NO dystopian picture of a climate-ruined planet is complete until you’ve been put off your lunch.

Whether it’s the grubs farmed by Dave Bautista in Blade Runner: 2049 or Charlton Heston in Soylent Green yelling that food is being made from “people”, there are few things that provoke as visceral a reaction as the prospect of an ecological disaster forcing you to eat something gross.

It is hardly surprising, then, if we are regularly promised a future of Blade Runner-style protein farms, where insect larvae are bred en masse for human consumption. “STOP insect-flour-based foods in school canteens,” Italy’s deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini wrote in an X posting last month, echoing a trope that’s found currency among the country’s farm protestors.