Let's not pretend bugs are the future

Look, I know they're idiots, but sometimes, it just doesn't pay to feed them propaganda opportunities regardless of the truth behind the matter.

I'm referring to the now common wingnut meme "the Green Left wants us to eat bugs and insects instead of meat - it's disgusting and I'm not doing it!".  This is being pushed along with stories like this:

Aldi considers selling edible INSECTS to help families through the cost-of-living crisis

    Aldi is considering introducing a line of edible insect recipe kits in its UK stores

and people like that professional whiny moron Paul Joseph Watson is all over it, posting videos in his  intensely grating style of performative politics.  

We can try to argue with them with reason:  that there are many countries in the world in which kids and adults are happy to eat fried or raw bugs - your "yuck" reaction is a cultural thing that can, no doubt, change over time.   (They can try to counter - and I am seeing this - "but insects carry dangerous parasites"; to which I suppose one can respond "if you eat sushimi, you run the risk of getting parasites, but I don't see you worried about that."  Etc.)

In any event, given the bigger picture here, which is surely that the West turning to bug farming is rather unlikely to be a significant replacement for eating cows, pigs and sheep in anything like a near term future, why give the wingnuts potential propaganda fodder in the first place?    It just makes their "job" too easy.

I know, you get all these studies and claims about how much better for the environment eating insects would be - but surely it just isn't going to scale easily both in terms of how quickly you can change public perception, and how much replacement protein you can expect to grow quickly as a total percent of human protein consumption.   Even in the long term future, I reckon vat grown microbial derived protein has a much bigger prospect of being a significant global source of human protein than bug farming.

 In the near term, getting people to move to a vegetarian diet supplemented with eggs and the most sustainable forms of seafood should be a relatively simple exercise and have significant benefits.  As we have seen, with sales growth stalling, getting people to eat more of the good quality, plant based fake meats is a big enough task, let alone getting them to eat powdered mealworms, or whatever.  

Well intentioned people should just stop pretending that trying to sell insect consumption is a worthwhile exercise.