Against Eating Insects
Not just because it's gross.
Blade Runner 2049 starts with Ryan Gosling (literally me) paying a visit to Dave Bautista (literally me, but less jacked). The former is hunting the latter as he’s a runaway replicant, and a tense conversation ensues.
Agent K: “Are you Sapper Morton? Civic Number: NK68514?”
Morton: “I’m a farmer”
Agent K: “I saw that. What do you farm?”
Morton: “It’s a protein farm”
Dave then places 5 grubs onto the table.
Yummy.
This is a bit of a science fiction trope. To communicate that some resources are in short supply, or some fascist government has robbed our food of it’s humanity, weird and strange things are eaten. But, just as GPT is slowing turning Her into reality, some people are trying to turn insects for dinner into it too.
I don’t deny that it would be beneficial for the environment compared to what we currently have. Animal Agriculture as it is is a disaster, and embarrassingly inefficient.
Meat is so cringe. Everyone’s saying it’s cringe.
The worry I have however, is how small insects are. I wrote previously on fish being one of the worst animals you can eat. Because they’re so much smaller than other animals, we have to kill so many more for the same number of calories. Eating insects would magnify that problem even further.
One locust has 179kcal, which is around 2800x times less calories than you get from a cow. We already kill animals in the tens of billions every year - transitioning this would bump that to what, trillions? Quadrillions? How many illions higher do we have to go before we realise that maybe it would be less cruel to eat some tofu instead?
Now, you might think that it’s permissible to eat insects because they don’t feel pain or aren’t conscious. I think insects have a much lower chance of being sentient that a cow, a pig, or a chicken. Plus, if they are, presumably their experience is less intense than our own. However, it’s not like we have no reason to think they can feel any pain. For example, if you give a cricket morphine, it will stay sat on a hotplate for longer. Bees also avoid hazards, but may endure them if the reward is high enough - which suggests their avoidance is more than just a reflex.
You also might think that plant farming is just as bad because we have to kill insects to protect our crops - but keep in mind that insects on farms have to be fed crops. Insect farms would be an insecticide magnifier of gigantic proportions. I also think there are other consequentialist reasons to only eat plants that I laid out here.
As with fish, we should play this safe. If there’s even a slim chance that insects feel pain, killing them in numbers so high I struggle to pronounce them would be very bad. We have a much more viable alternative that’s frankly, way more palatable.
“It’s a protein curry. Wallace design”
One worry I would have with your argument is that if insects on farms have lives worth living, then it would actually be a tremendous good to farm them in mind-boggling numbers.
I am of course no mealworm-psychologist, but they generally don't seem to have very many complex desires in their little minds. They seem quite content with being clumped together in large groups, and really they only seem to care about getting food (greedy bastards) - something which they will surely have plenty of on farms.
And so their eventual demise will surely be weighed up by living some weeks in mealworm-utopia.
I could of course be wildly mistaken about how sad mealworms are in general.
I totally agree. I eat wild fish, but avoid shrimp for this exact reason. And if insects do have a subjective experience, I wonder if their simplicity might not actually make it more rather than less intense. But mostly I just don't want to eat dozens or hundreds of individuals.