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Photo by Jair Cabrera/picture Alliance via Getty Images
While scrolling through New York, Times’ home page this morning, I spotted the headline “Cooking in the Time of Climate Change,” which was accompanied by a GIF featuring prep bowls and oil being poured into a hot pan. I clicked, thinking it was a recipe video — a seemingly safe assumption, as it appeared just a few inches below a similar GIF and the headline “24 Brilliant Baking Recipes to Change Your Kitchen Game.”
The headline on the actual article quickly revealed this fact. Times “Cooking” content. “The Joy of Cooking (Insects)” read the text hovering over rotating close-up images of fried bugs. Subhed: “Climate-conscious cooking means getting creative.” (Hours later, the home-page image was altered to a GIF of what appear to be crickets bouncing on a piece of bread, so perhaps I wasn’t the only reader confused on first blush.)
The piece, which serves as an introduction to an “Opinion” video, explains that the human population is increasing, driving up demand for food. But “agriculture, particularly the production of meat, is a big driver of environmental harm.” It continues,
Scientists warn that we cannot meet our climate goals if we don’t make significant changes to the food we eat, and how we produce it. A shift in dietary habits, including a reduction in meat consumption, would help ease the pressure on the environment and reduce global warming.
That’s where insects come in.
Okay, but couldn’t it also be where beans come in?
With more context, it’s somewhat clearer why plant-based protein sources are overlooked here. The accompanying 15-minute video on nascent efforts to incorporate more insects into a western diet is part of a series on how our “broken food system” contributes to climate change and the “three chances you get to help fix it — and save the planet — every day.” This involves “major adjustments to the food we eat and how we produce it.”
Should “we” — as in the human species — be investigating the use of bugs as an alternate source of protein? It seems smart and supposedly beneficial. 2 billion peoplePeople all over the globe are regularly enjoying crickets and the like. It could be an exaggeration). But do we — as in individuals reading the Times — We must get over our squeamishness towards eating insects to save the planet. This is not the right way to frame the discussion. It could backfire and make efforts to combat climate change seem too difficult for the average person to even try.
The TimesIt is not the only media outlet advocating a bug eating agenda. This is just one of many pieces that circulated. for some timeIn the past year, there have been stories in The Guardian asserted, “If We Want to Save the Planet, the Future of Food Is Insects”; Wired , “The Cicadas Are Coming. Let’s Eat Them!”; and WBUR declared, simply, “Why We Should All Eat Bugs.”
I am convinced that no one is being won over by these arguments, because they’re not working on me — and I’m their prime target. I was raised believing that a meal without meat was a meal. But my identity as a media executive from the coast eventually won me over. In a move that could not have been more clichéd, I started dabbling with a “flexitarian” diet (a.k.a. trying to eat more plant-based meals) in recent years after reading about Mark Bittman’s “Vegan before 6:00” diet and listening to a series of Ezra Klein podcastsThe moral, health, and environmental issues surrounding eating meat.
There were two factors that made Bittman and Klein’s arguments more palatable, both literally and metaphorically, than the pleas to go veg that I’d been rolling my eyes at for years. First, I had eaten Beyond and Impossible meat and found both to be genuinely tasty, unlike the gym mat-esque fake meat I’d previously encountered. They were also not suggesting that my inability of going vegan 100% was a moral failing. Conquering my aversion to vegetables as a main course wasn’t something I “must” do to “save the planet,” it was an easy thing I could try. I was motivated by the fact that I found a great chili made with beans. The thought of reducing climate change was a bonus.
Clearly, I am not a scientist or a climate-change expert; I’m just a lady who likes Beyond burgers and thinks shaming consumers for their individual choices (or Culturally ingrained dislike for bugs) is a dubious strategy for fighting climate change. There’s a 2018 Vox pieceThis is what I think about whenever I find myself chastising my self for forgetting to recycle or not trying mealworms. It asserts that climate change is not within the individual choices framework and offers this example:
If a Gen X climate activist cancels a family vacation in order to visit grandparents, the Earth won’t care if they do. It will not matter if a business executive decides that he or she will fly from New York to London only once a week, or once per month, instead of twice. It will only matter if All the wealthy travelers make the same decision, consistently, over time.
I appreciate the efforts made by the Times “Opinion” page to get people to collectively open their minds to bug consumption and anyone who decides they want to give locust succotash a shot. I refuse to believe that I have to give up eating bugs to care about the planet. At the moment, this is too big a leap for me, and I’m betting that’s true for most people. Let’s get more Americans into “Mondays without meat,” Impossible Whoppers, Veganism is imperfect first, and we’ll see where things go from there.
