Environmental Studies Seminar Series | Edible Insects and the Future of Food: Capitalist Dreams, Loss, and Everyday Immigrant Practices

In person and via Zoom (Meeting ID: 978 5545 8946, Passcode: 454736). 

If you are unable to stream the talk live and need to access a recorded version, please contact Stacy Philpott at sphilpot@ucsc.edu. A UC Santa Cruz email address is required to access the recording.

Host: Stacy Philpott

Speaker: Paolina Hwae Kyung Kao Yook Lu, UC Davis

Title: Edible Insects and the Future of Food: Capitalist Dreams, Loss, and Everyday Immigrant Practices

Abstract: In the 2010s, edible insects emerged in popular discourse as a potential “food of the future.” Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted in the United States from 2019-2024 with entrepreneurs, farmers, and food producers, this talk traces how insects became a hopeful response to anxieties about ecological crisis, food security, and changing ways of life. I bring one Southeast Asian American family’s enduring practice of foraging for grasshoppers into conversation with the emergence and transformation of the insect agriculture industry. Doing so reveals two distinct relationships to insects: one shaped by the anticipation of future loss and the desire to secure against it, the other by losses already lived through displacement and relocation. Attending to these differences while listening for what they share, the talk asks what an affective throughline of loss can reveal about the ways people imagine futures, develop relationships with other forms of life, and work to make and sustain lives through food.