The Promise and Perils of Insect Farming
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At this price I can justify buying them as a high calorie snack for long distance hikes/cycles, but not for day to day usage.
The same product at 7 £/kg would become a lot more attractive as a daily food.
I also get this feeling that once the industry really kicks in, corners will be cut, farms will boom and sleazy techniques by owners could end up with something as environmentally damaging as beef, even if for different reasons. There's also the risk of break outs. I'm pretty sure a million bugs escaping at once because of some accident won't be an easy fix.
Sure, I know we already do operations at a similar scale with shrimp farming or so, but for aquatic creatures you can kind of control their environment much better by testing the water and such. Something like crickets need an environment that can't be controlled as easily, and I kinda don't see someone going in there to clean up every day and check for molds or fungi that could come into play (and it'd be easily covered by a cluster of bugs feeding on it with the inspector being none the wiser because it's a literal swarm inside)
I can be entirely wrong of course. In fact I'd rather be mistaken here, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it's a baseless concern, even cows have had problems that spread to humans (and at least in my country it's the reason you can't buy bones for soup anymore, just in case), and now that the market is more open you could end up with contaminated product and that bug flour was delivered to 25 countries and used as cheap additive in 450 different products before anyone noticed.
More than anything I'd like to see what people thinks about this. Is it a baseless concern or is it something that could happen?
Isn't this just a matter of adaption? The "insects->chickens->humans" problem seems like a temporary one and not the ultimate fallacy. I would love to eat insects. The few I've tried in Southeast Asia were very tasty.
It wasn't bad. Sort of like crisps.
In grasshopper season, all the kids would be out under streetlights, with bags, grabbing all the little jumpers they could.
Cows provide fertilizer, provider highly nutritious meat and have the same neglible environmental impact as other wildlife. Essentially the emissions of ruminants on US soil is indistinguishable from the emission of ruminants 200 years ago.
The studies that proved that cows consume huge amounts of water or emit methane were highly flawed, either comparing the usage of naturally occurring water as water consumed, or comparing whole lifecycle of cow emission to tail pipe emission of a car (compare CO2 of all things a person uses in lifetime to another persons CO2 emission of CO2 during their life).
Animal industrial complexes destroy ecosystems. The amount of urine and manure is massive, it's a problem in itself. You can't just dump all that on farms.
> and have the same neglible environmental impact as other wildlife
Wildlife does not reproduce at the unsustainable scale that we force cows to do so. There are some 40k cows in the USA alone¹ (and many more pigs and chickens, which people eat more of).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/194302/number-of-beef-an...
We make mega-tons of fertilizers, so presumably this urine/manure can displace some of the fertilizer? At most, this is a question of cost/regulation/externality?
> Wildlife does not reproduce at the unsustainable scale that we force cows to do so
Well, yeah, true. But maybe u want to go back in time and tell your parents to have one less child? Let hope we find a balance over the next decades
That doesn't counter what I said. Sure they destroy ecosystems, but only as secondary effects. A field of almonds in a desert will destroy more ecosystems than cows being fed corn or grass.
> Wildlife does not reproduce at the unsustainable scale that we force cows to do so.
Sure it does, it's just the question of keeping wildlife in check via predation. When wolves disappear so do forests, because deer (or other ruminants) run amok. The way I see it, what US did is convert the biomass of wildlife into the biomass of cows.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128086 has a nice FAO quote along these lines.
Perhaps these issues don't offer the same performative opportunities to signal one's virtue. There's also the central planning aspect to consider.
Sent from my iPhone.
He’s pointing out an unspoken assumption that is incorrect.
Namely, that a creature’s intelligence has any bearing on how they ought be treated.
It obviously doesn’t.
The most intelligent animal of all is routinely enslaved, overworked, and discarded.
Thus, the assumption is not as universally accepted as many posters suggest.
Arguing about the relative intelligence of insects or cows or dogs or horses or whales with the end of concluding by that we ought or ought not eat them is silly. If it tastes good, people will eat it. Likewise, if someone is good at making iPhones or picking cotton, that’s what they’ll be forced to do regardless of their IQ.
And as others have stated they are protein rich and pretty efficient to raise. I wouldn't be surprised if within the next 5 to 10 years some insect eating fad breaks out with some popular tic tok'r and suddenly our perception on them starts to flip. Social media might actually redeem itself.
I'm sorry, but that's (several) steps too far in the campaign to make people feel guilty for being carnivores.
But it's even more mind-blowing how many vegetarians believe fish can't feel pain, so while they reject eating pork, beef or chicken because the poor animals suffer, they still find it fine to eat fish.
Those are the informed people! If they don't understand, why should the uninformed ones?
At least cows are not close to extinction.
I know this trope, but I have actually never met a vegetarian who think like this.
I know vegetarians who eat fish, because it is further away, from humans, DNA wise. Or in general they just feel fine with eating fish and they do what they feel fine with, which makes sense to me. But I never actually met a person who believe fish (or animals in general) can't feel pain. I met many who are ignorant of pain of others, yes, but I never met one who actually believe that. Is this a US thing?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/once-...
How DNA-closeness is relevant to this is even more beyond me.
“Until as recently as the 1980s, researchers assumed newborns did not have fully developed pain receptors, and believed that any responses babies had to pokes or pricks were merely muscular reactions.” [https://time.com/3827167/this-is-a-babys-brain-on-pain/]
As a result, doctors would perform surgeries without anesthesia on newborns. This is absolutely mind boggling.
I never knew that there really is such a thing.
TIL.
Also, if individual numbers count we might as well raise buffalo.
As far as we know they neither feel pain nor are they sentinent.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-021-01621-5
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-021-01642-0
There are 50-100 species of wild flowers in a meadow and probably other 500 species of invertebrates. In a soy field they is one plant, zero insects and some chemicals, therefore is a worse (not better, worse) option in terms of sustainability or ecology.
Both farming and agriculture can be bad or good. The dichotomy agriculture=good / farming=bad is a ideological construction and a nonsense.
Take a plant and put a sharp needle into its growth path. Many plats will avoid it and adjust their growth path, once they got into contact. Just like a human, a dog or a fish. The time scale is different, the effect is the same. It's a sensation that leads to avoidance of a certain negative stimulus.
Somehow words seem to be sufficient to get people to do anything.
Insects aren't made of meat, they're mostly chitin and lymph. They don't have muscles or blood vessels, turning them into "meat" is not really possible.
"Edible insects contain high quality protein, vitamins and amino acids for humans. Insects have a high food conversion rate, e.g. crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and twice less than pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein. Besides, they emit less greenhouse gases and ammonia than conventional livestock."
Otherwise beans would be meat too.
Personally, I think fried crickets taste much better than Impossible Burger and the ilk.
I'm astounded that pigs and chickens are that efficient compared to crickets. I was thinking efficiency and body mass would have a close-to-linear negative correlation.
They most certainly do. [1] We could argue about whether the hydraulic structures of the wing count as "blood vessels" - probably not for this purpose, inasmuch as they do not really circulate - but muscles, absolutely.
I mean, yes, insects are arthropods, and there are a few of those (such as salticids, which anyway are arachnids and not insects) who use hydraulic pressure to power some movements. But even for them, that's a special case; mostly they use muscles to move, just like we do, albeit with a very different style of scaffolding.
And, just generally - have you never eaten crab or lobster? What did you imagine you were eating then, if not muscle? Why assume other arthropods would not be constructed in a fashion generally similar to those?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_physiology#Muscular_s...
While you are ultimately right, it should be noted that the arthropods are a huge category of animals, and humans are much closer to fish (taxonomically) than insects are to crabs. In fact, insects and crabs are as close as we are to Tunicates [0]: the same phylum, Chordata for us or Arthropoda for them, but different Subphylums (Vertebrata vs Tunicata for us, Insecta vs Crustacea for them).
However, essentially all animals have muscles, from the simplest worms up. Sponges and a few other extremely simplistic animals do lack these, but they are minority exceptions.
So you still cannot create a meat meal with insects.
Source: I keep insectivorous pets.