Paper short abstract:

In the American Midwest, an emerging niche economy of cricket farming and consumption relies on assertions that insect consumption is a revival of a Biblical practice, while simultaneously gaining support through its promise to revive “the family farm,” a social formation feared to be going extinct.

Paper long abstract:

Around the world, there are longstanding traditions of insect consumption. People who have migrated to the United States have carried these traditions with them. But in the U.S. generally, insects are still more likely designated “pests” than “food.” Though crickets have been raised in this country as fishing bait since the 1940s, it is only in the past ten years that people have begun to farm them for human consumption. Today, crickets are being raised and promoted as an “alternative protein.” They are mentioned in the same hopeful breath as plant-based and cell-cultured meat, by people eager to create more sustainable food systems in the face of climate crisis. Based on ethnographic research working at a cricket farm in central Iowa, this paper examines the current emergence of a “third world” insect-based food system in the “heartland” of American industrial agriculture. It argues that the emergence of this niche economy relies on assertions that contemporary insect consumption is a revival of an ancient Western practice, while simultaneously gaining support through its promise to revive social formations – like “the family farm” – feared to be going extinct. The paper shows how peoples’ attempts to secure the future of food reveal their present anxieties, not only about ecological crisis, but about shifting demographics and modes of labor; changing relationships between north and south, urban and rural, and humans and animals; and the death of a figure at the core of American national mythology: the hardworking, resilient farmer.