Insect farming is an emerging global industry with big ambitions. Our unsustainable food system needs an overhaul: we currently feed the vast majority of the world’s soya to farmed animals, producing protein highly inefficiently and at devastating environmental cost.
The solution, according to insect farmers, is to feed larger animals on ground-up insects, while feeding the insects on human food waste, replacing an environmentally destructive process with a form of recycling.
UK start-ups such as Entocycle, The Bug Factory, Cricket Factory, Instar Farming and Better Origin are at the leading edge of developing the technology to achieve this vision, vying with major European players such as Protix and Ynsect.
In all other kinds of animal farming, it’s accepted that welfare matters. It matters to the animals themselves, it matters to consumers (who want high-welfare products) and it matters to the bottom line of producers, who lose financially from having stressed-out, unhealthy animals and high rates of mortality. That doesn’t guarantee that welfare is always good or even adequate — far from it — but at least there are minimum standards, providing a floor we can try to lift upwards over time.
Insects go unprotected
Insect farming, by contrast, has no industry-wide welfare standards at all. Every company processes insects in its own way, leading to great variation. A few years ago, it was common to hear industry figures dismissing the idea of animal welfare altogether. I once heard an industry leader remark that insects were more akin to plants or fungi than to animals — a wildly inaccurate statement, since they are literally animals.
The culture of the industry is changing: the major companies now speak the language of welfare and claim they have high standards. Yet without an agreed, industry-wide code of practice, consumers can have no assurance that this is really the case.
One obstacle to a code of practice is that so little is known about the animals' welfare needs. After a period of experimenting with many kinds of insect, the industry seems to be settling on a small number of key species, especially the black soldier fly, the yellow mealworm beetle and the domestic cricket. Nearly all black soldier flies and mealworm beetles are slaughtered as larvae, with some allowed to transform into adults to produce the next generation.
Do insects feel pain?
Very little scientific work has been done on the welfare of the larvae or the adults. Basic questions (e.g. what temperature, humidity or stocking density parameters minimise stress for these animals? How can we protect them from infectious disease? What slaughter method is quickest and most humane?) still lack clear answers.
More research is needed - that’s why I was glad to be a founding member of the Insect Welfare Research Society, a group of researchers working together to close these evidence gaps.
Some say: it’s a mistake to worry about welfare at all for these animals, because they aren’t capable of suffering - they aren’t ‘sentient’. Even today, the website of a major company says “it is unlikely insects can experience pain”. I’m not sure why people ever found the idea of pain in insects unlikely - but, whatever the reason, scientific evidence is now starting to amass that suggests a realistic possibility of pain.
Two recent experiments by Matilda Gibbons (at the time a researcher at Queen Mary, University of London, associated with my ‘Foundations of Animal Sentience’ project) have been especially eye-catching.
In one, bumblebees were touched with a heat probe on their antenna and were observed to groom it afterwards, as though tending an injury. In another, they were given a choice of feeders: some had an extra-sweet sugar solution (normally preferred by the bees) but, to get access to it, the bee had to stand on a heat pad. When the heat was turned up, bees visited the feeder less often, more often choosing to avoid the unpleasant heat even if it meant settling for a less sweet reward.
Up to now, the evidence of pain mostly concerns bees, often seen as the brainy superstars of the insect world. But the brains of bees (though large in insect terms) are not drastically different from those of other insects, so there is a good chance that the brain circuitry supporting these experiences in bees is also present in other species. We should err on the side of caution here. Even insect larvae still have complex brains, so it would be hasty to completely dismiss the possibility of pain. However, we cannot generalise reliably from adults to larvae, so we need evidence specifically concerning the larvae. That’s one of the current goals of our new insect sentience project.
What are the main issues a code of practice should address? Sadly, adult black soldier flies (which are needed only for reproducing and do this only once) are usually starved to death. There seems to be a widespread belief in the industry that they don’t need to feed - but they have functional mouths and digestive systems and in the wild have been seen to feed on nectar. It troubles me that the industry, despite talking the talk on welfare, has been reluctant to take the simple step of providing adult flies with sugar solution.
With the larvae, the lack of any standards on slaughter is an obvious problem. When researchers need to kill an insect in a lab, the preferred method is usually immersion in liquid nitrogen, which is very rapid for a single tiny animal. In industry, a variety of much slower methods are used, including microwaving the larvae en masse for up to 15 minutes, roasting them in hot sand for up to 30 minutes or baking them in an oven on a low heat for as long as 24 hours.
We would not accept these methods for larger animals, and there’s no good reason to accept them for insects either. Grinding in an industrial grinder will kill most larvae quickly, but some may get stuck in the machine, potentially suffering for some time. Freezing is a popular method, but standard freezers are much slower than liquid nitrogen.
Animal welfare is sometimes presented as an airbrake on innovation. To me, this is entirely the wrong way to think about it. Good welfare is win-win-win: the animals benefit from living better lives, consumers benefit from reassurance that their values are taken seriously, and producers benefit from having healthier, less stressed animals. And the goal of high welfare creates opportunities to innovate.
UK startups already position themselves as technological innovators - if they can genuinely position themselves as welfare innovators too, the sustainability case for investing in their business will be stronger.
In other news, Food Manufacture looks at how the F&B industry is adapting to better serve the planet in this exclusive deep-dive.
