Food giant enters insect market

Tyson Foods last week announced its foray into the insect protein market by partnering with Netherlands-based bug food manufacturer Protix.

In addition to a cash investment in Protix, Tyson Foods announced that the two companies have agreed to build a large facility which will be used to make bug food.

“The to-be-built facility in the U.S. will house an enclosed system to support all aspects of insect protein production including the breeding, incubating, and hatching of insect larvae,” said Tyson Foods in a statement Tuesday. “In addition to ingredients for the aquaculture and pet food industries, processed larvae may also be used as ingredients within livestock and plant feed.”

Protix, which in 2015 was selected as one of the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers, manufactures approximately 14,000 metric tons of bug food per year under the pretext of “fighting climate change.” Eating insects for the weather is a practice heavily pushed by globalist governments and the World Economic Forum, which has anticipated the day when “we can all buy a bag of edible insects at our local grocery store.”

Earlier this year the European Union approved the use of cricket powder in major processed foods sold to the public. In Australia, children are being fed crickets and conditioned to enjoy them as a snack. Frontline News reported in September 2022 that 1,000 Australian schools have added chips containing “eco-friendly” crickets to their canteens. In one video, three Australian school children can be seen eating the insect-laced snacks and being conditioned in real time by adults behind the camera. 

In July 2022 Canada’s government announced a C$8.5 million ($6.5 million) investment in a new production plant that will produce cricket protein for pet and human food. Located in London, Ontario, the facility is expected to house four billion crickets and produce 13 million kilograms of cricket protein per year.

Germany is currently searching for the most effective ways to persuade the public to eat bug food. In August the German government funded a study on how to convince people to eat insects.

The researchers conducted two experiments involving 665 participants to test whether they could increase the participants’ willingness to eat bugs through utility-value intervention (UVI). UVI is an interactive exercise which is geared to make subjects think about how a particular concept is relevant to their lives. The technique has been used successfully in education, where UVI has students contemplate the relevance of a variety of concepts to them, thereby promoting value and triggering their interest in closing the knowledge gap.

In the first experiment, 280 participants were asked to write a short essay about the relevance of eating insects to their lives or others:

Edible insects have gained a large amount of media attention recently. The reason for this is due to the need to find an alternative protein source that is more environmentally sustainable than current meat production practices. It is widely agreed that insects have the potential to fulfil this need, however many people are still unaware of this. During this experiment you will be asked to search for information on edible insects that is readily available on the internet. Specifically, we ask that you conduct a web search to find information on the benefits of eating insects.

Please conduct a web search and type a short essay (1–3 paragraphs) describing the potential relevance of eating insects, to your own life and the lives of others, please focus on how this information could be useful to you or others and give examples.

Other participants who were randomly siphoned into a control group were asked to write a short essay about “healthy and sustainable diets.” Both groups were then shown images of bug-infested foods alongside similar-looking regular foods and were asked to rate their willingness to try them.

The subjects from the value intervention group were significantly more willing to try the insect food. Furthermore, when they were brought back a month later and shown other images of insect food, they maintained their willingness to try them.

But the researchers, seeking the most efficient method of convincing the public at large to eat bugs, sought to determine if people must actually contemplate their insects' relevance to them or if simple exposure to insect food would be sufficient.

So, in the second experiment, the researchers changed the control condition so that instead of the participants writing an essay on a “healthy and sustainable diet,” they were asked to compose a food recipe containing insects.

In this case, both groups rated the images similarly, exhibiting a similar willingness to try bug food. The same was true a month later, suggesting that simply exposing people to the concept of bug food increases their willingness to try it.

“[T]hese results suggest that it may not be the increase in perceived value driving this attitudinal change but rather exposure to insects as a food,” concluded the researchers. 

The study was followed by another published last week from the University of Bristol which similarly found that university students, when presented with descriptive texts about other university students eating and enjoying insects, were more likely to eat bugs.