When David George Gordon passed away at seventy-six, the media rushed to crown him the visionary prophet of the western palate. The obituaries painted a neat, comforting picture of a misunderstood culinary pioneer who spent decades trying to convince a squeamish public that six-legged protein was the ticket to ecological salvation. He was hailed as the apostle of the bug burger, a quirky naturalist who saw the future where the rest of us saw a pest control problem.
It is a wonderful narrative. It is also entirely wrong. Also making news lately: The 135 Acre Legacy That Refused to Fall for Concrete.
Gordon was a brilliant science writer, a sharp humorist, and a consummate showman who wrote The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook with genuine affection for arthropods. But framing his life’s work as a failed revolution against western ignorance misses the point entirely. Entomophagy in the west is not a misunderstood movement waiting for the right marketing campaign. It is a solution looking for a problem that consumers have rejected with brutal, consistent economic finality.
For the past decade, venture capitalists, sustainability consultants, and eco-futurists have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into insect farms, cricket protein bars, and mealworm pasta startups. Nearly all of them have quietly burned through their cash reserves or pivoted to pet food. The public does not want to eat bugs. Pretending this aversion is a simple cultural hurdle we can lecture people out of is the height of elitist delusion. Additional information on this are covered by Apartment Therapy.
The Evolutionary Wall We Refuse to See
The standard pro-insect argument rests on a lazy comparison. Billions of people across the Global South eat insects daily, the argument goes, so westerners are simply culturally conditioned bigots who need to expand their horizons.
This argument collapses the moment you examine human biology and anthropology. In many tropical and subtropical regions, insects are seasonal, high-density calorie harvests that naturally emerge in massive swarms, making them calorically efficient to gather. In contrast, western agricultural traditions developed around high-yield cereal grains and large ruminants that convert cellulose into dense, nutrient-rich muscle mass.
More importantly, disgust is not a quaint social construct. It is an evolutionary adaptation. Humans evolved an acute aversion to crawling, rotting, spore-laden vectors of disease for a very good reason: survival. Chitin, the structural material making up the exoskeletons of insects, is notoriously difficult for humans to digest and can trigger allergic reactions eerily similar to shellfish allergies. Furthermore, insects carry parasites and pathogens that have evolved alongside arthropods for millions of years.
Telling a consumer that they should ignore millions of years of hardwired biological aversion because a PowerPoint presentation claims cricket flour has a lower carbon footprint is a masterclass in tone-deaf marketing. Humans eat with their emotions, their history, and their sensory apparatus. You can disguise cricket powder in a protein bar all you want, but at the end of the day, the consumer is paying a premium for a product that tastes faintly of damp earth and triggers an existential shudder.
The Spreadsheet That Stole Common Sense
Let us look at the math behind the industrial insect fantasy. Proponents love to cite feed-conversion ratios. Crickets require a fraction of the feed that cattle do to produce a pound of body mass. On paper, it looks like a slam dunk.
In reality, thermodynamics and industrial scaling are stubborn beasts. Cows eat grass, agricultural byproducts, and cornstalks that humans cannot touch. They turn sunshine and pasture into steak. Industrial crickets, however, are routinely fed high-grade chicken feed, soy, and grain. When you feed high-quality agricultural inputs to insects in a climate-controlled warehouse that requires constant energy to maintain tropical temperatures and humidity, the supposed environmental advantage evaporates faster than morning dew.
I have watched green-tech founders burn through millions trying to automate cricket harvesting. It turns out that manually sorting, washing, killing, roasting, and milling millions of fragile, cannibalistic, disease-prone jumpers is a logistical nightmare. Disease outbreaks in mass-rearing facilities wipe out entire colonies overnight. The capital expenditures required to run a sterile, high-output insect factory rival those of traditional food production, without any of the consumer demand to back it up.
When you factor in processing costs, flavoring agents required to mask the earthy funk, and the marketing spend necessary to convince someone to eat a grasshopper instead of a chicken breast, the economics are utterly upside down. It is an expensive hobby for venture funds masquerading as a planetary savior.
The Real Legacy of David George Gordon
Gordon understood something that his corporate disciples missed entirely: bugs were fun.
His contribution to culture was never about saving the planet from impending starvation. It was about curiosity. He was the guy who could make a room full of squeamish adults laugh by serving chocolate-chirp cookies at a museum lecture. He approached nature with a sense of wonder that bridged the gap between entomology and entertainment.
To turn him into a solemn martyr of sustainability is to strip away his wit and replace it with humorless corporate greenwashing. Gordon did not write his cookbook because he calculated the carbon offset of a roasted cicada. He wrote it because he thought nature was fascinating, weird, and worth chewing on.
When we institutionalize his whimsy into an ESG metric, we kill the joy. We transform a delightful eccentric into a pitch deck for an über-wealthy tech founder who wants us to eat bugs while they fly private jets to climate conferences.
Where Do We Actually Go
If we genuinely care about sustainable food systems, we need to stop looking for silver bullets in warehouse-farmed six-legged novelties.
The path forward is not found in convincing Westerners to swallow mealworms. It is found in fixing the systems we already have. It means scaling regenerative grazing, where ruminants actually restore soil microbiomes and sequester carbon. It means supporting regional, diversified agriculture that respects the ecological carrying capacity of local biomes. It means recognizing that food is cultural identity, community, and comfort, not just a spreadsheet of amino acids and carbon equivalents.
If you want to eat a cricket because you enjoy the crunch, go ahead. David George Gordon would have poured you a drink and applauded your adventurous spirit. But stop pretending that mass-producing creepy-crawlies in indoor factory farms is the future of human nutrition.
The bug revolution failed because humans are human, biology is stubborn, and marketing cannot rewrite evolution.
Pass the steak.
