Garbage Dinner Bugs

The story goes that president Theodore Roosevelt was eating breakfast one morning in the White House while reading Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel, The Jungle, about the meatpacking industry in Chicago at the turn of the 19th Century. Reaching Chapter 14,  T.R. read the following passage:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausages… old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white... would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms.... and thousands of rats would race about on it.... there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

He promptly stood up and threw his plate of sausages out of the window. The passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act -- signed into law by Roosevelt in 1906 -- was immediately downstream from those sausages flying out of the White House. The intent of the act was to ensure that Americans had clean, unadulterated, healthy food. Thanks Teddy!

Except now, another act of the White House seems poised to push us in the opposite direction. The Daily Caller reports that the Biden administration is funding a study to see if bugs fed on landfill garbage can be harvested for human consumption to help alleviate the chimera of “climate change.”

The $130,000 grant supports research that “addresses the need for more cost-efficient production of crickets as a sustainable protein source,” according to the listing. Specifically, the grant will support research into using municipal landfill waste to feed crickets that will later be harvested for human consumption.

While mainstream media outlets are fond of saying that the plan to get us all eating bugs is a “conspiracy theory,” that's a hard claim to make once it’s got federal funding behind it.

Yummy, yummy, yummy, I've got cicadas in my tummy.

What do we find in landfills on which our study bugs will be fed? Well, we don’t find the organic vegetables, free-range chicken and grass-fed beef on which our betters dine at Davos. According to a Science Daily report on "dangerous landfill pollutants":

Nearly 2,000 active landfills are spread across the U.S., with the majority of garbage discarded by homes and businesses finding its way to a landfill. The resulting chemicals and toxins that build up at these sites can then leach into soil and groundwater, and this "leachate" can present serious hazards to the environment and to the people who live nearby.

So let’s feed it to our food? Filtered through soil and sand, this stuff remains toxic. I daresay that filtering it through the digestive tract of an insect is unlikely to improve the situation, to say nothing of parasites that may be found in the gut of these insects moving to our gut. I've done quite a lot of farm work in my time, and have slaughtered and butchered dozens of cattle and hundreds of hogs. Given a choice, I’d eat insects consuming the fresh offal from a slaughter over bugs fattening on the top 40 most toxic compounds [found in landfills] included pesticides, fungicides, pharmaceuticals, and industrial byproducts, like those from cigarettes, coolants, lubricants, and flame retardants.

How's that for a Jungle? Upton Sinclair, call your office.