Is insect farming the answer?
Eating insects, could it be the solution to saving the world?
Well, increasingly it is being touted as such, with many people believing it to be an appropriate response to the growing awareness around the cruelty and environmental impact of farming the animals we currently consume.
So how does it compare, and should insects be the future of food?
Firstly, let’s look at the environmental impact.
It is well documented by this point that animal farming is simply not sustainable, although if you want to find out more about its impact on the environment then check out our previous video Veganism could save the planet. Here’s why.
So is insect farming a more sustainable option than our current animal farming system?
Simply put, yes. In Thailand, which is currently the largest producer of farmed insects, cricket farming produces half as much CO2 as chicken farming and uses 25% less water. It also uses less land and produces less waste.
But how does farming insects compare to farming plants?
According to the United Nations FAO, in the US it takes 2.5kg of feed to produce 1kg of chicken; 5kg to produce 1kg of pork and 10kg to produce 1kg of beef. However, for insects, it takes around 1.7 to 2kg of feed, making it more efficient than other animal products.
However, insect farmers will often use poultry feed as it has been shown to make the insects grow quicker, meaning that the feed often contains foods such as maize and soy. Other foods used as feed include different types of seeds, grains and vegetables. This ultimately means that consuming insects is less efficient than simply consuming the plants directly.
Dennis Oonincx, an expert in edible insects and sustainability, argues that all animal production systems create inefficiency as it requires converting plant matter into animal matter. From an environmental perspective, Oonincx stated that “plants that can be consumed directly are best used as food instead of feed for insects”.
Plus, when different food types were analysed - for a study published in 2015 in the journal Global Food Security entitled ‘Could consumption of insects, cultured meat or imitation meat reduce global agricultural land use?’ - the amount of protein and energy they produce on an area of land the same size, the production of soy (the only plant food analysed) was shown to provide over 25 per cent more energy and nearly twice as much protein when compared to mealworms, the second most efficient food type analysed. The lead author subsequently stated that eating a bean burger is the more sustainable option.
Proponents of insect farming also talk about the potential for insect farming to use waste food, such as the food that supermarkets normally throw away, as feed for the insects. However, the same is true of animals such as pigs, who could theoretically consume waste food. This isn’t done as it’s simply not a viable or economical option in the eyes of the farmer and isn’t the most efficient way to farm animals.
Firstly, there needs to be a consistent supply chain of waste products that provide the insects with the nutrients they need to grow, and secondly, it needs to be commercially competitive with feeding insects specialised feed, which is the common practice right now.
However, a study analysing the impact of different diets on farmed crickets showed that compared to processed food waste from supermarkets, crickets fed on poultry feed ended up with a 75 per cent larger gain in weight than those being fed the processed food waste, and gained that larger weight six days faster as well.
This means that using a specialised feed is a more commercially viable and efficient option for insect farmers, just as it is for animal farmers who raise pigs, chickens and the animals that we currently eat.
But what about the ethical argument?
Currently, around 1.2 trillion insects are killed each year to be used as animal feed and human food, with that number set to rise considerably in the near future. This number doesn’t include the additional two trillion wild-caught insects who are estimated to be killed for food each year as well.
Insects are commercially farmed in plastic trays or bins where they spend their lives until they reach slaughter weight.
They are normally killed by being packed tightly together and then frozen into a block, or by being ground up and turned into a powder. Alternatively, some companies will steam, boil or suffocate the animals to death.
In truth, the ethics of what we do to insects comes down to the insects’ capacity to suffer and experience subjectively, in essence, their sentience. With the available knowledge that we have now on animal sentience, we might take the position that eating insects is morally preferable because they are less sentient than animals such as pigs, cows, chickens, fish and the animals we conventionally consume - but this argument misses the point.
The question isn’t ‘are they as sentient as other farmed animals’ but rather ‘are they sentient in a morally relevant way’?
Firstly, insects have a nervous system and nociceptors - often referred to as pain receptors. They can possess endorphins and have been shown to have the ability to learn, such as avoiding stimulus that they associate with causing a negative experience, or actively choosing certain stimuli that they associate with a reward, such as food.
Fruit flies act in a way that suggests that they experience chronic pain and in the case of crickets, they have been shown to react to receiving morphine, staying in a box that was getting progressively hotter for a longer period than the crickets who were not given morphine. After five days of being given morphine, they even started exhibiting signs of addiction when they were no longer given the opiate.
So for all of the scientific ambiguity that still exists around the sentience of insects, they possess biological systems and display behaviours that make them deserving of moral consideration.
So whilst proponents of eating insects might attempt to morally justify doing so by claiming that eating insects is more ethical than eating other animals, this actually misses the point.
Plants on the other hand are not sentient, they don’t have the capacity to experience subjectively, meaning that morally, the consumption of plants is still the more ethically justified decision that we can make.
This becomes especially important when stacked against the sheer numbers of insects that would need to be killed to replace the animals we currently farm and kill. For example, we would need to slaughter around 363,000 crickets to get the same number of calories that comes from one slaughtered cow. But we slaughter 1.5 billion cows every single year, meaning that to get the same number of calories that we get from all the cows we slaughter would mean around 550 trillion crickets would need to be slaughtered instead.
Animals who, when given morphine, showed behavioural changes suggestive of the capacity to experience pain.
And it would be basically impossible to quantify how many insects would need to be killed to replace the other 70 billion land animals, and around 1.2 trillion marine animals, that are currently killed for animal products every single year.
So whilst scientific knowledge on insect sentience is still in its early days, what we already know about these animals makes their lives morally valuable, and makes creating a system that would end up slaughtering an entirely incomprehensible number of them, a serious moral concern that we are ethically obligated to avoid.
If we choose to ignore what is already being suggested about the consciousness of insects, in the same way in which we regard the sentience of other non-human animals, we may one day realise that their capacities exceed what we once thought.
Simply put, insect farming is not an adequate solution to the ethical or sustainability issues surrounding our current system of animal farming. Growing plants directly for human consumption is still the most efficient use of resources and is also the best way to reduce the suffering that we cause to animals as well.
