April 2, 2023 6:55 AM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
By Huo Jingnan
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In mid-March, a far-right Dutch member of parliament named Thierry Baudet tweeted ” WE WILL NOT EAT THE BUGS” accompanied by a photo of himself holding a microphone in one hand and pouring golden mealworms out of a bag in the other.
Earlier in the month, Poland’s ruling nationalist party Law and Justice falsely alleged that the opposition Civic Platform was trying to push citizens into eating worms, prompting the opposition to hit back with a similar accusation.
Those are just some of several instances of European right-wing politicians lobbing a conspiracy theory that elites want people to eat bugs. The accusations arrived shortly after the European Union approved mealworms and crickets as food ingredients.
Across the Atlantic, American right-wing pundits and influencers decry a similar plot. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration permits small amounts of insect matter to be included in foods.
“The ruling class really, really wants us to eat bugs,” conservative commentator Michael Knowles said in a YouTube video in January of 2022, waving a printout of a Bloomberg opinion piece titled “Why Bugs Must Be a Bigger Part of the Human Food Chain.” The story he referred to actually focused on insects’ potential as high-nutrient animal feed and on insects’ ability to process human food waste, rather than as food for human consumption.
On March 29, the conservative video outlet Prager University featured man-on-the-street interviews with host Aldo Buttazzoni telling passersby that “the World Economic Forum wants you to eat bugs to save the planet” and asking them if they wanted to eat live crickets and bread ostensibly made with cricket flour.
Including insects in human food has been an emerging, but still marginal, idea among climate scientists and food security experts. In countries where insects have not been a part of the diet, it’s an idea that has long been met with hesitancy and occasional ridicule.
In recent years, however, this aversion has fused with an amorphous and shapeshifting conspiracy theory in which a shadowy global elite conspires to control the world’s population. For those who espouse the theory, eating bugs isn’t just a matter of disgust, or questioning the impacts of climate change. It’s framed as a matter of individual freedom and government control.
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