![]() “I have been getting shitty little comments from people, saying things like, ‘Bill Gates is trying to get us all to eat bugs while he eats all the beef,’ since I started my company,” recalled Dossey, who acknowledged that he once got a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grant to pursue entomology research. Such conspiracy theories have long featured novel food trends or science, like the rise of chemical additives or genetic modifications, as proof that these plots seek to control our very diets and biology. “Like fan fiction, these theories can change and morph over time to accommodate new circumstances and information, while retaining many of the same features,” Uscinski noted. These theories all claim that these elites want to dominate and harm the common people in order to consolidate and expand their wealth and power. But it is just the latest in a decades-long lineage of (often anti-Semitic) conspiracy theories that argue that a secretive group of wealthy elites pull all the strings in the world. The Great Reset did not exist a decade ago, of course. report came out, a bunch of grad students decided they were going to start insect food companies to help save the world,” said Aaron Dossey, who founded the insect food ingredient company All Things Bugs in 2011. The movement really kicked off in 2013, however, when the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization released a report backing the idea that garnered a ton of popular attention. In recent decades, sustainable food activists and researchers started to advocate bug eating in the West as a less environmentally damaging alternative to meat. ![]() Many American and European communities also ate insects on and off until the dawn of the 20th century, when a number of social forces, including classism and racism, denigrated those traditions into shameful obscurity. In most cases this is not because they are chronically desperate or coerced into eating bugs, but because insects are an abundant source of protein and, acculturated disgust aside, plenty of them actually taste pretty good. “It’s puzzling why there is this focus on insects as food in conspiracy theories at this moment,” Cheryl Preyer of the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture told The Daily Beast.Ībout two billion people across 130 nations have long-standing and active insect-eating traditions. The insect-based food industry, for its part, is utterly baffled by this development, in large part because they’ve been promoting their products as sustainable alternatives to meat for years without catching much paranoiac flak. Be Happy,” right next to a classic dystopian conspiratorial illuminati eye. There are even shirts and posters available on mainstream online retail platforms decorated with phrases like “Own Nothing. Believers have started creating Let Them Eat Bug memes. But for weeks now, waves of new stories have popped up on far-right sites arguing that the elites are coming for your beef, with a bag of bugs in hand.Ī fresh round of chatter about this imminent threat to the world’s dinner plates started up in conspiratorial social media circles in the closing days of January. ![]() We do not know exactly how many people buy into the Great Reset, according to conspiracy researcher and University of Miami professor Joseph Uscinski, much less how many believers buy this latest spin on the theory. As it has, its proponents have been increasingly consumed by a particularly bizarre notion: that sinister elites want to force ordinary people to stop eating meat and instead subsist on a diet of bugs while they sip champagne, eat steaks, and laugh at us all. The Great Reset has gained serious traction across the far right-especially in the wake of Joe Biden’s election victory and as nations struggle to respond to the third wave of the pandemic. But it broadly holds that a vague, shadowy cabal of global elites either engineered the pandemic or are opportunistically using it as a means to destroy everything good in the world-and build a post-crisis totalitarian dystopia in which average people live benighted lives of slavery solely to serve the interests of the ruling class. The details of the theory vary from one conspiratorial echo chamber to the next. As the COVID-19 pandemic started to ravage the world in earnest last spring, a new conspiracy theory known as the “ Great Reset” slowly developed alongside it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |