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Bugs were supposed to be the future of food. Now, the insect farming industry is collapsing. 

How the frenzy over farming insects for food went bust.

“We have to get used to the idea of eating insects.”

This proclamation came from, of all people, an insect researcher. Dutch entomologist Marcel Dicke pitched eating bugs in his 2010 TED talk as critical to sustainably feeding a growing human population, because insects have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef, pork, and chicken.

In the mid-2010s, insects were hailed as the future of food — a way to sustainably feed the world’s growing human population and the hundreds of billions of animals farmed for meat.

Investors and governments alike poured $2 billion into insect farming startups. But now, a decade later, many are going belly up.

The sector has hit two main obstacles: Most people don’t want to eat bugs, and insects cost too much to produce in order to be an affordable source of livestock feed.

Without a clear market, many startups have shut down. The future of insect farming is likely destined for more niche markets, like pet food, novelty human food, and livestock feed additives.

To make his point, he even featured photographs of what might be a common meal in this bold new future: a stir fry with mealworm larvae, mushrooms, and snap peas, finished with a chocolate dessert topped with a large fried cricket.

Three years later, the United Nations published a comprehensive report that echoed many of Dicke’s ideas and argued that insects could be a more eco-friendly food source not just for humans, but also for livestock. The report received widespread media coverage and helped to trigger a wave of investment from venture capital firms and governments alike into insect farming startups across Europe, the US, Canada, and beyond, totaling some $2 billion.

There’s a ring of truth, it turns out, to the conspiracy theory that the globalist elites want us to eat bugs.

This money was pouring into insect agriculture at a time when investors and policymakers were hungry for new models to fix the conventional meat industry’s massive carbon footprint. And what’s more disruptive and novel than farming and eating bugs?

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.

All told, shuttered insect farming startups account for almost half of all investment into the industry.

“Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one insect farming CEO said late last year in a YouTube video.

And Vox can exclusively report that plans to build a large insect farm in Nebraska — a joint project between Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat company, and Protix, now the world’s second largest insect farming company — are indefinitely on hold.

Beyond the financial woes of the insect farming industry, some philosophers worry about the ethical implications of potentially farming tens of trillions of bugs for food, as emerging research suggests insects may well have some form of consciousness and hold the capacity to feel pain and suffer.

“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience........

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