Entrepreneur raises millions of bugs to tackle food waste problem (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Entrepreneur raises millions of bugs to tackle food waste problem (2017)

globaltimes.cn

79 pointsapo55 comments

Interesting. Jinan is the modern center of Shandong province, one of China's oldest continuously inhabited provinces according to the traditional view of the growth of Chinese civilization. It is pretty much denuded after 3,000 years of intensive agriculture, so any means to reuse food waste is welcome. If anyone has the chance to visit, the nearby town of Linzi has a musuem of cuju[0], an ancient Chinese game which FIFA recognized as the earliest form of association football. The ancient capital of Qingzhou[1] is fascinating, with some of the oldest mosques and most important Buddhist statuary as well as carved Buddhist grottoes on nearby mountains and a huge picturesque park-valley dividing in the middle of town. And the nearby town of Dezhou[2] holds the tomb of a Philippino Muslim sultan who is thought to have been murdered by the Chinese after failing to display appropriate deference to the Emperor. Then of course there's the home of Confucius - Qufu[3], the old German treaty port of Qingdao[4], etc. Not a bad province for those with historical inclinations!

On the subject of food waste, we are planning to collect and recycle from our food robots but this may be hampered by regulations frustrating importing food waste across the Chinese/HK and Chinese/Macau borders. We shall see.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuju

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingzhou

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dezhou

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qufu

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingdao

What kind of food robots do you have?

Scary awesome ones that make noodles. :)

Black solider flies (BSF) are another popular food composting insect. Their larvae are absolutely ravenous, and chickens go bananas for them. Their castings are not that nutritious, but they make a good bedding for worm composting. As an extra plus, unlike cockroaches the adult flies are not pests - they don’t bite people and they won’t stay around unless there’s rotting food. I would NOT want a cockroach farm anywhere near my home, while I would be just fine with a BSF farm in my own yard.

Video: https://youtu.be/5M6u9ZX5ecE

Isn't there an issue with biomagnification ? I mean the waste probably went into contact or already contain toxic molecules. How can it be a good idea to feed it to chicken again ?

This sounds like pure marketing to me. Statements like "Cockroaches are also a raw material in traditional Chinese medicine, known to be able to promote detoxification" and "found that chickens fed with the powder were not only healthier but also grew stronger and faster than normal chickens" without citations sets off all sorts of alarm bells.

And I don't know a ton about this area in general but it seems like if you are separating the organic compounds from trash then compost centers would be the real alternative (rather than landfills)?

Don't know about the chinese medicine, but insects chewing organic matter can be better than compost if you don't have a lot of dry carbon (paper, twigs, leaves whathaveyou). If you just let lots of fruit rot, you get anaerobic decomposition, which is slow and releases lots of methane (greenhouse gas) not to mention smells like rotting fruit. Can't compost meat without some real disease issues either.

I've got a friend with Black Soldier Fly larvae eating his leftovers of all kinds. Raw meat, pineapple, it all gets turned to dirt. Insects are magic.

I would love it if newspapers/media outlets had to attach a bibliography or some form of citation. Unfortunately not only is it not common practice, I'm not sure that I've ever seen one. I only see citations in scientific papers.

This reminds me heavily on the 'perfect food' issue primarily in western countries. Every apple that's not pretty, every cucumber that's not straight and so on. All just goes from the supermarket into a bin.

It's a really horrible amount of waste that easily could solve many issues around poverty and hunger, but yet, very little action. Good to see more momentum around food waste.

It's also horrible because, in the quest for the perfect looking food, flavor and nutrition are often the first thing to go.

Perfect looking with unnaturally long shelf life, yeah. Tomatoes certainly aren't the same thing I remember them being, for instance.

How did they used to taste?

You can grow excellent tomatoes yourself, or head to a local farmer's market for a reasonable selection of 'real' tomatoes.

The short answer -- a properly ripe tomato doesn't need any help whatsoever from salt or sugar to make it tasty.

Keep your eyes out for "Heirloom tomatoes" or my favorite, zebra-stripe tomatoes. They're a lot smaller, vary in color a lot. Pack a punch, I like to just snack on them whole.

Like tomatoes, instead of like watery cardboard.

That doesn't help answer the question at all.

The big problem with tomatoes is that the ones that go to supermarkets are harvested green and ripened artificially. They don't develop the same flavors as a natural sun-ripened tomato. But, a sun-ripened tomato at the peak of ripeness is both too fragile and too short lived to be shipped and sold in supermarkets. I think the same is true for a lot of other fruits.

The science suggests that food is becoming less nutritious because of more abundant carbon dioxide, not directly due to farming practices.

I have never heard that. Link?

Here is a NY Times article discussing the topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/climate/rice-global-warmi...

You could just breed it back down to being slower-growing if that was the case, if that was what any big farmer wanted...

Realistically, what the farmer wants is irrelevant. A farmer who grows what a farmer wants is a farmer that is no longer in business. You need to have customers to stay in business, and so the customer always dictates what is grown. Customers don't buy product they don't want – why would they?

If the customer desires a slower-growing plant, the customer will get a slower-growing plant (assuming the tech companies are able to make the science work, but that's outside of the hands of farmers). Although knowing the average consumer, there is a good chance they would never accept a slower-growing plant as it may cause autism or some other story that they start to spread around.

The breeding of a bigger, rounder, more beautiful tomato has absolutely come at the cost of nutrition. See https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-t... "Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food"

". The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers."

The rising CO2 doesn't help tho.

That's really not true. Imperfect food is generally not sent to the supermarket. Imperfect apples become applesauce. Imperfect cucumbers become relish or pickle slices. Imperfect tomatoes become ketchup.

While you're not incorrect, there's a whole slew of the 'on the fence' produce that DOES get sent to supermarkets, and then don't get sold. There's been a few documentaries about it, well worth a watch.

Yep, I know someone that ran a company stocking vegetables/fruits for one of the top supermarket chains here - they were the middlepeople who packed the pallets.

It's a very hard working/high demand place, it wouldn't be uncommon for the boss to have a 16 hour day every so often. Meth runs rampant for people to stay awake, people take a piss in the corner of the factory and have a smoke while packing. Anything that has a cut or bruise gets thrown in the trash, not sent to another place to get processed, not composted, just thrown in the trash.

Any staff can take home stuff at the end of the day that doesn't get thrown out, this would be enough veggies/fruits for 1-2 weeks for them.. just from a single day.

Looks like the protein can be consumed by humans as well, since many people eat roaches. Can't the protein powder be used like whey isolate powder? If yes, that's a massive industry to tap.

video of burly men lifting weights

Try Roach Protein! The workout supplement that will not die!

heavy metal guitar sting

Ro Bro Protein.

"Contains no soy, guaranteed!"

The food for farm animal for human consumption is heavily controlled. You can't give them any crap. They also need strict veterinary controls.

But if the roaches are farmed to produce food that is given to animals that are consumed by humans, the extra level of indirection makes everything more easy.

The food for farm animal for human consumption is heavily controlled. You can't give them any crap.

"poultry litter or broiler litter is a mixture of poultry excreta, spilled feed, feathers, and material used as bedding in poultry operations ... it is now also used as a livestock feed as a cost-saving measure compared with other feedstock materials, particularly for beef animals."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_litter#Use_as_cattle_f...

jesus f chirst that made me choke reading that this is legal in the united states. Thanks for the localavore booster shot.

"Waste not, want not." as they say ;)

And yes, disgusting. Also a workaround for organic designations. You can have an "organic" milk production operation that uses waste from chickens not raised under "organic" standards. Because there's a loophole for using waste as food. I also remember experiments feeding newspaper waste to cows, but I don't think that worked very well.

I know, isn't it unbelievable! Blechhh. I only learnt about it recently. Luckily am vegan... Those poor cows. "We feed them shit, as a cost-saving measure" sounds like Monty Python, or Rick and Morty or something.

Natural fertilizer is also livestock poo and it's usually healthier (except when the livestock it comes from was fed antibiotics and its poo contains antibiotic resistant bacteria). In fact the it's exactly the waste that covers chicken shed floors, described above, that is used for organic farming.

Gee, you can't see the difference between putting poo on plants and feeding it to cows?

I do not regret my decision to stop eating meat. That's disgusting.

the plants you eat are consumers of cow and other animal excreta

What do you think plants eat?

Remember that time (and that other time etc) that farmers padded their feed with bottom of the barrel cheap candy?

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/do-farmers-feed-cows-skitt...

[2] https://money.cnn.com/2012/10/10/news/economy/farmers-cows-c...

[3] http://fortune.com/2017/01/23/farmers-cows-red-skittles/

Through skimming some pages on the FDA website I see regulations based on preventing contamination to animal feed, and that the center for veterinary medicine supplies guidelines and recommendations, but can you point me to some regulation of what ranches are allowed to feed their cows? I'd be curious, I don't see any reason that cattle feed supplements couldn't toss in some insect protein powder, I'm sure the only reason they don't is there are cheaper sources like whey.

You can give them crap, but not just unclassified unknown crap.

It is ok to give the cattle insect (roach) power.

It is not ok to give them the waste from the restaurant that may included good food, rotten fruit, paper napkins (did one of the clients had flu?), something brown that was in the fridge, a piece of meat (did the butchered cow had the mad cow disease? let's break the cicle), some leftovers of the food of the dog of the owner, a rat (can I put the dead rat here? it was a natural dead after it was hit with a stick), some roaches that were unsuspectingly eating some leftovers, some flies and maggots, and some nasty stuff.

I suppose that makes sense, thanks :)

They already sell cricket protein powder [1], so I see no reason why roach powder couldn't be done. Marketing it would be difficult though, even more palatable insects are a hard sell.

[1] https://griloprotein.com.au/product/cricket-protein-powder-c...

Insect protein is surprisingly expensive: https://blog.plover.com/2018/04/19#maggots

Ok, so they've found all these bugs, but who is going to pay to fix them? This is the problem with open-source.

Something doesn’t add up, the roach eat but they need to shit and roaches don’t grow after reaching certain size. So at the point they’d be just eating and shitting. The shit can’t be used as protein, so there still need to land fill that waste correct? The article isn’t telling the whole story.

Their poop is compost.

As oh_sigh says their castings can be used as compost, and the roaches themselves can probably be used to make fish or animal feed. In fact their poop might too. People might hesitate at the prospect of eating roaches, or shit, but pass it all through some tilapia and they’re thrilled.

People might hesitate at the prospect of eating roaches, or shit, but pass it all through some tilapia and they’re thrilled.

Yeah, but that’s normal. People don’t want to eat grass either until it’s passed through a cow or a sheep.

Must be one of the worse place to work on earth too

Yeah, imagine if the cockroach containment breaks and they start to roam freely into neighbouring factories, office buildings or worse, homes. Expect properties near cockroach food recycling factories to be quite cheap.

I googled pics and the place in hallways is just overrun by roaches, not sure how they can contain those things. Back to topic, they say they grind up the rotting food and feed it into a massive glass container, imagine the smell along with all that

Why do I feel like the stuff they're eating is going to work itself back into our food supply somewhere down the line?

Sustainable business cycle! :)

At first I thought the title of this post was wrong or satire :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com