#entomophagy

You personally might recoil at the thought of eating fried crickets or roasted mealworms, but many cultures around the world consume insects, either caught from the wild or farmed on a small scale. And while grubs don’t feature prominently in current paleo cookbooks, our paleolithic ancestors most certainly ate plenty of bugs. But the past decade has shown that even if you build an insect farm, the global market may not come. Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.

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In spite of the initial hype surrounding the bug farming boom, the insect agriculture industry has learned just how difficult it is to compete with the incumbent, larger animal-based meat industry — and that, perhaps, it never really made sense to try doing so with bugs.

"I will not eat the bugs" first appeared on 4chan, an anonymous forum site, as early as August 2019, but its popularity surged after it merged with The Great Reset conspiracy during the Covid-19 pandemic, says Aniano. In 2021, the WEF published an article saying that insects are more sustainable than meat, both in terms of tackling climate change and food insecurity. "The bugs conspiracy folds into this idea that to vote for the left is a one-way ticket to the end of modern society as we know it," says Aniano. A necessity as seemingly simple as food is loaded with markers of culture and identity, she adds. The EU approved four insects as novel foods in January 2023, allowing limited insect species to be used as ingredients in the EU market under certain conditions of use. The four approved insects are the house cricket, larvae of the grain beetle, the migratory locust and the dried larvae of the flour beetle. That decision caused an outcry on social media.  French right-wing politician Laurent Duplomb criticised the EU's new food permission, saying: "We cannot allow the French to eat insects without their knowledge." This false claim suggests that the EU does not require insects to be clearly labelled when they are combined with other ingredients. Under EU law, the presence of insects in a product must be clearly and explicitly declared on its label.

Fortunately, both elves and orcs can survive by absorbing ambient energy left from the creation of Éa or emitted by higher beings, such as we Ainur. The elves refer to this as mattahó, and this can provide their basic caloric requirements for long periods of time.

They definitely don't do well with this alone for more than a few weeks, however. They need some food intake to maintain their bodies, or else nutritional deficiencies develop over time. They also can't go more than a few days without fresh water. Depending on the minerals present in the water, this in itself can help, but salts and proteins are absolutely essential.

For acute cases of malnutrition, we have developed a formula that can be mixed with water to quickly meet nutritional requirements, but they don't tend to consume willingly. Perhaps adding sugars would help? These are very difficult to obtain without plants, so it isn't a priority.

For the most part, we feed them animal protein, largely fish, with whatever else we can find. Elves are very wary of red meat, especially if they can't determine its origin, but are generally happier with bone broth.

Orcs are far less picky about eating corpses, though the ones who were primarily being fed in this way began exhibiting odd neurological symptoms, with memory loss, general confusion and reduced control over movements. Perhaps the elf taboo against cannibalism shouldn't have been removed.

I get it's how news works and how people are disgusted by the idea of eating insects so they get clicks with these sensationalised images that are AI and/or purposely dogshit, but I'm a little hater and therefore I will complain about it because it's stupid.

Yeah, people eat raw and/or live insects. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not meant to be framed like replacing your morning Lucky Charms with a bowl of live crickets. People also cook insects in a million different ways with a million different things because they're an ingredient.

I just hate the framing that eating insects can only be something unappetising or even threatening. Your beef hamburger doesn't need to be replaced by plain grasshoppers between two slabs of bread. You can eat hamburgers *and* you can eat a cicada stir-fry. Your morning cereal doesn't need to be replaced by flavourless, wriggling mealworms.