Getting Curious with JVN gets it wrong on insects
OPINION: Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness got to grips with insects and arachnids on their new Netflix spin-off show. What Van Ness failed to get a hold of so well, however, were the many inconsistencies in their message. Should we love insects or eat them, asks Claire Hamlett.
In the first episode of Jonathan Van Ness’s podcast spin-off series on Netflix, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, the Queer Eye star makes an admirable effort to confront their own bias against insects and arachnids. They get pooped on by a huge millipede, handle a tarantula, and touch the web of a lively Black Widow spider. They talk to various experts and people working with bugs to learn the answer to the episode’s title question, “are bugs gorgeous or gross?” and decide they are a bit of both. But of all the messages about these creatures that Van Ness could have highlighted, the one they go with is: Let’s eat them.
The first mention of eating bugs comes, surprisingly, from an entomologist Van Ness interviews. Insects may already be a common food, harvested from the wild, in some parts of the world, but it’s pretty weird to hear a person who studies them advocating for them to be farmed. It was perhaps inevitable that the topic would come up at some point during the episode – insect protein has been getting a lot of attention lately – but I wasn’t prepared for how much it would end up leaning into the idea of insect farming, nor the complete absence of critical analysis of this burgeoning industry.
First, let’s briefly explore why insect farming is being touted as a good alternative to animal farming and why it may actually not be all that great. It requires far less water and land, produces fewer greenhouse gases, and some insects can convert food waste into high-protein food for people or feed for livestock. But this last point is the first major problem with insect farming. So far, its main use has been to provide feed for the aquaculture and livestock industries, allowing companies like McDonald’s to claim they are becoming more sustainable by replacing deforestation-linked soy-based feed with bugs. But this solves none of the other problems of intensive animal farming, such as air pollution, methane emissions, animal cruelty, or antibiotic use. And even if insects were mostly farmed to feed humans, this is only an improvement when compared to humans eating animals. Compared to plant-based food, insects are still less efficient, as Surge explained in a recent video.
Getting Curious addresses none of these issues, simply presenting insect farming as a good way to feed humans without further interrogation. But the episode’s omissions don’t end there, as it fails to even mention the possibility of insect sentience and the serious ethical issues this raises. Ethicist Jeff Sebo recently wrote an in-depth essay exploring this topic, explaining that while we don’t know for sure insects are sentient, they display some traits indicative of sentience such as social learning and a capacity for pain. “If there is a non-negligible chance that insects are sentient,” he writes, “then killing insects is like driving drunk; it imposes a non-negligible risk on others against their will.” Or, as journalist Dylan Matthews wrote in Vox recently, with one trillion insects already farmed every year, “if there’s even a small chance” that insects feel pain, “the scale of the suffering that would imply is massive.”
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In all of the enthusiasm for eating bugs displayed by Van Ness and their interviewees, it’s striking that the only time the bugs’ perspective is taken into consideration is after the credits have rolled (accompanied by a song about eating bugs no less). Van Ness claims “No bugs were harmed in the making of this movie.” A jokey disclaimer then appears at the bottom of the screen saying “*except the ones we ate”.
The episode is odd as much for its focus on eating insects (and on how bugs can be used for other human ends, such as the medical uses of spider silk) as for what it ignores entirely. Over 40 per cent of insect species globally are at risk of extinction, and a further third are endangered. This is downright frightening. Insects are essential for pollinating crops, providing food for other wildlife, and cycling nutrients through ecosystems. Without them, we are basically completely screwed. So why are they faring so badly? Mainly because of intensive agriculture, which is driving habitat destruction and the use of bug-killing pesticides and fertilisers.
While trying to determine whether bugs are “gorgeous or gross”, it probably would have made sense for Van Ness to highlight just how crucial they are to all life on Earth. That might have tipped the scales in favour of them being “gorgeous”. And while we’re on that point, the question of bugs being gorgeous or not could have worked as a misleadingly simple one to hook people in, but instead, it often ends up functioning to reinforce prejudices against certain creatures based on their appeal to human sensibilities.
The problems with this episode of Getting Curious bug me (sorry), not because Van Ness should be expected to cover every last issue of the topics they explore in half-hour blocks, but because it was a huge wasted opportunity. Van Ness is fun and engaging, the perfect host to draw in audiences who might otherwise never have considered the sentience of insects or the catastrophe posed by their plummeting populations. The episode even featured Frank Somma, a bug expert who helps to educate people about why bugs are cool in the hope they will be better about protecting them (questions about the ethics of running an “insect zoo” aside). That could have been a chance to talk about the ecological value of bugs. Instead, it mainly served to highlight an inconsistency in Van Ness’s thinking. The conclusion they drew from meeting Somma was that we shouldn’t step on bugs because they’re beautiful and interesting, yet they seem to have no qualms about turning them into food.
If only Van Ness had returned to the question they pose at the start of the episode – “What gives me the right to kill this little baby insect?” – the episode would have been a far more nuanced and thoughtful look at bugs.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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