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September 16, 2014
Big Cricket Farms, of Youngstown, Ohio, opened six months ago. It is the first (and, so far, only) farm in America to raise crickets exclusively for human consumption. The farm, which was founded by Kevin Bachhuber, is housed in a formerly abandoned warehouse in the Rust Belt city. Inside, several hundred white reinforced fibreglass troughs sit on the floor, housing between three thousand and four thousand crickets each.
For a meat eater accustomed to choosing free-range over battery chickens, the sight of a seething, twitching mass of brown legs and antennae on the floor of Big Cricket Farms raises a tricky question: Are these crickets happy living in a fibreglass trough? How would one even know?