Bugs are small, they get around, they like our food, we need them for their pollination skills and there are just so damn many of them. And because of all this, we are killing them constantly — especially in agriculture. Yet they meet the vegan qualifications for suffering consideration and rights.
This is a problem.
Recently I’ve seen a couple of vegan blogs criticizing conscientious meat eaters for not eating insects, which are the most environmentally friendly and likely the most healthful animals to eat. Vegansaurus! recently had a post sarcastically endorsing bug eating, and Robert at PaleoVeganology is always calling out caveman diet followers on the dearth of creepy crawlies in their paleolithic aspiring food choices.
You might think this means that vegans are more okay with eating insects than other sorts of animals, but most vegans aren’t actually that thrilled when someone calls their bluff and goes vegan except for Jiminy Cricket.
A vegan who was considering an entomophagic deviation from the standard vegan line posted his idea to reddit/vegan, telling vegans of the Internet that he was looking for a higher quality source of protein than vegan food that was ethical, and thought raising mealworms in his backyard and stir frying them might be the answer.
There were a couple of supportive voices in the ~100-comment thread, but mostly what he got were stern reminders about vegan foods that are considered high in protein. Instead of growing bugs off of his rotting food scraps, he should be eating: tempeh, spirulina, beans, corn, rice, pea protein powder, seitan and Daiya cheeze sandwiches, BBQ seitan sandwiches, tofu, nut butters and/or nutritional yeast.
When an entomophagy sympathizer would point out that it kills more insects to grow and transport these foods than it would kill to raise insects off compost and eat them directly, the specter of intent was raised.
: As far as the ethics go, few people are eating 100% organic pesticide-free food. How is [eating insects] less vegan in any way?
m4124124: Because you are talking about very intentionally and needlessly exploiting animals. You are viewing animals as things to use. It is the very opposite of veganism. Veganism isn’t about “minimal impact eating”, though a lesser impact is a benefit. It’s about respecting other animals enough not to exploit them when you can avoid it.
Ahh, intent. Since animals probably can’t appreciate our respect for them when we kill them (a fact that vegans usually appreciate when they are castigating meat eaters for putting the deer they just shot in their prayers), can we really say that good intentions justify eating pea protein powder instead of bugs when we know that more insects are going to be killed in the growing, processing, packaging and transportation of pea protein powder than are going to be killed from eating the mealworms outside your door? Is that sort of willful ignorance intent really better than the intent of the non-vegan who kills animals with the explicit goal of killing fewer than veganism kills?
If so, veganism has some puzzling priorities. It’s not about what happens to the animals, but about how we feel about what happens to the animals. It’s worth it to kill more of them in order to congratulate ourselves for not quite as intentionally killing them. Sorry, animals — it makes us feel guilty when we have to actually see your dead bodies, so we’ll kill more of you because we can commit those murders offstage.
Intent is a hollow excuse when you know the unintentional consequences of your actions. We predictably instigated a bloody mess in Iraq, but at least our intention was to take out a murderous dictator, right? But if vegans insist on using intent anyway, meat eaters get to use it too. Just as vegans know that animals are going to die in order for them to eat vegetables, meat eaters know animals are going to die for them to eat meat. The meat eater goal (like the vegan goal) is not animal killing — the goal is food. Since killing the animals is not the intention, then, it is okay for them to kill animals to eat meat.
So despite the vegan attempt to intent the insect problem away, the massacre of insects in vegan agriculture is an issue for vegans who want to give animals rights. If they wanted to try to respect those rights, they would at a minimum have to be freegan. Ideally, they would become breatharians (being sure to wear masks over their mouths to prevent the inhalation of rights-bearing bugs) or seriously consider going back in time and preventing their parents from ever meeting and having intercourse, thus sparing the animal world their harm-inducing existences.
There might be a temptation, then, for some vegans to be at peace with killing insects. Since vegans kill insects every day, this would seem like a good plan. But this raises additional problems. If vegans discriminate against bugs by withholding from them their natural rights, vegans are being speciesist. And according to many vegan proponents, speciesism is as bad as every other discriminatory ism (save for anti-veganism, which is the worst of the worst). Plus, if you can be speciesist against insects with sentience — the only morally relevant characteristic, according to many vegan theorists — then there is no basis for prohibiting discrimination against any other species of animal.
Vegans could revise their stance a little and say that while insects might be sentient, they don’t actually experience pain, and not causing pain is what veganism is really all about. But then it becomes okay to kill any animal, as long as you do it painlessly. Vegans could then say that it’s not about pain, but rather that insects don’t amount to much in the scheme of things and thus don’t have lives that are particularly worth protecting. But that could just as easily excuse the killing of lambs, cows, pigs, fish and chickens too.
The best strategy for vegans is to ignore the insect question entirely, except to occasionally dare meat eaters to eat mealworms and hope they don’t really do it.
