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Let them eat insects Food and the future of capitalism

Marxist Analysis · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The central thesis is that the FAO's proposal to normalise insect consumption is not a rational response to genuine scarcity but an ideological expression of capitalism's deepening crisis. Lombardi argues that the world already produces enough food to feed everyone — the problem is not productive capacity but the profit-driven organisation of agriculture under capitalism. The article claims that the turn toward Malthusian thinking, including the promotion of insect-eating, represents a regression to ruling-class arguments that blame the poor and nature for problems caused by the system itself. The real solution is not dietary adaptation to capitalist decay but the revolutionary overthrow of a system that treats food as a commodity rather than a human right.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on classical Marxist political economy, particularly Marx's critique of Malthus and Engels' writings on the condition of the working class. The article applies the concept of the tendential fall in the rate of profit implicitly — the drive to cheapen all inputs to production, including labour-power, explains the systematic degradation of food quality. The wage is treated as the cost of reproducing labour-power, and the bourgeoisie's endless war to lower that cost explains why food is rendered progressively worse. The piece also deploys Lenin's theory of imperialism to explain the relationship between agribusiness monopolies and the subordination of developing countries' agriculture to export markets. The critique of "green capitalism" and organic food as mere product differentiation within capitalist market logic is grounded in the Marxist understanding that co-ops and ethical consumption cannot transcend the law of value. The analysis of GM foods as a form of primitive accumulation through patenting and seed monopoly echoes Marx's discussion of the expropriation of the direct producer.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was written in 2014, but its analysis remains acutely relevant to the current conjuncture. The FAO's insect-eating proposal has since been mainstreamed into corporate sustainability discourse, with the World Economic Forum and major agribusiness firms promoting "alternative proteins" as climate solutions. The underlying dynamic Lombardi identifies — that capitalism responds to its own crises not by solving hunger but by lowering the quality of what counts as food — has intensified. The 2022-2023 global food price crisis, triggered by the war in Ukraine and speculation on commodity futures, saw bread riots in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Egypt, exactly as the article predicts. The concentration of agribusiness has only deepened: Bayer's acquisition of Monsanto in 2018 created a monopoly controlling over 40% of the global seed market. The article's warning about water wars has materialised in conflicts over the Nile and the Indus. Meanwhile, the obesity epidemic has continued to worsen globally, with the WHO reporting that 1 in 8 people now live with obesity, while 828 million remain undernourished — a contradiction the article identifies as inherent to capitalism's food system.

Where the Argument Continues

The article leaves several questions open that are developed elsewhere in the IDOM corpus. The relationship between food crises and revolutionary possibilities is explored in more depth in articles on the 2008 bread riots and the Arab Spring. The critique of Malthusianism is expanded in IDOM's theoretical pieces on population and ecology. The analysis of GM foods as a form of primitive accumulation connects to broader Marxist work on intellectual property and biopiracy. The article's call for workers' control and nationalisation of the food chain is a general programmematic statement; the specific transitional demands — such as price controls, land reform, and the breaking up of agribusiness monopolies — are developed in IDOM's articles on food sovereignty and agrarian struggle. The question of how a planned economy would organise food production and distribution is addressed in Against the Stream episodes on socialist planning.

Connections

The article should be read alongside Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England, which documents the adulteration of food as a systematic feature of early industrial capitalism. Marx's critique of Malthus in Capital Volume I provides the theoretical foundation. For the contemporary food system, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is cited and complements the analysis. The IDOM corpus includes related articles on the 2008 food crisis, the political economy of obesity, and the role of the World Bank and IMF in imposing structural adjustment on agriculture. The broader Marxist tradition on ecology — particularly the work of John Bellamy Foster on the metabolic rift — is a natural companion, though the article does not use that term explicitly.

Key Quotes

  1. "The point is not about the number of human beings that live on the planet. What is unsustainable is the way capitalism treats the Earth and its natural resources. It is not humankind per se that is destroying the Earth, but that capitalism with its constant quest for more and more profit is making life unsustainable."

  2. "From a third to half of all food is wasted. This would be more than sufficient to feed everyone on the planet. The waste is not mainly a technical question, how food is transported, etc. It is a question of prices, it is a market strategy."

  3. "The more these costs are lowered, the lower can wages be driven, thus boosting profits. Therefore, since the early days of capitalism, the bourgeoisie has conducted an endless war to cheapen and worsen the commodities needed for the workers to live."

  4. "In the end, when the FAO advises humankind to eat insects, it is in fact stating that we are becoming poorer and should get ready to adjust what we eat to what we are becoming."

  5. "As all statistics show, food scarcity is a myth. It is the thirst for profit that produces the hunger of a large part of humanity. On a scientific level, we could feed not ten but twenty billion people even now."

  6. "We don't need to eat bugs to avoid starvation. We need to remove capitalism to avoid living like bugs."