Cricket. It’s what’s for dinner.
At least that’s what lefty environmentalists are pushing as a substitute for meat like beef, pork or chicken. All for the sake of the environment. Yum.
The Yale Climate Connections March 18 podcast claimed insects are a more environmentally friendly source of food than meat. [1] Left-wing media sites Think Progress [2], Vox and Huffington Post [3] have also promoted this idea. In the Yale podcast, Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz said that “the meat industry depends on antibiotics and fossil fuels, and sometimes deforestation for crops and pasture.”
For those reasons, he recommended farming “edible insects like crickets, mealworms, and waxworms” as a “low-impact” alternative. Although Leiserowitz admitted eating insects might be “a lot to swallow,” he urged listeners try to “get past the gag reflex and consider the benefits.”
He promoted bug-eating author Daniella Martin who argued, “if you can just get past the stigma, they’re often delicious.” The sheer volume of horror and scary sci-fi films about bugs illustrates the average person will squirm or even retch at the thought.
Martin wrote Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet and has a website, Girl Meets Bug [4]. On her site, Martin said she had “tasted over 35 different species, including those that are venomous, squishy, slimy, and even alive.” Alive? Someone alert PETA.
Liberals have been attacking meat in the name of environmentalism for some time. Singer, songwriter and electronic music legend Moby expounded [5] on his vegan views in a Sept. 29, 2014, op-ed for The Huffington Post saying, “We can do this. We have to. Our reliance on animal agriculture is literally killing us and ruining our climate and our planet.”
Goveg.com, a pro-vegetarian Web site, enlisted [6] rock stars Paul McCartney and Chrissie Hynde to go after the meat industry as “one of the leading sources of the greenhouse gases that lead to global warming.”
Substituting insects for beef or chicken is nutty, but some activists have far more extreme views about how to improve the planet. London’s Daily Express [6] one wrote a screed against pet ownership, complaining that a “medium-sized dog has the same carbon impact as a Toyota Land Cruiser driven 6,000 miles a year.” The media lauded “No Impact Man,” a Manhattanite trying to live as backward a life as possible for a year, right down to refusing to use toilet paper.
Founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society Paul Watson is even more extremist. He has said humans [7] were a “virus” on planet Earth and declared that we need to “re-wild the planet.” The former star of Animal Planet’s Whale Wars made it clear he wants humans to die off and for the human population to drop below 1 billion. That would require the death of about 6 billion people.