Right, I’ll be honest, I’ve resisted writing about the “bug eating” thing for a while now, for two reasons: The first is that, honestly, if people want to eat crickets, that’s up to them. People who point out that crickets are a good source of protein are not wrong, and if that’s how they want to get their five a day, or whatever, more power to them. The second is that the bug-eating thing by itself has become one of those insufferable culture war things that people make much more significant than it is: On one side, people catastrophising that there’s a secret globalist plot™ to force them to eat bugs and nothing else. On the other side, insufferable instagrammers who want you to know that they’re better, more environmentally aware, progressive people than you are because they have a spoonful of mealworms with their evening tea.
But people just won’t let it go, so here I am, on a Wednesday afternoon, reading this in the Guardian:
Insects can be turned into meat-like flavors, helping provide a more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional meat options, scientists have discovered.
Mealworms, the larval form of the yellow mealworm beetle, have been cooked with sugar by researchers who found that the result is a meat-like flavoring that could one day be used on convenience food as a source of protein.
While mealworms have until now mostly been used as snacks for pets or as bait while fishing, they have potential as a food source for humans to help get the recognizable flavors of meat without the harmful impacts upon the climate, as well as direct air and water pollution, of raising beef, pork and other animal-based foods.
The first thing you can discard there, as a matter of course, is the idea that insects can be made “meat flavoured”: We have, after all, already been through that with Tofu, and all the vegetable-based “meat alternatives” currently on the market. They do not taste like meat. They may have the texture of meat, and even that’s debatable, but they do not taste like a medium-rare fillet steak, and never will. My advice is that if you’re going to go vegetarian, just find vegetables and other things that taste like they’re supposed to and give up on the idea that the taste of meat can be replaced. It cannot be. Take supplements instead.
The second thing that would probably be helpful is if we all abandoned this idea that eating an insect is somehow an offence against our dignity or is in some way degrading. Morally speaking, I am not sure how this can be: Sorry now, to sound like a pinko, but I don’t see how it’s any more or less degrading to eat an insect than to eat a cow or a sheep that, but for your demand, would be living a happy life in a field somewhere. The left wingers are indisputably correct when they argue that our food choices are more cultural than they are based on genuine moral principles: In some cultures, they eat dogs the way we eat cattle. I find the very idea of that stomach churning and outrageous, and substantially more stomach churning than the idea of munching down a cricket. And what’s more, I’m not sure, in all honesty, that it’s not morally better to eat an insect than it is to eat a calf. Again, sorry if that makes me some kind of controlled opposition WEF stooge, but it’s how I feel.
But again, that’s not the point, is it? We’ve gotten to this place now where the question of whether people should eat insects has become a proxy for a million other cultural resentments. It’s a battle, really, between people who are determined that mankind should be improved and perfected, and those determined, as is their right, not to be moulded into Klaus Schwaab’s vision for mankind 2.0. “Eat your bugs”, in this paradigm, isn’t really about food at all. It’s about whether you can be convinced to eat your bugs like good little people, or whether you will resist all well-intentioned efforts to save the planet, like some kind of truculent far-right barbarian.
On that latter question, I am, of course, with the truculent far-right barbarians.
The determination of modern progressives, on all fronts, can be summed up in a single phrase: People are the problem. We eat too much. We consume too much. We have barbaric instincts that guide us, left to our own devices, towards war, and racism, and rape, and homophobia, and sin. In this sense, modern progressivism should really be seen for what it is – a religious movement. There are deep parallels between the global leaders of this movement, people like Schwaab and Gates, and the prophets of old, who would arrive to cities like Sodom and Gommorah and call down God’s vengeance on the people for their ways of sin and iniquity. As they see it, progressives are leading us down the path of salvation, for ourselves, and for the planet. Eating your bugs, in this context, isn’t only about reducing emissions – it’s also a very public demonstration of repentance. It’s the sackcloth and ashes – the unleavened bread – of global progressivism.
What we’re living through in the west is best understood in that context: It’s a religious revival, a sort of religious revolution, in which the earth is God, and we the people are the sinners who offend it. It is a religion that offers us salvation, and communion, and – like many of the Christian churches – an anointed elect where membership is demonstrated by reverence and good works. It has Bishops (the newspaper columnists), and Prophets (Ms Thunberg, blessed be her name), and its own workers of miracles (the scientists) and religious observances (International Women’s Day). It borrows heavily in many respects from Christianity itself – witness the new popularity of “naming ceremonies”, which are baptisms without god, where, the Examiner tells us, “tree planting” replaces washing away original sin with Holy Water. (What is the planting of a tree, if not a literal offering to mother earth?)
Resistance to this should not be unexpected. Those of us – and sorry now, if this offends my Christian readers – who find ourselves instinctively in opposition to it should be understood as not dissimilar to those poor Pagans who reacted in horror when Charlemagne cut down their holy trees, and baptized their people, at times, at the point of a sword. Like the Klaus Schwaabs of the current age, the Emperor of the Franks believed with deep sincerity that he was doing God’s own work.
So, eat your bugs, or don’t eat your bugs. It’s really up to you, in my view. But we’d all do well, I think, to recognise what’s happening in our culture and our world for what it is. Not some grand plan. Think of it instead as a form of religious mania, because that is what it is.