You might not have known, but a lot of people think you should be eating insects. Their arguments are legion: Edible bugs are better for the environment and can help slow climate change, they can alleviate malnutrition and ease food insecurity. Also, they’re delicious.

“June beetles are fantastic,” said MacKenzie Wade, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. “They truly taste like bacon.”

Wade, who farmed mealworms in her dorm room as an undergraduate at Kansas State University, is an unapologetic advocate for edible insects. Her interest in them, however, is far more than gustatory. Her research specializes in insects as food, and the cultural aversions to eating them.

That led her and Jeffrey Hoelle, an associate professor of anthropology and her graduate advisor, to do the first systematic review of research literature on edible insect production. “A review of edible insect industrialization: Scales of production and implications for sustainability,” in the journal Environmental Research Letters, challenges some of the assumptions about edible insects and their potential to combat climate change and inequality.

The researchers reviewed 66 articles from 2018, what they call “a watershed year in edible insect research.” They then analyzed several aspects of industrial insect farming, including microbiology, external production factors, product development, consumer acceptance, and the social and environmental dimensions of the industry.

Wade, the lead author, said nearly every paper was premised on the sustainability of insect farming, especially compared with industrialized animal production.

“But in the papers themselves,” she said, “there’s not a lot of grounded research being done on the actual sustainability impact of mass-rearing. That was one of the main disconnects that we saw.”

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