The Cosmopolitics of Insect Farming: Toward Scaling Out Just and Sustainable Food Futures

The Cosmopolitics of Insect Farming: Toward Scaling Out Just and Sustainable Food Futures | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article The Cosmopolitics of Insect Farming: Toward Scaling Out Just and Sustainable Food Futures Varvara Borisova, Tereza Stöckelová This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8694155/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Under Review Version 1 posted 7 You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract This article examines the social, ecological, and ethical dimensions of insect-based food systems through the lens of cosmopolitical justice, drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Czechia. Based on semi-structured interviews with researchers and insect-farming entrepreneurs, participant observation at insect farms, and public engagement events, we analyze three distinct scalings of insect farming—global, regional, and domestic—and show how each enacts particular socio-ecological relations, governance logics, and configurations of justice. Building on critical protein scholarship, post-growth approaches, the logic of scaling out, and cosmopolitics, we argue that global and regional models of insect food production tend to operate within pre-scripted sustainability frameworks. These models prioritize efficiency, growth, and standardization, positioning insects primarily as commodities while marginalizing alternative forms of knowledge, care, and multispecies relations. In contrast, domestic insect farming constitutes a distinct cosmopolitical configuration in which the common world is not a given in advance but is continuously negotiated through the everyday practices of cohabitation, attentiveness, and metabolic proximity between humans, insects, and other life forms. We show that domestic insect farming fosters relational care, low-cost and locally embedded provisioning, and openness to multispecies entanglements, enabling forms of justice that extend beyond distributive concerns to encompass epistemic and ontological dimensions. The article demonstrates how, breeding, and eating insects can, by means of outscaling, contribute to decentralized, post-growth, and multispecies-just food futures. More broadly, the article advances a cosmopolitical perspective as a framework for keeping food futures open, plural, and contested. edible insects cosmopolitics sustainability food transition justice Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Introduction In the contemporary debates on the sustainability of food production systems and the ecological burdens and limits they entail, edible insects have attracted increasing attention from researchers, policymakers, and producers as a potential alternative source of protein (European Commission 2020). Insect-based foods are widely promoted as sustainable, nutritious, and healthy substitutes for conventional animal products (Nowakowski et al. 2021) and are often positioned within broader narratives of technological innovation and efficiency-driven sustainability transitions. Yet, despite these promises, their integration into existing food systems remains deeply contested. Persistent cultural resistance—the so-called “yuck” factor—continues to hinder consumer acceptance in regions where insects have not traditionally been consumed (Belluco et al. 2017; Volden 2024). In an effort to overcome this barrier, many insect-based products enter the market as ultra-processed foods engineered to mimic familiar tastes and textures. While this approach may facilitate consumer acceptance, it simultaneously raises concerns about nutritional quality and its compatibility with public health objectives (Malila et al. 2024). Moreover, recent scholarship has questioned the sustainability claims surrounding edible insects. Biteau and colleagues (2025) demonstrate that the prevailing environmental assessments of insect farming rely on limited and often speculative data, suggesting that it is unlikely to deliver the promised environmental benefits once scaled to industrial levels. In addition, insect-based food systems raise significant questions of distributional and economic justice. Industrially produced insect-based foods are frequently costly, rendering them inaccessible to many consumers and reinforcing existing inequalities within food systems. Together, these tensions underscore the need to move beyond narrow techno-optimistic framings and to examine insect-based food production as a set of socio-technical and socio-ecological assemblages that require careful and reflexive governance. Within the European Union, entomophagy—the practice of eating insects—remains a relatively novel phenomenon. Edible insects are classified as novel foods and are therefore subject to specific regulatory regimes (Meijer et al. 2025). Currently, four species are approved for human consumption and recognized as farm animals: yellow mealworms, lesser mealworms, migratory locusts, and house crickets. To date, regulatory attention has focused primarily on food safety, market authorization, and technological feasibility. Considerably less attention has been paid to questions of governance understood in a broader, transformative sense. If insects are to become a more prominent component of a sustainable European foodscape, the critical issue is not merely how to regulate them efficiently but how to govern their production, circulation, and consumption in ways that actively contribute to socially just, ecologically responsible, and resilient food systems. Crucially, the social, environmental, and metabolic consequences of insect breeding and consumption are shaped by the scale at which these practices are organized. Accordingly, this article distinguishes three scalings of insect breeding—global, regional, and domestic—and analyzes how each produces distinct governance logics, power relations, and configurations of responsibility. These scalings, we argue, also distribute benefits, risks, and obligations unevenly, with important implications for social, environmental, and interspecies justice. Global scaling is characterized by industrial producers and importers of processed insect protein, often sourced from countries in Southeast Asia and Africa and integrated into global value chains. While this model generates new economic opportunities for producers in the Global South, it is also embedded in broader dynamics of “green extractivism” (Bruna 2022), whereby sustainability-oriented transitions may reproduce unequal North–South relations and displace environmental and social costs beyond Europe. Governance at this scale prioritizes standardization, traceability, and efficiency, while centering insect protein as an abstract, transferable commodity detached from its ecological and social contexts. Examples of regional scaling are found in insect farms and processing facilities operating in Czechia that have the ambition to export within Europe. Compared to global scaling, this mode reduces some of the ecological and social externalities associated with long-distance trade and import. Here, the insect organism as a whole becomes the primary object of production, sold either as animal feed or processed into food products for human consumption. This mode also incorporates frass—insect excrement—as a by-product used in plant fertilization. Nevertheless, regional insect farming remains highly standardized and is often oriented toward monocultural production systems, raising concerns related to biosecurity, ecological resilience, and systemic vulnerability. Governance in this mode centers on regulatory compliance, bioeconomic optimization, and risk management, while issues of multispecies coexistence tend to remain instrumental and secondary. Finally, domestic scaling deliberately avoids industrialization. It is practiced by home-based breeders who raise insects for personal consumption or for small-scale, neighborhood-based exchange. This mode builds on traditions of domestic cohabitation with animals, food self-provisioning, and gift-based economies. Humans and insects coexist in close spatial proximity, sustaining one another through everyday practices of care and shared resource use. As a result, domestic scaling offers a low-cost, locally embedded alternative that can be integrated into rural and low-income household economies, primarily through minimally processed foods. Multispecies governance at this scale is informal, relational, and practice-based, emerging from everyday ethics rather than formal regulation alone. All three modes possess specific advantages and may contribute, in different ways, to sustainability transitions. At the same time, each generates distinct risks and externalities, which we examine in detail in this article. We argue, however, that domestic scaling exhibits two features that give it particular relevance for transformative governance. First, by cultivating forms of more-than-human metabolic intimacy, domestic insect breeding challenges the anthropocentric and technocratic assumptions that continue to dominate sustainability transitions in agrifood systems. Second, it aligns with post-growth paradigms that prioritize sufficiency over efficiency, distribution over accumulation, and care over control (McGreevy et al. 2022). By scaling food production outward rather than upward, domestic insect breeding fosters decentralized and distributed networks of small producers, pointing toward forms of food system governance that are grounded in responsibility, resilience, experimentation, and post-growth imaginaries. Theoretical Grounding Our analysis is informed by four interrelated conceptual lenses that illuminate the social, environmental, and ethical dimensions of insect-based food systems: the protein transition and its critiques, post-growth, the logic of scaling out, and cosmopolitics. Together, these frameworks provide conceptual coordinates for articulating how alternative protein practices can be governed in ways that are just, responsible, and ecologically attuned. Critical protein scholarship highlights the historical and ongoing socio-technical and market dynamics that shape alternative protein innovation; post-growth and scaling out emphasize the merits of context-sensitive, decentralized approaches that prioritize sufficiency, care, and ecological limits; and the cosmopolitical framework foregrounds the negotiated, provisional, and heterogeneous character of shared worlds, resisting technocratic or growth-driven definitions of sustainability. By combining these perspectives, we are able to examine how insect breeding and consumption practices—whether globally industrial, regionally embedded, or domestically scaled—produce distinct social, ecological, and metabolic consequences, and how governance might be designed to support justice, resilience, and relational sustainability. This integrated framework informs our analysis of the three scalings of insect breeding in Czechia, enabling us to scrutinize broader questions of equity, care, and multispecies flourishing. Critical Protein Scholarship Protein has historically been positioned as a central concern in global nutrition, shaping public health discourse, research priorities, and food technologies. Early twentieth-century debates, particularly following Cicely Williams’ work on kwashiorkor , framed protein deficiency as a global problem and gave rise to the notion of a “protein gap,” prompting interventions ranging from supplementation to novel protein production technologies (Nott 2019). Protein’s symbolic and scientific authority—the notion of the “charismatic nutrient” (Kimura 2013; Guthman & Biltekoff 2022)—has persisted even as the original protein gap concept was debunked (McLaren 1974; Waterlow & Payne 1975). Today, protein remains a dominant lens for framing nutrition and sustainability challenges, underpinning markets for plant-based alternatives, meat cultivation technologies, and edible insects. Critical scholarship, however, highlights how contemporary protein transition initiatives often reproduce prior patterns of techno-fixing, market concentration, and growth-oriented thinking, obscuring social and environmental inequities and entrenching green extractivism (Guthman et al. 2022; Bruna 2022). Situating insect-based foods within this broader protein transition allows us to examine whose needs are prioritized, how innovation is shaped by capitalist logics, and what forms of governance are enacted—or foreclosed—through the socio-technical and market arrangements of the protein economy. Post-Growth Debates about sustainability remain deeply entangled with the ideology of economic growth. Dominant green-growth frameworks assume that environmental crises can be addressed through technological innovation, efficiency gains, and market expansion, often privileging large-scale solutions and quantitative metrics of performance (Infante-Amate et al. 2025). Critics argue that this growth-oriented logic preserves the very structures responsible for ecological degradation, and that its underlying assumptions—such as the decoupling of economic expansion from resource use—are empirically dubious (Parrique et al. 2019). Degrowth scholars have proposed a deliberate reduction of energy and resource throughput to bring global economies back into alignment with planetary boundaries, while simultaneously fostering social well-being, equity, and stability (Hickel 2020; Kallis 2011). This perspective emphasizes that sustainability cannot be achieved solely through technological innovation or efficiency gains; rather, it requires reconsidering the goals, values, and rhythms that underpin economic and social systems. Post-growth approaches extend these critiques by emphasizing prosperity without growth, sufficiency over efficiency, distribution over accumulation, and care over control (McGreevy et al. 2022; Kallis et al. 2025). Within agrifood systems, post-growth thinking foregrounds practices and governance arrangements that prioritize relationality, participation, and social justice over rapid technological upscaling or global market integration. This orientation encourages attention to locally embedded, small-scale, and relational food production practices, such as domestic insect farming that can support socially and ecologically resilient systems. By centering care, multispecies entanglements, and sufficiency, post-growth perspectives challenge conventional assumptions that feeding the future requires ever-increasing volumes of high-tech or industrially scaled protein, opening space for alternative approaches grounded in everyday practices and ethical attentiveness. Scaling Out A key extension of post-growth thinking is Papadopoulos’s (2022) concept of scaling out, which reinterprets conventional notions of scale. Traditional understandings of scale often prioritize vertical growth—replication, concentration, and territorial expansion—as a pathway to efficiency and profitability. Scaling out, by contrast, emphasizes horizontal expansion through context-specific, decentralized, and adaptive practices. It recognizes that solutions cannot be imposed universally; rather, they must emerge from the specific ecological, social, and cultural conditions of each site. Scaling out thus cultivates a mosaic of locally grounded experiments and socio-ecological practices that may align to support broader sustainability objectives without demanding homogenization or replication (Tacchetti et al. 2021). For insect-based food systems, the lens of scaling out draws attention to how production at different scales—the global industrial, regional farm-based, or domestic household level—creates distinct ecological, social, and ethical outcomes. Global-scale insect farming often emphasizes efficiency, traceability, and standardized protein outputs, while domestic-scale practices foreground multispecies cohabitation, relational care, and situated knowledge. Scaling out provides a conceptual framework for understanding the potential of decentralized and contextually adaptive approaches to contribute to post-growth, socially just, and ecologically attuned food systems. It underscores that the transformative potential of insect farming lies not solely in technological innovation or market integration but also in the ways production and care practices are scaled to meet the specific needs and capacities of particular socio-ecological settings. Cosmopolitics The governance of equitable sustainability transitions cannot rely on universal solutions or standardized pathways. Instead, it requires approaches that begin by asking who and what benefit from transition processes and outcomes in a particular site, and who and what remain marginalized or neglected. In this regard, the notion of cosmopolitics, as proposed by Isabelle Stengers (2005b; 2010) and Bruno Latour (2004), offers a productive lens for rethinking justice and governance in socio-ecological transitions. Central to cosmopolitical thinking is the idea of a common world—not as a pre-given reality determined by expert knowledge, religious authority, or political hegemony, but as a fragile and provisional achievement. Although these authors elaborated this concept through intense intellectual exchange, their respective conceptions of cosmopolitics differ in important ways. As Janicka (2024: 130) argues, a key point of divergence concerns the notion of universality: while Latour calls for assembling the “universal” through the idea of “local universalities,” Stengers turns away from universality altogether in defense of singularity. For Stengers, a common world emerges as a singular “cosmopolitical event” in which humans and non-humans do not participate in a harmonious or symmetrical manner, but instead retain their differences, conflicting interests, and distinctive capacities (Stengers 2005b). This conception emphasizes processes of collective world-making in which diverse beings, knowledges, and concerns are brought into partial relations without being reduced to a common metric or hierarchy. Applied to food transitions, a cosmopolitical framework shifts analytical attention away from optimizing predefined systems and performance indicators toward examining how specific arrangements of production, consumption, and care enact particular worlds—and, with them, particular distributions of vulnerability, responsibility, value, and costs. From a cosmopolitical standpoint, justice is therefore not limited to redistributing benefits and burdens within an existing ontological order; it also involves interrogating how that order itself is assembled, stabilized, and rendered authoritative. Situating justice within a cosmopolitical framework thus challenges the assumption that sustainability transitions are oriented toward a universal, expert-defined vision of a “sustainable future.” Instead, what is at stake is which world is being sustained, for whom, and at whose expense. In the context of insect-based food systems, cosmopolitics calls attention to how different modes of insect farming enact insect life, human–insect relations, and forms of care. Cosmopolitical justice, then, entails keeping open the question of what a just and sustainable food future might be and resisting its premature closure through technocratic or growth-oriented solutions. Methods and Data This article draws on ethnographic research on emerging food technologies in the Czech Republic, with a particular focus on alternative protein innovations, including cellular agriculture ([anonymized] 2026) and edible insects. Our research combines semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and close analysis of online materials and presentations of companies producing edible insects. Since January 2024, we conducted seven interviews with researchers specializing in food and agricultural production, as well as three interviews with entrepreneurs in the field of insect farming, amounting to over 700 minutes of recorded material. The interview guide for entrepreneurs addressed sources of expertise, interactions with the Czech agricultural system, expectations for the field’s development, and challenges and tensions encountered in the national context. The interview guide for researchers focused on the opportunities and risks associated with incorporating edible insects into Czech and European foodscapes, their potential environmental impacts, and perspectives on consumer acceptance. In addition to interviews, we conducted observations at two insect farming facilities in Czechia. The first was located in the village home of one entrepreneur’s family, where he breeds insects, while the second was located in a dedicated agricultural building. During both observations, we paid close attention to farming practices and workflows. Owners and employees guided us through their facilities, explaining daily operations and relations with insects. All interviews and fieldwork were conducted in Czech, and excerpts cited in this article have been translated into English by the authors. All participants’ names and the names of the companies have been pseudonymized. Further data were generated through two public events organized by the research team, which also involved some of the interviewed entrepreneurs. The first, held in October 2024, featured a tasting of edible insect products. Participants, including members of the general public, insect farmers, researchers, a shop founder specializing in insect-based foods, and an epidemiologist, were invited to distinguish between conventional products (e.g., crisps and crackers) and insect-based alternatives. The tasting progressed from familiar, minimally conspicuous foods to less processed products, including whole worms and crickets. Participants were encouraged to share both personal impressions and professional reflections on the potential role of insects in future diets. The second event, held in November 2025, was a workshop in which participants designed “recipes of the future,” engaging with emerging food production technologies. Finally, this article draws on an ongoing collaboration with one of the entrepreneurs, which included preparing a conference paper on modes of metabolic multispecies cohabitation. This collaboration provided unique insights into the bodily and metabolic proximities involved in domestic insect farming and the relational entanglements between humans and insects. Collectively, these methods allowed us to examine insect production and consumption across multiple scales, capturing the social, ecological, and ethical dynamics central to our study of transformative governance in alternative protein systems. Scalings of Insect Farming In this section, we examine three distinct scalings of insect farming, each illustrated through a specific case study. Each mode of scaling offers certain opportunities while simultaneously involving specific tensions and limitations. Through close analysis, we show how scaling practices shape not only production models and socio-ecological relations but also distinct configurations of justice. The global : “It is key for the circular economy that low-value items can be transformed back into something valuable.” Given the long-standing tradition of entomophagy in many Asian countries, in some of them insect farming has been identified as a strategic field of production and export. Thailand, in particular, has positioned itself as a global leader in the production and export of edible insects. It has played a pioneering role in establishing the standards of Good Agricultural Practice for cricket farming, with the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific seconding this initiative by issuing a guide to sustainable cricket farming. As Tiwasing, Bek, and colleagues argue (2025), these steps toward making insect farming sustainable “signal the intent to enter regulated food markets in developed regions such as Europe, the UK, and North America” (2025: 2). Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, the authors identify several challenges currently faced by Thai insect farmers seeking to access export markets, including limited marketing expertise and the high costs associated with export procedures. Nevertheless, the article emphasizes that the Thai edible insect industry holds significant potential to become an important component of the national economy and export portfolio, particularly against the backdrop of a rising demand for edible insects in Europe and the UK (Tiwasing et al. 2025: 14). Some EU-based companies producing insect-based foods rely on imported raw materials, most commonly powdered insect protein, which is subsequently processed into final products within Europe. Mr. Mucha, the CEO of an insect-based food company, explained that his company decided to establish a cricket farm in Thailand due to the country’s long-standing tradition of insect farming and the availability of well-developed production infrastructure. A key factor in this decision was the high cost of raw materials produced within the EU: he recalled that one Netherlands-based company offered “cricket flour”—ground crickets—at a price of approximately €200 per kilogram, a cost that proved economically unsustainable for their business model. As a result, Mr. Mucha and his team opted to build their own cricket farming facility in Thailand, which, according to their website, has since obtained Good Agricultural Practice certification and become one of the biggest facilities worldwide. The company emphasizes its integration with the local Thai community, including close collaboration with Thai researchers to improve farming practices and the provision of employment to the locals. Mr. Mucha is convinced that edible insects can play a meaningful role in reducing the environmental burden of contemporary agrifood systems. He frequently refers to comparative calculations that contrast the resource demands of producing one kilogram of beef with those required to produce one kilogram of cricket protein, highlighting the substantially lower inputs of land, water, and feed in the latter case. His entrepreneurial narrative forefronts his aspiration to contribute to social and environmental change and emphasizes that he turned down an offer from a prestigious university abroad in order to pursue this venture. Indeed, insect-based protein production, as practiced by his company, has the potential to reduce certain environmental costs associated with conventional livestock agriculture. Nevertheless, at the same time, the model of production and distribution on which this enterprise is built—namely, the large-scale farming of insects in Southeast Asia for export to European markets—also entails significant drawbacks. First, the reliance on long-distance transportation undermines some of the environmental benefits claimed for insect protein by contributing to the carbon emissions associated with global logistics. Second, even though Mr. Mucha’s operation currently emphasizes local collaboration, research partnerships, and employment opportunities within the Thai community, the broader model risks sliding into forms of green extractivism. In such scenarios, the sustainability demands of the Global North are met through the intensified extraction of resources, labor, and ecological capacity in the Global South. If demand for insect protein were to rise substantially, farming facilities in the Global South could become oriented toward export, potentially at the expense of local consumption. This shift could result in edible insects being diverted away from the local food systems and culinary traditions in which they have long been present, thereby disrupting existing nutritional practices and metabolic relationships with insects as food. What is here framed as a locally embedded and socially responsible enterprise thus carries the risk of reproducing asymmetries characteristic of global agrifood markets. A blog post on Mr. Mucha’s company website outlines a particular vision of future food systems. It imagines farming facilities like the one established in Thailand being replicated in every city to supply urban populations with sufficient insect protein. This vision echoes the farm-to-table model, in which the long-distance transportation of food is minimized and production is localized, potentially contributing to more sustainable forms of agriculture. However, within this framework, production is still premised on the global scaling and replication of standardized insect farming facilities deployed across diverse contexts. Thus, this model remains rooted in imaginaries of a “global food system,” a “global market,” and “global health.” Anthropologist Emily Yates-Doerr, in her analysis of Dutch research on edible insects (2015), shows how such visions rely on the assumption of “replicable immutability,” whereby a singular farming model is expected to travel seamlessly across the world to be reproduced. As she points out, this approach seeks to “tackle a generalized world” (2015: 11), but it overlooks the profound political, environmental, cultural, and socio-economic differences between the sites where these models are developed. The regional: “To get low prices, we need [bigger] production volumes” Mr. Komárek, the founder and CEO of an edible insect firm, chose a different path by establishing his own farming facility in Czechia. It is housed in the upper storage level of a former cowshed—a space once occupied by cattle is now populated by mealworms. His engagement with insects began several years ago, when he started breeding crickets as feed for his chameleon. He later transitioned to mealworms, which, unlike crickets, do not require high temperatures and can thrive in cooler environments. What began as an amateur experiment has since evolved into a business operation primarily focused on producing raw insect powder and frass—the insects’ excreta which can be used as a plant fertilizer. As Mr. Komárek guides us through the farm, he opens boxes filled with mealworms and proudly presents his “stock.” He places a pale worm on his palm, observes it closely, and affectionately refers to it as a “breeding success” (See Fig. 1 ) Like Mr. Mucha, Mr. Komárek sees edible insects as a food of the future and highlights not only their environmental benefits but also their nutritional value and culinary versatility. He emphasizes the wide range of possible uses—from frying whole larvae in a pan to producing insect powder that can be used, for example, to make pasta that would be enriched not only with protein but also with healthy fats and essential minerals. Unlike Mr. Mucha’s operation, however, the company positions itself as a regional facility “in the heart of Europe,” claiming to enable flexible and rapid distribution to consumers and warehouses across Europe while minimizing environmental impacts. According to Mr. Komárek, one of the key advantages of insect farming lies in its potential to support a circular economy by using intermediate food products and waste streams. His farm relies on by-products from a nearby brewery as well as write-off food from local supermarkets, which are repurposed as feed for the insects. But despite these advantages, Mr. Komárek does not expect edible insects to become a regular ingredient of the Czech diet in the near future, and not just because of the absence of an entomophagy tradition. He points instead to the “hyper-conservative” nature of Czech agriculture, where innovation—whether in the form of edible insects, aquaponic systems, or cell-cultivating technologies—tends to be slow to gain acceptance and even slower to receive institutional and political support through subsidies and policy frameworks. A second major obstacle, also highlighted by Mr. Mucha, is the high price of insect-based products, which limits their accessibility and broader uptake. Mr. Komárek details this issue as follows: I don’t think there’s really a technological obstacle to producing at large scale. But we end up stuck in this strange loop. People want low prices. Customers, food producers—they all want low prices. And I say—fine, but for you to get low prices, we need [bigger] production volumes. That is the economy of scale [...] If you wanted to get the price of the [insect] powder down to, for example, 50 Czech crowns [approx. €2], we’re talking about volumes of at least tens of tons, maybe even hundreds of tons [...] And selling off that amount on the market as it is now is simply problematic. That, in my view, is the current obstacle—and the one that will continue to block insect products from reaching people in large volumes in the future. It’s really about price and about who’s going to do it first—who’s willing to take the risk, invest tens of millions into a farm to achieve large volumes. But then what? Because you won’t necessarily have anyone to sell it to. Achieving lower prices for insect powder—and thereby scaling the benefits of edible insects by making them accessible to a broader population—requires increasing production volumes. Such scaling of production is not inherently or necessarily harmful. In the context of Mr. Komárek’s farm, access to wider markets could enable the creation of additional jobs and allow for the use of larger quantities of surplus and write-off food as insect feed, while generating greater amounts of frass. As a by-product, frass may yield indirect environmental benefits, given that nitrogen-based fertilizers constitute a major source of agricultural emissions and frass can serve as a their supplementary, lower-impact alternative. Finally, provided it remains a European operation, such scaling may contribute to the continent’s food and agricultural sovereignty. However, expanding the sales market and generating substantial demand for edible insects in a country where entomophagy remains uncommon is, according to Mr. Komárek, more a matter of intergenerational change than of marketing campaigns. He instead sees significant potential in the use of edible insects as animal feed—a possibility that has recently attracted growing attention from both researchers and farmers. In either case, whether insects are purposed for human consumption or for animal feed, their financial accessibility is closely tied to questions of scale. This requirement of upscaling is, once again, premised on assumptions of replicability and transcendence. In this sense—referring back to Papadopoulos’s analysis of scaling in modern chemistry—insect farming can be understood as a form of technoscience, oriented toward “overcoming concrete barriers” and reproducing standardized practices across contexts in order to enable expansion and scalability (2022: 119). As discussed above, scaling is not merely a matter of volumes—it entails a transformation of the ecological milieu within which it is embedded. The scaling up of insect farming thus may produce impacts that are difficult to anticipate. For instance, a growing demand for specific insect species could lead to their “monoculturization,” creating potential risks for food security and ecological resilience. Insect farmers might also begin to adopt practices common for conventional livestock management, such as using chemical or pharmaceutical inputs to maximize production and protect against diseases or pests. The environmental benefits of insect farming could be partially offset, as larger facilities require greater inputs of water, energy, and other resources, which may not be locally available, and while still lower than those of conventional livestock, the effects of this heightened demand on resources could impose a significant burden on ecosystems. Finally, the need to feed large numbers of insects might drive a shift away from circular practices—such as using write-off food and brewery waste—toward industrially processed feeds, which could also diminish the nutritional quality of the insect products. The benefits and assets of edible insects present at the scale of Mr. Komárek’s farm and within the specific ecological milieu it has established might thus be significantly diminished through processes of scaling and the attendant transformation of the networks, practices, and more-than-human collectives involved. The domestic: “My bugs are happy bugs” Mr. Brouk waves at us from the doorsteps as we approach his two-story house in South Moravia. He leads us into the kitchen, where our attention is immediately drawn to a brown bowl filled with what looks like fried worms. As Mr. Brouk later explains, these are mealworm pupae in homemade blueberry marmalade—one of his most recent culinary experiments with edible insects. His farm is located near the entrance of the house, in a small utility room that also accommodates a boiler and a washing machine. A four-shelf rack holds gray, numbered crates. The temperature in the room is a few degrees warmer than in the kitchen—Mr. Brouk explains that the worms generate heat. He pulls out the containers one by one, guiding us through the entire life cycle of the mealworms—eggs, larvae, pupae, and beetles. He places the eggs onto the feed, where the larvae hatch, and later transfers them into another crate. Using a sieve, he separates the pupae: some are harvested immediately, while others are allowed to develop into beetles, which in turn reproduce the next generation. The cycle then begins anew. As he explains these processes, Mr. Brouk continues to carry out his daily farming routines—spraying the eggs, removing dead worms from the crates, and feeding the beetles with potatoes and bread. Much of Mr. Brouk’s free time is devoted to improving the farm, experimenting in the kitchen, and sharing his know-how on his blog. In his case, insect farming can be understood as not just a hobby but rather a form of “responsible leisure activity.” Coined by Daněk and Jehlička in relation to gardening, this concept frames such practices as “combining self-care, purposeful leisure, the strengthening of social ties, and care for nature” (2024: 284). Mr. Brouk’s interest in insects emerged primarily for health-related reasons—he has experienced improved immunity since he started eating bugs. His experience is consistent with findings from contemporary research on the health benefits of entomophagy (Stull & Weir 2023; Ishara et al. 2025). At the same time, ecological motivations permeate our conversation: for Mr. Brouk, insect farming simply makes sense in terms of environmental sustainability, as it helps to reduce the strain on ecosystems. Rather than seeking to scale up or capitalize on his “harvest,” he pursues food self-sufficiency, and not only for himself but also at the level of family and community: he shares insect-based goulash with his family and brings mealworm pupae to the local pub, offering them to neighbors as a beer snack. Domestic insect farming can thus be situated within the framework of food self-provisioning practices, which typically take place outside market and governmental structures. As Smith and colleagues argue (2015), based on their research in Poland and Czechia, food self-provisioning in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe does not necessarily function as a “survival strategy” for low-income households. Instead, it can serve as a way of expressing identity and sustaining social relationships and networks. Food self-provisioning can therefore be driven not only by scarcity or frugality, but also by what the authors describe as “abundance, enjoyment and exuberance—or, in short, the ‘good life’” (Smith et al. 2015: 231). The authors conceptualize food self-provisioning as a form of “quiet sustainability” which refers to everyday practices that entail environmental benefits without being explicitly framed as sustainable, that operate largely beyond markets, policies, and institutionalized sustainability discourses, and that are embedded in social networks such as family and neighborhood ties. In this sense, food self-provisioning constitutes a parallel infrastructure to the dominant food market and industrialized food production, while also fostering a particular mode of multispecies cohabitation. Living in close proximity with household animals traditionally fed on kitchen leftovers—animals that in turn nourished families through the winter—creates what John Law and Annemarie Mol (2008) conceptualize as metabolic intimacy (See Fig. 2 ). However, instead of the “cottage pig” described by Law and Mol, Mr. Brouk deals with “cottage mealworms.” Feeding the insects with household scraps constitutes a form of metabolic sharing between the farmer and the “stock.” This intimacy is not limited to spatial closeness. It is also enacted through reciprocal exchanges of matter and energy, a process that unfolds at what Kelly Donati (2014) describes as a “convivial table,” where gastronomic and ethical values are shaped and negotiated across species lines. Mr. Brouk frames these practices of sharing as an expression of what he calls an “innate instinct in people to make use of every available resource.” Even in the absence of scarcity, he continues to follow this impulse by repurposing leftovers as insect feed. Through these acts of feeding and reuse, an extended metabolism ([anonymized] 2023) emerges—one that entangles not only him and the mealworms but also his family, his neighbors, the spiders that occasionally “steal” from the farm, and even the chickens at his grandmother’s house, which sometimes receive the beetles as feed. In this way, a broader multispecies collective of nourishment and care is woven together. It is care, rather than control, that is central to Mr. Brouk’s farming practices. Although he approaches the breeding of mealworms pragmatically, he explicitly acknowledges an affective dimension to caring for insects, particularly in witnessing their growth and vitality. As he wrote to [one of the authors] in an email during our collaboration on a conference paper: There probably is some emotional aspect after all. You definitely feel good knowing you’ve taken good care of the worms and that they’re growing. It gives you a purpose. Here, insect farming emerges not merely as a product-oriented, instrumental activity but as an affective engagement that cultivates empathy and joy. This affective orientation, in turn, informs how Mr. Brouk approaches everyday farming practices of feeding, cleaning, and slaughtering, inflecting them with a sense of responsibility for and attentiveness toward the insects’ wellbeing. “My bugs are happy bugs,” he says, holding a handful of mealworms. For Mr. Brouk, insect farming is not driven by scaling output or maximizing profit, but by sustaining what he understands as a “good life” —for himself, his insects, and the environment. Mr. Brouk repeatedly emphasizes that he is not a large-scale producer of edible insects and has no ambition to increase yields or generate profit. He frames insect farming as a hobby rather than a business—one he has neither professionalized nor intends to professionalize, describing himself instead as a beginner who is still learning how to be an insect farmer. Nevertheless, an entrepreneurial dimension is still present in his activities: Mr. Brouk sells basic equipment for insect farming, such as boxes and sieves. Importantly, he treats these transactions less as sales than as opportunities to share advice and practical know-how, noting that if even a few customers begin breeding mealworms at home for food, the effort is worthwhile. This approach resonates with Papadopoulos’s (2022) notion of scaling out. Rather than promoting a standardized, turnkey infrastructure, Mr. Brouk offers adaptable components that allow buyers to configure their own facilities in context-specific ways. His guidance is not delivered as an instruction to be followed but as the sharing of experience, coupled with an explicit encouragement to experiment and learn through practice. At the same time, the very qualities that make domestic insect farming meaningful and ethically compelling also delineate its limits. Its reliance on intimate care and sustained affective engagement renders such practices difficult to replicate beyond a relatively narrow circle of motivated practitioners; they demand time, attentiveness, and a willingness to live in close proximity with insects—conditions that many households may neither desire nor be able to accommodate. Domestic scaling thus risks remaining socially selective, embedded in particular dispositions, housing arrangements, and forms of cultural capital. Moreover, operating largely outside formal regulatory, veterinary, and food safety frameworks can make these practices fragile and ambiguous, especially if they were to proliferate without shared standards or appropriate governance infrastructures. There is also a tension between care and accumulation: expanding the number of insects, even at the household level, may gradually shift relations from convivial cohabitation toward routinized management, potentially eroding the very metabolic intimacy and ethical attentiveness that underpin the practice. Finally, as a parallel infrastructure that deliberately resists marketization, domestic insect farming—even if scaled out—remains limited in its capacity to generate systemic effects or to replace dominant modes of food and feed provisioning. Rather than constituting a pathway to mass transition, domestic scaling is better understood as exemplifying a situated mode of living and eating within more-than-human collectives that has combined ecological, health, and emotional benefits. Towards Cosmopolitical Justice through Insect Farming Employing the notion of cosmopolitics as proposed by Stengers (2005b) makes it possible to examine a dimension of justice that remains largely underexplored in the scholarship on just food-system transitions (Kaljonen et al. 2021; Tribaldos & Kortetmäki 2022), yet one that is crucial for imagining effective and sustainable food futures. Today, sustainability in food systems is predominantly defined on the basis of expert and scientific knowledge. While this approach has proven effective for achieving certain policy objectives, it also entails significant limitations. As Robert and Dufresne (2023) demonstrate in their analysis of public hearings on pesticide use, the scientific knowledge that underpins regulation—produced through methods designed to standardize and universalize phenomena—often encounters civic epistemologies grounded in citizens’ lived experience and situated expertise. This encounter is not simply a rejection of expert assessments or scientific models. Rather, it highlights the incompleteness of the worlds that are enacted through scientific practices and it redirects attention to their indeterminate and processual character, which is difficult to fully capture through standardized metrics alone. This argument echoes Stengers’s call to decenter modern science as the privileged arbiter of objective truth and to foreground other perspectives and experiences. In public deliberations, these divergent ontological positions meet not primarily in antagonism but in dialogue, as actors negotiate what counts as nature, society, and legitimate knowledge (Robert & Dufresne 2023: 206). A similar dynamic is identified by Ottinger (2024) in her analysis of air-monitoring practices in the United States, where frontline communities experience epistemic injustice as their embodied expertise and care-based forms of knowledge are systematically marginalized. Despite their intimate exposure to and understanding of environmental harms, these communities are excluded from decision-making by the dominance of “credentialed experts” (Ottinger 2024: 201). As a result, they are denied recognition as legitimate knowers, while their participation in deliberative processes remains severely limited. Ottinger therefore calls for extending justice through practices of careful knowing —approaches that recognize and value forms of knowledge grounded in lived experience, attentiveness, and responsibility. Taken together, civic epistemologies and practices of careful knowing reveal the limits and partiality of expert-driven definitions of sustainability. We engage the framework of cosmopolitics to extend this critique by opening a space for deliberation over what sustainability should involve, reframing it not as a fixed set of indicators but as a relational and situated practice that emerges through negotiations among heterogeneous actors. At the global and regional scalings of insect farming, the world within which sustainability efforts unfold is largely a pre-scripted universe. Human metabolic needs and planetary environmental limits are already established as the primary matters of concern through strategic policy documents and dominant sustainability frameworks. As a result, these framings tend to gloss over the tensions that arise from conflicting interests, which Stengers identifies as constitutive of ecological relations, and they instead advance supposedly “win–win” solutions that promise universal benefit. In effect, they aspire to an “innocent” sustainability—despite the fact that no sustainability intervention is ever free from consequences (Stengers 2011: 62). This mode of sustainability governance does not eliminate conflict but rather submerges it by rendering certain relations, actors, and impacts less visible. The pursuit of a universally applicable solution therefore risks obscuring the very questions that the cosmopolitical approach insists must remain open: questions of accountability, inflicted harm, conflicting practices, situated responsibility, and the political stakes of new relations between human and nonhuman beings. In contrast, at the domestic scale exemplified by Mr. Brouk, the common world is not treated as a given but is continually negotiated and composed through everyday practices. Beyond providing nourishment for humans, the farm sustains a multispecies collective that includes mealworms, spiders, chickens, plants, and microbes. This collective remains open to ongoing adjustment and response rather than being stabilized or tightly contained and interactions within it are neither fully harmonized nor without conflict. Spiders illustrate this process of making a world common: rather than being eradicated or excluded, they are lived with, even though their sporadic presence requires occasional intervention. As Mr. Brouk explains, when spiders arrive to feed, they prey not only on mealworms but also on moths, contributing to the regulation of the farm’s ecology and demonstrating that each species shapes the conditions of others. In line with Stengers’s notion of an ecology of practices, this arrangement treats each practice and species as unique and singular, with its own ethos and attachments (2005a: 184). The farm is, in Janicka’s reading of Stengers (2024: 138), a “local and temporary pact” that remains open to negotiation and experimentation. Different species and practices interact, compete, and co-constitute the ecology, and what counts as “good” emerges from within the practice itself rather than being imposed externally. Mr. Brouk does not seek to optimize or stabilize the ecology through multispecies compartmentalization; instead, he fosters a form of relational milieu, in which species are allowed to persist and interact while retaining their diverse, often conflicting interests. Cosmopolitical justice in this context does not imply symmetry, the absence of violence, or innocence—mealworms are still bred and slaughtered for human purposes, and spiders are occasionally displaced. However, it resists the abrupt and rushed ontological closures that often underpin sustainability frameworks. Cosmopolitical justice keeps asymmetries, dependencies, and ethical tensions visible and open to negotiation and transformation, while attending to the quality of relations through which humans and nonhumans come to live and metabolize one another. In this sense, domestic insect farming draws attention to the contingent, situated, and temporary nature of a common world and gestures toward a form of cosmopolitical justice grounded not in the resolution of multispecies inequalities but in sustained attentiveness to the ways of preserving openness for ongoing negotiation. Domestic farming represents an empirical site in which cosmopolitical negotiations become especially visible. Its value lies not in its scale or intimacy per se, but in how it foregrounds the ongoing work of and conflicts in composing a common world—work and conflicts that remain largely obscured within industrialized and policy-driven food systems. This emphasis on the emergent and negotiated character of reality resonates closely with Papadopoulos’s notion of scaling out (2022). Rather than replicating a singular model across diverse locales, scaling out foregrounds situated decision-making that responds to context-specific needs for ecological repair and social reproduction. From a cosmopolitical perspective, scaling out can be understood as the practice of keeping the common world open: to create solutions “on the ground” (Papadopoulos 2022: 128), it is first necessary to attend to the actors, boundaries, and entanglements that constitute this ground. This approach stands in contrast to dominant sustainability frameworks, which tend to operate with standardized, transcendent categories defined prior to engagement with particular ecologies, livelihoods, or multispecies collectives. Conclusion Situating insect farming within the broader theoretical landscape of protein transitions, post-growth, and cosmopolitical justice reveals important tensions around scale, governance, and value. At the global and regional levels, industrial insect protein production builds upon growth-oriented logics: it prioritizes economies of scale, requires substantial capital investment, and depends on extended supply chains that risk reproducing extractive relations and externalizing environmental costs. While such operations are often framed as sustainable solutions to future protein demand, they largely remain embedded in technocratic imaginaries that prioritize optimization, standardization, and expansion. In contrast, the domestic mode of insect breeding examined here aligns more closely with post-growth orientations to food production as articulated by McGreevy and colleagues (2022). Mr. Brouk’s farming practices emphasize sufficiency over maximization, rely on low-cost and locally embedded provisioning networks, and are grounded in care, attentiveness, and mutual dependency rather than species domination or industrial control. His mealworm farm thus offers an empirical window into forms of growing-with that generate value through multispecies collaboration rather than accumulation or scale expansion (cf. [anonymized] 2022). From this perspective, scaling out insect production does not represent a retreat from innovation or relevance but rather a reorientation of the protein debate itself. Echoing Yates-Doerr’s emphasis on “situated experimentation, creative innovation, and openness to the unknown” (2014), scaling out foregrounds responsiveness to local ecologies, social relations, and metabolic entanglements instead of enforcing universal, one-size-fits-all solutions. It challenges the widespread assumption that feeding the future while safeguarding planetary boundaries necessarily requires ever more efficient, high-tech, and globally scalable protein sources. Decentralized forms of insect farming—such as those fostered by Mr. Brouk through the sharing of know-how and the circulation of small-scale farming equipment—demonstrate how insect-based foods can contribute to post-growth imaginaries rooted in metabolic intimacy, relational care, and more-than-human coexistence, without claiming to replace or subsume other food-production systems. Cosmopolitical justice, as developed in this article, is therefore not concerned with ensuring that all actors benefit equally from food-system transitions. Rather, it attends to how consequences, harms, and benefits are distributed, and whether questions of accountability are addressed. Justice, in this sense, involves keeping open the negotiation of multispecies relations instead of subsuming them under a singular, expert-defined model of sustainability. Both post-growth thinking and cosmopolitics imply a shift toward participatory and distributed forms of decision-making that respond to human as well as more-than-human needs. While nonhumans cannot participate in governance in conventional deliberative terms, their agency and vulnerabilities can nonetheless be made present through practices of care, observation, and situated, careful knowing that inform how food systems are organized and regulated. Finally, although cosmopolitical justice does not translate into a prescriptive policy blueprint, it carries clear implications for food governance. It calls for regulatory frameworks that remain open to plural forms of knowledge, modes of production, and human–insect relations, rather than consolidating legitimacy exclusively around standardized metrics of efficiency, productivity, and control. Recognizing domestic practices as legitimate sites of experimentation can expand the repertoire of transition pathways considered politically viable, without requiring their universalization. In this light, insect farming—particularly in its domestic and decentralized forms—emerges not as a niche curiosity or a scalable fix, but as a critical site for rethinking how sustainable, just, and multispecies food futures might be collectively composed. Declarations Consent to participate statement: All interviewees provided informed consent for the use of interview transcripts in analysis and publication, contingent upon the protection of their anonymity. Ethics declaration: This research was approved by the Research Ethics Board of the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (approval no. SOÚ-382_3/2024). The research was conducted in accordance with the Code of Ethics of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology. Funding Information: This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Beyond Security: The Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building” (reg. no.: CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004595). Clinical trial number: Not applicable. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. References Anonymized. 2022. Anonymized. 2023. Anonymized. 2026. 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Volden, Johannes. 2024. “‘A Wing in the Throat’: Negotiating Edibility in Everyday Insect Consumption.” Geoforum 157: 104132–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104132. Waterlow, J. C., and P. R. Payne. 1975. “The Protein Gap.” Nature 258 (5531): 113–17. https://doi.org/10.1038/258113a0. Yates-Doerr, Emily. 2015. “The World in a Box? Food Security, Edible Insects, and ‘One World, One Health’ Collaboration.” Social Science & Medicine 129: 106–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.06.020. Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. 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Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-8694155","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Research Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":583245146,"identity":"20ca734d-f857-4ba1-bfe2-a85d5ae1b78b","order_by":0,"name":"Varvara Borisova","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Varvara","middleName":"","lastName":"Borisova","suffix":""},{"id":583245147,"identity":"79006f5f-adf3-4601-abac-f33c8b985389","order_by":1,"name":"Tereza Stöckelová","email":"data:image/png;base64,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","orcid":"","institution":"Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Tereza","middleName":"","lastName":"Stöckelová","suffix":""}],"badges":[],"createdAt":"2026-01-25 17:54:42","currentVersionCode":1,"declarations":"","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8694155/v1","doiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8694155/v1","draftVersion":[],"editorialEvents":[],"editorialNote":"","failedWorkflow":false,"files":[{"id":101790428,"identity":"14772396-0234-4b4c-b339-3f358799bae1","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-02-03 16:05:19","extension":"jpeg","order_by":1,"title":"Figure 1","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":430690,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eMr. Komárek’s “breeding success” (Czechia, October 2024, photo by [anonymized])\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"floatimage1.jpeg","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-8694155/v1/37f6c9f55e6fcca0c0bcc68d.jpeg"},{"id":101790427,"identity":"0527d8b0-a04e-48af-8656-29f38c920570","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-02-03 16:05:19","extension":"jpeg","order_by":2,"title":"Figure 2","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":703729,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eMealworms feeding on potatoes sourced from Mr. Brouk’s kitchen (Czechia, July 2024, photo by [anonymized])\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"floatimage2.jpeg","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-8694155/v1/e4f3b1965c5c7641ec81a4c8.jpeg"},{"id":101881518,"identity":"351cbe87-bd02-42d8-a512-0cb246ecc90c","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-02-04 15:12:44","extension":"pdf","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":1726405,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"manuscript.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-8694155/v1/5d322e36-e7ee-4c21-a9ca-5e884e3938ab.pdf"}],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"The Cosmopolitics of Insect Farming: Toward Scaling Out Just and Sustainable Food Futures","fulltext":[{"header":"Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003eIn the contemporary debates on the sustainability of food production systems and the ecological burdens and limits they entail, edible insects have attracted increasing attention from researchers, policymakers, and producers as a potential alternative source of protein (European Commission 2020). Insect-based foods are widely promoted as sustainable, nutritious, and healthy substitutes for conventional animal products (Nowakowski et al. 2021) and are often positioned within broader narratives of technological innovation and efficiency-driven sustainability transitions. Yet, despite these promises, their integration into existing food systems remains deeply contested. Persistent cultural resistance\u0026mdash;the so-called \u0026ldquo;yuck\u0026rdquo; factor\u0026mdash;continues to hinder consumer acceptance in regions where insects have not traditionally been consumed (Belluco et al. 2017; Volden 2024). In an effort to overcome this barrier, many insect-based products enter the market as ultra-processed foods engineered to mimic familiar tastes and textures. While this approach may facilitate consumer acceptance, it simultaneously raises concerns about nutritional quality and its compatibility with public health objectives (Malila et al. 2024).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMoreover, recent scholarship has questioned the sustainability claims surrounding edible insects. Biteau and colleagues (2025) demonstrate that the prevailing environmental assessments of insect farming rely on limited and often speculative data, suggesting that it is unlikely to deliver the promised environmental benefits once scaled to industrial levels. In addition, insect-based food systems raise significant questions of distributional and economic justice. Industrially produced insect-based foods are frequently costly, rendering them inaccessible to many consumers and reinforcing existing inequalities within food systems. Together, these tensions underscore the need to move beyond narrow techno-optimistic framings and to examine insect-based food production as a set of socio-technical and socio-ecological assemblages that require careful and reflexive governance.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e Within the European Union, entomophagy\u0026mdash;the practice of eating insects\u0026mdash;remains a relatively novel phenomenon. Edible insects are classified as novel foods and are therefore subject to specific regulatory regimes (Meijer et al. 2025). Currently, four species are approved for human consumption and recognized as farm animals: yellow mealworms, lesser mealworms, migratory locusts, and house crickets. To date, regulatory attention has focused primarily on food safety, market authorization, and technological feasibility. Considerably less attention has been paid to questions of governance understood in a broader, transformative sense. If insects are to become a more prominent component of a sustainable European foodscape, the critical issue is not merely how to regulate them efficiently but how to govern their production, circulation, and consumption in ways that actively contribute to socially just, ecologically responsible, and resilient food systems.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCrucially, the social, environmental, and metabolic consequences of insect breeding and consumption are shaped by the scale at which these practices are organized. Accordingly, this article distinguishes three scalings of insect breeding\u0026mdash;global, regional, and domestic\u0026mdash;and analyzes how each produces distinct governance logics, power relations, and configurations of responsibility. These scalings, we argue, also distribute benefits, risks, and obligations unevenly, with important implications for social, environmental, and interspecies justice.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eGlobal scaling is characterized by industrial producers and importers of processed insect protein, often sourced from countries in Southeast Asia and Africa and integrated into global value chains. While this model generates new economic opportunities for producers in the Global South, it is also embedded in broader dynamics of \u0026ldquo;green extractivism\u0026rdquo; (Bruna 2022), whereby sustainability-oriented transitions may reproduce unequal North\u0026ndash;South relations and displace environmental and social costs beyond Europe. Governance at this scale prioritizes standardization, traceability, and efficiency, while centering insect protein as an abstract, transferable commodity detached from its ecological and social contexts.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eExamples of regional scaling are found in insect farms and processing facilities operating in Czechia that have the ambition to export within Europe. Compared to global scaling, this mode reduces some of the ecological and social externalities associated with long-distance trade and import. Here, the insect organism as a whole becomes the primary object of production, sold either as animal feed or processed into food products for human consumption. This mode also incorporates frass\u0026mdash;insect excrement\u0026mdash;as a by-product used in plant fertilization. Nevertheless, regional insect farming remains highly standardized and is often oriented toward monocultural production systems, raising concerns related to biosecurity, ecological resilience, and systemic vulnerability. Governance in this mode centers on regulatory compliance, bioeconomic optimization, and risk management, while issues of multispecies coexistence tend to remain instrumental and secondary.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFinally, domestic scaling deliberately avoids industrialization. It is practiced by home-based breeders who raise insects for personal consumption or for small-scale, neighborhood-based exchange. This mode builds on traditions of domestic cohabitation with animals, food self-provisioning, and gift-based economies. Humans and insects coexist in close spatial proximity, sustaining one another through everyday practices of care and shared resource use. As a result, domestic scaling offers a low-cost, locally embedded alternative that can be integrated into rural and low-income household economies, primarily through minimally processed foods. Multispecies governance at this scale is informal, relational, and practice-based, emerging from everyday ethics rather than formal regulation alone.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAll three modes possess specific advantages and may contribute, in different ways, to sustainability transitions. At the same time, each generates distinct risks and externalities, which we examine in detail in this article. We argue, however, that domestic scaling exhibits two features that give it particular relevance for transformative governance. First, by cultivating forms of more-than-human metabolic intimacy, domestic insect breeding challenges the anthropocentric and technocratic assumptions that continue to dominate sustainability transitions in agrifood systems. Second, it aligns with post-growth paradigms that prioritize sufficiency over efficiency, distribution over accumulation, and care over control (McGreevy et al. 2022). By scaling food production outward rather than upward, domestic insect breeding fosters decentralized and distributed networks of small producers, pointing toward forms of food system governance that are grounded in responsibility, resilience, experimentation, and post-growth imaginaries.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Theoretical Grounding","content":"\u003cp\u003e Our analysis is informed by four interrelated conceptual lenses that illuminate the social, environmental, and ethical dimensions of insect-based food systems: the protein transition and its critiques, post-growth, the logic of scaling out, and cosmopolitics. Together, these frameworks provide conceptual coordinates for articulating how alternative protein practices can be governed in ways that are just, responsible, and ecologically attuned.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCritical protein scholarship highlights the historical and ongoing socio-technical and market dynamics that shape alternative protein innovation; post-growth and scaling out emphasize the merits of context-sensitive, decentralized approaches that prioritize sufficiency, care, and ecological limits; and the cosmopolitical framework foregrounds the negotiated, provisional, and heterogeneous character of shared worlds, resisting technocratic or growth-driven definitions of sustainability. By combining these perspectives, we are able to examine how insect breeding and consumption practices\u0026mdash;whether globally industrial, regionally embedded, or domestically scaled\u0026mdash;produce distinct social, ecological, and metabolic consequences, and how governance might be designed to support justice, resilience, and relational sustainability. This integrated framework informs our analysis of the three scalings of insect breeding in Czechia, enabling us to scrutinize broader questions of equity, care, and multispecies flourishing.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec3\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003eCritical Protein Scholarship\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eProtein has historically been positioned as a central concern in global nutrition, shaping public health discourse, research priorities, and food technologies. Early twentieth-century debates, particularly following Cicely Williams\u0026rsquo; work on \u003cem\u003ekwashiorkor\u003c/em\u003e, framed protein deficiency as a global problem and gave rise to the notion of a \u0026ldquo;protein gap,\u0026rdquo; prompting interventions ranging from supplementation to novel protein production technologies (Nott 2019). Protein\u0026rsquo;s symbolic and scientific authority\u0026mdash;the notion of the \u0026ldquo;charismatic nutrient\u0026rdquo; (Kimura 2013; Guthman \u0026amp; Biltekoff 2022)\u0026mdash;has persisted even as the original protein gap concept was debunked (McLaren 1974; Waterlow \u0026amp; Payne 1975).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eToday, protein remains a dominant lens for framing nutrition and sustainability challenges, underpinning markets for plant-based alternatives, meat cultivation technologies, and edible insects. Critical scholarship, however, highlights how contemporary protein transition initiatives often reproduce prior patterns of techno-fixing, market concentration, and growth-oriented thinking, obscuring social and environmental inequities and entrenching green extractivism (Guthman et al. 2022; Bruna 2022). Situating insect-based foods within this broader protein transition allows us to examine whose needs are prioritized, how innovation is shaped by capitalist logics, and what forms of governance are enacted\u0026mdash;or foreclosed\u0026mdash;through the socio-technical and market arrangements of the protein economy.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003ePost-Growth\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDebates about sustainability remain deeply entangled with the ideology of economic growth. Dominant green-growth frameworks assume that environmental crises can be addressed through technological innovation, efficiency gains, and market expansion, often privileging large-scale solutions and quantitative metrics of performance (Infante-Amate et al. 2025). Critics argue that this growth-oriented logic preserves the very structures responsible for ecological degradation, and that its underlying assumptions\u0026mdash;such as the decoupling of economic expansion from resource use\u0026mdash;are empirically dubious (Parrique et al. 2019). Degrowth scholars have proposed a deliberate reduction of energy and resource throughput to bring global economies back into alignment with planetary boundaries, while simultaneously fostering social well-being, equity, and stability (Hickel 2020; Kallis 2011). This perspective emphasizes that sustainability cannot be achieved solely through technological innovation or efficiency gains; rather, it requires reconsidering the goals, values, and rhythms that underpin economic and social systems.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePost-growth approaches extend these critiques by emphasizing prosperity without growth, sufficiency over efficiency, distribution over accumulation, and care over control (McGreevy et al. 2022; Kallis et al. 2025). Within agrifood systems, post-growth thinking foregrounds practices and governance arrangements that prioritize relationality, participation, and social justice over rapid technological upscaling or global market integration. This orientation encourages attention to locally embedded, small-scale, and relational food production practices, such as domestic insect farming that can support socially and ecologically resilient systems. By centering care, multispecies entanglements, and sufficiency, post-growth perspectives challenge conventional assumptions that feeding the future requires ever-increasing volumes of high-tech or industrially scaled protein, opening space for alternative approaches grounded in everyday practices and ethical attentiveness.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eScaling Out\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA key extension of post-growth thinking is Papadopoulos\u0026rsquo;s (2022) concept of scaling out, which reinterprets conventional notions of scale. Traditional understandings of scale often prioritize vertical growth\u0026mdash;replication, concentration, and territorial expansion\u0026mdash;as a pathway to efficiency and profitability. Scaling out, by contrast, emphasizes horizontal expansion through context-specific, decentralized, and adaptive practices. It recognizes that solutions cannot be imposed universally; rather, they must emerge from the specific ecological, social, and cultural conditions of each site. Scaling out thus cultivates a mosaic of locally grounded experiments and socio-ecological practices that may align to support broader sustainability objectives without demanding homogenization or replication (Tacchetti et al. 2021).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e For insect-based food systems, the lens of scaling out draws attention to how production at different scales\u0026mdash;the global industrial, regional farm-based, or domestic household level\u0026mdash;creates distinct ecological, social, and ethical outcomes. Global-scale insect farming often emphasizes efficiency, traceability, and standardized protein outputs, while domestic-scale practices foreground multispecies cohabitation, relational care, and situated knowledge. Scaling out provides a conceptual framework for understanding the potential of decentralized and contextually adaptive approaches to contribute to post-growth, socially just, and ecologically attuned food systems. It underscores that the transformative potential of insect farming lies not solely in technological innovation or market integration but also in the ways production and care practices are scaled to meet the specific needs and capacities of particular socio-ecological settings.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eCosmopolitics\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe governance of equitable sustainability transitions cannot rely on universal solutions or standardized pathways. Instead, it requires approaches that begin by asking who and what benefit from transition processes and outcomes in a particular site, and who and what remain marginalized or neglected. In this regard, the notion of cosmopolitics, as proposed by Isabelle Stengers (2005b; 2010) and Bruno Latour (2004), offers a productive lens for rethinking justice and governance in socio-ecological transitions. Central to cosmopolitical thinking is the idea of a common world\u0026mdash;not as a pre-given reality determined by expert knowledge, religious authority, or political hegemony, but as a fragile and provisional achievement. Although these authors elaborated this concept through intense intellectual exchange, their respective conceptions of cosmopolitics differ in important ways. As Janicka (2024: 130) argues, a key point of divergence concerns the notion of universality: while Latour calls for assembling the \u0026ldquo;universal\u0026rdquo; through the idea of \u0026ldquo;local universalities,\u0026rdquo; Stengers turns away from universality altogether in defense of singularity. For Stengers, a common world emerges as a singular \u0026ldquo;cosmopolitical event\u0026rdquo; in which humans and non-humans do not participate in a harmonious or symmetrical manner, but instead retain their differences, conflicting interests, and distinctive capacities (Stengers 2005b). This conception emphasizes processes of collective world-making in which diverse beings, knowledges, and concerns are brought into partial relations without being reduced to a common metric or hierarchy.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e Applied to food transitions, a cosmopolitical framework shifts analytical attention away from optimizing predefined systems and performance indicators toward examining how specific arrangements of production, consumption, and care enact particular worlds\u0026mdash;and, with them, particular distributions of vulnerability, responsibility, value, and costs. From a cosmopolitical standpoint, justice is therefore not limited to redistributing benefits and burdens within an existing ontological order; it also involves interrogating how that order itself is assembled, stabilized, and rendered authoritative. Situating justice within a cosmopolitical framework thus challenges the assumption that sustainability transitions are oriented toward a universal, expert-defined vision of a \u0026ldquo;sustainable future.\u0026rdquo; Instead, what is at stake is which world is being sustained, for whom, and at whose expense. In the context of insect-based food systems, cosmopolitics calls attention to how different modes of insect farming enact insect life, human\u0026ndash;insect relations, and forms of care. Cosmopolitical justice, then, entails keeping open the question of what a just and sustainable food future might be and resisting its premature closure through technocratic or growth-oriented solutions.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Methods and Data","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis article draws on ethnographic research on emerging food technologies in the Czech Republic, with a particular focus on alternative protein innovations, including cellular agriculture ([anonymized] 2026) and edible insects. Our research combines semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and close analysis of online materials and presentations of companies producing edible insects. Since January 2024, we conducted seven interviews with researchers specializing in food and agricultural production, as well as three interviews with entrepreneurs in the field of insect farming, amounting to over 700 minutes of recorded material. The interview guide for entrepreneurs addressed sources of expertise, interactions with the Czech agricultural system, expectations for the field\u0026rsquo;s development, and challenges and tensions encountered in the national context. The interview guide for researchers focused on the opportunities and risks associated with incorporating edible insects into Czech and European foodscapes, their potential environmental impacts, and perspectives on consumer acceptance.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn addition to interviews, we conducted observations at two insect farming facilities in Czechia. The first was located in the village home of one entrepreneur\u0026rsquo;s family, where he breeds insects, while the second was located in a dedicated agricultural building. During both observations, we paid close attention to farming practices and workflows. Owners and employees guided us through their facilities, explaining daily operations and relations with insects. All interviews and fieldwork were conducted in Czech, and excerpts cited in this article have been translated into English by the authors. All participants\u0026rsquo; names and the names of the companies have been pseudonymized.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFurther data were generated through two public events organized by the research team, which also involved some of the interviewed entrepreneurs. The first, held in October 2024, featured a tasting of edible insect products. Participants, including members of the general public, insect farmers, researchers, a shop founder specializing in insect-based foods, and an epidemiologist, were invited to distinguish between conventional products (e.g., crisps and crackers) and insect-based alternatives. The tasting progressed from familiar, minimally conspicuous foods to less processed products, including whole worms and crickets. Participants were encouraged to share both personal impressions and professional reflections on the potential role of insects in future diets. The second event, held in November 2025, was a workshop in which participants designed \u0026ldquo;recipes of the future,\u0026rdquo; engaging with emerging food production technologies.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFinally, this article draws on an ongoing collaboration with one of the entrepreneurs, which included preparing a conference paper on modes of metabolic multispecies cohabitation. This collaboration provided unique insights into the bodily and metabolic proximities involved in domestic insect farming and the relational entanglements between humans and insects. Collectively, these methods allowed us to examine insect production and consumption across multiple scales, capturing the social, ecological, and ethical dynamics central to our study of transformative governance in alternative protein systems.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec8\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003eScalings of Insect Farming\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn this section, we examine three distinct scalings of insect farming, each illustrated through a specific case study. Each mode of scaling offers certain opportunities while simultaneously involving specific tensions and limitations. Through close analysis, we show how scaling practices shape not only production models and socio-ecological relations but also distinct configurations of justice.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eThe global\u003c/b\u003e: \u003cb\u003e\u0026ldquo;It is key for the circular economy that low-value items can be transformed back into something valuable.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/b\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eGiven the long-standing tradition of entomophagy in many Asian countries, in some of them insect farming has been identified as a strategic field of production and export. Thailand, in particular, has positioned itself as a global leader in the production and export of edible insects. It has played a pioneering role in establishing the standards of Good Agricultural Practice for cricket farming, with the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific seconding this initiative by issuing a guide to sustainable cricket farming. As Tiwasing, Bek, and colleagues argue (2025), these steps toward making insect farming sustainable \u0026ldquo;signal the intent to enter regulated food markets in developed regions such as Europe, the UK, and North America\u0026rdquo; (2025: 2). Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, the authors identify several challenges currently faced by Thai insect farmers seeking to access export markets, including limited marketing expertise and the high costs associated with export procedures. Nevertheless, the article emphasizes that the Thai edible insect industry holds significant potential to become an important component of the national economy and export portfolio, particularly against the backdrop of a rising demand for edible insects in Europe and the UK (Tiwasing et al. 2025: 14).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSome EU-based companies producing insect-based foods rely on imported raw materials, most commonly powdered insect protein, which is subsequently processed into final products within Europe. Mr. Mucha, the CEO of an insect-based food company, explained that his company decided to establish a cricket farm in Thailand due to the country\u0026rsquo;s long-standing tradition of insect farming and the availability of well-developed production infrastructure. A key factor in this decision was the high cost of raw materials produced within the EU: he recalled that one Netherlands-based company offered \u0026ldquo;cricket flour\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;ground crickets\u0026mdash;at a price of approximately \u0026euro;200 per kilogram, a cost that proved economically unsustainable for their business model. As a result, Mr. Mucha and his team opted to build their own cricket farming facility in Thailand, which, according to their website, has since obtained Good Agricultural Practice certification and become one of the biggest facilities worldwide. The company emphasizes its integration with the local Thai community, including close collaboration with Thai researchers to improve farming practices and the provision of employment to the locals.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMr. Mucha is convinced that edible insects can play a meaningful role in reducing the environmental burden of contemporary agrifood systems. He frequently refers to comparative calculations that contrast the resource demands of producing one kilogram of beef with those required to produce one kilogram of cricket protein, highlighting the substantially lower inputs of land, water, and feed in the latter case. His entrepreneurial narrative forefronts his aspiration to contribute to social and environmental change and emphasizes that he turned down an offer from a prestigious university abroad in order to pursue this venture. Indeed, insect-based protein production, as practiced by his company, has the potential to reduce certain environmental costs associated with conventional livestock agriculture. Nevertheless, at the same time, the model of production and distribution on which this enterprise is built\u0026mdash;namely, the large-scale farming of insects in Southeast Asia for export to European markets\u0026mdash;also entails significant drawbacks.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFirst, the reliance on long-distance transportation undermines some of the environmental benefits claimed for insect protein by contributing to the carbon emissions associated with global logistics. Second, even though Mr. Mucha\u0026rsquo;s operation currently emphasizes local collaboration, research partnerships, and employment opportunities within the Thai community, the broader model risks sliding into forms of green extractivism. In such scenarios, the sustainability demands of the Global North are met through the intensified extraction of resources, labor, and ecological capacity in the Global South. If demand for insect protein were to rise substantially, farming facilities in the Global South could become oriented toward export, potentially at the expense of local consumption. This shift could result in edible insects being diverted away from the local food systems and culinary traditions in which they have long been present, thereby disrupting existing nutritional practices and metabolic relationships with insects as food. What is here framed as a locally embedded and socially responsible enterprise thus carries the risk of reproducing asymmetries characteristic of global agrifood markets.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA blog post on Mr. Mucha\u0026rsquo;s company website outlines a particular vision of future food systems. It imagines farming facilities like the one established in Thailand being replicated in every city to supply urban populations with sufficient insect protein. This vision echoes the farm-to-table model, in which the long-distance transportation of food is minimized and production is localized, potentially contributing to more sustainable forms of agriculture. However, within this framework, production is still premised on the global scaling and replication of standardized insect farming facilities deployed across diverse contexts. Thus, this model remains rooted in imaginaries of a \u0026ldquo;global food system,\u0026rdquo; a \u0026ldquo;global market,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;global health.\u0026rdquo; Anthropologist Emily Yates-Doerr, in her analysis of Dutch research on edible insects (2015), shows how such visions rely on the assumption of \u0026ldquo;replicable immutability,\u0026rdquo; whereby a singular farming model is expected to travel seamlessly across the world to be reproduced. As she points out, this approach seeks to \u0026ldquo;tackle a generalized world\u0026rdquo; (2015: 11), but it overlooks the profound political, environmental, cultural, and socio-economic differences between the sites where these models are developed.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eThe regional: “To get low prices, we need [bigger] production volumes”\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMr. Kom\u0026aacute;rek, the founder and CEO of an edible insect firm, chose a different path by establishing his own farming facility in Czechia. It is housed in the upper storage level of a former cowshed\u0026mdash;a space once occupied by cattle is now populated by mealworms. His engagement with insects began several years ago, when he started breeding crickets as feed for his chameleon. He later transitioned to mealworms, which, unlike crickets, do not require high temperatures and can thrive in cooler environments. What began as an amateur experiment has since evolved into a business operation primarily focused on producing raw insect powder and frass\u0026mdash;the insects\u0026rsquo; excreta which can be used as a plant fertilizer.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAs Mr. Kom\u0026aacute;rek guides us through the farm, he opens boxes filled with mealworms and proudly presents his \u0026ldquo;stock.\u0026rdquo; He places a pale worm on his palm, observes it closely, and affectionately refers to it as a \u0026ldquo;breeding success\u0026rdquo; (See Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e) Like Mr. Mucha, Mr. Kom\u0026aacute;rek sees edible insects as a food of the future and highlights not only their environmental benefits but also their nutritional value and culinary versatility. He emphasizes the wide range of possible uses\u0026mdash;from frying whole larvae in a pan to producing insect powder that can be used, for example, to make pasta that would be enriched not only with protein but also with healthy fats and essential minerals. Unlike Mr. Mucha\u0026rsquo;s operation, however, the company positions itself as a regional facility \u0026ldquo;in the heart of Europe,\u0026rdquo; claiming to enable flexible and rapid distribution to consumers and warehouses across Europe while minimizing environmental impacts.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e According to Mr. Kom\u0026aacute;rek, one of the key advantages of insect farming lies in its potential to support a circular economy by using intermediate food products and waste streams. His farm relies on by-products from a nearby brewery as well as write-off food from local supermarkets, which are repurposed as feed for the insects. But despite these advantages, Mr. Kom\u0026aacute;rek does not expect edible insects to become a regular ingredient of the Czech diet in the near future, and not just because of the absence of an entomophagy tradition. He points instead to the \u0026ldquo;hyper-conservative\u0026rdquo; nature of Czech agriculture, where innovation\u0026mdash;whether in the form of edible insects, aquaponic systems, or cell-cultivating technologies\u0026mdash;tends to be slow to gain acceptance and even slower to receive institutional and political support through subsidies and policy frameworks. A second major obstacle, also highlighted by Mr. Mucha, is the high price of insect-based products, which limits their accessibility and broader uptake. Mr. Kom\u0026aacute;rek details this issue as follows:\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eI don\u0026rsquo;t think there\u0026rsquo;s really a technological obstacle to producing at large scale. But we end up stuck in this strange loop. People want low prices. Customers, food producers\u0026mdash;they all want low prices. And I say\u0026mdash;fine, but for you to get low prices, we need [bigger] production volumes. That is the economy of scale [...] If you wanted to get the price of the [insect] powder down to, for example, 50 Czech crowns [approx. \u0026euro;2], we\u0026rsquo;re talking about volumes of at least tens of tons, maybe even hundreds of tons [...] And selling off that amount on the market as it is now is simply problematic. That, in my view, is the current obstacle\u0026mdash;and the one that will continue to block insect products from reaching people in large volumes in the future. It\u0026rsquo;s really about price and about who\u0026rsquo;s going to do it first\u0026mdash;who\u0026rsquo;s willing to take the risk, invest tens of millions into a farm to achieve large volumes. But then what? Because you won\u0026rsquo;t necessarily have anyone to sell it to.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAchieving lower prices for insect powder\u0026mdash;and thereby scaling the benefits of edible insects by making them accessible to a broader population\u0026mdash;requires increasing production volumes. Such scaling of production is not inherently or necessarily harmful. In the context of Mr. Kom\u0026aacute;rek\u0026rsquo;s farm, access to wider markets could enable the creation of additional jobs and allow for the use of larger quantities of surplus and write-off food as insect feed, while generating greater amounts of frass. As a by-product, frass may yield indirect environmental benefits, given that nitrogen-based fertilizers constitute a major source of agricultural emissions and frass can serve as a their supplementary, lower-impact alternative. Finally, provided it remains a European operation, such scaling may contribute to the continent\u0026rsquo;s food and agricultural sovereignty.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eHowever, expanding the sales market and generating substantial demand for edible insects in a country where entomophagy remains uncommon is, according to Mr. Kom\u0026aacute;rek, more a matter of intergenerational change than of marketing campaigns. He instead sees significant potential in the use of edible insects as animal feed\u0026mdash;a possibility that has recently attracted growing attention from both researchers and farmers. In either case, whether insects are purposed for human consumption or for animal feed, their financial accessibility is closely tied to questions of scale.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis requirement of upscaling is, once again, premised on assumptions of replicability and transcendence. In this sense\u0026mdash;referring back to Papadopoulos\u0026rsquo;s analysis of scaling in modern chemistry\u0026mdash;insect farming can be understood as a form of technoscience, oriented toward \u0026ldquo;overcoming concrete barriers\u0026rdquo; and reproducing standardized practices across contexts in order to enable expansion and scalability (2022: 119). As discussed above, scaling is not merely a matter of volumes\u0026mdash;it entails a transformation of the ecological milieu within which it is embedded. The scaling up of insect farming thus may produce impacts that are difficult to anticipate.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFor instance, a growing demand for specific insect species could lead to their \u0026ldquo;monoculturization,\u0026rdquo; creating potential risks for food security and ecological resilience. Insect farmers might also begin to adopt practices common for conventional livestock management, such as using chemical or pharmaceutical inputs to maximize production and protect against diseases or pests. The environmental benefits of insect farming could be partially offset, as larger facilities require greater inputs of water, energy, and other resources, which may not be locally available, and while still lower than those of conventional livestock, the effects of this heightened demand on resources could impose a significant burden on ecosystems. Finally, the need to feed large numbers of insects might drive a shift away from circular practices\u0026mdash;such as using write-off food and brewery waste\u0026mdash;toward industrially processed feeds, which could also diminish the nutritional quality of the insect products. The benefits and assets of edible insects present at the scale of Mr. Kom\u0026aacute;rek\u0026rsquo;s farm and within the specific ecological milieu it has established might thus be significantly diminished through processes of scaling and the attendant transformation of the networks, practices, and more-than-human collectives involved.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eThe domestic: “My bugs are happy bugs”\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMr. Brouk waves at us from the doorsteps as we approach his two-story house in South Moravia. He leads us into the kitchen, where our attention is immediately drawn to a brown bowl filled with what looks like fried worms. As Mr. Brouk later explains, these are mealworm pupae in homemade blueberry marmalade\u0026mdash;one of his most recent culinary experiments with edible insects. His farm is located near the entrance of the house, in a small utility room that also accommodates a boiler and a washing machine. A four-shelf rack holds gray, numbered crates. The temperature in the room is a few degrees warmer than in the kitchen\u0026mdash;Mr. Brouk explains that the worms generate heat. He pulls out the containers one by one, guiding us through the entire life cycle of the mealworms\u0026mdash;eggs, larvae, pupae, and beetles. He places the eggs onto the feed, where the larvae hatch, and later transfers them into another crate. Using a sieve, he separates the pupae: some are harvested immediately, while others are allowed to develop into beetles, which in turn reproduce the next generation. The cycle then begins anew. As he explains these processes, Mr. Brouk continues to carry out his daily farming routines\u0026mdash;spraying the eggs, removing dead worms from the crates, and feeding the beetles with potatoes and bread.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMuch of Mr. Brouk\u0026rsquo;s free time is devoted to improving the farm, experimenting in the kitchen, and sharing his know-how on his blog. In his case, insect farming can be understood as not just a hobby but rather a form of \u0026ldquo;responsible leisure activity.\u0026rdquo; Coined by Daněk and Jehlička in relation to gardening, this concept frames such practices as \u0026ldquo;combining self-care, purposeful leisure, the strengthening of social ties, and care for nature\u0026rdquo; (2024: 284). Mr. Brouk\u0026rsquo;s interest in insects emerged primarily for health-related reasons\u0026mdash;he has experienced improved immunity since he started eating bugs. His experience is consistent with findings from contemporary research on the health benefits of entomophagy (Stull \u0026amp; Weir 2023; Ishara et al. 2025). At the same time, ecological motivations permeate our conversation: for Mr. Brouk, insect farming simply makes sense in terms of environmental sustainability, as it helps to reduce the strain on ecosystems. Rather than seeking to scale up or capitalize on his \u0026ldquo;harvest,\u0026rdquo; he pursues food self-sufficiency, and not only for himself but also at the level of family and community: he shares insect-based goulash with his family and brings mealworm pupae to the local pub, offering them to neighbors as a beer snack.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDomestic insect farming can thus be situated within the framework of food self-provisioning practices, which typically take place outside market and governmental structures. As Smith and colleagues argue (2015), based on their research in Poland and Czechia, food self-provisioning in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe does not necessarily function as a \u0026ldquo;survival strategy\u0026rdquo; for low-income households. Instead, it can serve as a way of expressing identity and sustaining social relationships and networks. Food self-provisioning can therefore be driven not only by scarcity or frugality, but also by what the authors describe as \u0026ldquo;abundance, enjoyment and exuberance\u0026mdash;or, in short, the \u0026lsquo;good life\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; (Smith et al. 2015: 231). The authors conceptualize food self-provisioning as a form of \u0026ldquo;quiet sustainability\u0026rdquo; which refers to everyday practices that entail environmental benefits without being explicitly framed as sustainable, that operate largely beyond markets, policies, and institutionalized sustainability discourses, and that are embedded in social networks such as family and neighborhood ties. In this sense, food self-provisioning constitutes a parallel infrastructure to the dominant food market and industrialized food production, while also fostering a particular mode of multispecies cohabitation.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eLiving in close proximity with household animals traditionally fed on kitchen leftovers\u0026mdash;animals that in turn nourished families through the winter\u0026mdash;creates what John Law and Annemarie Mol (2008) conceptualize as metabolic intimacy (See Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e). However, instead of the \u0026ldquo;cottage pig\u0026rdquo; described by Law and Mol, Mr. Brouk deals with \u0026ldquo;cottage mealworms.\u0026rdquo; Feeding the insects with household scraps constitutes a form of metabolic sharing between the farmer and the \u0026ldquo;stock.\u0026rdquo; This intimacy is not limited to spatial closeness. It is also enacted through reciprocal exchanges of matter and energy, a process that unfolds at what Kelly Donati (2014) describes as a \u0026ldquo;convivial table,\u0026rdquo; where gastronomic and ethical values are shaped and negotiated across species lines. Mr. Brouk frames these practices of sharing as an expression of what he calls an \u0026ldquo;innate instinct in people to make use of every available resource.\u0026rdquo; Even in the absence of scarcity, he continues to follow this impulse by repurposing leftovers as insect feed. Through these acts of feeding and reuse, an extended metabolism ([anonymized] 2023) emerges\u0026mdash;one that entangles not only him and the mealworms but also his family, his neighbors, the spiders that occasionally \u0026ldquo;steal\u0026rdquo; from the farm, and even the chickens at his grandmother\u0026rsquo;s house, which sometimes receive the beetles as feed. In this way, a broader multispecies collective of nourishment and care is woven together.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIt is care, rather than control, that is central to Mr. Brouk\u0026rsquo;s farming practices. Although he approaches the breeding of mealworms pragmatically, he explicitly acknowledges an affective dimension to caring for insects, particularly in witnessing their growth and vitality. As he wrote to [one of the authors] in an email during our collaboration on a conference paper:\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThere probably is some emotional aspect after all. You definitely feel good knowing you\u0026rsquo;ve taken good care of the worms and that they\u0026rsquo;re growing. It gives you a purpose.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eHere, insect farming emerges not merely as a product-oriented, instrumental activity but as an affective engagement that cultivates empathy and joy. This affective orientation, in turn, informs how Mr. Brouk approaches everyday farming practices of feeding, cleaning, and slaughtering, inflecting them with a sense of responsibility for and attentiveness toward the insects\u0026rsquo; wellbeing. \u0026ldquo;My bugs are happy bugs,\u0026rdquo; he says, holding a handful of mealworms. For Mr. Brouk, insect farming is not driven by scaling output or maximizing profit, but by sustaining what he understands as a \u0026ldquo;good life\u0026rdquo; \u0026mdash;for himself, his insects, and the environment.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMr. Brouk repeatedly emphasizes that he is not a large-scale producer of edible insects and has no ambition to increase yields or generate profit. He frames insect farming as a hobby rather than a business\u0026mdash;one he has neither professionalized nor intends to professionalize, describing himself instead as a beginner who is still learning how to be an insect farmer. Nevertheless, an entrepreneurial dimension is still present in his activities: Mr. Brouk sells basic equipment for insect farming, such as boxes and sieves. Importantly, he treats these transactions less as sales than as opportunities to share advice and practical know-how, noting that if even a few customers begin breeding mealworms at home for food, the effort is worthwhile. This approach resonates with Papadopoulos\u0026rsquo;s (2022) notion of scaling out. Rather than promoting a standardized, turnkey infrastructure, Mr. Brouk offers adaptable components that allow buyers to configure their own facilities in context-specific ways. His guidance is not delivered as an instruction to be followed but as the sharing of experience, coupled with an explicit encouragement to experiment and learn through practice.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAt the same time, the very qualities that make domestic insect farming meaningful and ethically compelling also delineate its limits. Its reliance on intimate care and sustained affective engagement renders such practices difficult to replicate beyond a relatively narrow circle of motivated practitioners; they demand time, attentiveness, and a willingness to live in close proximity with insects\u0026mdash;conditions that many households may neither desire nor be able to accommodate. Domestic scaling thus risks remaining socially selective, embedded in particular dispositions, housing arrangements, and forms of cultural capital. Moreover, operating largely outside formal regulatory, veterinary, and food safety frameworks can make these practices fragile and ambiguous, especially if they were to proliferate without shared standards or appropriate governance infrastructures. There is also a tension between care and accumulation: expanding the number of insects, even at the household level, may gradually shift relations from convivial cohabitation toward routinized management, potentially eroding the very metabolic intimacy and ethical attentiveness that underpin the practice. Finally, as a parallel infrastructure that deliberately resists marketization, domestic insect farming\u0026mdash;even if scaled out\u0026mdash;remains limited in its capacity to generate systemic effects or to replace dominant modes of food and feed provisioning. Rather than constituting a pathway to mass transition, domestic scaling is better understood as exemplifying a situated mode of living and eating within more-than-human collectives that has combined ecological, health, and emotional benefits.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec11\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003eTowards Cosmopolitical Justice through Insect Farming\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eEmploying the notion of cosmopolitics as proposed by Stengers (2005b) makes it possible to examine a dimension of justice that remains largely underexplored in the scholarship on just food-system transitions (Kaljonen et al. 2021; Tribaldos \u0026amp; Kortetm\u0026auml;ki 2022), yet one that is crucial for imagining effective and sustainable food futures. Today, sustainability in food systems is predominantly defined on the basis of expert and scientific knowledge. While this approach has proven effective for achieving certain policy objectives, it also entails significant limitations. As Robert and Dufresne (2023) demonstrate in their analysis of public hearings on pesticide use, the scientific knowledge that underpins regulation\u0026mdash;produced through methods designed to standardize and universalize phenomena\u0026mdash;often encounters civic epistemologies grounded in citizens\u0026rsquo; lived experience and situated expertise. This encounter is not simply a rejection of expert assessments or scientific models. Rather, it highlights the incompleteness of the worlds that are enacted through scientific practices and it redirects attention to their indeterminate and processual character, which is difficult to fully capture through standardized metrics alone. This argument echoes Stengers\u0026rsquo;s call to decenter modern science as the privileged arbiter of objective truth and to foreground other perspectives and experiences. In public deliberations, these divergent ontological positions meet not primarily in antagonism but in dialogue, as actors negotiate what counts as nature, society, and legitimate knowledge (Robert \u0026amp; Dufresne 2023: 206).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA similar dynamic is identified by Ottinger (2024) in her analysis of air-monitoring practices in the United States, where frontline communities experience epistemic injustice as their embodied expertise and care-based forms of knowledge are systematically marginalized. Despite their intimate exposure to and understanding of environmental harms, these communities are excluded from decision-making by the dominance of \u0026ldquo;credentialed experts\u0026rdquo; (Ottinger 2024: 201). As a result, they are denied recognition as legitimate knowers, while their participation in deliberative processes remains severely limited. Ottinger therefore calls for extending justice through practices of \u003cem\u003ecareful knowing\u003c/em\u003e\u0026mdash;approaches that recognize and value forms of knowledge grounded in lived experience, attentiveness, and responsibility. Taken together, civic epistemologies and practices of careful knowing reveal the limits and partiality of expert-driven definitions of sustainability. We engage the framework of cosmopolitics to extend this critique by opening a space for deliberation over what sustainability should involve, reframing it not as a fixed set of indicators but as a relational and situated practice that emerges through negotiations among heterogeneous actors.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e At the global and regional scalings of insect farming, the world within which sustainability efforts unfold is largely a pre-scripted universe. Human metabolic needs and planetary environmental limits are already established as the primary matters of concern through strategic policy documents and dominant sustainability frameworks. As a result, these framings tend to gloss over the tensions that arise from conflicting interests, which Stengers identifies as constitutive of ecological relations, and they instead advance supposedly \u0026ldquo;win\u0026ndash;win\u0026rdquo; solutions that promise universal benefit. In effect, they aspire to an \u0026ldquo;innocent\u0026rdquo; sustainability\u0026mdash;despite the fact that no sustainability intervention is ever free from consequences (Stengers 2011: 62). This mode of sustainability governance does not eliminate conflict but rather submerges it by rendering certain relations, actors, and impacts less visible. The pursuit of a universally applicable solution therefore risks obscuring the very questions that the cosmopolitical approach insists must remain open: questions of accountability, inflicted harm, conflicting practices, situated responsibility, and the political stakes of new relations between human and nonhuman beings.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn contrast, at the domestic scale exemplified by Mr. Brouk, the common world is not treated as a given but is continually negotiated and composed through everyday practices. Beyond providing nourishment for humans, the farm sustains a multispecies collective that includes mealworms, spiders, chickens, plants, and microbes. This collective remains open to ongoing adjustment and response rather than being stabilized or tightly contained and interactions within it are neither fully harmonized nor without conflict. Spiders illustrate this process of making a world common: rather than being eradicated or excluded, they are lived with, even though their sporadic presence requires occasional intervention. As Mr. Brouk explains, when spiders arrive to feed, they prey not only on mealworms but also on moths, contributing to the regulation of the farm\u0026rsquo;s ecology and demonstrating that each species shapes the conditions of others. In line with Stengers\u0026rsquo;s notion of an ecology of practices, this arrangement treats each practice and species as unique and singular, with its own ethos and attachments (2005a: 184). The farm is, in Janicka\u0026rsquo;s reading of Stengers (2024: 138), a \u0026ldquo;local and temporary pact\u0026rdquo; that remains open to negotiation and experimentation. Different species and practices interact, compete, and co-constitute the ecology, and what counts as \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo; emerges from within the practice itself rather than being imposed externally. Mr. Brouk does not seek to optimize or stabilize the ecology through multispecies compartmentalization; instead, he fosters a form of relational milieu, in which species are allowed to persist and interact while retaining their diverse, often conflicting interests.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCosmopolitical justice in this context does not imply symmetry, the absence of violence, or innocence\u0026mdash;mealworms are still bred and slaughtered for human purposes, and spiders are occasionally displaced. However, it resists the abrupt and rushed ontological closures that often underpin sustainability frameworks. Cosmopolitical justice keeps asymmetries, dependencies, and ethical tensions visible and open to negotiation and transformation, while attending to the quality of relations through which humans and nonhumans come to live and metabolize one another. In this sense, domestic insect farming draws attention to the contingent, situated, and temporary nature of a common world and gestures toward a form of cosmopolitical justice grounded not in the resolution of multispecies inequalities but in sustained attentiveness to the ways of preserving openness for ongoing negotiation. Domestic farming represents an empirical site in which cosmopolitical negotiations become especially visible. Its value lies not in its scale or intimacy per se, but in how it foregrounds the ongoing work of and conflicts in composing a common world\u0026mdash;work and conflicts that remain largely obscured within industrialized and policy-driven food systems.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis emphasis on the emergent and negotiated character of reality resonates closely with Papadopoulos\u0026rsquo;s notion of scaling out (2022). Rather than replicating a singular model across diverse locales, scaling out foregrounds situated decision-making that responds to context-specific needs for ecological repair and social reproduction. From a cosmopolitical perspective, scaling out can be understood as the practice of keeping the common world open: to create solutions \u0026ldquo;on the ground\u0026rdquo; (Papadopoulos 2022: 128), it is first necessary to attend to the actors, boundaries, and entanglements that constitute this ground. This approach stands in contrast to dominant sustainability frameworks, which tend to operate with standardized, transcendent categories defined prior to engagement with particular ecologies, livelihoods, or multispecies collectives.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eSituating insect farming within the broader theoretical landscape of protein transitions, post-growth, and cosmopolitical justice reveals important tensions around scale, governance, and value. At the global and regional levels, industrial insect protein production builds upon growth-oriented logics: it prioritizes economies of scale, requires substantial capital investment, and depends on extended supply chains that risk reproducing extractive relations and externalizing environmental costs. While such operations are often framed as sustainable solutions to future protein demand, they largely remain embedded in technocratic imaginaries that prioritize optimization, standardization, and expansion. In contrast, the domestic mode of insect breeding examined here aligns more closely with post-growth orientations to food production as articulated by McGreevy and colleagues (2022). Mr. Brouk\u0026rsquo;s farming practices emphasize sufficiency over maximization, rely on low-cost and locally embedded provisioning networks, and are grounded in care, attentiveness, and mutual dependency rather than species domination or industrial control. His mealworm farm thus offers an empirical window into forms of growing-with that generate value through multispecies collaboration rather than accumulation or scale expansion (cf. [anonymized] 2022).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFrom this perspective, scaling out insect production does not represent a retreat from innovation or relevance but rather a reorientation of the protein debate itself. Echoing Yates-Doerr\u0026rsquo;s emphasis on \u0026ldquo;situated experimentation, creative innovation, and openness to the unknown\u0026rdquo; (2014), scaling out foregrounds responsiveness to local ecologies, social relations, and metabolic entanglements instead of enforcing universal, one-size-fits-all solutions. It challenges the widespread assumption that feeding the future while safeguarding planetary boundaries necessarily requires ever more efficient, high-tech, and globally scalable protein sources. Decentralized forms of insect farming\u0026mdash;such as those fostered by Mr. Brouk through the sharing of know-how and the circulation of small-scale farming equipment\u0026mdash;demonstrate how insect-based foods can contribute to post-growth imaginaries rooted in metabolic intimacy, relational care, and more-than-human coexistence, without claiming to replace or subsume other food-production systems.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCosmopolitical justice, as developed in this article, is therefore not concerned with ensuring that all actors benefit equally from food-system transitions. Rather, it attends to how consequences, harms, and benefits are distributed, and whether questions of accountability are addressed. Justice, in this sense, involves keeping open the negotiation of multispecies relations instead of subsuming them under a singular, expert-defined model of sustainability. Both post-growth thinking and cosmopolitics imply a shift toward participatory and distributed forms of decision-making that respond to human as well as more-than-human needs. While nonhumans cannot participate in governance in conventional deliberative terms, their agency and vulnerabilities can nonetheless be made present through practices of care, observation, and situated, careful knowing that inform how food systems are organized and regulated.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFinally, although cosmopolitical justice does not translate into a prescriptive policy blueprint, it carries clear implications for food governance. It calls for regulatory frameworks that remain open to plural forms of knowledge, modes of production, and human\u0026ndash;insect relations, rather than consolidating legitimacy exclusively around standardized metrics of efficiency, productivity, and control. Recognizing domestic practices as legitimate sites of experimentation can expand the repertoire of transition pathways considered politically viable, without requiring their universalization. In this light, insect farming\u0026mdash;particularly in its domestic and decentralized forms\u0026mdash;emerges not as a niche curiosity or a scalable fix, but as a critical site for rethinking how sustainable, just, and multispecies food futures might be collectively composed.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eConsent to participate statement:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003eAll interviewees provided informed consent for the use of interview transcripts in analysis and publication, contingent upon the protection of their anonymity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEthics declaration:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003eThis research was approved by the Research Ethics Board of the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (approval no. SOÚ-382_3/2024). The research was conducted in accordance with the Code of Ethics of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFunding Information:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003eThis work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Beyond Security: The Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building” (reg. no.: CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004595).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClinical trial number:\u003c/strong\u003e Not applicable.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCompeting interests:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003eThe authors declare no competing interests.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnonymized. 2022.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnonymized. 2023.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnonymized. 2026.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBelluco, Simone, Afton Halloran, and Alfredo Ricci. 2017. \u0026ldquo;New Protein Sources and Food Legislation: The Case of Edible Insects and EU Law.\u0026rdquo; \u003cem\u003eFood Security\u003c/em\u003e 9 (4): 803\u0026ndash;14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-017-0704-0.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBiteau, Corentin, Tom Bry-Chevalier, Dustin Crummett, Ren Ryba, and Michael St. Jules. 2025. \u0026ldquo;Bugs in the System: The Logic of Insect Farming Research Is Flawed by Unfounded Assumptions.\u0026rdquo; \u003cem\u003eNpj Sustainable Agriculture\u003c/em\u003e 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44264-024-00042-0.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBruna, Natacha. 2022. \u0026ldquo;A Climate-Smart World and the Rise of Green Extractivism.\u0026rdquo; \u003cem\u003eThe Journal of Peasant Studies\u003c/em\u003e 49 (4): 839\u0026ndash;64. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2022.2070482.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDaněk, Petr, and Petr Jehlička. 2024. \u0026ldquo;Gardening as a Responsible Leisure Activity: The Geography of Central European Food Self-Provisioning.\u0026rdquo; \u003cem\u003eErdkunde\u003c/em\u003e 78 (4): 273\u0026ndash;87. https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.2024.04.02.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDonati, Kelly. 2014. \u0026ldquo;The Convivial Table: Imagining Ethical Relations through Multispecies Gastronomy.\u0026rdquo; \u003cem\u003eThe Aristologist: An Antipodean Journal of Food History\u003c/em\u003e 4: 127\u0026ndash;43.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eEuropean Commission. 2020. 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Food Security, Edible Insects, and \u0026lsquo;One World, One Health\u0026rsquo; Collaboration.\u0026rdquo; \u003cem\u003eSocial Science \u0026amp; Medicine\u003c/em\u003e 129: 106\u0026ndash;12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.06.020.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":false,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"food-ethics","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"foet","sideBox":"Learn more about [Food Ethics](http://link.springer.com/journal/41055)","snPcode":"41055","submissionUrl":"https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/41055/3","title":"Food Ethics","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"stoa","reportingPortfolio":"Springer Hybrid","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false},"keywords":"edible insects, cosmopolitics, sustainability, food transition, justice","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8694155/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8694155/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003e This article examines the social, ecological, and ethical dimensions of insect-based food systems through the lens of cosmopolitical justice, drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Czechia. Based on semi-structured interviews with researchers and insect-farming entrepreneurs, participant observation at insect farms, and public engagement events, we analyze three distinct scalings of insect farming\u0026mdash;global, regional, and domestic\u0026mdash;and show how each enacts particular socio-ecological relations, governance logics, and configurations of justice.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e Building on critical protein scholarship, post-growth approaches, the logic of scaling out, and cosmopolitics, we argue that global and regional models of insect food production tend to operate within pre-scripted sustainability frameworks. These models prioritize efficiency, growth, and standardization, positioning insects primarily as commodities while marginalizing alternative forms of knowledge, care, and multispecies relations. In contrast, domestic insect farming constitutes a distinct cosmopolitical configuration in which the common world is not a given in advance but is continuously negotiated through the everyday practices of cohabitation, attentiveness, and metabolic proximity between humans, insects, and other life forms.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWe show that domestic insect farming fosters relational care, low-cost and locally embedded provisioning, and openness to multispecies entanglements, enabling forms of justice that extend beyond distributive concerns to encompass epistemic and ontological dimensions. The article demonstrates how, breeding, and eating insects can, by means of outscaling, contribute to decentralized, post-growth, and multispecies-just food futures. More broadly, the article advances a cosmopolitical perspective as a framework for keeping food futures open, plural, and contested.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"The Cosmopolitics of Insect Farming: Toward Scaling Out Just and Sustainable Food Futures","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2026-02-03 16:05:14","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8694155/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-04-06T16:21:45+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"17372570677607701130397812356537155922","date":"2026-02-04T19:02:33+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"158110400952062979744825655635258900794","date":"2026-02-03T12:50:34+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"","date":"2026-01-30T18:40:20+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorAssigned","content":"","date":"2026-01-30T12:11:21+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"checksComplete","content":"","date":"2026-01-30T12:05:11+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"submitted","content":"Food Ethics","date":"2026-01-25T17:43:50+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"food-ethics","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"foet","sideBox":"Learn more about [Food Ethics](http://link.springer.com/journal/41055)","snPcode":"41055","submissionUrl":"https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/41055/3","title":"Food Ethics","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"stoa","reportingPortfolio":"Springer Hybrid","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"3029d45a-3549-47cf-82c3-ffdbb72854b2","owner":[],"postedDate":"February 3rd, 2026","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"under-review","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-02-03T16:05:14+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2026-02-03 16:05:14","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-8694155","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-8694155","identity":"rs-8694155","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"XKTyCvWXoU3ODBz1xrDgd","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}