More people are eating bugs – but is it ethical to farm insects for food? | Hacker News Reader

More people are eating bugs – but is it ethical to farm insects for food?

theconversation.com

> If one assumes, hypothetically, that insects are 0.1% as sentient as cows, or that the probability that insects can suffer is 0.1%, then killing 1,000 crickets has a similar ethical footprint as killing one cow.

Ok... are we really doing this? Math of suffering? I'm not even going to go into it, but I will point out a simple fact. Most people in the developed world over-eat. The amount of calories people consume is excessive and unreasonable.

People literally eat for pleasure. You want to be a moral human? Stop eating for pleasure, and stop over-eating calories. If everyone did this, we wouldn't even need to resort to meat alternatives. And yes, I am very sorry to point this out, but if this whole line of thinking is desirable...meaning we don't want animals to suffer as well as the logical conclusion that eating less would diminish this...being overweight is immoral. So here's my conclusion, the low hanging fruit in all this is people eating for pleasure, not controlling their calories and therefore gaining lots of weight, and as a consequence more animals suffer.

I would like to stop seeing overweight people all over the place, and the whole industry of eating for pleasure gone, before considering if switching to insects is moral because they might or might not suffer as much.

You make this about morality, but we feel pleasure when we eat nutritious food because this is how we can identify what we should and shouldn't eat. It is a mechanism that developed at a time when food was not plentiful and now that there is a lot more food to eat, it causes people to become overweight, because of course they can't turn off their sense of fulfillment and satisfaction from a plentiful meal! Nor their cravings for nutritious food.

The food industry on the other hand takes very deliberately advantage of this human characteristic and stuffs its products full of ingredients that create a sense of pleasure withouth actually being nutritious: fat, sugar, salt and all sorts of taste, flavour and appearance enhancers (emulsifiers, colourings, flavourings, etc).

Other animals are not any different than humans in that. If you've been around animals at all, pets or farm animals, you will know that when it's lunch time, they go absolutely crazy. Animals are wired to seek out the food that gives them pleasure just as much as humans are- and that's because humans are animals and our apetites are animal apetites.

You make out the pleasure of feeding as all about morality, but it is a morality that is not grounded in material reality.

Right, you are outlining the precise problem here. There is a direct line to a solution to avoid mass farming, mass suffering of animals, which is the moral issue at hand.

Instead of taking the most straight path which is eating less, and avoid over-eating for pleasure to solve the moral issue, society has favored and indirect, aimless path which creates problems in its path... let's continue over-eating, rewarding that industry by buying more and more food, and as a result more farms are needed, more chemicals in our food are needed, and also more doctors and medicine is needed to treat the illnesses that arise in parallel.

> Other animals are not any different than humans in that.

If you're going to lower the bar that low, then let's just do mass farming, and who cares if cows and pigs suffer? Animals don't care about the suffering of other animals. Just look up what chimpanzees to do other chimp tribes (it's pretty gruesome). If humans are just animals, then all this talk about making animals suffer is moot.

When you say "overeating", do you mean just overeating meat, or overeating in general? It sounds like you mean just overeating meat. But eating for pleasue doesn't mean eating meat for pleasure. For example, when I overeat it's usually pasta or fries and it's always vegan to boot (because I cook with olive oil rather than butter). So you can eat for pleasure, without eating any animal food and still overeat.

My comment about humans being just like other animals is to explain that humans don't find pleasure in food because we are filthy immoral gluttons. It's because the pleasure we feel when we eat food is derived from our senses and has nothing to do with morality. Moral and immoral people are equally capable of deriving pleasure from food.

And neither can "stop eating for pleasure" like you admonish in your first comment. In the same way that you can't turn off your sexual pleasure, you can't turn off the pleasure you get from food. Unless you damage yourself.

> If you're going to lower the bar that low, then let's just do mass farming, and who cares if cows and pigs suffer?

I don't understand what you mean. I said humans are animals. Why does that force us to do mass farming or ignore pigs' suffering?

Also, why am I "lowering the bar"? The bar for what?

> When you say "overeating", do you mean just overeating meat, or overeating in general?

I mean in general, which includes meat for the purposes of the current context (article). I understand we're not eating for pleasure on purpose, and we're 'wired' to do so, but I think it definitely has to do with morality. Monks and priests do a lot of fasting for related reasons, but won't go into that right now.

> And neither can "stop eating for pleasure" like you admonish in your first comment.

I think we can, but first to clarify, it's not that we HAVE to do it, but rather that if we are to be concerned about the suffering of animals to an extent that we advocate for society to change diets we should first worry about the quantity of food people eat before the type of the food (or at least prioritize it this way). People can gain lots of calories from carbs and that is a huge problem right now in society. I'm pretty sure people will eat according to their weight, so heavier people will also eat more meat.

And yes, I think it's possible to enjoy food less (or enjoy healthier choices). This is just my observation here, but there is a correlation between weight and how much pleasure people get from eating food. I see ultra heavy people enjoy food in ways I seem to not be able to. It's absolutely an addiction which is somehow being enabled in society, even though it goes against the environment and public health.

> Also, why am I "lowering the bar"? The bar for what?

The bar for what we expect from people in terms of controlling their own pleasure as explained above. It sounded like that because animals can't control their impulses it is somehow justified for humans as well. If that were the case, I implied that it should also follow for cruelty. Animals can't control their cruelty, so why should we? It's the same line of logic. Not sure if that was your point, but some people do make that argument.

Sorry for the late reply. I pointed out that humans are animals to say that the reason we find pleasure in food has nothing to do with morality, and has everything to do with having animal bodies.

For the same reason, I think you are wrong to make this about morality. Every system of thought that has ever made pleasure a moral issue has caused way more damage than good. You bring up religious fasting. Think of the harm that Christianity has caused by making sexual pleasure into a sin. You can't take away peoples' ability to feel pleasure without causing them harm. A life without pleasure is a life not worth living. Even a life in pain is better than a life without pleasure.

You say that overweight people eat more meat. I don't know how true this is but maybe you should try to find out?

You blame fat people and call them immoral because they eat too much, but I think that's not very different than saying that gay men are immoral because they have "too much" sex. I think it's also "blaming the victim". In my experience, overweight people are very different than what you say: they eat too much because they don't really enjoy food. This is because the food they have available is very low quality food that is not capable of nourishing them, or really sastisfying them. They are certainly addicted, like you say, to substances like sugar, fat and starch, and salt, that make them want more all the time, but they are addicted this way because they don't have access to good quality, nutritious food. And I bet that your experience comes from a place like the United States or western Europe, places that don't have what's known as a "food culture" and where quantity is much easier to find than quality.

I wonder also whether that's the reason you, yourself, say that you can't enjoy food in the same way that you see fat people enjoying it. Maybe it's because they're not really enjoying it, after all? Maybe you need to look for a way to eat well, and satisfy your appetite, rather than your morality?

Btw, it's not just fat people who are subject to all this. Thin people also eat in the same way. Thin people can also overeat. I don't know if you've ever watched adolescent boys eating? There's no way an adult, of either sex, could eat that much and not baloon up to morbid obesity. But young boys have a voracious metabolism that keeps them thin. Until they're middle aged, that is, when their eating habbits catch up with them and they start turning fat. Older people, men and women, also overeat, way, way too much. Everyone is constantly craving more sugar, more salt, more fat, more of everything. And they can never have enough because those things are not what they really want. What they really want is taste, flavour, nutriton, good food, but they don't get that, they get fast food, pizza, pasta, burgers and fries. And these are empty, pointless things that only fill the belly, but not the heart. So I think you're making a mistake also of making this about fat people vs. thin people, as you're making a mistake of making it about moral vs. immoral people.

The problem, for me, is the industrialisation of food production. I think you can probably agree that it's a problem, even if you don't agree that it is the problem. But for me, all the harm that comes from the way we produce food and eat it, comes from the simple fact that we have decentralised food production and preparation, that most people on the Earth today can't recognise good food if it bites them in the foot, and have no idea how to choose what they should eat over what they shouldn't eat. They've been made dependent to the food industry and everybody and everything suffers because of this dependence: people themselves, animals, the environment, everything and everybody.

But, you won't fix that by calling people immoral and saying they should do things to take even more pleasure away from their poor, unsatisfied lives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com