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Why is the government pushing bugs onto our plates?

Why is the government pushing bugs onto our plates? Why is the government pushing bugs onto our plates?

People in the United States are slowly moving toward consuming more plant-based foods. A study examining people’s dietary patterns found that between 2019 and 2022, the percentage of consumers who followed some sort of plant-based diet more than doubled. While the consumption of animal products is not going away anytime soon, the marketplace is making plant-based options tastier and more readily available for consumers who want these choices. 

Why, then, is the government spending millions of dollars trying to get people to eat bugs and feed insects to our animals? 

Toward the end of 2024, the Biden administration’s Department of Agriculture granted $11.8 million to InnovaFeed, a French company dedicated to using insects to feed crops, animals, and people. The grant came through the USDA’s Fertilizer Production Expansion Program, which aims to expand bug-based fertilizer production in the U.S. InnovaFeed will put the money to work at the company’s plant in Decatur, Illinois, turning bug parts and excrement into crop fertilizer. 

It gets worse. InnovaFeed received not just federal funding for fertilizer innovation but also at least $1.5 million in tax credits from the state of Illinois to build out its Decatur facility to advance insect protein development. Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) praised the company, commenting, “Innovative, exciting new approaches to agricultural and environmental challenges are what Illinois is all about, from the invention of the farm silo to global leaders like Innovafeed.” 

A foreign company receiving both state and federal taxpayer dollars to push insect products onto people is problematic. However, InnovaFeed isn’t the only insect-focused company that receives taxpayer dollars and government support. The USDA has given millions of dollars in grants to other companies through FPEP. The federal government has also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars subsidizing “research” into the best ways to grind crickets into protein, expenditures that were recently highlighted as government waste. The National Science Foundation awarded $2.2 million to advance the use of insects as food. 

Taxpayer money should not be used to subsidize insect farming. Through these subsidies, people transitioning toward plant-based and cruelty-free diets are being forced to pay for the production of animal products. And, even though animal welfare advocates and the agriculture industry often clash when debating the role of agriculture subsidies, propping up the market for insect protein doesn’t help farmers and ranchers either. 

“At the end of the day, many farmers in America are struggling to make ends meet,” said Kelly Lester, a policy analyst at the John Locke Foundation’s Center for Food, Power, and Life. “Government subsidies already favor mega-farms; the last thing small and midsize farmers need is wasteful spending on useless endeavors.”

Even if the U.S. stops subsidizing the use of insects for direct human consumption, many people would still argue that insects are a sustainable, affordable food source for livestock and pets. At the Wilberforce Institute, a think tank advancing market solutions for animal welfare, we believe better and more innovative options exist. One example is the work being done by the Centre for Feed Innovation. 

CFI is working to develop safe, sustainable, and scalable solutions for animal feed. It works with novel feed ingredients that can help reduce the environmental effects of raising farm animals. Such novel ingredients include micro and macroalgae, plant-based proteins, and single-cell proteins (such as fungi). Innovative solutions, such as those developed by CFI and other companies, could move us away from the assumption that insect-based animal feed is the future of the agriculture and pet food industries. 

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Novel plant-based feed ingredients are something consumers, whether plant-based or still eating animal products, could get behind. These solutions could reduce the price of animal feed while eliminating practices such as “garbage feeding,” where animals are fed actual trash, making animal products healthier for consumers who buy meat.

People deserve to be able to make food choices for themselves, and our taxpayer dollars should not subsidize insect protein. If consumers want to eat bugs or feed them to their animals, market demand will increase. Our lawmakers should not manipulate the market into embracing insect protein. 

Kelvey Vander Hart is a senior fellow at the Wilberforce Institute

This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com

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