The Lies of Big Bug

Insect farming was built on a set of foundational premises. They were all wrong.

The majority of farmed animals killed each year are insects, and this number is only expected to increase. By 2033, it’s estimated that around 5 trillion insects will be slaughtered annually—more than 50 times the number of cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and the like currently slaughtered. But insect farming is built on a dark secret: its foundational premises are all lies!

There has been a calculated plot by the insect farming industry to mislead the public. They know that if the public knew the truth about them, they’d never support subsidizing them. The insect farms can only thrive in darkness—shielded from public scrutiny.

Insect farming was promised as an environmentally-friendly alternative to meat. In reality, however, there’s virtually no consumer market for insects, so the insect farming industry mostly feeds insects to farmed animals like chickens and fish. Insect farming is not a competitor of traditional, environmentally-devastating factory-farming—it’s a complementary industry. For this reason, the insect farming industry is on track to be bad for the environment and to increase carbon emissions. A report by the UK government estimates that insect feed fed to animals has 13.5 times the carbon emissions of soy-based alternatives. Further studies have only confirmed this impression. Part of why the industry is so disastrous is that it must use lots of resources and energy feeding insects and keeping them at adequate temperatures to grow.

How does the insect industry challenge such allegations? Well, mostly they ignore them. In the rare cases they address them at all, they make mealy-mouthed (meal-wormy-mouthed???) statements about the importance of sustainability while ignoring the inconvenient facts about their environmental impact. Journalism articles talking about the promises of insect farming uncritically quote the CEO’s of insect companies—a bit like an article about the impact of oil on the environment uncritically quoting the head of an oil company.

They also cite their own life-cycle assessments. Basically, they pay people to analyze their environmental impact, and shockingly discover that they’re great for the environment. It’s no surprise that when an insect company pays someone to analyze their environmental impact, the people paid by the insect industry often find that insect farming is great for the environment—wildly contradicting the results of academic studies. The data from such studies is consistently private so that independent investigators can’t vet it. This would be a bit like big oil doing their own report, and which they cite as evidence of the environmental sustainability of oil. Once again, the insect farming can only pretend to be environmentally friendly by lying and misleading.

It was claimed that the insect industry would be an economically-viable juggernaut—feeding large numbers of people. But in reality, the industry has been embarrassingly floundering because it can’t sustain itself. The largest insect company recently shut down despite half its money coming from federal subsidies, and many of the others are on the verge of bankruptcy.

One detailed report summarized “Through interviews with insect rearing experts we discover that currently the insect industry is not able to offer many economic, environmental or social values.” Insect meal is far more expensive than traditional livestock meal, and that is unlikely to change in the future. The largest Dutch financial newspaper summarized the dismal situation in an article titled How Investors Completely Choked on Edible Insects.

Insect farming was promised to be able to outcompete alternatives. It was never supposed to be propped up indefinitely by taxpayer dollars. In reality, however, it’s strikingly reliant on federal funds. Despite millions of dollars in funding, the insect farming industry can’t seem to be viable.

It was promised as a more humane alternative to traditional meat consumption. But then the insect farms built colossal juggernauts of insect torture. Most industrially farmed animals slaughtered every year are insects. They’re kept in overcrowded crates with no ability to express their natural behaviors. Disease spreads rapidly. They’re killed by being crushed to death, boiled, or microwaved. This often takes minutes or hours. The adult black soldier flies, the most farmed species of farmed insect, are never fed—they’re all killed by being starved to death. And all this comes at a time when more and more research is confirming that black soldier flies feel pain just like larger and more charismatic animals.

The industry has justified this inhumane mass starvation policy by claiming that adult black soldier flies don’t need to eat food. This would come as news to the black soldier flies themselves! Like much of what the industry claims, it is complete fabrication used to justify mass starvation. They cannot eat solid food, but can eat liquid food—and need to eat it to survive. When they don’t, they die in a matter of days. This is just another of the many lies that the insect farming industry needs to fool people into believing to justify their continued existence.

Disease spreads so rapidly in the farms that it’s even a threats to wild insects. Because the industry has limited ability to contain the insects, the disease that run rampant in the farms could spread.

Why are we doing this? Why are we spending millions or billions of dollars of taxpayer funds propping up a failing industry that can’t make a profit on its own. Why are we providing mass subsidies for those hurting the environment and mass torturing insects? Why we we allowing an industry to keep the majority of farmed animals slaughtered each year in hellish conditions—all so that they can provide bougie pet food and overpriced food for farmed insects?

It would be one thing if insect farming were what it was claimed to be. If insects didn’t suffer, if it was an economically viable replacement for environmentally-unfriendly animal products, perhaps these subsidies would be justified. But every one of the claims that insect farming is based on is a lie. It is worse for the environment, worse for animals, a helper rather than competitor of traditional factory farming. Humans are not going to eat the bugs. Farmed fish are.

Can someone in DOGE cut these subsidies? If you know anyone from DOGE, please reach out to them about this! Not eating the bugs seems to be a big thing among conservatives. So why the hell are we subsidizing bug farms, so that your hard-earned tax payer dollars are spent keeping failing bug farms afloat. The industry knows that people are not going to eat bugs, so they must engage in subterfuge—and feed the bugs to farmed animals who you then eat.

I won’t eat the bugs! Probably you won’t eat the bugs! Almost no one wants to eat the bugs! So let’s stop using taxpayer funds to prop up an industry built on a series of lies that have now been conclusively proven false. Reach out to your local representative about this! It’s about time they stopped taking our money to fund an industry built on lies and the corpses of trillions of insects who they starved to death.

(If you want to help out farmed insects, you can give here and here—both are potentially very high impact.)

(Much of the research for this article came from here).