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Sparks

If You Eat Sea Bugs, You Can Eat Land Bugs

Crabs are gross too, okay?

Edible insects.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Last week, CNN reported that “Tyson Foods, one of the biggest meat producers, is investing in insect protein.” Nothing about this headline is, strictly speaking, misleading: Tyson produces about a fifth of all American beef, pork, and chicken, and it has indeed acquired a minority stake in the Dutch insect protein startup Protix. But the black soldier flies Tyson has invested in will only be used in pet, livestock, and fish food — they’re not “going into human food,” CNN clarifies, adding ominously, “at this point.”

Still, “the climate people want you to eat bugs!” is a media trope that seems to resurface every couple of months, with bug-eating — or, more politely, “entomophagy” — floated as an opportunity to “save the world” if only Westerners could get over “the psychological ‘ick’ factor.” (Many other cultures and ethnic groups still practice entomophagy today.) Right-wing media, unsurprisingly, loves to play up the gross-out: “The ruling class really, really wants us to eat bugs,” conservative commentator Michael Knowles claimed last year.

The word “bug” usually means “a small insect,” and in that sense, most people in the United States do not electively eat bugs. But colloquially, “bug” is used to refer to any small gross vermin (someone once tried to tell me that a mouse is a bug), and Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary both allow for definitions that include “any of various small arthropods” to be considered bugs too. In which case, the ruling class eats bugs … all the time.

Crabs, lobsters, shrimp, prawns — have you ever really looked at those guys?

Crab.This is absolutely a bug.Getty Images

Crawfish.A whole plate of tasty bugs. Getty Images

Like crickets, grasshoppers, and spiders, shellfish are all arthropods, and if they creepy-crawlied their way through our living rooms, rather than out of sight in the ocean, we’d absolutely just refer to them as “bugs” and call the exterminator. In fact, even the human immune system gets confused and “fail[s] to differentiate between bugs of the land and the ocean,” McGill University reports. The 2% of people who have shellfish allergies are typically reacting to the protein tropomyosin, which is also found in “insects like crickets, fruit flies, grasshoppers, cockroaches, locusts, and dust mites.” (I’ve inadvertently tested this out on myself and, uh, can confirm the shared allergen to be true).

Pass the cocktail sauce.Getty Images

While headlines and right-wing commentators continue to scaremonger about “insect protein” creeping closer and closer to our dinner plates, the leap to mainstream bug consumption might not even be that far off because of the relative bugginess of our diets already. In the span of only about 200 years, for example, lobster went from being considered disgusting and barely edible by many Westerners to being one of the most popular last-meal requests of death row prisoners. Conceptually, we’ve already cleared the hurdle of eating animals with more than four legs and that look like they just arrived from outer space. The remaining barrier to bug-eating might be as flimsy as just that: the word bug.

So no, Tyson isn’t going to start sneaking insects into your hamburgers. But when you next walk past your grocery store’s tank of sea cockroaches, consider that if it weren’t for a little residual squeamishness, you could be eating delicious land plankton instead.

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Sparks

The Fed Has No Relief for Renewables Developers (or Trump)

The U.S. central bank left its interest rate target unchanged for the fifth time in a row.

Donald Trump and Jerome Powell.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Interest rate relief isn’t coming anytime soon for renewables. As widely expected, the Federal Reserve chose to keep rates unchanged on Wednesday, despite intense pressure from President Trump and two Republican Fed governors to lower rates.

The Fed maintained the benchmark short term rate at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%. During the press conference that followed the rate announcement, Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave no indication that the board will lower rates at the Fed’s next meeting in September, either. That’s contrary to Trump’s claims to reporters after the meeting. “We have made no decisions about September,” Powell said. “We don’t do that in advance. We’ll be taking that information into consideration and all the other information we get as we make our decision.”

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After Trump Phone Call, DOE Cancels $5 Billion for Grain Belt Express

The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.

A cut wire.
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The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.

“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.

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Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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