The scale of the farmers’ protests that swept Europe in the first half of 2024 led many commentators to speak of a broad-based “greenlash” against the European Commission’s climate agenda. Among the forces feeding this backlash was the populist right, which used anger at the green agenda to articulate a much wider set of critiques against EU climate policy, well beyond the specific demands of the protesting farmers. A study published in May – a month before the European Parliament elections – by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) noted how effectively the Right had capitalised on cost-of-living increases across the EU to frame the Commission’s climate agenda “as the latest imposition on member state governments by an internationalist conspiracy”. Citizens and livelihoods were the Right’s stated targets; farmers, and especially food, became its emblems.

Indeed, as the Commission backtracked on plans to halve pesticide use and cut agriculture-related emissions in response to the protests,¹ the focus of political contestation shifted from farming subsidies to more symbolic battlefields: not only the threat of farming livelihoods disappearing, but of “normal food” along with them, as part of the Green Deal’s maleficent designs.²

The June 2024 European elections became a platform for the populist right to sound the alarm on an impending end to “normal food”: a “nightmare” in which “fried insects would substitute fried fish”³ and “Frankenstein” meat (i.e. lab-grown meat) would be forced upon unsuspecting citizens by greedy corporate actors. The fight against lab-grown meat became part of a wider battle against the Commission’s climate proposals, with Janusz Wojciechowski, agriculture commissioner between 2019 and 2024, moving to cut encouragement for “diversified protein intake” from the EU’s 2040 climate target.⁴

Italy was the forerunner in the debates over alternative proteins, becoming the first country to ban both the production and sale of labgrown meat in 2023. Giorgia Meloni’s minister for agriculture and food sovereignty, Francesco Lollobrigida, framed the issue as much more than simply a health-based concern; alternative protein sources were also a threat to Italian culture and civilisation. Ettore Prandini, president of the powerful Italian farmers’ union Coldiretti, had forcefully argued a similar line in various EU fora in the preceding months, decrying the promotion of alternative protein sources as simply the latest corporate plot “to modify natural food styles based on quality and tradition”.⁵

“Frankenstein” meat and other alleged monstrosities like insects thus took centre stage in political debates across the EU, effectively shifting the discussion away from actual policy prescriptions to a symbolic terrain that held great affective appeal. The Italian initiative to ban lab-grown meat well before it had even begun the European Food Safety Authority approval process is telling in this regard.

Icons of a culture war

These symbolic battles should be taken seriously if we are to advance an effective European climate policy. “Frankenstein” meat and insects have been made icons of a culture war – not just in the EU but across the Atlantic – and European and US populist right forces are drawing inspiration from each other in this fight, one whose antagonist is largely imagined but whose consequences are very real.

This summer, Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign with claims that “We don’t eat bacon anymore” as states across the US South, led by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, moved to not just ban but also criminalise the manufacture and sale of lab-grown meat. Signing the bill, DeSantis announced: “Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” Lab-grown meat had become the latest salvo in a broader US culture war.

It would be tempting to discount tales of global corporate elites foisting “monstrous food” on unsuspecting consumers as mere electoral clickbait from right-populist politicians who have made their careers on extreme statements. The fear of “ab-normal” food fits within an accusatory framework long used by populist leaders, in which elites want to impose a series of iniquitous and “un-natural” practices on so-called regular people, all in the name of the eco-folly that is the Green Deal.

Those appeals, and their symbolic objects, speak to a much wider set of anxieties among US and European publics in much the same way as the headscarf became a material icon gathering diffuse anxieties in the past decades. As French anthropologist Emmanuel Terray argued in his 2004 essay “Headscarf Hysteria”:

When a community fails to find within itself the means or energy to deal with a problem that challenges, if not its existence, then at least its way of being and self-image, it may be tempted to adopt a peculiar defensive ploy. It will substitute a fictional problem, which can be mediated purely through words and symbols, for a real one, which it finds insurmountable. In grappling with the former, the community can convince itself that it has successfully confronted the latter.

Terray’s essay spoke to how the headscarf folded into itself a much wider “politics of fear” in France.⁶ It appears that the spectre of insects replacing meat has taken on a similar fetish-like function in political discussions regarding climate policy today, only this time it is not regarding the “alien” presence of migrant others within Western societies, but the putative replacement of “normal” and “native” staples by “alien” foods such as insects.

Lab-grown meat and insects provide symbolic and material containers for the fears and anxieties stoked by the populist right.

Food to be feared

How can we, then, try to make political sense of the “insect fetish”? How can we understand the ways in which, to quote Rachel Pain and Susan Smith, “global insecurities worm their way into everyday life”?⁷ The “worming” metaphor – apt here, given our subject – allows us to begin to understand how wider fears about a rapidly transforming world – and its political, economic, and ecological aspects – impact people’s everyday lives and are made sense of. And how such fears are translated into bodies and things to be feared.

Specific objects, just like specific bodies, are central to understanding the politics of populist resentment, as recent work in cultural and political geography on affective geopolitics has emphasised. Just like migrant bodies that have become the symbols of alterity, “out of place” in right-populist discourses, objects can take on a similar function, “acting as a lure for feelings”. Feelings like fear and anger thus “stick” to things just as they stick to bodies; or, better yet, they are “made to stick”, as feminist scholar Sara Ahmed has argued over the past two decades. Describing the “affective economies” that determine to what and to whom – which things, which bodies – certain feelings stick, Ahmed compellingly delineates how “emotions accumulate over time, as a form of affective value”.⁸

Lab-grown meat and insects provide ideal symbolic as well as material containers for the fears and anxieties stoked by the populist right in Europe and the US. Fears regarding uncertain futures – economic and ecological – are made to stick to food, the most basic substance that all of us need to survive. Food is the most intimate, most everyday object, which becomes part of our bodies not only to replenish our energies and enhance our wellbeing, but also to nourish our sense of self and identity, anchoring us in communities of belonging, of local (or national) culture and tradition.

Meat, more specifically, has long embodied traditional and masculine politics.⁹ The spectre of substituting meat with insects or “Frankenstein” meat (embodying the urban elite’s “woke” environmental ideologies – the “soy boys” derided by Trump supporters) thus triggers a literally visceral reaction, the replacement of meat spelling also the replacement of “normal” bacon-eating people.¹⁰

Food is in fact profoundly visceral: it provokes affective responses such as pleasure and disgust that go beyond reason. Insects, in particular, elicit visceral responses: a butterfly is stunning, but a maggot is repulsive. Especially in the West, insects have long been represented as alien, dangerous, contagious, and disgusting (out of place, out of plate). As Heidi Kosonen reminds us, “Disgust might be the most visceral of basic human emotions because it has been associated with human defense mechanisms […] [It] may protect organisms from threats to their existence, such as spoilt food or poisonous animals […] or infectious diseases.” But, she adds, “Disgust has [also] been connected to varied kinds of symbolic differentiations between ‘self’ and ‘the world’, ‘us’ and ‘the others’.”

The insect-as-food is thus easily invoked in both Europe and the US as the perfect “undigestible” other – and the visceral politics of disgust is easily woven into wider conspiracy theories, just as the apparent “plot” to force us all to eat insects has been.¹¹

Another French anthropologist, Didier Fassin, writing on the power of conspiratorial imaginations, has argued: “Conspiracy theories do not only belong to the realm of delusion. They are also indexes of social relations, political tensions, cultural disquietude, and moral uneasiness.” As such, they are forms of political discourse and should be examined accordingly.

Instrumentalising rural livelihoods

Taking the fear of insects seriously then means taking seriously wider fears of dispossession and loss of livelihoods – but also the moral uneasiness many citizens feel towards the prescriptions fashioned by so-called “green elites” to address them. It means taking seriously the political ecologies of the green transition but also its political and affective economies. When the populist right claims the replacement of meat by its “monstrous” surrogates – whether insects or lab-grown meat – is a plot hatched by the elite institutions of global governance (whether the World Economic Forum, COP28, or the European Commission)¹² to erase the livelihoods and traditions of “normal folks”, we need to have better answers rather than simply deriding such claims as conspiratorial.

We need to recognise, first of all, the unequal political economies of the green transition, which will impact livelihoods in highly differentiated ways.¹³ But that alone is not sufficient. As researchers Edoardo Campanella and Robert Lawrence write, in addressing the “greenlash” in Europe and the US, economic incentives alone will not suffice: “Rather than framing the green transition as a technical problem with technocratic solutions, those promoting climate policies need to spin more compelling narratives, emphasising how global warming threatens peoples’ traditional ways of life, their health, and the places where they live.”

How can we “spin more compelling narratives” and offer different, but equally emotional and affective, appeals? The provisions of the EU Green Deal are far from unproblematic. After decades of the Common Agricultural Policy supporting intensive, industrial, and large-scale farming systems, the EU is now attempting to mitigate the environmental impacts of such policies. Yet once again, it is forgetting small-scale holders and their key role in nourishing extensive, regenerative agriculture and husbandry. It is in fact likely that the Farm to Fork Strategy will have negative economic impacts on some farmers. But the populist right’s rhetorical focus on the “end of meat” has very little to do with European (or, for that matter, US) farmers’ real problems and interests. In the symbolic battle being waged against fake meat and insects, rural livelihoods are being instrumentalised to serve the populist right’s political agendas.

How can we provide a different set of symbols and narratives to motivate citizens in a moment of profound distrust?

Laughter as political intervention

The autumn 2024 issue of US ranching magazine Range featured a lead story on the global attack against farmers and food, tracing the common battles that unite US, Brazilian, and Dutch farmers. As the piece admonished in closing, “This is not just about steak, though. The future of humanity and freedom are literally at stake.” They are indeed – but not in the way imagined by the populist right.

Again, how can we provide a different set of symbols and narratives to motivate citizens in a moment of profound distrust, not just in science but in all “elite” institutions, at a time when many feel powerless in the face of catastrophic climate change, if not in outright denial of it? Among the many already struggling to “bring home the bacon”, the imposition of further sacrifices – through legislation or moralising appeals to “responsibility” – in the name of some future “green rewards” is bound to be met with anger.

Rather than feeding on people’s visceral fears, perhaps we should try to engage other, equally embodied and visceral reactions, such as those of laughter, pleasure, and enjoyment. Laugher, just like disgust, is one of our most visceral emotions. But it can also be a very powerful “non-rational form of political intervention”, as geographers Ian Cook and Tara Woodyer have argued. Laughter “is a way to become aware of the ethical ambiguities and paradoxes that we live with, without being paralysed by them; to recognise and negotiate our own complicit involvement in wider economic and political processes and exploitative relations; to simultaneously express charm and haunting, delight and unsettledness, and to be critical, yet also hopeful”.¹⁴

The best strategy could then be, literally,to laugh it off – dismissing the insect fetish as laughable, but at the same time offering other narratives based on the recognition of the beauty and pleasure that “real” food brings, all the while recognising the fundamental role of those involved in its production.

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1. With Ursula von der Leyen noting the initiative had become “a symbol of polarisation”. See: Alice Hancock & Andy Bounds (2024). “Brussels bows to farmers’ protests by slashing environmental targets”. Financial Times. 6 February 2024. Available at <https://bit.ly/3XYV9n8>. ↩︎
2. The contribution of meat production to greenhouse gas emissions has been long recognised, and the European Green Deal has made it an important part of its Farm to Fork strategy. ↩︎
3. These were the terms used on the Instagram profile of the right-wing youth conference Atreju. Available at <https://rb.gy/y728wf>. ↩︎
4. See for example: Bartosz Brzeziński & Karl Mathiesen (2024). “EU dumped lab meats from climate plans on farm chief’s demand”. Politico. 9 February 2024. Available at <https://bit.ly/4gTiQVp>. ↩︎
5. See for example: Coldiretti Giovani Impresa (2021). “Consumi: le 5 bugie della carne Frankenstein”. 18 November 2021. Available at <https://bit.ly/3XYmuG0>. ↩︎
6. Ruth Wodak (2021). The Politics of Fear: The Shameless Normalization of Far-Right Discourse. London: Sage. ↩︎
7. Rachel Pain & Susan Smith (2008). Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. ↩︎
8. Sara Ahmed (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ↩︎
9. Carol J. Adams, C. (1990). The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum. ↩︎
10. In its feature articles, the US ranching magazine Range regularly makes the equation between the disappearance of meat, the disappearance of “a way of life”, and the disappearance of farmers’ lives. A regular rubric is entitled: “Confessions of Red Meat Survivors”. ↩︎
11. As the European Digital Media Observatory has noted, even linked to the economic impact of the war in Ukraine. Available at <https://shorturl.at/mW4VE>. ↩︎
12. The World Economic Forum’s advocacy of insects as an alternative protein source is longstanding. See for example: Antoine Hubert (2021). “Why we need to give insects the role they deserve in our food systems”. World Economic Forum (12 July 2021). Available at <https://shorturl.at/GTtXY>. COP28 in Dubai also devoted attention to alternative proteins. ↩︎
13. As some preliminary attempts to model its effects have noted. See for example: Hervé Guyomard, Louis-Georges Soler, et al.(2023). “The European Green Deal improves the sustainability of food systems but has uneven economic impacts on consumers and farmers”. Communications Earth & Environment, 4, 358. Available at <https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-01019-6>. ↩︎
14. Ian Cook & Tara Woodyer (2012). “Lives of things”. In Barnes, T.J., Peck, J. & Sheppard, E.S. (eds), The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 226-241. ↩︎