Mealmoth Flambé

Sylvia Shawcross

Now, some of us, admittedly not a large number at this point, find ourselves up at midnight reading The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet and wondering what the hell is wrong with us?

We used to read James Herriott and chuckle into the wee hours but now… We whimper our way through all sorts of things, living in the New Abnormal desperately trying to figure out what is happening to the Stepford/Zombie people we know while out there in the world strange things keep happening.

There was no way we could have predicted that Russia would start building cricket factories for our consumption in Siberia. I mean, we eventually grudgingly could admit that building cricket factories is “just” the thing that Justin Trudeau in Canada would do, but Putin? Really? Isn’t he supposed to be the bad guy now?

We can’t have the bad guys and the good guys doing the same thing or we’ll confuse the agenda and people might start thinking for themselves. But never mind all that.

I’m just saying there was no way we could have predicted that the shelves would run out of Dijon mustard just when Cooking with Crickets magazine was featuring an award-winning recipe on Moutarde de Flandres Mealmoth flambe?

How could we really have known that the French farmers would be on the road driving their tractors to town instead of farming and that the truckers would be off road in convoys and not delivering in protest at the price of fuel and booster mandates? No mustard this month or next!

How could we have known?

Well, alright. In truth we could have known.

We were just not listening to the right talking heads. And we were too busy fighting each other over every issue-du-jour that we failed to recognize that which needed to be recognized before things got out of control. And now things are completely out of control and we humans have only ourselves to blame. Ourselves and the mass media of course.

However, there is hope. Just so you know…

Now, I know I’ve been going on in my writings quite a bit about saving the sad and unhappy lives of the crickets but I was wrong.

It takes a lot of pride swallowing to say that. In all my naïveté I believed that we would finally find world peace by uniting to save the cricket. Now I believe we need to take those creepy spindly-legged little noisy monsters, put them in Ziploc bags and freeze them until they die horribly and we get to eat them.

Bring on the Russian bug gulags! That’s what I think now. And why do I think that? Because they are the black swan event that saved the world.

The crickets have come out of nowhere to save us all.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if the crickets are here to save us all, then why are we killing and eating them? Well… that would be my point. And not because they’re going to feed a starving world but precisely because it is the act of killing and eating them and arguing about killing and eating them that is saving the world.

When you think about it. All the opinions expressed. All the books written. All the discussion papers. The policies. The interviews. The research papers. The desperate effort made these last few years by so many many people to expose the truth as they know it. To educate. To open up dialogue. To bridge the great divide. All of these things. And none of them really worked to unite us. We were still hellbent on divisiveness. And it was the divisiveness that was killing us all.

Until the cricket.

For the first time in Lord knows how many years the vast majority all agree on something: We don’t want to eat bugs.

We just don’t want to eat bugs. No matter what nationality, gender, political inclination, race or status in the world, we agree we don’t want to eat bugs.*

We are FINALLY united on a topic. AND bonus of all bonuses: YouTube and Google don’t censor our opinions on bugs. This is why we’re being inundated by bug discussion right now.

It is a free-for-all. It is uncensored glory. It is our salvation. And people, insane, morose, and enraged as they may be in this world, recognize a good thing when they see it. We can talk to anybody anywhere about this topic without worrying about their political affiliation or if they’ve been vaccinated or if they support Ukraine or care about the farmers and truckers of the world.

We are remembering the freedom of free speech.

This is why we need to keep it up. We need to keep promoting eating crickets, because pushing back against that idea is going to unite everyone.

We must kill the crickets. To hell with the wild crickets huddling fearfully together in the long grass discussing the rumoured “camps” we’ve been building for them. The long-awaited dialogue between disparate and dissenting voices has finally found common ground and the doors are open for world peace and prosperity.

And this can only happen as long as we’re in the thick of insect massacres.

Normalizing the killing of crickets however is not going to be easy. Just so you know. Nothing worth having and all that. Beside the fact that on account of this plastic-is-bad movement we might run out of Ziploc bags for the extermination process, the greatest danger for the cricket revolution may very well be the crickets themselves.

We’ve put them in warehouses. And like the divisive idiots we are, we divided them between the organic and the non-organic.

We never learn.

They’re not going to get along. They’re going to start killing each other over their differences before they’re ready for harvest. Isn’t it always the way! I’m not sure how we’re going to handle that. Maybe if we figure that out we can figure it out for humans too, but how likely is that?

And then there’s that other thing that might be a problem—when we realize that in order to create nourishing crickets they must be fed a well-balanced diet of protein, grains, fruits and vegetables.

There might be hell to pay when people begin to realize the crickets are going to be eating better than we are. Not sure how that happened, but anyway—we’ll need a visionary philosophy to reset the whole cricket farm for the future.

It won’t be easy. The Great Insect Reset. It will have to happen I’m afraid. To save us all.

Well, that’s about all I have to say about totalitarianism as interpreted from Desmet’s book (a good read btw) That, and please join the Cricket Revolution. Thank you.

Sylvia Shawcross writes things that are deeply unimportant in a world where everything is important. And I’m now figuratively fed up with bugs and hopeful about wandering into other irrelevant topics in the future. If there is a future.

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