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

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.