Abstract
Proponents of entomophagy have argued that the farming of insects offers many advantages when contrasted with more traditional farming practices. This article explores the place of insect farming within a wider Christian food ethic and argues that insect farming has much to recommend it. However, through exploring the role of animal agriculture within the ideological structures of anthropocentrism, a more ambiguous picture of the ethics of insect farming emerges. This belies a simple endorsement or denunciation of insect farming as an ethical alternative to the farming of larger animals. Moreover, the example of insect farming reveals that Christian food ethics needs to radically reimagine the entire food provisioning system if it is to inculcate substantive change in human relationships with nonhuman animals.
Introduction
In this article, I begin by establishing the inadequate treatment insects have received in Christian thought and reasons why this might be problematic for a Christian account of nonhuman life. I then explore the main merits of the farming of insects for a Christian food ethic, focusing both on animal agriculture as socio-environmental system and also on the flourishing of the individual animals within animal farms.
Having established the multitudinous reasons why a Christian food ethic might look positively on the farming of insects, I turn to conceptualizations of animal agriculture as an ideological system. Drawing on Eric Daryl Meyer's cross-reading of Incarnational theology with Giorgio Agamben's account of the ‘anthropological machine’, I contend that insect farming would represent an expansion and solidification of the ideological apparatus that produces an ecocidal and fundamentally unsustainable conception of humanity. I conclude by suggesting that the example of insect farming suggests that Christian food ethics needs a more radical and comprehensive understanding of the symbolic and ideological functions of animal agriculture.
The Vertebrate Bias in Animal Theology
While theological inquiry into nonhuman animals has longstanding precedent in the Christian tradition, 2 recent developments have seen an increase in both the number of these projects and their theological and theoretical sophistication. Despite this increasing sophistication, one continued limitation that runs across much of the ethical thought of animal theology is an undue foregrounding of animal life that is closely comparable to that of humans.
Some theological explorations of animal life have provided explicit taxonomic limitations on their analysis. Ethical consideration is limited to particular groupings of animals—mammals primarily, perhaps birds as well. 3 In other instances, the extent to which analysis of animal life is centred around animals that are ‘like us’ 4 is even more explicit. Here, animal life is considered ethically and theologically relevant to the extent that it shares similarities with human life. If we look at the specific species held up for close attention, we find dogs, donkeys and birds 5 appear as loci of attention in a manner that is not seen with sponges, dengue fly or mealworms. This fundamentally anthropocentric focus may be intuitively appealing, but it raises substantial problems. It is unclear according to which metric an animal can be judged to be ‘like us’. Moreover, using similarity to humanity as a metric for inclusion within the scope of animal theology further reinforces the unwarranted anthropocentrism that animal theology is, ostensibly, oriented against.
As a result of this latent anthropocentrism within Christian accounts of nonhuman life, there is an overwhelming bias towards vertebrate animals. When examples of ethically relevant animal life are reached for, invertebrates are elided in favour of more familiar vertebrates whose embodiment more closely resembles our own. This ‘institutional vertebratism’ 6 is not unique to animal theology by any means. Theoretical reflections on animals and human-animal relations have overwhelmingly favoured vertebrates across academic disciplines. 7
Despite this widespread vertebratism, there is good reason to think that invertebrates—particularly insects—should occupy a more prominent role in animal theology.
Insects in Christian Thought
Insects have historically occupied a very minor position within Christian thought and practice. Within the biblical narrative insects appear most famously en masse as swarms that devour crops and cause immense human suffering (Exod. 10:14). In this register, insect life is rendered as something more proximate to an elemental force than as a collection of individual lives deserving of attention as individual creatures. Although the authors of Leviticus grant insects closer attention (Lev. 11:20-23), they are more interested in the status of different insects as clean (those that hop) or unclean (those that crawl) than the specific characteristics of the insects themselves. The relative inattention to the specifics of insect life is exemplified in the misidentification of the locusts as four-legged. 8
Despite the seeming inattention to the specifics of insect bodies, the place of insects within the dietary laws of Leviticus can provide rich theorizations as to the authors’ conceptual world. The division of insects ostensibly according to their method of locomotion is likely not a simple articulation of preference for hopping over crawling. Instead, it has been argued that the designation of hopping as clean may be because the classic example of a hopping insect—the locust—is herbivorous and thus consumption of a locust would not conflict with the prohibition on the consumption of blood. 9 That is, permission to eat locusts can be understood as an implicit rejection of predation and connected violence as incompatible with holiness. 10 In this analysis, insects operate as a fulcrum along which an entire moral vision of the universe is articulated. Alternatively, if we turn our focus from the exemption granted to locusts to the more general prohibition on insect consumption, we find a contrasting explanation of the place of insects within the authors’ cosmology. For Mary Douglas, the ‘teeming’ fecundity of the insect is key. Douglas identifies biological generativity as that which connects the prohibitions on the consumption of insects (as part of a wider prohibition on swarming life [Lev. 11:41-42]) with the prohibition on the sacrificial offering on leaven bread. Both insects and leaven bread embody a particular form of natural fecundity that stands outside the covenant between God and his people. 11
Clearly, the place of insects within the dietary laws of Leviticus can be leveraged to understand the moral cosmology of the authors in new ways. However, what is lacking in Leviticus—even as creatively articulated by Douglas—is specific consideration of insects as individual animals. In understanding insects as an embodiment of fecund generativity, for example, the particular characteristics of insects that distinguish them from other instances of teeming life are obscured.
Medieval Christianity was, in particular times and places, more willing to grant insects direct attention. The tendency of insects to damage or destroy human agricultural produce led to discussion as to the theological position of insects and the possible ramifications of their extermination. This apprehension of insect life primarily through its deleterious effects on humans culminated in the repeated legal trials of collections of insects accused of various crimes and, in some cases, in their ultimate excommunication. 12 We can see in these prosecutions a degree of debate about the status of insects as either tests from God or agents of the Devil. 13 Whilst this does mark something of an increased entomological focus in comparison with the biblical narrative, these trials show that insects were principally considered theologically relevant only in as far as they interacted with humans.
The paucity of consideration for insect life continues in contemporary Christian thought. At the most, insects can hope for inclusion as part of a list describing the wider continuum of ethically relevant nonhuman life 14 or as an index of ecosystem decline. 15 This entomological lacuna within theological assessments of animal life is quite remarkable because under several metrics, insects are the majority constituents of animal life. By sheer mass, insects comfortably outweigh many other forms of animal life. 16 The 12 families of termites alone outweigh the entirety of all birds and reptiles combined. 17 In terms of species diversity, the panoply of insect life stands far above any comparison. With over five million different species 18 it is quite likely that there are substantially more species of insects than all other forms of animal life. Turning our attention to numbers of individual animals, insects are once again dominant. Estimates vary wildly, but there is little doubt that insects outnumber all other terrestrial animals. 19 Of course, theological and ethical importance is not a matter of pure numbers. Nonetheless, the fact that insects make up such a large proportion of animal life would suggest that their absence from direct theological assessment is concerning.
That insects often escape theological attention becomes all the more concerning in light of the fact that, contrary to common perception, insects share a number of ethically significant characteristics with the larger animals that occupy a more central position in animal theology.
Consciousness—broadly understood as a capacity for subjective experience 20 —is a central motivator for some of the most prominent and influential theological accounts of nonhuman life. 21 In these accounts, animals are of particular ethical and theological significance in a manner distinct from life in general precisely because of their status as conscious beings. Whilst consciousness may once have been thought to be a characteristic exclusive to larger and more complex animals or even uniquely human, it no longer enjoys this level of exclusivity. 22 It is enormously difficult to investigate consciousness in nonhuman animals and it is not clear precisely what role neuroscience can play in this. This debate is further complexified by the possibility that a plurality of consciousnesses exist and that different neurological structures may lead to different modalities of consciousness. However, there is increasing evidence that many insects possess the neurological architecture required for some form of consciousness. 23 If we hold that it is consciousness that marks animals as particularly ethically relevant, this would place insects alongside the larger animals that tend to occupy ethicists and theologians.
More specifically than consciousness, sentience and the capacity to experience pain and suffering has often formed the central metric for the inclusion of animals into ethical analysis across disciplinary bounds. 24 This is equally true of Christian theology, where sentience has been understood by some theologians to mark out animals as experiencing a relationship with God more expansive than that possessed by non-sentient creatures. 25 As with consciousness, it is difficult to directly gauge suffering in nonhuman animals. However, insects such as fruit flies have been shown to experience both acute and chronic nociception, 26 which is the neurophysical correlate to the subjective experience of pain. This is not in itself evidence that insects can feel pain, but it is indicative that insects are able to experience the world in a manner that can be analogous to pain. More surprisingly, honeybees have been found to exhibit behaviours that are analogous to anxiety, suggesting the existence of positive and negative mental states. 27 Neither of these findings are evidence in themselves that insects can suffer. Insects exhibit enormous diversity and, as such, evidence of pain in one species ought not to be generalized. Moreover, pain is not equivalent to suffering. Suffering is normally assumed to involve a subjective experiential dimension as well as physical nociception. Whilst the likelihood of some degree of insect consciousness might suggest a capacity for the experiential dimensions of suffering, this is not certain. Perhaps some insects can suffer in a manner analogous to humans, and others cannot. However, if we take a more modest definition of suffering as the simple condition of having interests thwarted, 28 then it is self-evident that all insects can suffer in some sense.
The point here is not to assess the precise capacity insects may have for consciousness, pain or suffering. This may vary enormously with the particular characteristics of the insect in question and is outside the scope of this article. Also outside the scope of this article is the validity of grounding the ethical status of animals in particular shared characteristics. There are a range of perspectives in animal ethics that would argue that animals have a moral claim on humans regardless of any particular capacity or characteristic. Care theorists, for example, would posit that the ethical considerability of nonhumans is determined through their relations with humans. 29 Equally, there is increasing challenge to an ethical framework that extends to animals, but not to other forms of nonhuman life and beyond. Soil, for example, is absolutely central to the circulations of life on Earth and it would seem to be a failing of any ethical framework that cannot find space for such a vital material substrate. 30
Although both these trajectories in nonhuman ethics would support the extension of ethical consideration to insects as part of a radical adjustment of the scope of ethical consideration, I wish to make a more modest claim. Even if one is committed to the more conservative claim that other animals are to be considered ethically relevant only as far as they possess particularly ethically significant characteristics or attributes, then this ethical consideration ought to be extended to insects as well.
The Farming of Insects for Food
Insects are enormously heterogenous and their relations with humans are diverse and pluriform. As such, in order to avoid being overwhelmed, there is value in identifying one particular form of human-insect relation as the locus of analysis for the remainder of this article. One dimension of human-insect relation that is likely to become increasingly relevant in the near future is the farming of insects for food.
Farmed animals have been the locus of Christian thought and action for centuries 31 and concern for the welfare of farmed animals continues to motivate some of the most influential texts of animal theology. These analyses consistently lack an entomological dimension. From a global perspective, this is a notable lacuna. At present, the 2000 or so species of edible insects recognized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) supplement the diets of almost 2 billion people globally and entomophagy is practised by upwards of 3000 ethnic groups in over 100 countries. 32
The absence of insects within theological reflection on animal agriculture is doubtless a reflection of the fact that, at present, only one species of insect is farmed in significant numbers in the developed world—the western honeybee. Apiculture is not an insignificant component of the wider phenomenon of animal agriculture. In the UK there are over 100,000 colonies of honeybees tended by both professional and amateur beekeepers amounting to hundreds of millions of individual bees. 33 Whilst the specific ethical and theoretical challenges posed by honeybees are important, the relatively small contribution of apiculture to animal agriculture as a whole places it in a marginal position in discourse surrounding animal agriculture in western countries. Although there are, of course, many other motivations for considering animals within ethical analysis, this would suggest that insects have little place at present within a theology of farmed animal life.
However, the marginal position of insects with regards to animal agriculture in developed countries may not hold forever. There is increasing consumer interest in edible insects 34 across western nations for gastronomic and environmental reasons. There are increasing calls from a range of sources for the promotion of entomophagy as a more environmentally and socially sustainable source of protein than traditional animal sources. 35 In recognition of this, legal systems for the regulation of food safety have begun to increasingly incorporate insect farming into their framework in various positions. 36 Farmed insects are unlikely to be the hegemonic future of animal agriculture, but it is quite plausible that insect farming will play an increasingly substantial role in food provisioning systems.
Christian Ethics of Insect Farming—Environmental and Social Contexts
Any ethical analysis of animal agriculture must account for the reality of contemporary global food systems as they presently exist. A strict focus on decontextualized animal welfare would fail to account for the complex environmental, social and political structures in which animal agriculture operates as a form of food provisioning.
As such, to locate the appropriate place of insect farming within a wider Christian food ethic, one might start with the fact that, first and foremost, animal agriculture produces enormous environmental stress. This is the foremost context for both popular and academic discourse surrounding insect farming. Whilst animal agriculture describes a huge range of differing practices and contexts that have dramatically varying environmental impacts, animal agriculture has substantial environmental costs in terms of carbon emissions, freshwater use and deforestation 37 to name just three of the most prominent.
In comparison, the farming of insects for food appears quite attractive. Farmed insects are much more efficient sources of nutrition than larger animals. House crickets, for example, compare very favourably in terms of feed required to produce a comparable amount of protein when compared with poultry, and this comparative advantage only grows when compared with sheep or cattle. 38 Whilst the environmental benefits of this efficiency are offset somewhat by the energy demands of insect rearing, insects compare well with other animals in terms of greenhouse gas emission per unit of protein. 39 In terms of both water use 40 and land use, 41 insects also come out ahead. There is no one single metric for evaluating the environmental impact of different methods of food production and there will be obvious variation in the impact of different agricultural methods. Nonetheless, farming insects appears to be a far more environmentally sustainable form of animal agriculture with some life-cycle analyses determining insect products procured from agricultural by-products as two to five times less environmentally damaging than meat alternatives. 42
There are other possible social advantages to insect farming that extend beyond environmental concerns. As food justice has developed into an increasingly interdisciplinary and intersectional paradigm, the slaughterhouse has emerged as a site of multiple intersecting injustices. Thinking in terms of justice provides greater insight into the complex ways in which humans and nonhumans intersect in and through the food production system and provides greater analytical clarity in addressing the linked exploitation of both animals and particular groups of people. 43 Such an approach reveals that slaughterhouses can have multiple deleterious effects on the workers they employ and the communities they are situated in, including elevated incidence of disease, crime, workplace injury and psychological distress. 44
As the food justice perspective makes clear, these negative consequences of contemporary forms of animal slaughter are bound up with wider social and economic conditions. As such, replacing the slaughter of larger animals with insects would not be a panacea. However, it is probable that such a move would ameliorate some of these negative impacts. For example, processing animals in slaughterhouses can be very physically dangerous to workers and rates of physical injury in slaughterhouses in the UK are high. 45 These dangers are in part a result of the anatomy of larger farmed animals and the need for heavy, sharp blades to efficiently process them. Whilst the physical dangers posed by processing insects for food is doubtless dependent on the technologies and machinery involved and safety procedures surrounding them, the much smaller and more easily processed bodies of insects would seem to lend itself to safer working practices.
Equally, there is evidence that there can be substantial psychological and emotional harms associated with involvement in the slaughter of large numbers of animals. 46 This is not to insinuate that the slaughter and butchery of animals should or necessarily will cause emotional harm—the role of emotions in organized animal slaughter is complex and multifaceted. 47 It would be a mistake, however, to entirely ignore this dimension of industrialized animal agriculture. It is intuitive that the processing of insects is unlikely to be associated with similar emotional harms on the grounds of the marked dissimilarity between insect bodies and more emotionally evocative mammalian bodies. Even if we acknowledge, as I have argued we should, that insects are more similar to larger animals than is often granted, there remains a significant difference in the affective dimensions of human relations with insects and larger animals. It is not the case that greater similarity between insects and larger animals in respect of consciousness or ethical relevance, for example, should necessitate greater emotional attachment to insects.
Finally, given the likely zoonotic origins of the virus responsible for the global Covid-19 pandemic, 48 increased attention is being turned to the role of human activity in the propagation and spread of zoonotic diseases. 49 Animal agriculture plays a major role in this pathogenesis by concentrating large numbers of animals in close quarters with repeated human interactions. Here, the specific biology of insects once again makes insect farming an attractive proposition. Insect biology is markedly different from human biology. Therefore, whilst this is an under-researched area, 50 there is good reason to assume that the evolutionary distance between humans and insects means that diseases that affect humans are less likely to emerge from insect populations. 51 As insect-borne diseases such as malaria show, this does not mean that insects cannot operate as vectors for human diseases but rather that the concentrations of insect life required by insect farms present a reduced risk for the emergence of new diseases.
Insect Farming and the Flourishing of Animals on Farms
Whilst animal agriculture must be understood and analysed in its social and environmental context, a central commitment of Christian animal ethics is that animals are also ethically relevant as individuals. One of the signal contributions of a distinctly Christian animal ethic is a refusal to understand animal life in solely abstracted and massified terms. 52
This commitment to the individuality of particular animals is perhaps best clarified in the conceptual framework of ‘animal flourishing’ as described by David Clough. For Clough, ‘All creatures are declared good by their creator in their own right; all creatures exist in utter dependence on God and mutual dependence on one another; no creature can be comprehended merely as the means to the flourishing of another’. 53 Drawing on both God's celebration of all animal life as presented by the Psalms (Ps. 104) and also insistences on God's attention and care for each individual animal in its specificity (Matt. 10:29; Lk. 12:6), 54 Clough contends that God not only acknowledges each and every animal, but specifically wills these animals to flourish. As such, the response of Christians to these animal lives is to engage with them in such a manner as to promote their flourishing where possible and limit the curtailing of this flourishing to a minimum. What flourishing actually entails will vary between animal species and, as a result, a Christian ethic of nonhuman life has to be attentive to the particularities of the different characteristics of differing animal species.
The most comprehensive application of this conceptual framework to the practical realities of contemporary animal agriculture is the recently published policy framework ‘The Christian Ethics of Farmed Animal Welfare’ (CEFAW). 55 This policy document lays out five common farming practices that impinge on the flourishing of farmed animals. By assessing each of these practices in turn, we can see that in several aspects a move from larger animals to insects in animal agriculture would be more amenable to the flourishing of nonhuman life in food production.
The first practice identified by CEFAW as impinging on farmed animal flourishing is the subjection of farmed animals to impoverished lives in monotonous environments. Whilst it might be inaccurate to describe these animals as capable of being bored, the larger animals that constitute the majority of farmed animals do exhibit affective benefits when living in enriched environments as contrasted with more barren environments. 56 Moreover, housing these animals (particularly those in intensive farming operations) in very limited indoor environments often results in an inability to express the species-specific behaviours that clearly constitute a component of their specific modality of flourishing. 57
In contrast, it has been noted that the conditions in which insects are reared are in fact fairly similar to the preferred environments of free, living insects. 58 Likewise, many of the species-specific behaviours that insects exhibit, such as the highly choreographed antagonisms of male house crickets, 59 are by no means prevented by an agricultural setting. The required environment for insect flourishing is more concordant with animal agriculture than it is for larger animals.
The second and third farming practices to limit flourishing are the widespread mutilation of farmed animals for welfare purposes—castration, teeth clipping, beak trimming etc.—and the separation of family groupings. Although specific mutilations might produce a net reduction in suffering for the farmed animal in the long term, they are less defensible in the more holistic approach of animal flourishing. These mutilations preclude several of the species-specific activities that constitute proper animal flourishing. For a similar reason, the separation of family groups precludes a wide range of animal behaviours surrounding rearing, grooming, learning and play which are all constitutive of a properly flourishing animal life. Insects reared for human consumption are not mutilated at any point in the farming process. Equally, separation of family units is less of a concern for insects than the larger animals that constitute contemporary UK animal agriculture. The degree of parental care exhibited by different insect species—and, by extension, the relative importance of family grouping to these insects—varies substantially. 60 However, as a general rule, insects provide minimal parental care and exhibit little involvement with their offspring. 61 From this, we can assume that the separation of family units in the farming of insects is not a significant barrier to their flourishing.
The fourth practice that limits animal flourishing is one in which insect farming does not appear so favourable. The curtailing of the lifespan of farmed animals—often to small fractions of their possible longevity—dramatically reduces their capacity to flourish. Whilst the extent to which this occurs varies in insect farming, farmed insects overwhelmingly do not live their entire lifespan. For some species, such as mealworms (the grub of the Tenibro Monitor beetle) this curtailing is substantial and in farming contexts these insects’ lives are ended before they fully mature. For other species the curtailing of their lifespan is less significant as a result of their naturally reduced lifespans—house crickets might be harvested at approximately half their natural lifespan, 62 which compares favourably with many larger farmed animals. 63 Moreover, incidence of accidental farmed insect death due to drowning or cannibalism 64 can be relatively high depending on the conditions of insect rearing, further curtailing average lifespan. As such, in its present state, insect farming must be considered at best broadly equivalent to the farming of larger animals as far as curtailing flourishing through limiting lifespans is concerned.
The fifth and final practice identified in the CEFAW document is the selective breeding of farmed animals. Farmed animals today are, in many cases, vastly different from their wild-living forebears as a result of many generations of selective breeding. This can have enormously deleterious effects for the animals in question—chicken bodies that strain and fail under the demands their massively increased weight puts on them, for example. The comparatively rapid generational turnover of insects would place them as ideal candidates for selective breeding programmes. However, despite a few initial investigations into the possibility of improving yields through this practice, 65 selective breeding to the point of producing deleterious effects on farmed insects is not a present characteristic of insect farming.
It would, therefore, appear that from the perspective of encouraging and promoting the flourishing of farmed animals, the farming of insects may offer substantial advantages in comparison to the farming of larger animals. Whilst some of the practices that constitute contemporary insect farming do limit the ability of farmed insects to flourish, these limitations are neither as numerous nor severe as in more traditional animal farming. In tandem with the environmental and social benefits that insect farming represents, there appears to be a strong ethical case for promoting insect farming as a more substantial source of human nutrition.
Ideology, Incarnation and Insects
There are, however, grounds to consider caution before endorsing insect farming. This caution becomes apparent if we move our scope of analysis from farming per se to the entire constellation of relationships between humans and nonhumans.
One of the most influential conceptualizations of the relationship of human life to animals is that proposed by Giorgio Agamben. Agamben adapts the conceptual framework of Aristotle to provide a distinction between natural life (zoē) and political/organized life (bios). Natural life describes life in its biological registers as shared by all living beings regardless of species boundary—life as governed by demands of respiration, eating, procreation, etc. Organized life describes a more particular way of living including features such as justice and happiness. This distinction is, on Agamben's reading, the ‘fundamental categorical pair of Western politics’ 66 that structures both our political imaginary and the operations of society.
Where Agamben's account becomes particularly generative is in his inversion of the more intuitive account of the relationship between zoē and bios. Instead of a zōē that exists already ‘in the wild’ only to be subsequently ordered and corralled into bios, Agamben argues that the distinction between bios and zoē is in fact constantly produced and reproduced through the action of sovereign power. Political activity precedes the supposedly originary natural life, articulating and rearticulating the distinction between that natural life and political life. This occurs on both on a rhetorical level as a justification of the superiority of political life and more literally through withdrawing (or threatening to withdraw) the protections and structures of bios for some people and exposing them to the vicissitudes of nature. 67
In his initial exposition of this concept, Agamben keeps his focus locked on purely human subjects and the humanisation and dehumanisation of different people by political systems. However, this conceptual framework lends itself readily to understanding the distinction between humanity and animality and this has not escaped the attention of either critical readers of Agamben nor Agamben himself. 68 The exact relationship between the bios/zoē distinction and the human/animal distinction is contested. However, we can broadly identify zoē with animality as encompassing both nonhuman animals and the animality of human beings and bios with a particular ideological formation of humanity as distinct from nonhuman animals. 69
In explaining the production of the distinction between humanity and animality, Agamben describes the operation of an ‘anthropological machine’. This machine is nothing less than the entire ideological edifice of humanity as fundamentally distinct from other forms of life. It works to produce a ‘pure’ humanity through continually recognizing and excluding the animality of human beings through a wide range of social and discursive practices. 70 This machine has the ability to deny humanity to particular human beings and, as such, is implicated by Agamben in the dehumanization that accompanied some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. Therefore, when Agamben articulates a politico-ethical response to the anthropological machine he does not want to strengthen our identification with either bios or zoē. Instead, it is the process by which the distinction between the two are produced that is problematic. As such, Agamben contends that we ought to direct our energies to stopping the operation of the anthropological machine itself.
The relevance of the anthropological machine for Christian thought is best explored in the work of Eric Daryl Meyer. Meyer's contribution can be appraised according to two key interventions. The first is a creative re-reading of Genesis 2–3. It must be emphasized that this is not an attempt to uncover an obscured authorial intent. Rather, in recognition of the anthropocentrism that has been traditionally derived from readings of Genesis 2–3, Meyer wishes to offer a creative counter-reading that deploys the Edenic narrative against any supposed human exceptionalism. Meyer contends that one can identify a structural similarity between Christian accounts of the Fall and original sin and Agamben's description of the production of a transcendent humanity through the anthropological machine.
Meyer identifies some of the key traits that Genesis 2–3 identifies as central to human exceptionalism: language, knowledge of death, shame etc. Where Meyer moves sharply against anthropocentrism is in arguing that ‘as each of these traits distinguish humanity from animality in the narrative, they are simultaneously linked to human disobedience and expulsion from Eden’. 71 That is to say, Meyer contends that the process by which humanity is distinguished from animality is precisely the process by which sinfulness adheres to that humanity. As such, in contradistinction to trajectories within the Christian tradition that want to align sinfulness with animality, Meyer contends that Genesis 2–3 reveals that ‘the sinfulness into which humanity falls is not enmeshment in animality but pretension to a transcendent exceptionalism within creation’. 72 Sin, as a structuring characteristic of human subjectivity and sociality, is directly identified as the material-symbolic production of human subjectivity through the repression and expulsion of animality.
Meyer's second contribution is a distinctively anti-anthropocentric reading of the Incarnation. Meyer identifies in the prologue to the Gospel of John a distinction between the political rationality of humanity as produced through the anthropological machine and the divine Logos. Building on this, Meyer contends that the Incarnation is not an assumption of humanity as distinct from animality, but rather an identification of God with the zoē of human life. This occurs, in Meyer's reading, on three levels: Jesus as Logos clearly stands with the ‘bare life’ of the outcast against the political life of citizenship; Jesus occupies and transforms the symbolic position of various animal lives, including the sacrificial lamb and the scapegoat; Jesus's life, death and resurrection inaugurate a pattern of human life that is wholly other to the strictures and demands of the present structure of human subjectivity. 73
On a first reading, it might appear that Meyer is suggesting an Incarnational endorsement of zoē over bios with the concomitant claim that a properly Incarnational Christian ethic would seek to reclaim and restore human animality in some way. However, this would be to mistake the full radicality of Meyer's argument. In identifying with the zoē of human life, the Incarnation is not as much an endorsement of animality as a direct rejection of the distinction between humanity and animality. Jesus does not, in Meyer's reading, embrace animality as presently constructed but rather collapses the distinction on which both humanity and animality rest. Indeed, Meyer identifies the Incarnation strongly with Agamben's hope that we might oppose the functioning of the anthropological machine: ‘The becoming-flesh of the Logos is not the endorsement of the present structure of human subjectivity and self-understanding, but an effort to knock loose the gears of the destructive machine that produces it.’ 74 A Christian ethic derived from this reading of the Incarnation would not so much call for a ‘re-discovery’ of a suppressed animality but rather a dissolution of the systems by which both humanity and animality are produced.
The specific relevance of Meyer's argument for insect life bears emphasizing. Meyer is not arguing that the assumption of flesh in the Incarnation extends our ethical consideration to animals that share that flesh. This would place insects in an ambiguous position. Insect biology is similar to more obviously ‘fleshy’ animals in many aspects, but there are important differences as well. It would, therefore, be unclear if we could say insects share in the flesh of the Incarnation and on what grounds this would be determined—at what point of morphological similarity to a human can an animal be said to be fleshy? Meyer's argument, however, obviates the need for such an assessment. His focus is not on the materiality of the flesh of the Incarnation, but rather the way in which animality is identified, transformed and undermined by the Incarnation. Insects might not share in the material flesh of the Incarnation, but they do share its animality. As such, insect life is as affected by the transformation Meyer describes as any other animal.
It is here that the place of insect farming within this anti-anthropocentric Incarnational ethic becomes apparent. Meyer is chiefly concerned with the symbolic and discursive practices by which human animality is identified and repressed. However, the anthropological machine also functions on a decidedly material level through the identification and control of the animality of animals themselves. The central locus for this operation of the anthropological machine is the animal farm. The animal farm is a site in which the conceptual distinction between humanity and animality is enacted through the treatment of animal lives. It must be stressed that this does not specifically refer to exceptionally cruel treatment, but rather to the political distinction between human and animal life on which the operation of any animal farm is predicated. Indeed, given the enormous scope of contemporary animal agriculture and the immense numbers of animals who live their lives within agricultural systems, it would not be an overreach to describe animal agriculture as the centre of operations for the anthropological machine. 75
At present, insect lives are largely absent from the symbolic and material structures of animal agriculture. However, the development and widespread adoption of insect farming within developed countries would represent an expansion of the scope of this facet of the anthropological machine. Insect farming would bring a wider range of animality into the direct consideration of economic and political rationality. In doing so, it would diversify and retrench the hold the anthropological machine has over all life, both human and animal. If, following Meyer, an Incarnational Christian ethic would work to disrupt the operation of the anthropological machine, then insect farming would appear to be a problematic proposition for a Christian food ethic.
An Ambiguous Position for Insect Farming
Appraising the position of insect farming within a wider Christian food ethic is not as simple as one might think. In contrast with more traditional animal agriculture, the farming of insects offers myriad benefits that ought to be taken seriously. At the same time, widespread adoption of the farming of insects may work to further reinforce and solidify the ideological structures by which creaturely solidarity with other animals is denied. Rather than trying to resolve these competing impulses and provide a synthesized endorsement or denunciation of insect farming, it may be more appropriate to hold them together in tension, casting an ultimately ambiguous judgment on insect farming.
Moreover, the example of insect farming reveals that a Christian ethic of nonhuman animals and our relationships with them cannot limit itself to understanding the welfare of individual animals, nor even to the societal and ecological consequences of wider structures such as animal agriculture. Instead, Christian ethics must wrestle with the centrality of animals to some of the most fundamental ideological structures of society. Any effort to reorganize our relationships with nonhuman animals must include radical alterations to systems of food provisioning if it is to avoid replicating these ideological structures with nothing more than superficial changes.
