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Comment by manimino | Hacker News Reader

Who exactly is "they"? The... Big Bug industry?

Insects are being promoted as a way to hit UN’s sustainable development goals [1]

There’s also an industry emerging, with big pushes from organizations like WEF, to normalize eating bugs [2]. Investors are getting in on this trend too [3]

1. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4450/12/6/557

2. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...

3. https://fortune.com/2022/05/24/war-ukraine-big-ag-insect-fee...

in what world will people eat bugs instead of beef, do bugs taste anywhere as good as beef? all the push from the supply side doesn't fix the demand problem.

Honestly they are really delicious and satiate in a similar way to meat. Try some grasshoppers next chance you get.

ill try anything !

Is there actually anything wrong with normalizing eating bugs? Like, get meat if you want but don't be a baby about insects?

Yea insects typically have a high amount of allergens to humans. It's why bioreactors for things like insulin, igb, etc avoid insects cells if they can.

You want to go as low as possible for a medicine, but how common are allergies to the kind of breeds that make reasonable food?

For comparison, it would be silly to say we shouldn't normalize eating peanuts because of the allergy risk.

Are you kidding? Insect cells used in bioreactors would be an order of magnitude safer than possible insect food ( medical grade is much much higher standard than food grade), and people still avoid it as much as possible . That should tell you "food grade" insects have enormous risk associated with them.

Well if I look at peanuts again, an order of magnitude safer would still be something to avoid very strongly in bioreactors.

At this point I'll keep an eye out but insects are such a broad and mostly unexplored category that I'm not convinced there's an unavoidable and crippling allergen risk.

"Eat the Bugs" has become a far-right/anti-woke catchphrase. This video is typical:

https://youtu.be/8_8LTUmHWP0

Lol what did I just watch?

From a quick search it appears eating of bugs specifically refers to the WEF push:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/good-grub-why-we-migh...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...

don’t know about the catch phrase or how it’s “anti-woke” but interesting

"Eat the bugs", "Woke", "Socialist" can all be used in a positive way it's just that they are also often used by the US right wing in a negative way. You'll understand that when Alex Jones is calling a democrat "woke" he is using it in implying being woke is a bad thing. "Eat the bugs" is similar and is more common in the anti globalist conspiracist circles.

Lobbyists exist for everything.

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