Cricket Farming’s Capitalist Emergence: Care, Scale, and Moral Imaginaries in a New Industry of Food Production

Abstract

Since its emergence in the early 2010s, cricket farming and food production for human consumption in the U.S. and Canada has started to industrialize. Much of the anthropological literature on insect eating has been limited to non-Western cultures (Sutton 1988; Turpin & Si 2017; Kekeunou et al. 2020) or primate insect consumption (Lesnik, Sanz, and Morgan 2015; Mosdossy, Melin, and Fedigan 2015; Lesnik 2018). Using ethnographic fieldwork, analysis of cricket company websites, and interviews, I examine how the edible cricket industry is an example of how entrepreneurs imagine their businesses can help solve complex problems like climate change and food insecurity. Within the cricket industry, entrepreneurs do so through the moral imaginaries they hold, their practices of care, and visions for how the industry should look after scaling up.