go back to it, and under what auspices?

Why this is about informed consent

Here’s the truth of the matter: if we are to truly acknowledge once and for all that it is the development of the food industry and ultra-processed foods that is helping the human race hurtle towards self-administered oblivion, it doesn’t matter what our ancestors did or which peoples today consume raw, fried, grilled or boiled witchetty, sago palm, agave, or mopane grubs, or the wriggling and scurrying adult insects with antennas, legs, back hairs, multi-lens eyes and mandibles. What matters is whether we have informed consent, choice, control or say in how and when we consume anything at all. Why do those notions sharply remind us of recent events where we had no say in the matter either?

If the same authorities and their sycophantic media that only recently have been telling us that insects are in decline and we are losing our pollinators (and all the other horror stories we are subjected to ad nauseam), now have their heralds on the streets blowing trumpets for the arrival of the Great Age of Insect Consumption, we need to proceed with caution. These bodies are authorising not the free sale of insects in a market, such as we would find in Asia, or Latin America, rather, they have authorised the food industry to process these insects and put them in already suspect packaged, ultra-processed foods. This includes increasing the ‘shelf-life of insect products’, and ‘isolation of proteins and lipids from insects’, as described by Sosa and Fogliano in their 2017 study.

The risks of eating insects

Entomophagy has three inherent determined risks, according to a review by Jantzen da Silva Lucas et al (2020). The first and foremost is allergenicity: there are 239 identified allergens according to the WHO, including muscle, cellular, circulating and enzyme proteins. Further to this, there are documented case studies in the medical literature of anaphylactic shocks which can be produced by any of the above but also cross-reactivity, for instance, of mealworm larvae and crickets in patients with allergies to mites, crustaceans, and shrimp. The same identified allergen, a protein called tropomyosin, is found in mollusks and cockroaches. Another identified allergen is chitin, a polysaccharide in the exoskeleton of insects: this seems to be able to modulate our immune systems in ways that are not yet quite clear. There are also links to insect bite allergies and cockroach allergy. Other studies have looked at the prevalence of parasites, toxic moulds and yeasts in edible insects.

The point being, that if we know the inherent risks, and can choose whether or not we want to consume insects, know where they have come from and what they have fed upon, maybe it is all O.K. However, with insects in decline, we then face the problem of where exactly would we get our insects from and how can we guarantee their own diets as being relevant to our needs? Take your pick: a nice fat grub that has been feeding on sago palm or on a wild plant in a forest; a toasted grub fed municipal waste (human or other) which can host multiple pathogens; a mealworm grown in a factory farm with proprietary doctored chow that just meets the biological necessities for rapid growth and fattening, like the unfortunate mammals trapped in the feedlot farming industry.

That is without going into other doubtful and noxious practices that are already emerging at the forefront of this newfangled industry, like genetic modification; and what of other uses insects are being researched for, as after all, if they are being studied to carry viruses, who is to say what they might actually be being fed in the farms destined for human consumption.

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The big picture

To summarise, anyone aware of the nutritional degradation of our diets in the past 40 years as a result of large-scale industrial food processing techniques, and able to see how these techniques, plus the social control techniques and brainwashing, are being used from the onset of any discussion into the use of insects as foodstuffs in developed nations, will proceed with caution. Unbeknownst to us, shadowy bodies have been discreetly funding and developing studies, large-scale factories and processing techniques, plus potentially underwriting the endless stream of infomercials from mainstream media.

This is put into practice by introducing it to defenceless children in schools and, to use the feedlot imagery above, if we live in the also suddenly globally proposed 15-minute cities eating insect chow in the future, we will be the mammals that are trapped.

Francesca Havens is nutritional therapist and clinical psychoneuroimmunologist, with a background in modern languages and social anthropology. She will be giving a webinar on Thursday, 30th March on various ways the food industry has biohacked our minds and bodies and all are welcome to join. For more details, click here.