The bugs-for-food industry is indeed struggling badly, and the ethical question about insect sentience isn’t new or fringe—it’s a live scientific debate that predates the current collapse. – Mother Jones

The industry collapse is real and mostly economic Major outlets across the spectrum (Vox, Mother Jones) reported in early March 2026 that roughly a quarter of the ~20 largest insect-farming startups have gone bust or entered liquidation after ~$2 billion in total investment.

Why?

Not primarily ethics or “leftist regret.” It’s straightforward economics:

• Insect meal costs ~10× soybean meal and 3.5× fishmeal.
• Feed, energy, and scaling problems make it uncompetitive.
• Consumer demand for actual bug-based human food never materialized in the West (it’s mostly a novelty). The bulk of production was aimed at livestock feed, but even there the math doesn’t work well. motherjones.com

Markets rejected the “eat ze bugs” pitch faster than regulators or venture capital could prop it up. Cultural aversion to insects as staple protein is strong and persistent outside a few traditional societies.

The bugs-for-food industry (more precisely, large-scale insect farming for protein in human food or animal feed) has faced serious setbacks, with several high-profile failures driving headlines about a “collapse” in early 2026.

Key developments include:

• French company Ÿnsect, once the sector’s flagship (raised over $600 million, backed by figures like Robert Downey Jr. and significant public funds), entered judicial liquidation in late 2025 after struggling with financing and scaling issues. Its main facility shut down, though a smaller site may pivot to fertilizer production.
• Of the roughly 20 largest insect-farming startups (which collectively attracted around $2 billion in investment), nearly a quarter have failed or liquidated, accounting for almost half the total funding poured into the space.
• Other projects, like a planned large Tyson Foods-backed facility in Nebraska for black soldier fly larvae, remain on hold or scaled back.

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As bugs-for-food industry ‘collapses,’ one leftist wonders if it were an unethical endeavor all along since insects might be able to feel pain

From The American Thinker

By Olivia Murray

Fantastic news, and a reminder that “progressive” ideas deserve no consideration.

The good-news pieces are too far and few between, but this is one of them: Kenny Torrella at Vox (via Mother Jones) reports that the bugs-for-food industry is in a death spiral, and things are “collapsing” in grand fashion.

Feeding us bugs was “supposed to be the future,” a perfect humiliation ritual and solution to decimate what health we have left (water laced with microplastics and synthetic hormones and skies sprayed with a range of chemicals anyone?) all rolled into one, but the “global market” never showed up:

Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.

All told, shuttered insect farming startups account for almost half of all investment into the industry. “Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one insect farming CEO said late last year in a YouTube video.

And Vox can exclusively report that plans to build a large insect farm in Nebraska—a joint project between Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat company, and Protix, now the world’s second largest insect farming company—are indefinitely on hold.

(I wrote on that Tyson-Protix deal in 2023, an essay which can be found here.)

Now, I thought the bugs-for-food campaign was going to be successful—I’m happy to have been wrong thus far—because I’m well aware that the minds behind the scheme have an absolute arsenal of tools at their disposal to force our hands, and all the money in the world to see it through. However, I never thought the global market would come to the table willingly, and neither did Andrea Widburg, who quipped: “Bugs are for starving people living marginal existences. We’ll eat them after they make us starve; not before.”

But did they actually expect something different? How is that possible? Save a few self-loathing leftists, who in the first world prefers bugs to filet mignon or a ribeye?

Anyway, this is all well and good that things are going to poorly for the WEF crowd, but there’s another nugget in Torrella’s report that deserves attention, because it’s a good reminder that “progressive” ideas deserve no consideration or regard, and they really are the most abhorrent group of individuals:

Beyond the financial woes of the insect farming industry, some philosophers worry about the ethical implications of potentially farming tens of trillions of bugs for food, as emerging research suggests insects may well have some form of consciousness and hold the capacity to feel pain and suffer.

‘Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects,’ Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who leads the Foundations of Animal Sentience project at the university, told me last year.

For context, we’re talking about “fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets.”

Do these two individuals lamenting over a filthy little grub’s alleged sentience and supposed “capacity to feel pain” possess the same empathy to the lives of other nascent and developing creatures? Namely…humans?!

Since Torratella works for Vox, I highly doubt it.

What kind of deluded sicko considers it a worthier crusade to defend a bug’s right to life than a precious baby’s? I could be wrong, but after a quick search online, I could not find a single defense of the unborn written by Torratella.

Now I get it, most of us probably don’t need the reminder that the left and their ideas are completely idiotic and unworthy of recognition, but I feel compelled to routinely address it lest our considerate sides get the better of us, and we get sucked into believing we’re simply all informed and well-meaning, albeit with different, but equally valid perspectives and opinions; the two sides are not equal, and these people are completely unable to positively participate in the real world.