Before Humanity Is Forced to Eat Cockroaches, We Intend to Ask Why
“Is there really nothing else to eat in this world?” “Snowpiercer was way too ahead of its time!” — these were the existential questions netizens posted yesterday, after watching a reporter who had visited an American cockroach farm down a cup of cockroach-crunch coffee.
Picture this: besides American cockroaches, countless yellow mealworms and black soldier flies wriggle and grow all across the world, even as we sleep soundly through the night, all for the day they land on your dinner plate. It is easy to see the parallel with the doomsday food reserved for the lower classes in the film Snowpiercer — insect protein blocks.
So what is that reason? Do we really have to accept it? Will insects truly make a mass appearance on our dinner tables in the future?
1. Insect Protein: A Noble Vision
Today, the purpose of the new, large-scale insect-farming industry is more about extracting animal protein from insects. This fundamentally changes the nature of “eating insects” — it is no longer a dietary custom evolved naturally in a particular region but an engineered arrangement.
In fact, the very term “insect protein” is disorienting — after all, nobody calls beef “mammal protein”. Yet the wording is precise, because it is a blanket term for powder finely processed from edible insects. The raw material might be yellow mealworms or black soldier flies; it might simply be dried and ground, or it might undergo complex enzymatic hydrolysis.
So what exactly is the purpose behind mass-producing insect protein?
The answer traces back to 2013, when the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published the report Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security. Since then, the supposed benefits of insect protein have been endlessly repeated and can be summarised as follows:
1. As the planet’s climate and resource crises intensify, insect farming consumes far less water and arable land than soybean, fishmeal, beef or lamb, and its greenhouse gas emissions are far lower than those of livestock farming;
2. Insects can convert food waste and livestock manure into high-quality protein;
3. Precisely on the strength of these two sustainability assumptions, insect protein is increasingly seen as an effective solution to food crises and world hunger in a future where ecological crisis and population growth compound each other.
What the UN never put front and centre, though — and what actually draws industry after industry into this race — is the long-standing predicament of industrialised animal farming: feed shortages and volatile prices. Corn, soybeans, wheat and fishmeal are the material bedrock of the livestock industry; their cost accounts for roughly 60–70 % of total animal-rearing expenses, and the primary nutrient they provide is protein.
In recent years, the intertwined impacts of the pandemic, geopolitical tensions and extreme weather have left international supply chains unstable, keeping soybean meal prices stubbornly high. In 2022 alone, soybean meal prices surged from CNY 3,580 per tonne all the way up to CNY 5,630 per tonne. Under these circumstances, many countries, including China, have been scrambling for more stable sources of feed protein. Insect farming, reputed to save arable land, has become a leading avenue for exploring feed alternatives worldwide.
Industry research shows that the global insect-protein market reached USD 145 million in 2019 and was projected to grow to USD 366 million by 2023. China has gone further still, writing “expanding the production capacity of insect-protein feed” into the action targets of its Action Plan for Reducing Feed Grain Use in the Livestock Industry. Industry insiders reveal that in 2025, China’s insect-protein export market was booming, driven mainly by feed-grade exports.
Insect farming is hardly a new thing in China — artificial-rearing research on yellow mealworms has been underway since at least 2001. But it was around the time the FAO published its report in 2013 that capital began rushing into the emerging insect-protein sector in earnest.
By one incomplete tally, as of 2022, the 13 active insect-protein companies on the market — including Chinese firms Ziran Chuangzao and Buluting — had collectively raised more than CNY 6 billion.
2. Ÿnsect’s Bankruptcy and Capital’s Agrifood Fantasy
In truth, many companies in the alternative-protein space are floundering in a quagmire of losses. In insect protein’s precursor — the plant-based meat market — Beyond Meat, once the flagship of the so-called “first stock to replace all meat”, is now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Impossible Foods, under revenue pressure, publicly stated it was considering adding real animal meat to its plant-based products. From a purely economic standpoint, whether in terms of growth trajectory or market demand, stable profitability for alternative proteins remains a distant prospect.
Perhaps having learned from the plant-based meat veterans, the insect-protein sector has set its sights primarily on animal feed.
Only a brave few dare launch products like cricket biscuits or insect meatballs — assuming everyone on the planet is a Bear Grylls — and market reception is predictable.
But even the animal-feed path is rocky. Ÿnsect’s former slogan was “Creating a more sustainable global food system”. That vision sounds idealistic, but what brought Ÿnsect down was the fact that, in actual operation, it ran squarely counter to sustainability.
The first fact is this: the idealised model of insect-protein farming involves feeding insects food waste or animal manure, but in reality, because of BSE (mad cow disease), Europe has only permitted feeding insects with plant-based or animal-derived feedstuffs free of ruminant material since 2018. This has effectively closed the door on food-waste feeding, and animal-manure feeding faces its own host of obstacles — Ÿnsect still has to feed its insects on soybean meal and similar conventional feed.
This sounds deeply ironic: insect protein is itself an animal-feed product, yet the feed supply for industrial-scale insect farming depends just as much on grains that could be fed directly to animals. In examining the reasons behind Ÿnsect’s failed push into the animal-feed market, the international tech outlet TechCrunch asked whether this means that “insect protein simply adds an expensive extra step”.
In a bid to save itself, Ÿnsect attempted to pivot to the higher-margin pet-food market, but it did not succeed. The company had already sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into building “the world’s most expensive insect farm”, and its crushing debts could not afford to wait for the new business to grow and sustain them.
This is the second fact that runs counter to sustainability: large-scale insect farming is heavily dependent on industrial and automated equipment, with upfront capital costs far exceeding those of conventional feed production — and this is the second reason for its failure to compete in the animal-feed market.
III. Puncturing the Low-Carbon Myth of Insect Protein
Of course, words alone carry no weight; behind such claims there must be scientific data to make them so convincing, and so there is. The mainstream research narrative tells us that insect protein is strongly eco-friendly. The FAO’s Edible Insects report once stated that greenhouse gas emissions from insect farming are only one-tenth of those from livestock production.
Other studies offer more specific figures: one found that for every tonne of organic waste consumed by black soldier flies, approximately 233 kg of organic fertiliser and 67 kg of insect protein can be produced, achieving a net carbon reduction of 55.69 kg. A 2023 literature review reported greenhouse gas emissions of 0.3–3 kg CO2 equivalent per kilogram of fresh insect meat, far below poultry (5.97 kg), pigs (6.95 kg), and cattle (35 kg).
Worryingly, a closer look at the background of these studies reveals the fingerprints of capital in every one. Either the study itself was conducted by a food company, or the researchers work for companies producing insect-based pet food.
Fortunately, national agricultural authorities also take this issue seriously, given that agriculture bears the brunt of the severe consequences of global warming. One research project commissioned by the UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), titled Life Cycle Assessment of Insect Protein Production Processes in the UK: For Pig and Poultry Feed, compared the full life-cycle environmental impact of black soldier fly larvae powder (hereafter insect meal), soybean meal, and fishmeal as animal feed. The insect meal was further subdivided into three categories based on its feed input: conventional feed, poultry manure, and food waste.
The findings were entirely contrary: the climate change impact value per kilogram of insect meal ranged from 12.9 to 30.1 kg CO2 equivalent — meaning that producing one kilogram of insect meal releases approximately 12.9 to 30.1 kilograms of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere.
The reason for such a vast divergence between studies is that the academic community still lacks a unified standard for measuring climate change impacts. The data obtainable with current technology is limited and insufficient, and is further constrained by funding and geographic location. The “climate change impact value” in the UK report does not merely tally greenhouse gas emissions; it also incorporates factors such as acidification, water consumption, land use, and marine and freshwater eutrophication, all converted into “CO2 equivalent” — which naturally leads to different conclusions.
Looking at the overall data, food-waste-fed insect meal (FW) has the lowest climate change impact value of the three insect meals, with emissions of 12.9 kg per kilogram produced; poultry-manure-fed insect meal (CM) follows at 16.0; and conventional-feed-fed insect meal (TF) reaches as high as 30.1. All three are far above soybean meal (2.23) and fishmeal (7.98) — roughly 5.7 to 13.5 times that of soybean meal, and 1.8 to 4.2 times that of fishmeal.
More specifically, the gaps at the numerical level can be traced to the production and processing workflow of insect protein. Many people instinctively assume that insect farming is a relatively natural process, unaware that it is nothing but technology and heavy industry behind the scenes. A large-scale insect farm is not a stack of wooden rearing boxes but a gleaming array of automated equipment. Compared to warm-blooded animals like chickens and ducks, insects are far more sensitive to environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and bacteria, and their growth cycle is measured in weeks — the environment must be kept stable around the clock, with temperature and humidity adjusted to match the larvae’s age in weeks at every stage.
According to a senior executive at a domestic insect-protein company, given that each insect species has different environmental requirements, every farm’s equipment must be custom-built. Inside a rearing facility, insect density is hundreds of times higher than in the natural environment; in such crowded conditions, insects not only consume large amounts of oxygen through respiration and expel waste gases, but also generate substantial heat, excrement, and water vapour. In nature, flowing air, porous soil, and rainfall maintain a dynamic equilibrium; farms, on the other hand, can only rely on air conditioning for temperature control (for example, black soldier flies feed only at 25–35 °C), ventilation systems for fresh air exchange, and mechanical or manual collection of excrement and regular cleaning of rearing containers. His team has invested considerable effort into redesigning the ventilation ductwork and adjusting the rearing positions of larvae at different ages in weeks, in order to maintain suitable rearing conditions while keeping electricity costs down.
This is precisely why insect meal’s carbon emissions far exceed those of soybean meal and fishmeal in the UK report.
Given that differences in the production stages play such a decisive role in environmental impact, Defra also modelled changes to certain production steps to determine whether insect meal has the potential to help the UK’s livestock sector decarbonise in the future — for example, switching from conventional energy to nuclear power, replacing petrol vehicles with electric ones, and filtering and recirculating all water consumed within the system, among other measures. After such adjustments, insect meal’s carbon emissions could potentially fall below those of soybean meal and fishmeal, showing that insect meal is not without environmental promise.
In China, the practical obstacle to food-waste-fed insect farming is that food waste is currently handled primarily through incineration. A senior executive at a domestic insect-protein company noted that, although his firm is already an industry leader, its scale is still far too small compared with incineration plants — food waste management companies prefer to deal with incineration plants directly. In other words, the idealised waste-recycling model for insect protein faces enormous practical difficulties in reality.
It is therefore clear that neither industry-funded nor government-funded research has completed primary data collection on climate change impact indicators across the full chain. Setting aside conflicts of interest (which cannot be ignored), the conclusions drawn from insect-protein research remain theoretical and cannot be equated with actual environmental impacts.
Even among independent studies, conclusions diverge. EU-funded research indicates that insect farming consumes more water than poultry and pig, cattle, and sheep farming, while the UK agricultural report states that insect meal is far more water-efficient than soybean meal. Yet both studies express concern about excessive optimism regarding insect protein’s environmental credentials.
IV. Can Agrifood High-Tech Save Humanity and the Planet?
When some people trumpet so-called “alternative” proteins, there is little evidence that these insect proteins or plant-based meats are genuinely replacing beef or lamb. Research has noted that edible insect protein is consumed primarily as snacks (energy bars, crisps, and the like) rather than as staples — in other words, an addition rather than a substitution. Meanwhile, ecologically friendly “naturally grazed livestock farming” is routinely excluded from the picture for being “expensive and low-yielding”, yet perhaps it is precisely this kind of “reduction substitution” that should command our resources and effort as a direction for genuine change.
After all, hunger is not a product of scarcity but of inequity.
As for the claim that “insect protein can solve the food crisis”: first, there is clear evidence that no global “protein gap” exists — for those suffering from hunger and malnutrition, protein is merely one of many nutrients they lack. A look at the data published by the FAO shows that the overall tension between global food production and demand has not been severe in recent years, yet as of 2024, as many as 700 million people remain hungry. The causes include regional conflicts, extreme weather, and economic downturns — not insufficient supply.
Among these causes, a form of waste that cannot be overlooked occurs well beyond the dining table: vast quantities of grain are diverted to the production of ultra-processed foods, livestock feed, and fuel. It is estimated that in 2022, approximately 15.5 % of Brazil’s population experienced hunger, while Brazil annually converts roughly 70 million tonnes of grain into ethanol for use as fuel.
Meanwhile, in 2022, approximately 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted at the household and retail level worldwide — equivalent to 1.3 meals a day for every hungry person on the planet. The sharp fall in beef prices in China over the past two years has been driven by a surge in Brazilian beef imports, yet the remarkably low import prices are genuinely puzzling. If one stops thinking in terms of cost and instead considers stock clearance, does “everything suddenly add up”? To be honest with myself, once I bought beef at bargain prices, my own meat consumption did increase; a friend had to throw away some of what they had stored after a year’s worth of overstocking — a textbook case of producers turning food-waste pressure into a net gain through outsourcing. While the solution cannot simply be reduced to “distributing surplus food to the hungry”, we are entitled to question the urgency attached to ever-increasing output.
When it comes to sustainability and ecology, framing emerging agrifood high-tech — insect farming, vertical farming, and the like — in binary opposition to conventional industrial agriculture, with the former assumed to solve the problems created by the latter, may be a misconception from the very outset. What truly warrants scrutiny is the shared underpinning and logic of both: treating nature as an object to be arbitrarily arranged and reshaped. Insect farming artificially concentrates insects in a space that must be maintained with precision equipment, while industrial livestock farming is the classic example of humans arbitrarily reshaping a space for intensive farming and feed cultivation.
Today, the uneven distribution of food exacerbated by intensive farming, the transport emissions left hanging in the atmosphere, the pollution of waterways with slurry, and the devastating ecological damage caused by the overuse of antibiotics in surrounding areas are no longer secrets. Should we still place our faith in agrifood high-tech built on the very same logic to save us?
Of course, these agrifood high-tech projects were conceived from the outset to attract investment, so it is hardly surprising that the tail ended up wagging the dog. Capital needs new narratives and growth drivers and is willing to reshape humanity’s dietary habits to get them — this is a story repeated throughout the modern food system, and we can only bear the costs in food safety, nutritional health, and ecological crisis once the dust has settled.
Only this time, perhaps we can understand the changes underway sooner and more comprehensively; perhaps we can even begin to imagine, earlier, an insect-farming model that is genuinely sustainable. But the precondition is that we refuse to be swept along by the rhetoric used to attract investment and market these products, and instead face squarely the flaws and shortcomings of the current insect-farming model that demand change.
History moves on regardless. On 20 January 2025, the European Commission approved: from 10 February this year, whole yellow mealworm larvae powder subjected to ultraviolet treatment may be placed on the market as a novel food. At present, many countries, including China, are gradually broadening the scope for insect-protein inclusion, exploring its use as a supplement and alternative to animal protein sources. Will humanity truly “eat bugs” at scale in the future? As I write these words, it strikes me that this is absolutely no longer just a question from a sci-fi film.
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