Rick McGinnis:
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Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I have eaten crickets – and many other bugs besides. There was a couple of culinary events for “foodies” showcasing not just insect ingredients but the skills of chefs tasked with making them palatable. And then there were trips to places where bugs are on the menu – like the escamoles (ant larvae) that topped a pozole in Mexico.
I can’t recommend eating insects with honest enthusiasm; the crickets stir-fried in north African spices were good, as were the escamoles, but the grubs and stick insects aren’t a palatable memory and I’d stay away from black ant sushi. (Not much flavour, and the spiny chitinous carapaces stick in the throat.) There are cultures that eat and enjoy insects; I’m just glad I come from the one that invented the hamburger.
Bug eating, as prescribed by the kind of people who want to control our lives as a way of “saving the world,” is ostensibly the target of Spanish writer and satirist Itxa Díaz’s book I Will Not Eat Crickets, but its real target is revealed in its subtitle: An Angry Satirist Declares War on the Globalist Elite.
Díaz, who has written for National Review, Daily Beast, Tablet, First Things, and Daily Caller among others, begins his book by talking about Davos, Klaus Schwab, and the World Economic Forum (WEF), but only shows real ire when he talks about the United Nations and its current Secretary General António Guterres, whom he describes as “a cross between Kofi Annan, Greta Thunberg, Bernie Sanders and Jim Carrey.”
“Guterres lives in a permanent state of anxiety, no doubt suffering both night and day terrors, and needs rest,” Díaz writes, going on to note that “a Google search with the words ‘Guterres’ and ‘alarm’ yields 12 million results, while a search with the words ‘Guterres’ and ‘pledges’ offers 94,800 bulls**t results. That’s all you need to know about the irrational and lunatic hysteria of the UN Secretary-General.”
There are many recent books that share the same targets as Díaz without his satirical tone, but you have to understand up front that his target—globalism—has had a sea change in its definition and its opponents in the last generation. Back when free trade was an article of conservative political faith, the globalist worldview was embraced by people who wanted to lower costs, broaden supply chains, and – as they sold it in a best-case scenario – export economic prosperity from first to third worlds as they offshored labour.
Like most ideal scenarios, it didn’t quite work out as planned.
Today globalization is at the top of the targets of populist conservatism, which has its greatest support wherever manufacturing was decimated, like the U.S. rust belt, and is embraced by the kind of people who oppose border policing and cling to the moral authority of international bodies like the UN – and to academics and activists who once wrote and read anti-globalist books like Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz’ Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) or Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999).
And both sides have described the goals and methods of their globalist enemies as a conspiracy – a program enacted by the unelected to enrich the lives of the powerful at the cost of everyone else, achieved with the connivance of corruptible elected politicians. Díaz insists that he doesn’t “much believe in globalist conspiracies, but I do believe in bad intentions. Guterres does not, I believe, head a globalist conspiracy, but he has worse intentions than I do when I approach a sexy blonde at the disco.”
The writer strives to emulate the tone of his hero, the late political satirist P.J. O’Rourke (to whom Díaz’s book is dedicated); that he largely falls short is something that he might even admit, with the qualification that he’s been translated from Spanish to English, and everyone knows that humour is one of the first things to get lost in translation.
When he finally gets around to talking about eating bugs, it’s part of a larger discussion about billionaire activists like Bill Gates investing in businesses like Beyond Meat while buying tens of thousands of acres of US farmland. The billionaire’s motivation – expressed as concerns about “climate change” – are as gnomic as a Rockefeller’s, as he pushes for legislation to discourage meat production using the access to politicians only a man like Gates can demand.
Díaz writes that “it never ceases to amaze me that someone who became rich, at least in apart, thanks to economic freedom and the spectacular demand for his Windows, now wants to further increase his fortune with government intervention that can artificially inflate the (almost non-existent) demand for synthetic meat in the First World.”
The push to replace meat with bugs as protein in our diets is based on one unprovable assertion—cows are the enemy of the environment—leading inevitably to an unprovable conclusion that it is both healthy and desirable for human beings to eat bugs in quantity. Its supporters claim to have science on their side but their motivation is substantially sentimental – the pangs of guilt and regret you might feel looking into the eyes of a lamb or cow or pig that you don’t when staring into a vat of mealworms.
The major obstacle to their utopian vision of bug-filled larders is the “ick” factor – a natural revulsion that is hundreds if not thousands of generations deep in western culture. A picture of an insect on a package in a supermarket doesn’t tempt the appetite; it’s a warning that the contents are meant for pest control and are probably poisonous. It will take a lot to overcome this, even with the weight of legislation, and is only making headway with subterfuge – like sneaking pulverized bugs as “protein meal” into ingredients lists of products. (Does anyone remember when companies were forced to admit that insects made their way into flour and other foodstuffs – but only by accident?)
So far attempts to replace meat and market bugs haven’t been successful; despite a massive marketing push, sales of Beyond Meat and its highly processed products have been disappointing. Tebrito, the Swedish company that processed mealworms into food, recently went bankrupt despite investments of 45 million Swedish krona.
There is also a widespread suspicion that the people who are so intent on making us eat bugs will also have the most to profit from grub wieners and beetle burgers – and will continue eating whatever scarce meat is still to be had in the privacy of their own well-fortified homes. You don’t have to believe in conspiracy theories to believe that privilege is jealously hoarded and greed is essentially human.
In the end Díaz’s message is that we “need more sovereignty – strong nations. Nations that are great again. Nations that – precisely because they respect themselves – are the best suited to respect others, to reach bilateral agreements based on common interests, and to create associations that are founded on shared objectives, not on the lunatic daydreams of a few enlightened messiahs barking from UN Headquarters, Davos, or Brussels.”
Which sounds like a plan until you contemplate the sorry state of our political class today who, at least in this country, consider their term in government as a resumé item on their way to a position in some international body, quango, ostensible “non-profit” or post at the UN. I don’t have a solution for this problem, and neither does Díaz. All I can say is stay away from the black ant sushi.