‘Pimp my Climate’ #3: Insect vs. Vegan Café – a wrong dichotomy?

I love cake. Too much. Who doesn’t? So much so that I dedicated my first-ever podcast appearance to it. Growing up with the widely loved fourth meal of the day – ‘Kaffee and Kuchen’ – has instilled a great appreciation for the sacred art of eating cake. But the sad truth is that the cakes I grew up eating are not exactly healthy. But their recipes are often historical treasures passed down through generations – shout out to my grandma’s secret quintuple-layer cheesecake recipe…?

So, if ‘cake cultures’ are a means of preserving the past, are they still timely? (someone must have written a book – not a baking book – but about ‘cake resistance’ in oppressive regimes already, right?) The names of cakes and translations tell a rich history of culinary diffusion: For example, German migrants brought their recipes and the word ‘kuchen’ to Chilean Spanish and Dakotan English dictionaries). But that’s all stuff of the past.?

Towards the future: Only a few weeks ago, at the Edinburgh Climate Festival, I was blown away by the existence (and taste) of The Insect Café’s delicacies. So much, so that I decided to keep trying until I had made my way through all of them – one slice at a time.

You might be wondering why someone who is ~80% plant-based (I prefer the label ‘powered by plants’) would be promoting eating cakes made of disgusting pests. Because they are not! Mostly out of necessity, people have had ‘insect-informed’ diets including Bogong moths in (ancestral) Australia, leafcutter ants in Guatemala, palm weevil larvae in Peru, grasshoppers in Mexico and so many others for centuries if not millennia. So, instead of a misleading insect vs. vegan dichotomy, the question should be: How we can meet that protein demand and expand our diets to meet it while keeping within planetary boundaries at scale?

Let me make just three points very clear here:

1.????? With the global protein demand predicted to increase 60% by 2050 we’ll be hard-pressed to find enough chickens to feed the masses – turning to insects could be part of the cost-saving, ecological solution we’re looking for.

2.????? You really can’t see or taste ground insects in cakes. But you do get a protein boost.

3.????? If you consider yourself a meat-eater or vegetarian, why not give it a go?

Now, as a ‘kuchen connoisseur’, I can promise you: With the right ingredients, an eye for details, dedication and innovation, every cake (and bake) experience can make your day. To bring together both seemingly loose ends of this story:

è ‘Conventional’ agriculture and diets are the second largest ‘climate killer’. We might be heading towards a point where we are ‘eating ourselves to extinction’.

è While many (cake) recipes have stayed the same, the rest of our lives have not: Western diets and lifestyles drive a pandemic of obesity and civilizational diseases;? in India alone, more than 100 million people are diabetic and the Desi diaspora’s complex relationship with sugar (dating back to the colonial rule of the British Raj) has recently become the subject of an eye-opening ethnographic novel, set in Fiji.? ?

è Food systems across the globe are malfunctioning, best illustrated by the difference between ‘food security’ and ‘food sovereignty’ as ‘surviving versus thriving’.

è Fixing many of our climate and health problems is about a global shift away from (red) meat, not about celebrating the 1% of hard-core ?(and often scary) vegans.

It was my grandmother who – over (not so vegan) Kuchen – provided me with the safe space I needed away from family struggles and planted the seeds for my present-day passions. So, I genuinely believe that sharing a cake is a fantastic way to open people’s hearts and minds while filling their bellies: If we can bake rainbow cakes, why not also climate stripe cakes? If we’re already exploiting almost 40% of our planet’s land to sustain a population of 8 billion, could insect-informed diets not pave the way forward, using up to 90% less land? If we can feed the world without devouring the planet, how can we re-purpose public (and private) land towards a healthier equilibrium of ‘public luxury’ and ‘private sufficiency’?

Over to you: Are you trying to fix our broken food system from the inside, or outside? Can you share stories of ‘tiny transformations’ (or even ‘resounding revolutions’) regarding the climate crisis? How many innovative cafés do you know, in what parts of the world? Which changemakers in these geographies do you know, how can you support them – or could you be one of them, inspiring future generations of progressive leaders yourself??