Can insects become a big part of humanity’s diet? Should it?
When I was in college, a girl who lived in my dorm was an evangelist for an unlikely cause: the potential of insects as food. She was really, really passionate about bugs as an ethical, environmentally friendly source of protein, in the way that driven undergrads can be really, really passionate about quixotic causes.
At the time I laughed it off. They’re bugs! No one will want to eat bugs, right? The joke was on me: A few years later, she and her business partner went on Shark Tank and received a $100,000 investment from Mark Cuban, and now her company, Chirps Chips, sells cricket-based chips around the world.
My classmate was ahead of the curve. As humans gradually realize we need to cut back on traditional meat consumption for the sake of the planet, eating bugs — primarily crickets and mealworms — has become a buzzy, green alternative.
Some cultures, encompassing some 2 billion people around the world, already eat bugs. Mopane worms and shea caterpillars are routinely farmed and eaten (the former in South Africa and Zimbabwe, the latter in Burkina Faso and Mali), as is the African edible bush-cricket, which is commonly consumed in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Madagascar. Wild insect gathering for food for either subsistence or sale is common throughout East Asia and the Pacific, from India to Indonesia to Japan to Australia. In the northwest Amazon region of South America, somewhere between 5 and 7 percent of total protein comes from insects.
But proponents of insect farming are looking to further industrialize the practice to raise more insects as feed for farmed animals as well as for human consumption — mostly in Europe and the US, where the practice is less common. In May, a European Union panel voted to approve the sale of an insect-based food for humans for the first time in the union’s history. The French company Agronutris had put in the application to sell dried yellow mealworm, a maggot-like organism “said to taste a lot like peanuts” when dried; with EU regulatory approval, the company hopes to sell the mealworm as a flour-like powder.
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Cyril Marcilhacy/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Insect farming may still be a niche industry, but dozens of startups have come on the scene over the last few years. (And two French startups received a combined $537 million in funding in just the last year.) Meanwhile, chefs in the US are embracing cicadas, trillions of which have emerged on the East Coast, as a potential ingredient. Dogs are already enjoying the bounty of Brood X, the current crop of cicadas, but there’s no health or safety reason for why humans couldn’t join in.
This excitement is eminently understandable: Insects are nutritious and environmentally sound to produce, which makes them a compelling alternative to traditional factory-farmed meats. But setting aside people’s personal tastes, I’m still wary of the push to eat bugs, largely because of one unanswered question: Do we really know all we need to know about the lives of insects — and whether they’re worthy of moral consideration?
Why insects could be a good alternative to traditional meat …
The case for eating bugs is straightforward: They’re healthy, and doing so is good for the environment. A study published in May from researchers at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin-Madison summarizes both arguments well.
The authors found that if consumers in Africa and Asia added 5 grams of insect food to their daily diets, 67 million fewer people would be at risk of protein deficiency, with 166 million fewer people at risk of zinc deficiency and 251 million fewer people at risk of vitamin B12 deficiency. Anemia would also fall considerably.
The study notes that 5 grams is not that much in the grand scheme of things. Cricket protein companies often cite a serving size of 10 to 20 grams of cricket protein powder for use in smoothies or porridge and the like. A 5-gram requirement could be met by one of those meals every two to four days.
Particularly in areas of the world where nutritional shortfalls are common, insects could fill a useful role.
Then there’s the environmental side. Factory farms are an environmental disaster. Beef farming specifically produces a huge share of the world’s methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than ordinary carbon dioxide, and drives deforestation in the Amazon as beef companies seek more open land for grazing. But factory farms of all kinds have environmental costs, not least from manure runoff that can poison streams, hurt local ecosystems, and endanger the health of local residents.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has promoted insect-based food in part because insects, which are cold-blooded, are more efficient than other animals at converting their food into meat. “On average, insects can convert 2 kg of feed into 1 kg of insect mass, whereas cattle require 8 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of body weight gain,” the FAO has noted.
Insects also require less water and land than traditional livestock, and produce 10 to 100 times fewer greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of food than pigs, per the FAO. Their climate impact looks even better next to cows, which emit more than pigs.
… And why we should be wary about it anyway
The anti-entomophagy case is subtler but (I think) still compelling. We have to ask what farmed insects will be used for — and more importantly, what farming insects means for the insects themselves.
Let’s take cricket farms as an example. At a cricket farm, the animals are typically laid out in plastic bins with cardboard walls they can climb and lay eggs on, according to a report from the research group Rethink Priorities. Because crickets need humid temperatures and can easily drown in a pool of water, damp sponges are often included in the bins to both regulate humidity and provide a drinking source. This video tour of a cricket farm in Finland gives a good sense of the situation, as does this photo of a Canadian farm:
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James MacDonald/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Lewis Bollard, who runs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy — the effective, altruist-inspired grantmaking group funded by billionaires Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz — recently published an excellent rundown of the perils of insect meat, specifically when it comes to industrializing insect meat production.
First and foremost for animal welfare supporters, the market for human-edible insects is completely overshadowed by the market for insects as feed for farm animals. Most insects are raised to be fed to farmed fish and chickens (or ground up into pet food). “Insect farming isn’t an alternative to factory farming — it’s a supplier,” Bollard writes.
This usage further indicts the environmental case for insect farming, he argues: “Feeding corn to insects, then feeding them to chickens, is inherently less efficient than just feeding the corn to chickens.” (To be fair, this is more an argument against the current insect-farming industry, as opposed to what some proponents want it to become: a system to feed humans more efficiently.)
Then there are the insects themselves. As Bollard notes, we really have no idea if insects are “sentient” in the way that, say, a pig or cow appears to be (or if they’re sentient at all). Pigs are really smart; they can play video games. Flies, by contrast, aren’t going to trounce you at Skyrim. Some smart people are trying to think through what we do know about insect sentience, but we still don’t know a lot.
Rethink Priorities has tried to pull together what we know about the welfare experience of insects on farms, but similarly, it’s not a lot. Insect farms mostly freeze and/or shred their animals, but we don’t know much about whether those methods cause the insects significant pain.
If you’ve read this far and aren’t a vegan or vegetarian, or even someone who thinks about animal welfare much at all, all of this may seem absurd. Insects are not creatures whose welfare we’re used to considering, an indifference that even makes its way into our vernacular. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly” doesn’t mean “she’s not a sociopath” in the same way that “she wouldn’t kick a dog” does — it means “she wouldn’t do a mean thing so trivial no one should care about it.”
But humans are constantly expanding our circle of moral concern. And though most humans have yet to expand their moral circle to fully include farm animals, attitudes on animal welfare have certainly evolved. The number of pets in the US has more than doubled since the 1970s, while the number euthanized every year has fallen dramatically, from 20 million to 3 million. Humans have become less comfortable killing animals just for being a nuisance: A half-century ago, it wasn’t so uncommon for dog owners to euthanize their pet because it was cheaper than putting them in a kennel during their vacation. That’s unimaginable today.
It’s not a far step from “cats and dogs deserve to be treated well” to “pigs and cows deserve to be treated well.” And while “caterpillars and crickets” is a leap further from there, it’s hardly an unthinkable one. They’re animals too. Bees understand the number zero, a concept that human children often cannot grasp. Fruit flies sometimes act in ways that suggest they experience a form of chronic pain. Is it so inconceivable that the insect world might deserve humane treatment?
For me, the most sobering finding of Rethink Priorities’s research is that around 1 trillion insects are already raised and killed on farms every year — a staggering number, since we’re still at the start of the insect-food boom. Because insects live very short lives, that annual total encompasses many generations; only between 79 billion and 94 billion farmed insects are alive at any given time.
I don’t know for sure whether those insects feel pain — but if there’s even a small chance they do, the scale of the suffering that would imply is massive. I’m not categorically against insect farming, but I do hope we can learn more about what insects’ lives are like before we start farming them at an even greater scale.
Acidic and otherwise sloppy, Physical’s star is its saving grace.
In the seminal film Legally Blonde, first-year law prodigy Elle Woods presents an iconic defense of her exercise guru client: “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands.”
I’ve found Elle Woods’s theorem to be generally true, that people who exercise are happy. I’ve also yet to meet a murderer at fitness class. But in the new AppleTV+ aerobics period piece Physical, starring Rose Byrne, exercise is less about creating happiness than it is about making the life you live a little less painful.
The most surprising thing about the 10-episode series, created and written by Annie Weisman, is just how unpleasant it’s willing to get to make that point. An example: Physical often smashes emotional distress and queasiness into brutal sequences where Sheila (Byrne) binges and purges hamburger combo meals to enact vengeance upon her own unhappiness. It’s a dramatic turn from how the show has been marketed as a campy ’80s paean to aerobics starring the mean woman from Bridesmaids.
Physical is not for everyone, and it’s very close to being not for anyone at all.
The series finds its protagonist Sheila in a desperate situation. She’s married to a flop who doesn’t appreciate her, taking care of their child with no help, and she has given up any sense of a career to live this unsatisfying life. Sheila’s only tether to sanity is being able to get away from her life via exercise.
For an hour of her day, it gives her everything she’s lacking in her real life and everything she needs to survive it.
Physical would be unwatchable misery if it wasn’t for Byrne’s performance. Her Sheila is a mess that’s fraying at her edges. In Byrne’s hands, that jittery exterior gives way to a bellowing sadness and frustration not just at her life gone wrong, but also the state of the world around her — as she dwells on everything from ocean pollution to Reaganomics to, it seems, the end of disco. Somehow, in her sweat and metallic lycra, Byrne allows you to see the spark of hope that Sheila might just turn everything around.
The series ultimately becomes a portrait of a woman learning to live with her own demons by manifesting her own success, even if that success clashes against everything she believes in. In doing so, it shifts and challenges our own ideas about what it is — capitalism, self-obliteration, divorce — we’re rooting for. You may have to steel yourself, though, to stick with Physical until the second half of Sheila’s caustic journey.
Wow, I do not want Sheila’s life
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Apple TV+
The most devastatingly effective takeaway from Physical is that it will never make you want to live in 1980s San Diego. Beneath the perpetual golden hour, Sheila Rubin is stuck in a desperate hell. Her husband, Danny (Rory Scovel), is a mediocre professor who has decided to pivot and make a bid for state assembly as a leftist upstart.
That goes about as well as his (failed) tenure attempt.
In her head, Sheila curses his mediocrity. But soon, she comes to realize that the only person sadder than the unexceptional professor turned unexceptional politician is the woman cooking his eggs, putting the kid to sleep, dealing with his deadbeat friends, and tending to his every beck and call. The series heavily features Byrne in voiceover, cruelly mocking the deficiencies — fatness, stupidity, weakness — of the humans around her, including Greta (Dierdre Friel), her earnest and only ally, before turning the acidic insults onto herself.
The punishment Sheila inflicts upon herself eventually becomes, yes, physical. Sheila’s dark secret is that she’s been using her and Danny’s joint savings, buying hamburger meals and then bingeing and purging the pain away one calorie at a time. Her knuckles have callused from how often she’s made herself throw up. From the very first episode, we learn that Sheila is incredibly and shockingly adept at hurting herself.
If you want to tap out, that’s understandable — especially if you’re sensitive to the heightened sound effects of a toilet flushing and a woman retching. Though Sheila’s disordered eating isn’t glamorized or depicted in a visually graphic way, it is a cornerstone to Physical, and viewers should be aware of this when deciding to watch the show.
To some extent, Physical’s corrosiveness can be explained by the show presenting itself as a taunt and a dare. Here’s a desperate, terrible woman, and boy is she unfathomably destructive.
But its overall unpleasantness is unintentional because it comes in large part from a lack of imagination. Making fun of someone doesn’t always need to be funny or inventive, but having Sheila repeatedly lurch back to the lowest common denominator by simply calling people fat or stupid derails Physical’s momentum. I get that the point is that this woman’s miserable life is entrenched in monotony and that she herself is trapped in a soul-numbing redundancy — but there are ways to get that point across without turning the show itself into something redundant.
Viewers who stick it out a little further will be rewarded with Sheila finding salvation in an aerobics class called “Body by Bunny.”
At “Body by Bunny,” which is located in a mall that will induce nostalgia in viewers of a certain age, Sheila’s life melts away and synth music drowns out her inner voice. She feels strong. Her face softens into a smile. Each kick and thrust brings crystal clarity into her consciousness, showing her that this is the way life should feel and the way it should be. Sheila’s smitten with this feeling. The show itself twists away from its finicky energy in its aerobics sequences to slow-motion fantasy shots and languid dreaminess.
It’s in these moments, where Byrne is looking at her aerobics instructor like someone witnessing a holy miracle, that Byrne unlocks her character’s full potential.
What’s frustrating is that there should be more than just moments for Byrne. On paper, Sheila feels like a character tailor-made for Byrne. The actress has shown she’s equally adept at playing hilariously mean villains in Spy and Bridesmaids, winsome momtagonists in Neighbors and Instant Family, and a calibrated cool Gloria Steinem in Mrs. America. Sheila’s in Byrne’s ballpark. But the writing on Physical doesn’t often match Byrne’s heroic performance, and the best parts of the show are wordless ones with Byrne digging into physical, aerobic comedy to carry it someplace better.
Physical plays aerobics straight
In hammering home Sheila’s unhappy existence, Weisman seems to want to answer why people like Sheila threw themselves at something ridiculous like aerobics and perhaps why people, specifically women, today throw themselves into fad exercise trends like SoulCycle, Peloton, and “The Class.”
Weisman provides a lot of answers, to a fault. For Sheila, aerobics becomes not only her hour-long respite from her life but also a possible meal ticket. If she can figure out a way to teach and record her workouts on tape, she could amass a home workout video fortune not unlike Jane Fonda. Physical spends a lot of time pinning aerobics to capitalism and how it would violate the leftist politics Sheila thinks she stands for.
If capitalism vis-à-vis aerobics is the only thing that can make Sheila feel alive, can it really be so bad? Looping in Sheila’s mediocre husband and all the deadening he represents, it becomes obvious to Sheila that capitalism and aerobics is the way to go. And so large parts of Physical become Sheila allegorically being seduced by — and then chasing — that forbidden fruit, which also involves a bizarre sexually tinged relationship with the conservative mall owner John Breem (Paul Sparks).
But I found the most riveting argument of Physical in the less splashy, less biblical, more effortless moment.
Sheila’s entire existence is built on a premise that her desires, small or large, shouldn’t even be considered. Her husband scoffs at the idea of making an effort, just one time, to comfort his own child back to sleep instead of leaving that responsibility to Sheila. He can’t imagine Sheila wanting to do something other than make him breakfast. He is so oblivious to her own existence, and so preoccupied with his own, that he can’t see her wasting away.
Bunny’s aerobics class is the antithesis of that, a place where desire isn’t shamed and Sheila’s existence is acknowledged, even encouraged. It’s the one place where Sheila feels like she comes first.
It’s not surprising that dismissing her devotion to the spectacle of exercise as ridiculous fails to convince Sheila it isn’t a worthwhile pursuit; from Sheila’s perspective, all of her desires have already been dismissed as ridiculous.
And to Sheila’s credit, aerobics is a lot less harmful and exponentially more legal than any urge she might have to shoot her husband.
What Physical whiffs on is building this idea in a bigger way. We understand why Sheila needs aerobics but not exactly why women are drawn to Sheila or what makes Sheila, out of presumably a world filled with Sheilas, the woman (and aerobics instructor) they need. It might be because they too lead lives of caged dread, keep self-destructive secrets, or harbor frustrations with their husbands. The audience is asked to connect the dots in a way that Physical takes for granted, and a lot like Sheila herself, it’s not hard to feel neglected at the end of it.
The first three episodes of Physical debut Friday, June 18, on AppleTV+. After that, one new episode will be released on the streaming service each week.
The film adaptation of the musical revealed the pain of experiencing racism within one’s own ethnic communities.
The film adaptation of In the Heights, based on the popular stage musical by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, was billed as a much-needed celebration of the diverse Latinx neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. Yet when the movie opened, criticism immediately ensued on social media. For a film set in a heavily Afro-Latinx neighborhood, darker-skinned people were relegated to dancers, hair salon workers, and other background roles. And among the leading roles, there was a glaring lack of Afro-Latinx representation.
In an interview for the Root with some cast members and the director, Jon Chu, journalist Felice León asked about the absence of dark-skinned Afro-Latinx representation in the film. Chu responded, “In the end, when we were looking at the cast, we tried to get the people who were best for those roles.” A few days later, Miranda shared an apology via Twitter, saying, “I’m truly sorry. I’m learning from the feedback. I thank you for raising it and I’m listening.” The following night, the legendary Puerto Rican musical actress Rita Moreno appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert defending Miranda, saying, “Can’t you just wait a while and leave it alone?” which also drew backlash, for which she eventually apologized. This controversy, and the reaction to it among these Hollywood creators, exposes ugly realities lurking within the Latinx community.
I was only about 10 minutes into watching the film when I, an Afro-Puerto Rican from New York state who has spent time in Washington Heights, immediately realized the racial composition of the light-skinned and white-passing Latinx cast was not reflective of what you see walking through that neighborhood. Washington Heights is historically a Dominican neighborhood and arguably the most prominent Dominican community in the US; nearly half of the residents in Washington Heights identify as Dominican. That coupled with the fact that Black Latinx identification is most prevalent among Dominicans in comparison to other Latinx subgroups makes this fallacy of Latinx representation even more baffling. Afro-Latinos are central to all that is vibrant in Washington Heights; the most cherished aspects of Dominican food and music are a product of the African diaspora.
The erasure of Afro-Latinx people, and especially of those who are darker-skinned, has long been an issue within the Latinx community. I know this, not only because I’ve lived it, but because it’s something I’ve researched and studied as a doctoral student and former faculty member in higher education. It’s not uncommon for Latinos who are quick to tout their pride in merengue, bachata, mangú, and mofongo to ignore the very people — those of the African diaspora — whose ancestors introduced these into the culture. It goes to show how ingrained the devaluation of Black aesthetics in the Latinx community really is, and how colorism, or the practices of discrimination that privilege people of color with lighter skin over those with darker skin, pervades communities of color.
As I watched the movie over the weekend with my two Afro-Latinx children, I had a deep yearning to be able to point to one of the lead characters and say, “Look, they look like we do!” Unfortunately, that moment never came. Instead, I had an out-of-body experience in which I was witnessing my own triple consciousness, a phrase that explains Afro-Latinx realities in which “one ever feels his three-ness — a Latino, a Negro, an American.” This pain stems from receiving messages of inferiority not only from white people but also from the Latinx community to which we purportedly belong.
From research I have conducted, I know all too well how frequently experiences with colorism occur within the Latinx community. Modern-day colorism can be traced back to European colonization and slavery; it is rooted in white supremacist standards of beauty and works in tandem with racism. It manifests as the privileging of white phenotypic features — light skin, straight hair, a narrow nose, or light eyes — over Afro-centric features within the same racial or ethnic group. This hierarchy is a phenomenon that shows up not only in Latinx communities but in Black and Asian communities as well, both in America and globally.
These racialized standards of beauty encourage darker-skinned people of color to alter their bodies in an attempt to be considered more attractive. For example, skin lightening creams are a lucrative industry in Afro-Caribbean and African countries as well as across the Asian continent. Another important consequence of these dominant Eurocentric beauty ideals is an entertainment industry that still rewards a proximity to whiteness. Both Black and Latina actresses like Viola Davis and Gina Torres have shared experiences of being passed over for their whiter-looking counterparts.
But the movie’s issues were not limited to its lack of representation. It omitted an important scene in the original stage play in which one of the lead characters, Nina’s father, expresses anti-Black sentiments toward a Black character Nina is dating named Benny. This moment would have been an opportunity to shine a light on familiar yet uncomfortable anti-Black sentiment within many Latino families. This has complicated origins rooted in the history of many Latinx countries, where centuries of colonialism have led to a preference for whiteness, such as the 1930s Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who carried out an intricate plan to lighten Dominicans as a group.
Unfortunately, colorism is a global issue that transcends the shortsighted casting choices of In the Heights producers. In fact, this is not even the first time that director Jon Chu has been called out for upholding colorism. When asked about the lack of dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, Chu said, “that was something we talked about and I needed to be educated about.” Yet he faced similar criticism after his 2018 movie Crazy Rich Asians, which featured a cast of lighter-skinned East Asians despite the movie taking place in Singapore, which has a diverse population that includes those of Malay and Indian descent. This goes to show that even movies written and directed exclusively by people of color fail to escape the grasp of white supremacy when systems like colorism rear their ugly head.
While I was heartened to see In the Heights depict the music, food, and language that is near and dear to my heart, I was ultimately left unfulfilled. The creators of this film did not take full advantage of this rare opportunity to forefront the racial diversity of the Latinx community, instead falling into the traps of colorism and anti-Black Latinx racism that have long been a thread throughout our history. In the wake of more recent awareness of anti-Blackness, lighter-skinned and white Latinos must do their part in addressing these issues within our own community. Our children deserve better. My children deserve better.
Jasmine Haywood is a strategy director for student success at Lumina Foundation. Her expertise is in the areas of Afro-Latinidad, colorism, and anti-Black racism. She has a master’s degree and a PhD from Indiana University.