3 Easy Ways to Get The General Public to Eat Insects

Meet the food of
the future.

Everyone knows that insects are the food source of the future. They’re abundant, they require less agriculture and farming than plants and animals, and they’re a great source of vitamins, fiber, and protein. The only problem is the public at large is very uncomfortable with the idea of eating creepy crawlies. In order to help conserve resources we need to transition into eating insects as soon as possible. In order to do that we need to get over the idea that eating bugs is gross. Here are three simple ways to change people’s mind about chowing down on roaches and tree grubs:

1. Tell them it’s gluten free and ironic.

Gluten free foods are really popular these days. Even people who don’t have Celiac disease are trying to avoid gluten. Most insects are gluten free and that should be promoted. If you want to make eating bugs even more popular, tell people that eating them is ironic. Just the same way young people will dress like elderly people wearing suspenders with handlebar mustaches and monocles, or glasses with no lenses, they’ll eat a handful of bugs every day. It doesn’t matter if it looks stupid or weird, if you highlight eating bugs as the anti-conformist thing to do, hipsters and young people will buy into it. Then once you get the young generation hooked it’s only a matter of time before the old people try it so they can be cool too.

Just looking at gluten can give some people diarrhea these days.

2. Slip ground up bugs into normal foods.

The key to getting people to eat bugs is to desensitize them to the bugs. If companies add ground up bug powder into foods like cereal and tacos then people could be unknowingly eating the bugs and getting nutrition from them. In a year or so the companies could reveal what they had done and while there might be some initial backlash I think most people would just get over it and it would encourage them to give more bugs a chance.

You mean there were beetles in my muffins this whole time?!

3. Cook them with bacon.

People always say “Bacon makes everything better” so that should include insects. I think if you wrap a caterpillar in a strip of bacon most Americans would eat it. The caterpillar would provide a nice gooey contrast to the crispy bacon and set off the oily salty flavor of the bacon. Who wouldn’t eat ants fried in bacon grease? If selling it to the young people and sneaking it into foods without people knowing doesn’t work, cooking it with bacon sure as hell will.

It's true what they say. Bacon really does make everything better. Except for maybe the Holocaust.