I’ll begin with a personal story: I was a small child standing at a table in my local Parish’s church basement. I was not alone, there were several adults standing around this same table and the focus of our attention was a small envelope. One of the adults was telling a story about his relative who had recently come back from Brazil and that “they really do eat them down there.” Being too young to recognise the implied racism, I focused on the contents of the white envelope: giant dried ants. Well, “giant” for an ant.
Everyone in the room was engaged in the same kind of Mexican standoff like the end of a Tarantino movie. Each one of them daring the other to go ahead and give it a shot, until I did. I was pretty sure that my preteen hand grabbing a few of the ants and popping them in my mouth was the only time anyone ate them. I believe they were spicy, but could not tell you if they were seasoned.
It was not an act of bravery on my part. I was just curious, and like a certain small cartoon monkey, my curiosity simply won. I reasoned that, if people ate them, they couldn’t be dangerous. This was the same reasoning that I would use to avoid watching the show Fear Factor – the show wasn’t going to put people at any real risk. They weren’t testing the person’s health or their ability to swallow, they were testing their ability to crunch down on a possibly living bug.
I’ve never suffered food aversion, in fact, I have the opposite problem – I’ll eat anything twice (sometimes a thing isn’t made right and requires a second chance). The ants were no different. I’ve never had them subsequently, only because I’ve not had the opportunity.
A gothic bar near me serves fried meal worms, which I tried (meh) and I’ve had cricket. Of course, I’ve had the usual sea roaches as well: prawns (depends), lobster (good but overrated), crab (good), clams (good), oysters (good), squid (fine), and octopodes (which I won’t eat anymore because they pass a cognitive threshold for me).
I know people that will not eat lobster under any circumstances, which is fine for them. I’m not a crustacean evangelist, eat what makes you happy – except for cilantro/coriander; curse that vile weed (I’ve got the gene). For the extremist conspiracy crowd – the Ickes and Joneses of the world – declaring that they “will not eat the bugs” is a mantra of pride for them. It’s a brag, and they have chosen to die on a hill that no one is fighting them for, but it’s in defiance of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its founder, Klaus Schwab. The conspiracy world has this fear that the WEF is going to do a few things to change the world. Forced vaccinations, fifteen-minute cities, and eating the bugs.
Before we get into our future diet of crickets, grasshoppers, and locusts, I should focus on the WEF and their role in the conspiracy world. The WEF, in the objective world, is a think tank that hosts political and business leaders at an annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In this respect they are no different than the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, or the Bilderberg Group. Like each of those, they have become the subject of the conspiracy set, because they are groups that can have the ear of the most powerful people in the world.
These types of claims have not only been adopted by the conspiratorial right wing, they’ve been adopted by the regular right-wing political parties as well. In the US, The Tri-Lateral commission was demonised by Barry Goldwater as a tool of UN control, the CFR was the subject of an attack by the John Birch Society and Gary Allen’s surprisingly (and depressingly) influential “None Dare Call it Conspiracy”, while the Bilderberg group was the initial target of Alex Jones and Luke Rudkowski when they weren’t shilling out their 9/11 “Truth” claims.
It seems that every movement needs a Baba Yaga to fear and hate, and blaming it on “the Jews” is too obvious. The WEF has a web page, you can read all about it here. At the center of the WEF is the real focal point of evil in the conservative conspiracy world, Klaus Schwab. Schwab is the head of the WEF, and he’s become king of all malfeasance because the former puppet master, George Soros, is 94, and that’s just too old for this crowd.
The forced vaccination claims are pretty rote at this point. The fifteen-minute cities panic completely mischaracterises both the plan and the intent, which have been covered in The Skeptic before. And then there are the bugs.
The “I will not eat the bugs” mantra works on a few levels that fifteen-minute cities or “the Great Replacement” claims do not. The first is that, if you really look at the plan for fifteen-minute cities, it’s appealing. No one likes traffic, no one likes being stuck at red lights behind people that do not know how to turn – when all you hopped in your car to do was get a dozen eggs. This conspiracy theory only appeals to the most hardened of libertarians, which is why everyone pretty much lost interest in it. It’s also not obviously racist like the “Great replacement” theories.
Now, there are many countries in the world that have some kind of invertebrate as a staple diet food and they aren’t of the European variety – but people eat everything, and there is food and drink that seems odd no matter what race, culture, or people eats them. You can buy into this theory without seeming like you’re from the Tucker Carlson/ Brexit crowd.
The theory is easily pushable because it’s obscure enough that it is hard to fact check. No one but weird skeptics (or desperate students in need of extra credit) will be looking through WEF documents to fact check the theory. It contains the “ick factor” that gives it an appeal much greater than the usual conspiracy theories. This means that your normally rational cousin, who knows the world is round, vaccines are good, and that aliens didn’t build the Pyramids, would still be a bit wary about stuffing down a plate of fried tarantula legs at the next pub trivia event.
Let’s look at this from the point of view of the conspiracy theorist. In their mind, the world has been changing in very sudden, very shocking (to them) ways. They don’t view the toleration of sexual identities and orientations as the recognition of something that has always existed, they think that it is something entirely new thrust on the world. Yet, because of a lack of interaction with people identifying as LGBTQ+, they can view this phenomenon as something abstract.
The conspiracy theorist can be a bigot because this is something happening somewhere else to someone else. However, the bugs theory is private, it is personal, it has an effect on your dinner plate. The theory is attacking the “traditional” – and therefore perfect – dinner of meat and potatoes to be replaced with crickets and tofu.
So, what, if any, is the truth in all of this? The easiest criticism of this theory is that the WEF cannot make you do anything. Like the think tanks listed above, there are no binding edicts or economic policies that the WEF can issue that anyone MUST follow. At best, the WEF is an advisory group and, like any kind of advice, it’s free to be adopted or ignored by anyone reading.
As far as the recommendation itself? Well, they do say that insects should form a more important place in the human diet, but it’s not as simple as just eating bugs. Indeed, the problem for the conspiracy mongers is that if people do the fact checking and read the actual documents the WEF has published; they might find a more universal approach to insects as food. It’s not about replacing steak with scorpions, and bacon with cicadas; it’s about using insect products as commercial animal feed as well as introducing them to our diet. Insects possess the advantage of having quicker life cycles and being more efficient, according to the WEF report, at turning their food into our food.
The approach is also beneficial because insects do not generate the same kind of climate damage that large scale cattle and pig interests do. They require less land and less resource, which is the point of the WEF report in the first place. Given that conspiracy theorists are typically climate change doubters to begin with, any plan to alleviate the effects of climate change are going to be adopted into a conspiracy theory.
The only thing that surprises me is that the vast and incredible cicada uprising hasn’t been ascribed to this plan.
