The invention of sliced bread, for all the acclaim it occasioned, offered little more than an ergonomic advantage. It spared mothers’ fingertips and accelerated the proliferation of the PB&J, but the ingredients in the humble loaf remained the same: flour, water, salt, and yeast. The big disruption in dough—the one we will litigate in the culture wars in perpetuity—has been less celebrated. As World War II concluded, 14,000-odd years after humans started eating bread, the industrial-agriculture giants changed the recipe, adding azodicarbonamide, potassium bromate, soy lecithin, and other additives whose names are hard to read and to pronounce. The flavor remained the same, more or less, but loaves became quicker to mass-produce and more resistant to mold. If certain thinkers on the right are to be believed, the product might now turn you gay.
In May, Ammon Blair, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank, was trying to get a college-aged kid to understand that the bread he eats isn’t really bread. A 42-year-old former U.S. Border Patrol agent with spiked dirty-blond hair, Blair had come to College Station to lead an event titled, provocatively, “Globalists Want You Eating Bugs.” He promised to educate his audience on an insidious threat to our way of life and equip it to fight back.
A decade ago, to address food insecurity, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations started pushing insects as a potential sustainable protein source—already eaten routinely in much of the world, packed with nutrients, and pleasantly crunchy when toasted or fried. In recent years many YouTubers and 4Chan users saw headlines on edible bugs and cooked them into conspiracy theories about how nefarious elites would begin foisting them on us as fare.
Blair started investigating food systems while serving as an intelligence analyst for onetime Fox Nation host Lara Logan, consuming, in his words, reams of center-left critiques of industrial agriculture. Later, while stationed in Georgia for the National Guard and looking to fill his free time away from his family, he worked on a regenerative farm. He then started sermonizing to the grassroots right on border issues, he said, but upon receiving a cease and desist notice from his employer, the Border Patrol, pivoted to discussing agriculture instead.
In College Station he spoke at the invitation of True Texas Project, a far-right political group on the front lines of the culture wars. It had given all guests—around thirty or so locals, mainly senior citizens—pocket Constitutions upon entry, useful for swatting bugs, perhaps, though it wasn’t clear how they might protect folks from eating bugs. Blair’s direction on how to resist that fate began, as in the Bible, with warnings about leavened bread.
After taking the mic, Blair asked the college-aged kid what brand of bread he ate. The 22-year-old mumbled that he wasn’t sure. His mom, beside him, chimed in: she bought Nature’s Own. Blair pounced on the answer. The bread’s recipe had changed so much since Mom was a kid that now it was practically Artificial’s Own. He asked audience members if they believed they were being poisoned. The crowd responded with a resounding chorus of yeses. He asked a follow-up: “Do you guys still eat it?”
Some rushed in with denials before a brave few offered bashful affirmatives, which were followed by a wave of disgruntled acknowledgments. It is far easier, after all, to expose a conspiracy than to resist it. “They feed us poison, so we buy their cures, whilst they suppress our real medicine,” Blair later opined, retrofitting an internet meme with archaic language.
Dressed in jeans, a brown vest, and a blazer, Blair spoke with the affect of a professor intent on scandalizing his students. He told a story of America’s abandonment of the family farm that he could have offered, with a similar reception, at a fruit stand in Berkeley: agrochemical and industrial-food producers had captured American politicians, including many on the right, and now their additives and pesticides were making us sick. His presentation traced recent history: from the creation of the League of Nations after World War I through the Dust Bowl and up to the weakening of antitrust laws during the Reagan era, which allowed multinationals to push out small agrarians. Legislators in both parties, businessmen, and bureaucrats in the U.S. had rejected “food from God,” he said, in favor of genetically modified, patentable “food from men.”
When it came time to name the responsible parties, Blair’s message veered away from the crunchy and toward the outright conspiratorial. The UN and major multinational food corporations, he argued, had ginned up climate change and COVID to induce a “great reset,” tightly controlling the food supply to establish worldwide autocracy. He described hippie farmers who believe in climate change as puppets, compared their alleged masters, the “climate zealots,” to Satan, and admonished them for “always [using] half-truths.” The plot’s chief masterminds, he explained, were “every three-letter agency” and most of the world’s biggest financial institutions. He told me that even right-wing organizations have called him a “tin hat” theorist, but he welcomes any “PowerPoint ranger” who disbelieves him to visit a farm and “see what is actually happening.”
For most of his lecture, Blair conspicuously avoided discussing the bugs that had piqued his audience’s interest. Finally, an hour in, he showed an image of a wide-eyed woman gawking at a bowl of crickets. A True Texan in the crowd, dressed in an American-flag shawl and wearing Texas-flag Crocs, whispered that she’d have nightmares for weeks.
After the meeting Blair would tell me that one of his friends from the military launched a cricket-based food-product company and that he doesn’t mind eating bugs—as a Mormon missionary in Malaysia he consumed them often. He just wants to make sure no one is forced to do so. His main focus of the talk, instead, was an apocalyptic vision. Elites would orchestrate mass inflation and a famine if President Joe Biden, then still the presumptive Democratic nominee, were reelected, and America soon would have no food. Even good Christian neighbors would raid one another’s farms for sustenance.
Blair advised his listeners that they could stave off that future by eschewing megacorporations and buying from local farmers, shaking hands with them “like in the old days before COVID.” Better yet, they should grow their own food. To that end, he suggested everyone go home and test the viability of the earth beneath their feet—by burying their tighty-whities. If a month later their underwear hadn’t been broken down by the worms and microbes present in healthy soil, he explained, they’d have to find somewhere else to grow produce; they had dirt, not humus.
Many on the right share Blair’s fears about the government dictating what Americans consume and buy. Senator Ted Cruz, for one, warns that Americans won’t be allowed to eat beef, will have to cook exclusively on electric stoves after all gas ones are impounded, and will be limited to two beers a week. Blair’s concern about famine is also shared widely—even by his enemies in the “global order.” The UN projects that we will need 50 percent more food by 2050 and that our current food system can’t meet that demand in a sustainable and equitable manner. We won’t be able to simply scale up our current agricultural system. Climate change will ravage crops in many parts of the world and shorten the life expectancies of livestock. That’s where insects come in.
The public sector wasn’t the first to propose the expanded use of bugs for food. In the early aughts, entrepreneurs realized that insect production could be industrialized—and that there was money to be made. The UN estimates that around the world, as many as two billion humans regularly eat insects, and we’ve discovered nearly two thousand edible species. For farmers, insects are also a far more economically efficient protein source than mammalian livestock: they convert what they eat to body mass much more quickly, they can sustain themselves on food waste from other animals, and they take up less space and require less water. They emit fewer greenhouse gases to boot.
Governments and international bodies have caught on quickly. To meet the second of the UN’s seventeen goals of sustainable development—which Blair dubs the seventeen goals of “enslavement”—countries have invested in insects as food. In 2021 the U.S. National Science Foundation awarded Texas A&M and two other universities a $2.2 million grant to establish the Center for Environmental Sustainability Through Insect Farming. Sixteen multinational companies, including Mars and Tyson Foods, also joined as member organizations.
The bug lab at A&M sits a ten-minute drive from the hotel conference room where Blair spoke. The day of his lecture, I toured the facility. Considering its part in a lofty mission of helping to stave off famine, it is unassuming—from the outside, it could be mistaken for a maintenance shed. In one cold room whose walls are lined with refrigerators full of unhatched insect eggs, a horde of larvae pulsed in a bin of decomposing vegetables, resembling a heartbeat.
Jeff Tomberlin, a bespectacled entomologist in a light blue polo, khakis, and loafers, boldly thrust his hand in and roiled the bin, revealing hundreds of writhing maggots breaking down food waste. He explained that the larvae—just a few of the 1.5 million housed in the lab—were those of black soldier flies. “The crown jewel of insects as feed,” he said with a smile, his tone admiring. In a greenhouse just outside, fully grown black soldiers, darker and longer than houseflies and with wings that rest tight to their bodies, traipsed in a cage, busily laying eggs. He told me that around 4 million larvae—four hundred cages’ worth of flies—can devour a hundred tons of food waste a day.
Tomberlin, a director of the multi-university center and of the lab at A&M, does not resemble the globalist villain many on the right envision. Soft-spoken with a Southern drawl and a corny sense of humor—a hand-drawn sign of two rodents on his door reads “Aw rats. You’re 50”—he grew up in rural Georgia, the grandchild of sharecroppers. He remembers scouring cornfields after farmers had burned the stubble to pick up charred ears to feed the animals on his family’s farm. On his office desk, he keeps a tin cup that one of the pigs had bitten, as a reminder to not discard anything that can be reused. He told me he regrets that he doesn’t get dirty enough anymore. “That’s the problem as you develop this stuff,” he said. “You become more of an administrator.”
Tomberlin’s colleagues at other universities study the rearing of crickets and mealworms—beetle larvae—for human consumption. At the center’s A&M outpost, he is studying the black soldier fly for use as a highly nutritious and efficient livestock feed. In the early aughts, Tomberlin created a method to colonize the flies at scale. He has also found a way to store its larvae long-term. Today, farms in at least six states breed the flies, and a company called Protix is investing in facilities that do so for livestock feed nationwide.
Tomberlin assured me that the goal of the center isn’t to force insects onto anyone’s plate. He doesn’t like eating them, though he tells me he respects those who do, just as he’s “supportive of people that are vegan.” He repeatedly reminded me that the interest in bugs as food is driven more by capitalism—you can make money farming them—than by government incentives. He told me the folks who react viscerally to the idea of eating bugs are typically those most removed from their food sources. Farmers like him know that insects have always dwelled in produce.
Indeed, Tomberlin explained, every American is already eating bugs. The Food and Drug Administration (three letters!) allows a certain quantity of insect parts—“filth,” as it dubs them—in some of the food we consume. Take a PB&J, for example. A serving of peanut butter is allowed to contain as many as 9.6 insect fragments. The wheat that goes into two slices of bread can contain more than one and a half insect parts per gram. The FDA doesn’t have guidelines for jelly, but the fruit in it can contain myriad insect parts. So in our typical sandwich, we could be eating about three dozen insect fragments. At least with the food products made from the insects that Tomberlin’s colleagues study, he noted, you’ll know you’re eating them.
Throughout most of our conversation, Tomberlin shrugged off the notion that the work of the Center for Environmental Sustainability Through Insect Farming faces political resistance. But after I mentioned the upcoming True Texas Project event, he admitted that Iowa senator Joni Ernst authored a newsletter last year identifying the center as an example of wasteful government spending, signing off with “Bug Appétit!” I asked whether it bothered him that his research is becoming a culture-war issue. “No,” he told me, adding with characteristic politeness as he smiled thinly, “I’m grateful for the platform to talk about what we do.”
The notion that our agriculture is failing us has gone mainstream—the disagreement, it seems, lies in what to do about it. In March I attended a screening of Common Ground, a documentary, narrated by six Hollywood stars, about the dangers that Big Ag, and politicians it has bought, poses to our health and that of the planet.
After the screening, codirector Josh Tickell told me that “the moral conscience of the country is waiting for [politicians] to do the right thing.” But when I asked him what regular folks could do to take on some of the largest companies in the world and a class of lawmakers available to the highest bidder, his response was unsatisfying. “The first thing we recommend for people to do is to watch the movie and share it with other people,” he said, hoping the screenings would encourage folks to support regenerative farms.
Many on the right, to their credit, have more empowering solutions. Blair, who’s seen Common Ground and found it lacking, offered a tangible call to action beyond mere awareness: don’t wait on the moral conscience of politicians; start tending to your fields.
His vision was easily more convincing. But I couldn’t so readily become a farmer. I’ve never been able to keep even a potted plant alive in my apartment. My part, it occurred to me, was to keep my tighty-whities on and instead sample some insects cultivated locally.
I opted for a lightly seasoned trail mix of bugs on a recent Tuesday evening. The dried insects—mealworms, grasshoppers, and crickets—came in three layers of protective plastic. They resembled potpourri but with a slightly smoky scent. I felt sick both reaching into the bag of bugs and pouring them on a plate, so I settled for picking at them with chopsticks.
Cricket tasted like—you guessed it—chicken. Kind of. But not in the way, say, that margarine tastes like butter. Listening to the crunch it made in my mouth, I could quite easily believe it was not poultry. The mealworms flaked like the skin of a peanut but didn’t taste like much beyond salt. After a few fitful bites, I had to stop—not because of the flavor but because I was eating with my eyes. I was struck by an idea. I spread peanut butter and jelly onto two slices of Nature’s Own whole wheat bread, sprinkled a few bugs in between, and dived in. It was nice, actually, not to know exactly what I was eating.
This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Let Them Eat Crickets.” Subscribe today.
