The Ethics of Eating Bugs
Insect farming seems likely to be part of a more sustainable future — what should people who care about animal suffering think about it?
Miranda Zhang had been a vegan for a year when a friend returned from a trip overseas and suggested she try eating insects. Though Zhang’s friend had inspired her to go vegan in the first place, she suggested that insects could be a viable and more environmentally friendly diet than eating meat from livestock. Zhang told me she thought it might be a good stepping-stone for people who “couldn’t immediately switch to plants from animals.”
Soon after, she won a recipe contest run by a mealworm-colony startup. Her winning submission? Mealworm fried rice. Her prize was a package of freeze-dried mealworms, but she didn’t end up eating them until she found herself in a situation many vegans may find familiar: a need for protein at the end of a long day. “I had no dinner options and hadn’t met my protein macro,” she says. She “literally just sauteéd them with peanut butter!” She wouldn’t precisely recommend this option, though; she’d used the whole pack, and they were “very salty.”
Zhang says she probably wouldn’t eat insects again “unless it were very clear that doing so would have an even more positive impact on the environment…
