(Mercola)—Mealworm meatballs, anyone? Or how about a salad with a side of crickets? With the recent changes transpiring in the food industry, it’s highly possible that these will be the food choices you’ll see on restaurant menus in the future.

In Singapore, the movement toward a more insect-inclusive diet is progressing rapidly. The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) recently approved the import of insect and insect products for human consumption, set to take effect immediately.¹

SFA Approves 16 Insects for Human Consumption

Reports about Singapore planning to add more edible insects and insect products to their food supply actually made news in the last quarter of 2022. It was estimated that by the end of 2023, the SFA would give the green light for 16 types of insects to be approved for human consumption or to be used in animal feed.²

However, the approval was pushed back; it was only on July 8, 2024, when the agency finally gave the go-signal for these insects to be used as food. According to the SFA’s press release:³

“As the insect industry is nascent and insects are a new food item here, [the] SFA has developed the insect regulatory framework, which puts in place guidelines for insects to be approved as food.

With immediate effect, [the] SFA will allow the import of insects and insect products belonging to species that have been assessed to be of low regulatory concern.”

The 16 insect species included in the SFA’s list have different stages of growth — there are adult house crickets (Acheta domesticus) and grasshoppers (Oxya japonica), Superworm beetle mealworms (Zophobas atratus/Zophobas morio) and Whitegrub larvae (Protaetia brevitarsis), and Silk moth pupa and silkworm larvae (Bombyx mori).⁴

Various insect-containing products are also allowed. “Among the insect products that Singaporean authorities have said can be imported are: insect oil, uncooked pasta with insects as an added ingredient, chocolate and other confectionery containing no more than 20% insect, salted, brined, smoked and dried bee larva, marinated beetle grub, and silkworm pupa,” The Guardian reports.⁵

Local restaurants are gearing to accommodate these novel products, making notable changes to their menus to attract “more daring” customers. For example, the restaurant House of Seafood is planning a menu with at least 30 insect-infused dishes, which include silkworm- and crispy cricket-garnished sushi and salted egg crab with silkworms.⁶

Insects Are Touted To Be the ‘Future’ of Food

According to insect-as-food promoters, humans have a long history of eating insects, saying that it isn’t an entirely new concept. They also market it as a sign of innovation and “being hip;” they say that “if you think eating insects is gross, you may be in the cultural minority.”

However, insects are actually being used in some processed foods. In particular, cricket and mealworm flour are used not just in the U.S., but in many countries as well,⁷ although you couldn’t tell, as they are discreetly mentioned on product labels. For example, if you see “Acheta protein” or “Acheta powder” listed as an ingredient in any product, it means you’re eating cricket protein powder.⁸

A study reports⁹ that 2,205 species are being eaten worldwide, across 128 countries, mostly in Asia, Mexico and Africa. “In Thailand, India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and China hundreds of species of insect are consumed, with Brazil, Japan and Cameroon each eating 100 or more species,” according to The Guardian.¹⁰

In Canada and the U.S., the edible insect sector is also “rapidly expanding,” driven by consumer demand for sustainable food. According to a 2023 study¹¹ published in the Animal Frontiers journal:

“The [edible insect] sector is now gaining momentum with several primary insect producers across the continent and value chain partners downstream beginning to incorporate insects as a primary ingredient in their products. The number of active insect-based companies is hard to establish considering the high turnover of start-ups (opening and winding down).”

But while humans did historically eat insects, we mainly did so for survival or as a last-resort tactic — not as a delicacy. According to the Smithsonian,¹² military survival manuals recommend insects as a “perfect alternative” in the absence of other food options.

Would You Drink ‘Cockroach Milk’?

Another seemingly out-of-this world “innovation” involving the use of insects to replace traditional food is cockroach milk — and yes, it is exactly what it seems. As Times of India reported:

“[C]ockroach milk is a protein-rich substance female cockroaches use to feed their young. It has rich nutritional content which is extractable from only one type of cockroach — the Pacific beetle cockroach.”

Unlike other cockroach species that lay their eggs, the Pacific beetle cockroach (Diploptera punctata) gives birth to 50 or so live young. Before their birth, the young feed on a pale yellow, crystal-like “milk” from the mother’s uterus-like brood sac.¹³ The crystals have proteins, fats and sugars — they fit the requirements of a “complete food.” An article in Prevention calls it a “superfood trend nightmares are made of.”¹⁴

However, cockroach milk production is an “energy-intensive and time-consuming” process, as the crystals can only be harvested from the cockroach during a specific time in their lifespan (lactation). Plus, it takes a thousand cockroaches to make just 3.5 ounces of milk.¹⁵

Even so, similar insect-based products are being conducted in various countries. For example, a company called Gourmet Grubb in South Africa has a product called Entomilk that’s basically milk made from black soldier fly larvae.¹⁶

This lactose- and gluten-free “dairy alternative” is being used to make luxury ice cream — an ingenious way to manipulate consumers to accept insects as an ingredient of popular snacks. In a CNN article,¹⁷ Gourmet Grubb co-founder Leah Bessa says, “We were expecting a lot of push back, however people have been extremely open minded. Everybody loves ice cream.”

Insects Can Trigger Allergies in Sensitive Individuals

In his Substack page,¹⁸ Dr. Robert Malone highlights that despite its steady growth, the edible insect market is not being regulated in any systematic way. The Animal Frontiers study also mentions that consumers are not being properly informed about this emerging industry.¹⁹

This can be particularly troublesome especially for individuals with food sensitivities. Studies have found that in people with shellfish allergies, consuming insects may trigger the same allergic reactions.²⁰ The primary allergen is said to be a protein called tropomyosin, which is found in both shellfish and many insects, including crickets and grasshoppers.²¹

“The problem with the lack of regulatory controls on insect products is that they carry specific risks to the general population, particularly people with shellfish allergies. This has been known for years, but even now — a slew of peer-reviewed papers are being published about the dangers of insects being added to foods without proper labeling,” Dr. Malone says.

Adding Insects to Your Dinner Plate Is Part of the ‘Green Agenda’

So, despite these drawbacks, why is there a sudden, somewhat-insistent drive to encourage people to make the shift to insects? The answer is simple — they want to control you and every aspect of your life, including your food choices.

It’s apparent that the globalists are doing everything in their power to control the global food supply, and that includes promoting and normalizing gross food options. They use the narrative that doing so will help save the planet, as these novel foods are “a more sustainable source of protein.”

As The Guardian article mentions, “The farming of insects for human food and for animal feed has been promoted by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] for their benefits as a sustainable form of protein.” Indeed, the FAO has been strongly recommending the use of insects as human food and animal feed since 2003. As their website states:²²

“Edible insects contain high quality protein, vitamins and amino acids for humans. Insects have a high food conversion rate, e.g. crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and twice less than pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein.

Besides, they emit less greenhouse gases and ammonia than conventional livestock. Insects can be grown on organic waste. Therefore, insects are a potential source for conventional production (mini-livestock) of protein, either for direct human consumption, or indirectly in recomposed foods.”

While their campaign toward sustainability may sound admirable, it is important to realize that this “green agenda” they’re imposing is nothing but a ruse and scare tactic to bring people to the point of accepting living conditions that would otherwise be unacceptable. So even though the idea of eating insects for food may be repulsive, the globalists are intent on normalizing the behavior to suit their agenda — one that is based on cherry-picked flawed ideas.

Here’s one example — the globalists claim that nitrogen fertilizer is a pollutant that can only be reined in by eliminating farming. However, there are regenerative strategies that would automatically minimize the use of fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals. Without farmers, how do we eat? The globalists’ answer is insects, weeds and possibly, even your own flesh.

‘You Are What You Eat’ — Globalists Promote the Idea of Cannibalism

You read that last statement right. Apparently, in 2020 scientists came up with a grow-your-own-steak kit — and the main ingredient is human cells. Dubbed “Ouroboros Steak,” named for the snake that eats its own tail, the kit uses cells harvested from inside of a person’s cheek and then fed serum derived from expired, donated blood.²³ It’s like something straight out of a terrifying science fiction novel.

The project’s goal was to criticize the meat industry’s rising use of living cells from animals. However, it ended up sparking a heated debate about “bioethics and the pitfalls of artistic critique.”²⁴

“The designers hoped that shocking audiences with the suggestion would trigger an examination of environmental responsibility and the clean-meat industry, which has promoted itself as producing ‘kill-free’ food, although most companies heavily rely on fetal bovine serum harvested during the slaughter of pregnant cows for cell cultivation,” The New York Times reports.²⁵

Although you wouldn’t be seeing Ouroboros Steak in supermarkets anytime soon, synthetic meats have already been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022.²⁶

Pretty soon, they’ll be making their way into your foods – even though they’re worse for the environment than livestock and will undoubtedly deteriorate human health to boot. You can read more about the pitfalls of synthetic meats in my article, “What They Don’t Want You to Know About Lab-Grown Meat.”

They’re Trying to Take Over Our Food Supply

It’s important to realize that both the edible insect movement and the synthetic meat market are based on a slew of false premises and assumptions. There’s a dark and more sinister agenda behind them, and it has nothing to do with saving the planet or improving human health. Instead, their goal is to eliminate traditional farming and make populations dependent on mass-produced, patented, ultraprocessed foods.

At the helm of all these absurd changes is the World Economic Forum, an unelected global think-tank. In May 2024, WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab announced he’ll be stepping down from his executive role in the organization after 50 years at its helm. Norwegian national Børge Brende is currently the President of WEF.²⁷ During their 15th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, which was held in China last June 2024, Schwab said in his opening remarks:

“We must embrace innovation and force the collaboration across sectors, regions, nations, and cultures to create the more peaceful, inclusive, sustainable and resilient future.”²⁸

It might seem like a harmless, even uplifting statement, but once you take a closer look, he uses the word “force” — implying that their “collaborators” have no choice but to bend to the WEF’s will. They’re clearly imposing strict authoritarian control, with little tolerance for dissent.

The global cabal is targeting our health, food security, independence and freedom. These elitists are intending to destroy them so that they can then “solve” the issue by rolling out a new food system, one that’s based on patented lab-grown synthetic and genetically engineered foods and massive insect farms.

Switching to bug-based and lab-grown diet is not the answer to food safety and security. Instead, there are other more viable options available to help address all our existing environmental concerns.

I believe that regenerative agriculture — which includes and, indeed, requires livestock — is the best solution to clean up the globe, as well as support human health and longevity. Hence, we must focus on building a decentralized system that connects communities with farmers who grow real food in sustainable ways and distribute that food locally.

• ^1, 3, 4 Singapore Food Agency, July 8, 2024
• ² Yahoo News, October 17, 2022
• ^5, 10 The Guardian, July 10, 2024
• ⁶ The Straits Times, July 9, 2024
• ^{7, 16, 18, 28} Substack, Who is Robert Malone, July 8, 2024
• ⁸ Yahoo Life, May 3, 2024
• ⁹ Sci Rep. 2024; 14: 5045
• ^11, 19 Anim Front. 2023 Aug; 13(4): 16–25. Commercial Concerns
• ¹² Smithsonian, Insects as Food for Humans
• ¹³ The Scientist, February 24, 2022
• ¹⁴ Prevention, May 29, 2018
• ¹⁵ The Reader, February 2, 2023
• ¹⁷ CNN, July 25, 2019
• ²⁰ Journal of Investigational Allergology and Clinical Immunology, May 2021, 32(1)
• ²¹ Mol Nutr Food Res. 2020 Apr;64(8):e1900923
• ²² Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, Insects for food and feed
• ²³ Dezeen, November 13, 2020
• ^24, 25 New York Times, Dec. 7, 2020
• ²⁶ Fox Business, June 21, 2023
• ²⁷ Yahoo! Finance May 21, 2024

Among the casualties are a growing number of plant-based meat substitute companies that initially garnered substantial investor interest but have since grappled with low and diminishing consumer demand. In June of this year, UK-based Meatless Farm shut its doors not long after Heck, a maker of meatless sausages, announced that it would substantially reduce its consumer offerings. Nestlé-owned Garden Gourmet also pulled its vegan offerings from UK shops in March 2023. Canada’s Very Good Food Company, a vegan food producer which soared 800 percent on the day of its public offering in 2020, recently collapsed after revealing it had never been profitable.

By far the biggest turnabout has occurred in the most prominent plant-meat substitute enterprise, Beyond Meats. The corporate flagship of the sector conducted its IPO in May 2019 priced at $25 per share, opening at $46 and rising to as high as $72 on its first day of trading. By July 2019 the stock price briefly surpassed $230 per share, spiking above $150 per share several times during the pandemic. But since mid-2021, the stock price fell from over $100 to recently close below $6. For six consecutive quarters, the company has reported negative sales growth amid not only a loss of market share but a contraction in the size of the fake meat market. Nearly one-fifth of the firm’s non-production workforce was laid off early in November 2023. Financial analysts have characterized the firm as in survival mode, with its financial deterioration bringing about a “going concern” risk.

So why are so many plant-based “alternative” meat companies faltering at the same time? Part of the answer, we propose, may derive from a pattern of noisy market signals that we dub Conspicuous Production.

Conspicuous Production refers to the creation of goods that are not necessarily sought by a large consumer base, but that are thought to convey certain social signals when they are marketed to the public. It’s a supplier’s counterpart to the more famous concept of Conspicuous Consumption, wherein consumers purchase products to show off the status, wealth, tastes, or social desirability that ownership of a good is perceived to convey. In the case of conspicuously produced goods, the supplier offers a product that caters to certain social trends and causes, whether or not people are willing to purchase it.

It is not difficult to see how artificial “meat” companies fall into a pattern of Conspicuous Production. These plant-based alternatives are presented as more environmentally friendly alternatives to meat. They ostensibly facilitate the reduction of meat-based diets, which is an increasingly vocal political demand of climate activists. Many of these products are also marketed as vegan under an ideological presumption that eating plants is more ethical than eating animals. A retailer might accordingly choose to carry large selections of plant-based “meat” products out of the belief that it will gain them reputational accolades from their shoppers by signaling social responsibility, sustainability, and similar sentiments. Similarly, a restaurant may add a meat-colored congealed vegetable patty to their burger lineup, hoping to garner goodwill from diners who perceive this offering as environmentally ethical.

But what happens if very few people buy these same conspicuously produced food items?

We suspect that many vegan food companies have mistakenly interpreted the social signaling of “alternative meat” store displays and menu items as indicative of a much larger consumer base than they actually possess. It’s only when they unexpectedly encounter financial difficulties due to sluggish sales that the true state of affairs becomes evident. Furthermore, the prolonged shelf life of plant-based alternatives to meat, attributed to the numerous chemicals and binding agents used in their production, could be convenient for those seeking to showcase their company’s social consciousness by stocking their freezers. As we’ve witnessed during events such as hurricanes, COVID-induced grocery store rushes, and similar natural or political crises, what Pete Earle has termed “Magness Effects” are undeniably real.

To elaborate, even in situations where there is a glaring and widespread shortage of essential food items due to emergency circumstances, the vegan section of the freezer aisle often remains largely untouched. The majority of consumers simply have no desire to consume such products (and the small minority that does may already have well-stocked freezers filled with these items, again benefitting from their long shelf lives).

Yet, there is an underlying economic rationale behind the existence of these Magness Effects. Rather than aligning their product offerings with genuine consumer preferences, most grocery stores seem to allocate prime shelf space to faux-meat products as a way of projecting a particular image of social responsibility. They hope that when customers pass by a prominently displayed shelf of vegan goods, they may infer that the store is actively promoting values like saving the planet or protecting animals. It’s akin to establishments that prominently place recycling bins in public view, even though, in reality, the recyclables often end up mixed with regular trash once they’re out of sight.

While the vast majority of shoppers are unlikely to open the vegan freezer door and select a package of artificially colored and molded celery stalks masquerading as chicken tenders, a substantial minority perceives this shelf as a testament to the store’s corporate social responsibility toward the environment. Meanwhile, the subset of the population that does consume these products maintains an ongoing oversupply relative to their market share. Since there’s little demand from others, they can walk into the store during a hurricane, blizzard, or other run on groceries and the artificial meat shelf will appear virtually unchanged from a typical Tuesday.

The news is not encouraging for plant-based meat entrepreneurs. A November 18th Telegraph UK article reports that the plunging fortunes of vegan food makers have occurred alongside the resurgence of interest in real meat. “Smashed burgers” account for a substantial part of the renewed interest, with eateries offering twists on the recipe in towns all across the UK. (Unsurprisingly, it’s a style that originated in the United States.) As for meat consumption trends in the US, the USDA estimates per-capita retail weight consumption of 224.6 pounds of red meat and poultry in 2022: 10.3 pounds higher than the average observed from 2012 to 2021.

The desperation of the grass-meat constituency is clear in the headlines of ideologically aligned media supporters. A widely-syndicated16 November Associated Press article implored readers: “Plant-based meat is a simple solution to climate woes — if more people would eat it.”

Yet despite consumers speaking about as clearly as they ever do, an arrow remains in the quiver of the grass-burger constituency. Impossible Foods CEO (and former Stanford University biochemist) Pat Brown recommends a meat tax, drawing comparisons with the levies currently charged on tobacco, marijuana, and sugar products in various jurisdictions. If consumer tastes won’t salvage the market for animal-part-shaped blocks of dyed soy extract, its boosters and beneficiaries are hoping that government interventions will.

In the meantime, the plant-based alternatives industry appears to be facing its first true market test and doing poorly. True, the consumer base for fake meat is not zero. It’s simply a much smaller market than producers perceived, due to the noisy signals and political distortions of Conspicuous Production. The result is a plant-based alternative food industry that far outpaced the interest in what it had to offer, and is now seeing a rapid contraction as the consumer sovereignty corrects those misread signals.

About the Author

Phillip W. Magness is Senior Research Faculty and F.A. Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston). Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College. Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains an active research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic thought. His work has appeared in scholarly outlets including the Journal of Political Economy, the Economic Journal, Economic Inquiry, and the Journal of Business Ethics. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Image by Marco Verch via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 DEED.