ARTICLE F&A Alternative Proteins Edition April 2023 45 of insect farming leads, inevitably, to misunderstanding the industry and its impacts on the food system. Insect farming does not answer the question of how to make the food system more sustainable, because it does not ask it. Insect farming is the wrong answer to the wrong question. Worryingly, the effects of this expanding sector and its apparent contradictions have flown mostly under the EU’s radar. There are significant knowledge gaps among key decision-makers about how industrial insect farming could affect animal welfare, the climate and our food systems. This context is, however, critical in shaping the industry as it develops, as well as the various food, farming and animal welfare legislations it interconnects with. Unfortunately, there is no joined-up, systemic nor strategic thinking in the EU regarding insect farming. Rather, the authorisation process focuses on details and not the bigger picture. Individual EU departments and agencies take individual technical issues and deal with them technocratically, in their particular silo. With policymakers behind the curve (the European Commission even stating that there is an “overwhelming lack of knowledge” regarding all aspects of this sector), industry leaders are calling the shots when it comes to insect farming. In turn, their suggestions for the growth of the field are underpinned by industry needs, namely, productivity and cost-efficiency. As a result, the welfare of insects in these farming systems has been neglected in decisions made about the sector so far, with little acknowledgement of their behavioural needs or even their sentience. INSECT WELFARE MATTERS Animal welfare is characterised as the physical and mental wellbeing of an animal. Whether we are concerned with the welfare of an animal depends on whether the animal is capable of feeling, and therefore capable of having negative physical and mental experiences (like pain and suffering) as well as positive ones (like pleasure or joy). This is known as sentience, from the Latin word for feeling. Historically, insects and all other invertebrates have been assumed to be insentient, reflected for example in the exclusion of insects from animal welfare protection legislation. This assumption is not founded in a scientific case against sentience in these animals, and may lie instead in our reduced
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