Should We Be Eating Insects?

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I recently went to Mexico City for vacation, and I was surprised by how many restaurants served chapulines (or toasted grasshoppers). They were available in different formats, grounded into the rim on a Michelada (beer-based cocktail with spices), scooped onto a tortilla with guacamole, or served as a delicacy at a 2 Michelin Star restaurant (both Quintonil and Pujol).

Comparing insects against traditional meat

Naturally, I became curious about the nutritional profile of insects. For context, insect protein as a category is a graveyard for consumer VC. Yet, on a per-gram basis, insects are actually better than traditional animal protein. They contain all 9 essential amino acids, making them a complete protein. They excel in iron, zinc, magnesium, B12, and they provide micronutrients that you usually can’t get without vegetables.

On environmental metrics, crickets need 6x less feed than cattle. Land use is also a fraction compared to other animal proteins. If you designed a protein source from scratch to feed billions of people, you would probably come quite close to designing a cricket of some sort.

So why has a protein source this good never gone mainstream?

People don’t eat nutrients. They eat foods that carry meaning, memory, texture, and visual identity that the macro label cannot override.

The academic literature on Western insect acceptance is remarkably consistent on this point. A 2021 systematic review in Frontiers in Nutrition identified two dominant barriers across nearly every published study: food neophobia (the fear of unfamiliar foods) and disgust. Disgust, in particular, is a stable, hard-to-shift trait. It's triggered most strongly by visible "animalness" (e.g., legs, antennae, eyes, anything that signals "this used to crawl"). The more processed and unrecognizable the insect form, the higher acceptance climbs. Cricket flour outperforms whole crickets. Crickets baked into a chip outperform crickets sprinkled on top of one.

This is exactly what Mexico City's tradition does, almost incidentally. By the time chapulines reach your plate, they've been toasted, seasoned, and integrated into a dish whose grammar you already understand. The aesthetic load is distributed across the whole presentation.

There are many cautionary tales

In May 2025, Aspire Food Group, once the most-hyped insect protein company in North America, was placed into receivership by an Ontario court. Its 150,000-square-foot fully automated cricket facility in London, Ontario, was supposed to produce 13M kilograms of protein per year and prove that insect agriculture could go industrial. Instead, it ran at half capacity at best, never came close to its targets, and collapsed under roughly $44 million CAD in debt. About $35 million CAD of the funding had come from Canadian taxpayers via federal grants and Farm Credit Canada loans.

The companies that haven't collapsed have mostly retreated to the same niche: pet food and aquaculture feed. Dogs and farmed salmon don't have aesthetic objections. They eat what they're given. Pet food trials show acceptance rates above 80%.

Why you should care

I am skeptical that insect protein will ever be a meaningful piece of the Western diet, even though I think it logically should have a place. The nutrition and environmental case are both real.

People building these VC-based insect protein companies kept trying to win on macros, sustainability, and feed-conversion ratios, when the actual variable that mattered was aesthetics.

My own bet, if I were placing one, is that insect protein in the US will quietly succeed in three places: pet food (already happening), aquaculture feed (already happening), and as an invisible flour-type ingredient in mainstream packaged goods (slowly happening). The visible-insect-on-the-bag market will continue to be a graveyard.

In general, you’ll notice nutritionally excellent food will often fail to cross over because they ignore aesthetics (organ meats are another example). Macros don't do enough to move human behavior but plates do.

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