Mealworms are among the most widely farmed insects for food and feed - welfare science is developing standards for humane rearing and slaughter.
Mealworm welfare sits in genuinely uncertain moral territory. Their nervous systems are simpler than crickets, but nociception - detecting and responding to harmful stimuli - is documented. The precautionary principle applied to billions of individual animals justifies taking welfare seriously even under uncertainty. Key welfare considerations include temperature management (avoiding thermal stress), substrate quality (nutrition and hygiene), and slaughter methods (rapid freezing appears preferable to slow heat death). Building welfare considerations into mealworm farming from the outset is easier than retrofitting them after commercial scale is established.