Sci-Fi Stories - #2 The Insect

Signal #2 Signal: “New food innovations need vehicles to adapt to current realities.”* Writer: Damien Lutz

Some days I feel like I’m becoming an insect.

Not just because my 83-year-old skin is crusting up from sun damage and age, and my joints grind and clack as my fluids dry up.

No, it’s because of those damn insect plagues fillin’ the outside air that I’m sure breathin’ in mouthfuls of—even with my mask on—that I then imagine colonise inside me and breed, crawling through my veins, under my skin, and up into my brain to nest and control my thoughts.

(Drone picture of a Spring plague)

They say I got a phobia, like what many suffer from these days, with the air filled with constant buzzing, crawling, scratching. While many of the flyin’ and buzzin’ critters died in some parts of the world as the temperatures rose, others migrated and thrived, and here the ground and the air and the walls seem to crawl with them.

Desperate for food, they destroy our crops and nest in our walls and floors and ceilings.

At night, when the lights flicker, I try not to think about them chewing the wires, electrical grease dribbling down their little chins.

Our only way to fight back is to eat them, make them the majority of our diet.

But many, like me with the phobia, can’t bring themselves to willingly ingest them.

Just the thought makes my stomach knot and my oesophagus fit, my hands claw and my back tense into a shell, as if consuming them would finalise my complete transition into a giant cockroach, a constant waking nightmare that fills me with terror.

That’s why I spend more time than an old man like me with a bad heart should at Joto’s Burger and Salad Bar. It’s the only place to get a juicy steak burger dripping with the grease that could only come from a cooked animal, and fresh mixed salads that could have only been grown under a sun-drenched sky not filled with locusts, crickets, beetle, and hoppers. Comfort of a past free from critter plagues. Although the meat is made from muscle and fat grown in the lab, it’s as damn good any beef burger I had before the plagues.

Doctor says the burgers don’t do my heart any harm because the meat and fat came from insect cells, and I can tell ya that thought still weevils into my brain from time to time.

But I zap that thought from my mind like a bug zapper vanquishes a pesky mosquito before I swallow a big bite of my Joto’s Double Patty with Cheese, look up to watch the TV screens showing cows in green paddocks chewing grass and brushing away an occasional bug with their tail, and wipe the grease dribbling down my chin.

(Keyframe from the screen)

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Sci-Fi Stories is a collection of sci-fi texts by Damien Lutz based on prompts from real-life research. Each text contains serious clues regarding future food innovations that represent research paths taken by the Transformative Times team. Current research focuses on how to accelerate the adoption of new food habits.

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