Will you join the insect revolution?

There are over 2,000 types of insects that people eat across the world. Some of these species could have the potential to be cultivated at scale using less land, less water, and fewer greenhouse gas emissions while supplying a nutritious protein source to many. But what does scaling insect production look like, and will people actually eat them?

In this bonus episode, we dive deep into the world of insects as a potential food source. We visit a Swedish mealworm factory to understand the production process, and speak to researchers in Ethiopia and the Netherlands about the environmental benefits, ethical considerations, and likelihood of Europeans eating insects in the future.

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Music by Blue dot Sessions.

Transcript

Nils 00:01

Welcome to the food factory. THe future food factory.

Ylva 00:07

Ola just went and fetched a glass jar filled with dried mealworms.

Ola 00:15

Please have a snack. 

Ylva 00:16

Right, so they're about two to three centimeters long. Brownish,
yes. Yep.

[crunchy sounds]

Ola 00:25

Take more than one to really. Think of it as a wine tasting or - 

Ylva  00:33

Popcorn. Mmm, yes. Quite neutral.

Nils 00:37

Yeah, I like them. It's easily incorporated. I would say and I
think that the chefs of the future really have a new source here to explore.

Matthew 00:52

Welcome back to Meat the Four Futures presented by TABLE. I’m
Matthew Kessler and I’m excited to share a bonus episode with you today.

We’ve been wanting to take a closer look at insects this whole
series, but we weren’t exactly sure where to place it in our four futures -
efficient meat, alternative meat, less meat, no meat.  Is it a meat
alternative? Insects are a source of protein that are cultivated indoors that
aim to replace some of the global demand for meat.

But it could also be efficient meat? You’re growing trillions of
these incredibly tiny livestock in close quarters.

Or even less meat, as insects are well suited to recycle or
upcycle waste streams from industrial by-products and turn them into a
nutritious source of food.

Or a plant-based food. No, just kidding. They’re definitely not
plants. And they might be a lot more smarter than you ever thought…

Bernice 01:55

If
you give them a tiny little ball, they will play with it and seem to just do
that out of fun.

Matthew 02:04

In this episode we’ll visit a mealworm factory in Sweden to better
understand their circular production,  And we speak to researchers in the
Netherlands and Ethiopia, about the environmental advantages and the ethics of
farming and eating insects.

And while they’re already eaten in many parts of the world - often
as a snack, will we see this production scale up in the future? And will people
replace some of the meat portion of their diets with insects?

Jonas House 02:33

I just fail to see what question insects are answering that the
plants can’t also answer?

Namukolu Covic 02:38

There’s move currently on the African continent to develop a
continental insect strategy, so I think it’s an area that requires attention.

Matthew 02:52

If you’re only joining us now and you haven’t listened to the
whole series - you can hear the rest at our website www.tabledebates.org/meat 

In episode 4, alternative meat - utopia or dystopia, we talked
about the different meat alternatives that are on the market now - like meat
substitutes made from plants and from fungi. 

We also talked about the futuristic alt-meats that are actually
grown from animal cells, which as of 2023 are only available in some
restaurants and markets in Singapore and in incredibly select restaurants for
tastings.

While cultivated meat from animal cells gets a lot of attention,
we may not actually see them widely distributed and available in grocery stores
and markets for years or even decades to come.  

Which is why we want to bring your attention to a meat-alternative
that can be found in some stores and markets today.  You can find it
ground into burger patties, into meatballs and in protein bars. But all of
these foods are meant to disguise what we’re talking about, which is insects -
you know crickets, mealworms, grasshoppers.

 To get a better sense of what it’s like to farm insects,
we’re first going to hear from my colleague  from the Future Food at the
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. YIva Carlqvist Warnborg, who takes
you behind the scenes of a factory growing these insects in Sweden. 

Ylva 04:23

In central Sweden just outside the small town of Orsa, there is a
company transforming from a startup to a scale up. Not as drastic a
transformation, as the products do with themselves, transforming from eggs to
larvae.

Nils 04:38

This is next week's harvest so they are almost full grown.

Ylva  04:46

Nils Osterstrom is the CEO and co-founder of the company Tebrito,
producing mealworms. They are well researched for nutritional value, they are
domestic insects and easily digested by humans. Inside the factory facility in
different rooms are stacks and stacks of blue plastic trays, well organized
with eggs, worms, and beetles.

Nils  05:11

And here we have the beetles that lays eggs, new starting culture
for another batch of mealworms.

Ylva  05:19

All insects neatly in place in the trays from where they have no
reason to escape, embedded as they are in wheat hull. Food they love. And
they're in a warm and humid environment.

Nils  05:32

Yes, they have a fantastic life or they are in the perfect spot,
with a very good environment, no birds, and surrounded with the things that
they like the most.

Ylva  05:46

As a child, Nils wanted to become an inventor of important things,
and he feels he almost got there. Setting up today's and tomorrow's protein
production. In a world he thinks can't increase its meat production. Although
the world population is growing. By 2050, he estimates that around 4% of the
world's protein consumption will come from different insects.

Nils  06:14

And that means 37 million tons of insects consumed all over the
world, we don't have more fields, we have the numerous seas available, we have
to do things more efficiently and the insects is a very, very good solution on
that. We have the same quality in terms of amino acid like the protein quality
with a fraction of the greenhouse gas emission. We use side streams from the
food industry and the agriculture industry and make it more efficient.

Ylva  06:50

So with no more fields, and no more seas, insects, and in this
case, mealworms seem a perfect solution when speaking with Nils and his
colleague Ola Broström, Research and Development Manager, as well as sales
manager.

Ola  07:08

My biggest concern is actually to deliver the requested volumes
needed and asked for, because we have higher interest and more customers than
we can serve. And because it is a living organism and it has a circle of
population and growing, it takes time to increase the volumes. You can't really
just build a factory and then boom, it's there. So you have to actually grow
it. So that's the main obstacle but nothing really to do about it.

Ylva  07:39

From the outside this factory building says nothing about what's
happening inside and there is plenty of room to expand, which will be necessary
if their plan of exponential growth of the production will succeed. 

Sometimes you say that what you eat says a lot about who you are
and what your values are, and so on. So what does it say about a person who's
into eating mealworms?

Ola  08:02

First of all, you like good tasting food, and then you're also
concerned and enlightened about your surroundings and the global situation. And
that you make an active choice to choose what kind of food source you're
actually into. So that you maybe have a most part of your diet is vegetarian,
and you have some part fish and some part meat. And then you add some part of
insect-based product. I think it signals that you are aware of where the world
is going.

Nils  08:40

You should also know that in the world, 2.6 billion people think
insects are just ordinary food. And that's also one key thing to remember that
this is nothing strange for very many people.

Ylva 09:00

To fill the gap between today and tomorrow’s demand for protein,
they believe they provide a solution.

Ola  09:07

We can provide proper nice ingredients to the food industry.
Whoever wants to be a part of our insect revolution. It's quite as a wave, it
will flood over you. Everybody will be a part of it in some way. Everybody will
end up having an opinion.

Matthew  09:40

That was Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg, reporting at Tebrito, at their
factory in Orsa Sweden. Tebrito is currently exploring collaborations with
other companies, including meat producers, to blend flour from the ground
mealworms with minced meat. They want to be a part of the answer to the
question “how do we decrease global livestock production?” 

While many in the Global North view insects as a novelty food that
could solve many problems, insects have long been seen in the Global South as
an established protein source that comes with a lot of benefits, well known
to  Namukolo Covic from Zambia; the International Livestock Research
Institute’s Director General’s Representative to Ethiopia.

Namukolo Covic 10:24

I was visiting in the Netherlands, one of the universities, and
they were having a trial, somebody had done a study on insects, and people were
tasting. And I watched people contorting their faces, trying to accept the
taste of this thing and I thought to myself: why is this research happening
here? Because, I mean, we have settings where people will actually consume
those things with a smile on their faces. I mean, I tasted some very happily; I
mean literally I asked them if I could have a handful. 

Matthew 10:55

Do you think Global North shouldn’t be doing research on insects
as a source of protein?

Namukolo 11:02

No, they should! I don’t think it’s a question of them not doing
it, but I would like to see that also happening in the Global South, because
the potential for growth, because there is already a taste for it, is that much
greater.

There is move currently on the African continent to develop a
continental insect strategy, and so I think it’s an area that requires
attention. Because of all the different benefits that it can bring. Currently
we are looking at three things; one is insects for food, two is insects like
blow fly larvae as a protein supplement for poultry feed; and the third is
growing these insects using organic waste and then producing organic manure
from it. So it’s addressing different perspectives of the food system, if you
will. So yes, it’s an area of interest.

Matthew 12:10

That’s Namukolo Covic from the International Livestock Research
Institute who reminds us that this quote “novel”  food that might be
destined to become a new food commodity, is just an everyday food for many in
Africa.

And insects across the world could hold a lot of
promise for food systems. They are a nutritious source of food, an efficient
animal feed to replace the imported soybeans that are fed to chickens, and they
can be used as a sustainable fertilizer.

But, not everyone is on board with the insect revolution.

Jonas House 12:43

I just fail to see what question insects are answering that the
plants can’t also answer?

Matthew 12:48

Jonas House is a researcher at Wageningen University in the
Netherlands who examines the social and cultural factors that bring people to
change their diets.

And he’s skeptical about the role insects will play in the future
of food. For a few reasons.

Jonas 13:02

Foods often travel because they sort of move with people as people
move and become established in new places.  And as far as I know, there
doesn't seem to be a sort of insect based cuisine that's traveled with people.

Matthew 13:15

For the people who have migrated to different countries and
brought part of their food culture with them, insects weren’t really at the top
of the list.

Jonas 13:21

Insects aren’t really a core part of cuisines in many places,
they're often eaten seasonally, when there is a lot of them around. They're
often a snack.

Matthew  13:30

So people might be eating insects in the hot summer months for a
crunchy snack, but they aren’t often ‘replacing meat’, nor are they typically
consumed as a staple part of people’s diets. 

But there are some other barriers for people who aren’t familiar
with eating insects. Like they aren’t being prepared in ways that make them
exciting, tasty and distinctive to eat. And we haven’t mentioned maybe the most
obvious reason. Many people see insects as gross. 

[Disgusting] from the Matrix

But Jonas isn’t convinced that you can’t overcome this way of
thinking.

Jonas 14:08

I've been quite critical of this idea of the ‘yuck factor’.
Because I think that humans can learn to eat more or less anything. And a good
example, I suppose, is sushi contains ingredients that were culturally unusual
in the US, up until around the 1960s.

Matthew 14:26

Right. I bet US investors weren’t putting their money into raw
fish restaurants produced by Japanese-Americans not long after World War II.
But now, decades later, you can visit most towns across the United States and
find a place to eat sushi. Jonas documents this fascinating history in his
article called “Sushi in the United States, 1945–1970.” In a more recent
article called “Insects are not the new sushi”, he argues that the cultures and
practices around eating food make the pathways for insects to become more
mainstream very unlikely, even with savvy marketing.

Jonas House boils it down to a simple question.  What are
insects’ unique selling point?

Jonas 15:11

I don't really see how they can compete with plant based sources
of protein, which are cheaper, more abundant, don't require specialist
facilities, don't have the yuck factor associated with them.

Matthew 15:27

And there’s one other consideration that Jonas wonders about. When
people try eating insects for the first time, are they becoming converted
insect eaters or were they just trying them for novelty reasons?

Jonas 15:38

Are people willing to try it once or is it going to be routinely
consumed? So the majority of insect food consumer research focuses on sort of
willingness to eat, willingness to pay, would you eat this insect or this
something else? Which is fine, but it only applies to that single time it
doesn't look at, doesn't account for, would somebody pick this in a
supermarket, if it was surrounded by other potential foods? And that's a much
bigger issue.

Matthew  16:07

Ultimately, Jonas imagines a far less ambitious role for insects
in feeding future humans. 

Jonas 16:14

I think they'll probably remain a niche interest. In protein bars
and hypoallergenic pet food, and things like that.

Matthew 16:21

Jonas House, researcher at Wageningen University.

We’ve heard from a mealworm factory in Sweden showing the promise
of insects as a more environmentally friendly alternative to meat. We heard a
call to do more research on insects in Africa, where there is a larger
possibility to scale production. And Jonas House just shared his skepticism
about insects ever becoming a main part of anyone’s diet in the future. 

To close this episode out, we explore one other consideration -
from an ethical perspective, should we be eating insects? 

Bernice 17:04

Yeah, that's very hard to just answer with a yes or no. 

Matthew 17:09

Animal and environmental ethicist Bernice Bovenkerk from
Wageningen University, who you may recognize from Episode 7.

Bernice 17:15

So only quite recently, animal ethicists have turned towards
insects and start wondering, well, do insects also have a welfare? Can they
suffer? And it's just, it's very difficult, it very much depends on not just
your ethical theory, but also on your theory of mind, and your cognition
theory. 

Matthew 17:55

Most animal ethicists say that if animals can suffer and feel
pain, it’s not ethical to eat them when alternatives exist. When it comes to
insects, some theories state that insects are conscious but it’s not clear whether
they are phenomenally conscious - which basically means they aren’t aware that
they experience the world as an insect. 

Bernice 17:55

There's more and more research is actually surfacing that shows
that insects are much more complex than we always thought that they do respond
to painful stimuli, and that it seems to be more than just a reflex response,
but also that they they communicate with each other that they are, well,
cognitively advanced. And of course, there's many, many different insects. So it's
very difficult to just talk about one one or the other, but especially in bees
and humming bees, there's been a lot of research with humming bees, for
example. 

Matthew 18:26

You might be thinking, how do they test if a humming bee, or
bumble bees, intelligent and able to communicate?

Bernice 18:33

There's this researcher, Lars Chittka, who shows that they play
even if they don't get a reward. If you give them a tiny little ball, they will
play with it and seem to just do that out of fun. But also, he made some really
interesting test facilities where he had a little plate of nectar with a glass
plate above it and a little string attached to the nectar. And the humming bees
could figure out pretty quickly that if they pulled that string, they could get
to the nectar, but also having bees that were watching. So that hadn't actually
tried it themselves, they straightaway knew how to do it. But then it turned
out to be that also other having bees in the colony later on, when they hadn't
watched it, they knew straightaway how to do it. So it seems like they're
telling each other. 

Matthew 19:21

Okay. So they’re clever, but just how clever?  

Bernice 19:25

And then an interesting other observation that he made was he cut
the string at some point. So it wouldn't make sense to start pulling that
string to get to the nectar and humming bees when they flew over that glass
plate. And they saw that the string had been cut, they didn't even try to pull
them out anymore. So that does point to some form of reasoning. And it's
something that we never thought was possible in humming bees.

Matthew 19:48

So this challenges some of our notions of these creatures. They’re
very small, they look funny, and they perpetually fly towards the light, so
they’re pretty hard to identify with, but Bernice says what appears to us as
strange behaviors, can just be built into their DNA as a strong survival
instinct.

Bernice 20:06

So and I think, yeah, more and more research is showing that there
is more at least to insects, and we always suspected. And also, that means you
have to wonder if you're going to rear insects for consumption, then you're
going to keep them probably in very close rearing conditions.

So it could turn out and I think we should, we should be very
careful, I think we do need to give them the benefit of the doubt. Because what
if it turns out at some point, we find out that they do experience pain, and
you know that they have a lot of harm to welfare when we breed them, I think
that's worse than if we at some point decide not to breed them. And it turns
out, they don't feel pain, then nothing is necessarily lost. And there's no
cost. 

Matthew 20:52

Maybe there is no cost from an ethical perspective, as in no harm
done to these insects. But what if people started to eat insects instead of
chickens, pigs, ducks, cattle, sheep, goats and the rest.

Bernice 21:04

On the other hand, you could argue, well, it's better from an
environmental perspective to eat insects then to eat other animal protein.

Here again, I think, well, yes, but it's still better to eat
pulses, or grains, or plant based matter, then the argument is well, but they
can actually be reared on side streams of agriculture, leftover streams. So
that makes the system more circular. And that's also a reason why some people
think it's better to eat them. And, and that may, that may very well be the
case. So you have to weigh up the pros and cons here. 

Matthew 21:42

So the arguments to eat or not eat insects really comes down to
your values and what you prioritize. Do you care about animal ethics and
potentially doing no harm to conscious creatures? In which case, you may not
want to see these systems in the world.

On the other hand, insects could be a part of a more sustainable
food system. as a nutritious source of human food, of animal feed, and as an
agricultural fertilizer. From Bernice Bovenkerk’s point of view, she would like
us to pause before making such a decision to eat insects.

Bernice 22:14

So at the moment, I would say, well, we don't need it, at least in
the West, I think we don't need it, we need to do more research before we start
consuming insects. I think it's a different story in countries where often
insects are a standard part of the diets, they're often caught in the wild, for
example, and I think that's much less problematic than starting to sort of
create a bio industry, Factory Farming of many livestock again.

Matthew 22:45

It’s worth pointing out that research on sentience or
consciousness of the insects people are likely to be consuming like crickets,
mealworms, and grasshoppers - that’s not as well understood as say different
types of bees.

There is one more vision of insect farming Bernice spoken about. 

Bernice 23:03

But what if you will do it on the farm itself, every farmer would
have their own little insect rearing setup? Well, it's probably a bit risky,
because there might escape and the biosecurity is probably not as high if you
do it per individual farm. But I think that would be in a sense, a better model
than to do it on such a massive scale. 

Matthew 23:26

Some insects could become pests or carriers of diseases if they
escape the farm, so the biosecurity risk is higher if you have lots of little
insect farms spread out across a region. But on the other hand, a small insect
operation could increase the resilience of a farm. For example, poultry farmers
who import soy beans to use as feed for their chickens, could instead be
growing their own feed on the farm.

Bernice 23:52

But yet there again, I don't think we we need it, because we don't
need to eat those animals in the first place. 

But we are working under non-ideal circumstances, so then we need
to also think about, well, if we're going to have these animal farming systems,
what is the best way to do it? And in that respect, I think it is good to look
for, you know, alternatives. If we're going to use insects, we have to make
sure that we then keep them in facilities that don't harm their welfare.

Matthew 24:37

There are over 2,000 types of insects that people eat across the
world. Some of these species have the potential to be scaled to be cultivated
using less land, less water, and fewer greenhouse gas emissions while supplying
a nutritious protein source to many.

But there are still some open questions: What does scaling this
insect production look like and will it live up to its environmental promise?
And the crucial question: will people actually eat them?

Will you join the insect revolution, by replacing some of the meat
you eat with ground mealworms and cricket energy bars? Or maybe you’re a vegan
or a vegetarian who won’t eat insects, but would like to see them on the menu
instead of chickens and cows. 

Whether they play a big role in the future of protein consumption
remains an open question. There is one final vision for insects that extends
beyond our planet. Ola Brostrom from Tebrito shared a vision of building an
insect farm in space to help establish a Mars habitat. 

Ola 25:45

With one kilo of mealworms or insects in general. You can actually
start to growing a meat farm, a protein farm in the habitat on Mars so that you
can have a really good and nutritious food produced in the future.

Matthew 26:02

Thanks so much for listening to another episode of Meat the four
Future. We’d appreciate any help spreading the word about the podcast - sharing
it with your friends, family, colleagues - people who eat the same diet as you
and those who eat the opposite!

You can rate and review us on Apple podcast, Spotify or wherever
you listen.

A big thanks to the guests you heard in this episode. More
information about their factories, research, and work can be found on our
website: tabledebates.org/meat

This Formas funded podcast was initiated by the Future Food
platform at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, or SLU, and
produced by TABLE, a collaboration between the University of Oxford, SLU and
Wageningen University.

To follow our work covering global food system debates, you can
subscribe to our newsletter Fodder, and subscribe to my other food systems
podcast called Feed. We’ll provide links to both in the shownotes.

This episode was edited, written and produced by me Matthew
Kessler, with help from Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg, Tamsin Blaxter, Jackie Turner,
Elin Röös and Tara Garnett. Music by Blue dot Sessions. Again, thank you for
following the series!