(The Defender)—While regulators in non-U.S. countries, including Singapore, have issued approvals for specific insect-based foods, in the U.S., the regulatory landscape is murkier — there is no legal approval process or clear-cut prohibition of insects for human consumption.
As a result, insect-containing foods have reached U.S. consumers, even though one of the few existing U.S. laws that address insects in the food supply refers to them as “filth” and a form of “adulteration.”
Crickets and grasshoppers reach U.S. consumers in a variety of forms, from protein bars to protein shakes. They’re also found on restaurant menus and are promoted as pet food and animal feed ingredients.
With few U.S. regulatory barriers to contend with, investors like Bill Gates and Big Food giants such as Tyson Foods have also begun investing in “alternative protein” startups — despite mainstream media “fact-checks” claiming Gates doesn’t support the consumption of insects.
Internist Dr. Meryl Nass, founder of Door to Freedom, told The Defender lax U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations — under which many insect-containing foods can be classified as “Generally Regarded as Safe” (GRAS) — “means they don’t require testing” and enable the FDA to “look the other way.”
“How long will it take before we learn whether these foods are safe? It could take generations,” Nass said.
Gates, U.S. military among backers of ‘alternative protein’ startups
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations program in 2012 funded All Things Bugs, a project to “develop a novel food product made from insects to treat malnutrition in children from famine stricken areas of the world,” according to Eurasia Review.
All Things Bugs has since expanded into the development of genetically modified insects. With funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “we are using CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and other methodologies to develop base technologies for creating insects as a new bioresource,” the company states.
DARPA is a research and development agency that operates under the U.S. Department of Defense.
All Things Bugs said that while insects are “a very sustainable source of protein,” it “is innovating to make them a feasible commodity for the food industry.”
Claire Robinson, managing editor of GMWatch, told The Defender, “With all GMOs [genetically modified organisms], including insects, it’s vital that they are subjected to a pre-marketing risk assessment for health and the environment.”
Robinson said, “This includes testing them for the presence of pathogens, possible allergens and substances that may be toxic to humans. Then they must be clearly labeled for the consumer.”
Gates’ investments in insect-based foods appear to be part of a broader strategy to invest in alternatives to animal-based foods for consumers.
In a February blog post, Gates said he invested in Savor, a startup producing butter made from air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen). And in 2022, the Gates Foundation awarded a $4.76 million grant to Nature’s Fynd, a startup producing foods containing fungi-based protein. In 2020, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, founded by Gates, invested in Nature’s Fynd.
The U.S. government’s National Science Foundation (NSF) also is involved in the insects-as-food space, through its funding of the Center for Environmental Sustainability through Insect Farming (CEIF). Established in 2021, CEIF seeks “to develop novel methods for using insects as feed for livestock, poultry, and aquaculture.”
Institutions participating in CEIF include Texas A&M University, Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis and Mississippi State University — along with Tyson Foods, Protix and Innovafeed, backed by food processing giant ADM, formerly the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company.
Insect protein start-ups raised ‘over $1 billion in venture capital since 2020’
The production of insects for human food is expanding in the U.S. and globally, with support from the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF).
In 2013, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released a seminal report, “Edible insects: future prospects for food and feed security,” which promotes the environmental and nutritional benefits of insect consumption.”
A 2022 WEF paper, “5 reasons why eating insects can reduce climate change,” suggests people are “conditioned to think of animals and plants as our primary sources of proteins … but there’s an unsung category of sustainable and nutritious protein that has yet to widely catch on: insects.”
According to a November 2023 Washington Post report, “Insect start-ups have raised over $1 billion in venture capital since 2020.”
A 2021 report by Netherlands-based Rabobank claimed the demand for insect protein, “mainly as an animal feed and pet food ingredient, could reach half a million metric tons by 2030, up from today’s market of approximately 10,000 metric tons.”
A report by Grand View Research forecasted the global insect protein market will expand by an annual compound growth rate of 16.9% by 2030, while European projections estimate “the number of Europeans consuming insect-based food will [reach] a total of 390 million by 2030,” according to EuroNews.
Ynsect, for instance, has built factories in France and the Netherlands, and is erecting factories in the U.S. and Mexico, according to Feed Navigator. The company claims its insect-producing farms are “climate positive,” “benefit biodiversity” and are aligned with the Paris Agreement and the European Union’s “Fit for 55” goal.
In March 2022, Ynsect acquired Nebraska-based Jord Producers — a mealworm farm. And in December 2022, Ynsect signed an agreement with U.S. flour milling company Ardent Mills to build a factory in the Midwestern U.S. Ardent Mills is a joint venture between ConAgra Foods, Cargill and CHS, a global agribusiness cooperative.
Investors in Ynsect include actor Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition and France’s Crédit Agricole bank — along with support from the FAO and the European Commission. The company has raised over $600 million.
Celebrity chefs also are embracing insect food. In November 2023, the Financial Times featured Joseph Yoon, founder of Brooklyn Bugs, whose “goal is to popularise edible insects and build up this food source to help support global food security.”
Your dog can eat insects, too
In addition to a lack of FDA regulations governing the use of insects in foods for humans, the FDA also does not regulate the use of insects for pet food ingredients.
According to Animal Frontiers, “pet food is under the nongovernment Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO)” in the U.S. In January, French firm Ynsect became the first company to receive AAFCO authorization for commercial production of mealworm protein for dog food in the U.S.
In October 2023, Big Food giant Tyson Foods announced the acquisition of an ownership stake in the Dutch insect ingredient producer Protix. Tyson said the new joint venture would construct “the first at-scale facility of its kind to upcycle food manufacturing byproducts into high-quality insect proteins and lipids which will primarily be used in the pet food, aquaculture, and livestock industries.”
Although the announcement did not definitively exclude the production of insect-containing foods for humans, a Reuters “fact check” published in May stated, “Tyson Foods does not put insects into products for human consumption.”
Tyson has invested in Upside Foods, which in June 2023 won approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to produce lab-grown chicken. Upside garnered more than $600 million in research and development investments, including from Gates, Richard Branson, Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk and Cargill.
Vanguard and BlackRock, the world’s two largest institutional investment firms, are also the two top institutional holders of Tyson Foods shares. BlackRock, and its CEO, Larry Fink, have promoted “sustainable” corporate practices.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Are there any ex-military snipers willing to do humanity a favor, and draw a bead on Gates head? We need you folks now more than ever.
Why genetically modify insects when they are naturally very easy to propagate?
Surely with all the grey matter that Bill Gates has he could come up with a better idea that eating bugs????
How about hydroponics on steroids
Bugs are bad enough but,Genetically modified? They won’t even let us buy raw milk which I drank for many years right out of the milk tank and,I never got sick and it had way more nutrients than pasteurized .