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Comment by lapetitejort | Hacker News Reader

I'm patiently waiting for the west to realize that insects are the future of protein. I will gladly munch down a handful of crickets, even before they're prepared to look appetizing. "Beyond" and "Impossible" meats, lab grown meats, and black bean patties are neat projects, but not the future. And movies like Snowpiercer that shows the horror of flavorful, nutritious, and sustainable bars of crickets (edit: cockroaches) really aren't helping.

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Look at how hard vegetarians and vegans have worked for decades and decades to try to convince people to replace foods they like with other types of food that they already eat but just don't like as much. The amount of success they've had is small, and the amount of backlash high.

With insects you're trying to convince people to replace foods they like with foods they literally find disgusting and have never eaten in their lives. Yes I'm sure it makes sense on paper, but I think you're drastically underestimating the cultural barriers on this one.

I'm waiting for the same thing, but with fungi. Mycelia alone are protein rich and love to literally grow in giant vats. Culturing fungi is well understood and massively scalable compared to culturing animal cells.

A company already exists that uses this technology; see here for more: https://www.quorn.us/mycoprotein

As far as I know, they're one of the only companies doing this and their strain of fungi is their IP. I'd like to see this catch on at a larger scale.

Is there an advantage of insects as a protein source over plants or fungi? What makes you dismiss the plant-based Beyond/Impossible meats?

I'm struggling to find a real source, however glancing at nutritional facts of cricket powder, it appears that protein makes up 3/5ths of its mass, versus 1/4th for black beans.

I think you'd have to factor in the resource input required to create that mass of crickets vs beans/pulses/etc. I realize crickets are pretty efficient but they could end up being very similar. I also don't have good sources for this.

I don't understand why people are looking to insects over legumes for protein. Legumes are widely cultivated and socially and culturally acceptable. Protein is pretty much a solved problem.

Agree, and I don't understand any of this lab-grown meat hype when there are so many plant based alternatives. It doesn't seem that lab grown meat will be cheaper or have a better carbon footprint than plant based foods.

iirc legume protein is significantly lower quality then meat protein?

Have you seen the kilo prices of editable insects? I can by a pack of crickets for 20 dollars for 26 grams at a domestic online store. There are 453 grams in a pound!

A cheaper option is buffalo worm flour at just over 100 dollars per kilo.

"Beyond" and "Impossible" meats have already undercut insect prices tremendously on super market shelves.

I’m not sure anything would help. Though, I find hot dogs to be disgusting, so I’m probably not a great candidate for cricket dogs.

Cricket can be turned into powder which then becomes flour for baking protein-rich goods. Doesn’t have to look like a hot dog.

You can turn lots of things into a powder that contains protein, that doesn't mean they should be eaten. Would you try baking "protein-rich goods" with dried semen?

hmm, this sounds like this could create a lot of jobs though.

How much more efficient is it though than the current system with livestock? This process is still growing plants to feed animals to feed humans.

I haven't watched Snowpiercer, but the mesmerized Renfield from Dracula seems more fitting.

I'm having difficulty discerning what your position on the social/culture barrier is.

Is it that the West has failed to realize a future in insect-consumption that other regions/cultures already have? Or that this future won't be realized unless the West in particular embraces consumption of insects?

Insects are only eaten by people who are so extremely impoverished that's their only alternative, sort of like Haitian mud cakes. Nobody sane will willingly touch them.

I will happily go full vegetarian before I cross that line.

Ok, you eat bugs, I will stay with grass-fed beef like normal people. Meat is not a "problem" and it doesn't need "solving", and I will not eat insects, that's absolutely disgusting.

A dead carcass / decaying flesh is "normal" but bugs are where you draw a line? That's kind of interesting, and almost certainly cultural rather than logical.

A steak or chicken breast or pork chop is a fundamentally different thing than anything you can get from bugs. Culturally they might be interchangeable sources of protein, but you can't get a steak from crickets or grubs.

Like it or not, steak is normal, and good eats to a majority of the west.

We're not automatons that you can throw any random mix of protein and carbohydrates into as fuel, and food choices are not "logical". Being forced to eat insects like an animal is humiliating and disgusting. Regular meat is delicious. Most people will never consider eating bugs, they're synonymous with disease, filth, and poverty.

Please don't straw-man here; I never said you can throw a random mix of protein and carbs together as fuel. A plant-based diet is recognized by dieticians around the world as suitable for virtually all stages of life

Meat is a problem, too - for your health and for the environment - not to mention the animals themselves.

edited to remove fluffff

Meat is more nutritious and more tasty, and it's great to eat either seasoned and not. What is definitely not beneficial for health is a heavily processed and salted mush of plant based meat facsimile, or whatever frankenmeat they're trying to conjure in those labs. It's also another step towards you being more heavily dependent on enormous multinational industries.

Meat is still a problem, for all the areas I've listed above. If you're willing to neglect that reality for something tasting good, you're absolutely right that food choices aren't logical (at least in your personal case).

You're also welcome to provide evidence that something like Beyond beef is less healthy than it's flesh counterpart. With zero cholesterol in any plant-based product, though, I have a feeling you're going to encounter some difficulty.

Americans used to consider lobsters disgusting: they look like sea cockroaches after all. Yet look at where they are now.

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