Consider Insects and Worms
In 2013, in studying the challenge of environmentally sustainable food security, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations landed not on a plant-based solution but on the consumption of insects and worms.[1] It’s not a new idea: insects and worms supplement the diets of some 2 billion people, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where they are among the most available sources of protein.[2] Now being raised and killed by the trillions for consumption, insects are subjected to many of the same cruelties as chickens, pigs, cows, and other farmed animals, such as cramped housing, poor nutrition, and inhumane slaughter methods, including being frozen, baked, boiled, microwaved, or mechanically shredded—all while still alive.[3] [4]
What Are Insects and Worms?
Insects and worms are invertebrate animals—they have no backbone or bony skeleton, just like 97 percent of animals.[9] Insects are part of a phylum of animals called Arthropoda—arthropods have protective exoskeletons, which is a hard outer covering, and jointed legs. With more than one million different species identified so far, insects are the most abundant group of animals in the world, live in almost every habitat, and have been around for more than 350 million years.[10] Insects have three pairs of legs, three body segments (the head, the thorax, and the abdomen), two antennae, and usually one or two pairs of wings. They also have eyes and mouthparts that are especially adapted for the insect’s specific lifestyle.[11]
While it may be tempting to assume that insects are simple creatures, their senses are often far more complex than ours. Some moths have a kind of ear on their abdomen for detecting the echolocation of bats hunting them, for example, while butterflies can taste with their feet, allowing them to tell whether a plant they’ve landed on will be safe for their baby caterpillars to eat.[12] Flies not only smell through their antennae but use the motion of odors to navigate.[13] Many insects, such as bees[14] and butterflies,[15] can see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to humans, and use this ability to locate nectar-bearing flowers. Bees, ants, and termites can detect elevated levels of carbon dioxide in their living spaces and take corrective action: bees initiate a wing-fanning response to push fresh air through the hive, while ants and termites modify their nests for more ventilation.[16] In 2025, scientists announced that the tiny Bogong moth navigates 620 miles using the stars—a feat only humans and migratory birds were known to do.[17] In short, insects are truly remarkable animals.
As for what they feel, the more we learn about insect species, the more we see that they do indeed feel pain. Writing in Scientific America, zoologist Lars Chittka, who studies animal cognition, says that insects not only feel pain, but they develop lasting memories about the conditions under which they were hurt. Moreover, he says, insects experience joy, optimism, and even a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some also self-medicate with alcohol found in fermenting fruit. “Why would insects consume mind-altering substances,” he writes, “if there isn’t a mind to alter?”[18] Indeed, researchers studying major depressive disorder induced a depression-like state in flies and then used the human antidepressant lithium to alleviate it.[19]
Worms are a little more complicated. There are many kinds of animals commonly called “worms,” but unlike insects, they fall under several distinct phyla and reflect a wide range in size, complexity, efficiency, and body structure. Worms are generally long, thin organisms who move proficiently without legs. Flatworms (phylum Platyhelminthes) are considered to have the least complex body plan; roundworms (phylum Nematoda) are slightly more complex; and segmented worms (phylum Annelida), such as earthworms, are the most complex, with bodies that are divided into sections called segments with many internal organs repeated in each segment.[20]
The worm’s main sense organ is their skin, which is very sensitive to light, touch, moisture, and temperature. Although they lack ears, worms also “hear” airborne sound at certain frequencies, with their skin acting as a kind of eardrum.[21] In marveling over how worms eat and digest a variety of materials to form soil, the naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin wrote, “It may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played such an important part in the history of the world as these lowly organized creatures.”[22]
Researchers have found that worms also feel pain and that they have developed a chemical system to protect themselves from it—a system similar to that of human beings. They discovered that earthworms produce enkephalins and beta-endorphins, two chemicals that in human brains act as opiates akin to morphine. The researchers believe that an animal’s production of these chemicals helps them tolerate pain.[23] If a worm is producing painkilling chemicals, it stands to reason they are doing so because they have the ability to experience pain.
Not every researcher agrees that insects and worms feel pain, however. As the authors of a 2023 study titled “Is It Time for Insect Researchers to Consider Their Subjects’ Welfare?” put it, “Pain is hard to identify in nonhuman animals because unpleasant feelings might not accompany simple withdrawal and other behavioral responses.”[24] When trying to determine whether an organism can experience pain, one of the signs researchers look for is the presence of nociceptors, which are specialized neurons that detect and respond to thermally, mechanically, and chemically noxious stimuli.[25] Nociception typically results in reflex-like responses, such as automatically moving away when you touch a hot stove.
Nociceptors have been found in worms and insects,[26] but regardless of whether they feel pain—at least in the subjective way that humans experience it—these beings deserve the same considerations that all animals do.
Insect and Worm Farming
According to one projection, the global farming of insects for protein, which is much more widespread than worm farming, is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 16 percent—from US$1.17 billion to US$4.46 billion—between 2025 and 2034.[27] (This includes the use of insects for both animal feed and human consumption.) In contrast, projected growth of the global “meat” industry during the same period is just 8.2 percent.[28]
Considering the reluctance that most consumers in the Global North have toward eating bugs,[29] it’s reasonable to ask why the farming of insects is becoming so popular. One reason is that, as mentioned, cultures in other parts of the world have a long tradition of insect consumption. Another is that environmental groups say industrial-scale insect farming is sustainable, since it has a lower impact than the “meat” industry.
Recently, however, a team of researchers from England, France, and the U.S. took a closer look at insect agriculture and found that much of the academic research on the industry is outdated or misleading. Their 2025 paper, “Bugs in the System: The Logic of Insect Farming Research Is Flawed by Unfounded Assumptions,” states: “When discussing the environmental sustainability of insect farming, a notable trend in the literature is the heavy reliance on a small number of older studies. While these studies were landmark contributions at the time, the insect industry has evolved to a point that these studies can no longer be considered representative of commercial-scale conditions.”[30]
To illustrate their argument, the researchers refer to the FAO’s 2013 report, “Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security,” which they say is filled with misinformation. Among the problems they found with the FAO report is it assumes that edible insects will directly compete with conventional “meat” when it’s more likely they will form ingredients for foods such as energy bars, cookies, crackers, protein powder, pasta, and bread—most of which already have much lower environmental impacts than “meat.” Also, the report does not address water usage, which is quite high in insect farming. Moreover, evidence of “sustainability” in the FAO study was based on data from one small facility mainly selling live or frozen insects for birds or reptiles, which is nowhere near the scale of a facility raising and killing insects for human consumption or animal feed.
The researchers also contend that, despite the claim by environmentalists that insect farms will rely heavily on food waste to feed their insects, most facilities show little interest in this. Perhaps this is due to the significant challenges to providing food waste to insect farms at an industrial scale, including infrastructural requirements, high cost, safety treatments, and potential competition for waste from other industries, such as biogas production or conventional farmed animal feed.[31] It appears that most large-scale commercial insect farmers are feeding their insects grains, which is the feed most large-scale enterprises raising cows, chickens, and pigs use.[32]
Dr. Chittka sees another problem with insect farming. “The bulk of the industry does not actually seek to replace human consumption of vertebrate meat with insects,” he says. “Instead most of the slaughtered insects go to feeding other animals that are farmed for human consumption, such as salmon or chicken. In other words, farmed insects are being used to turbocharge, not replace, the conventional livestock production.”[33]
Another study, meanwhile, focused on the sustainability of raising and killing insects for animal feed and found that feeding farmed animals black soldier fly larvae has a climate change impact as high as 13.5 times the impact of soybean meal. The 2025 analysis showed that insect-based feeds underperformed on 13 out of 16 environmental-impact criteria when the insects are raised on traditional commercial feed.[34]
Although not as popular as insect farming (at least not yet), the farming of worms to help meet the global food demand has also gotten attention from researchers, who recommend earthworms as a safe form of animal-based protein.[35] Moreover, many insect larvae are mistakenly marketed as edible “worms,” such as the larvae of butterflies, crickets, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and termites.[36] Even the “worm” added to mezcal bottles is the larva of a moth.
Other Considerations
During the last stage of her very short life, the female fig wasp enters a tiny hole at the bottom of an immature fig, tearing her wings off in the process, and lays her eggs among the many flowers and spreading pollen from the fig in which she was born. She soon dies, and the larvae hatch, eventually pupating into matured wasps. The males, who are wingless, mate with the females and then create pathways in the fig for the fertile females to exit and eventually perish inside the fig. Before departing, the winged females collect pollen from the fig and then search for another fig in which to lay their eggs, continuing the cycle.[38] In the final stage of this obligate mutualism, the dead wasps inside the fig are enzymatically digested by the fig, absorbing the nutrients to create ripe fruit and seeds.[39]
While there are several commercial varieties of fig trees that do not require wasp pollination to produce fruits, such as the Celeste and Brown Turkey, most figs would not exist without wasps, and this is central to the debate over whether figs are vegan friendly or not.[40] Jordi Casamitjana, an ethical vegan and zoologist who has studied wasps, avoids figs. “I don’t want to eat any figs that may have had a dead wasp inside because I am very fond of wasps, so, out of respect for them, I do not want to consume their ‘place of rest,’” he says.[41] Not everyone in the vegan community agrees with him, and it’s a personal choice whether you consider figs vegan friendly.
Less debatable, we believe, is whether honey is vegan. As our page “The Buzz About Honey” explains, bees make honey as a source of nourishment. The practice of taking honey from bees has many troubling parallels with dairy production, including that both the dairy industry and the commercial honey industry are built upon models in which humans ultimately steal the animals’ food source and replace it with an inferior and unnatural substitute. In addition, like cows, honeybees are artificially inseminated. And, just as cows and calves are considered “expendable” in the dairy industry, so too are bees sometimes killed after they have outlived their usefulness: bee farms have been known to destroy entire colonies after harvesting because it’s cheaper than feeding the bees throughout the winter.[42]
Also of concern is a product produced by an insect known as Kerria lacca. These insects ingest tree sap and then secrete lac, an edible resin that is sometimes called “confectioner’s glaze” and is used in the food industry.[43] (Lac is also the source of shellac, used as a varnish.[44]) Confectioner’s glaze is used to coat candies (it goes by “E 904” on ingredients lists) and pharmaceutical pills and to polish raw fruit.[45] Lac comes mostly from forests in Southeast Asia, where Kerria lacca use it to cling to trees. Harvesters gather the lac-covered branches, crush them, and wash and sieve the resin, inevitably killing countless insects in the process.[46]
Recommendations
As an ethical vegan organization, Food Empowerment Project naturally advises against eating all animals, including insects and worms. Without a demand for these animals, companies will have no incentive to exploit them. We encourage consumers to speak out about the rising popularity of entomophagy and to share this page with family and friends. We also urge you to contest any new regulatory approvals that pave the way for insect farms, and you can oppose what may be even more vital to the future of the industry: financial investments, including government grants. In other words, let your legislators know you stand against the growth of insect farming.
But as we consider insects and worms, we can also avoid all products that use them, including honey and beeswax, made by bees; silk, made by silkworms; and carmine, a bright-red pigment made from oval-shaped insects called cochineals and used to color foods, cosmetics, and some beverages, such as Campari.
Note: We agree with the definition of veganism as “a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.” We understand that some cultures, especially those with very limited resources or living in challenging environments, depend on animals such as insects and worms for their survival. Our mission is to educate the greatest number of people so they do not rely on animals.