Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
Have you considered using newlines or breaks?
You probably have amazing ideas and more people would read them if it was easier to read
(my 2c)
You will see a noticeable uptick in engagement with your comments on this website if you add newlines for emphasis, clarity, and readability. You don't necessarily need to put them between every sentence. There is a bit of finesse involved.
That being said, the comment is so excellent and information dense that it largely escapes this potential pitfall.
Though anyone reading using a wide browser window on a desktop will be facing long lines; don't blame the big paragraph for poor readability due to line length.
I think that's a poor example - Moby Dick isn't exactly praised for ease of casual reading (and internet comments should definitely fall in the category of casual reading. Relative ease is a choice, and the parent comment was just suggesting that the other comment would find wider reach if it were easier to parse)
> I'm with Antirez here: dumb Americans who can't read and all that
Oh
DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Being able to read large chunks of text with minimal or no formatting is useful, but so is knowing how to format the text you produce so it's easier for people to consume. We should all strive to be capable of both.
Do you write code this way?
Redis is an excellent codebase and an extremely useful piece of software. I am a very grateful user.
I'm just mystified by the idea that functions, modules, and paragraphs are not only useful, but expected, while newlines in HN comments are not.
The best answer I can come up with is that internet etiquette and formatting is constantly evolving. If that's the case, I don't see the issue with suggesting a formatting that might be more effective or accessible.
Neither do I, as I'm up-thread with the same point. I just thought it was sort of funny. :)
Gatekeeping perhaps? Surely that's not the argument that you're making.
Literacy needs to be handled in primary and secondary school.
That's a very strange argument - would you apply it to coding too? Perhaps remove comments so people are forced to interpret the code alone.
Also I'm not against proper formatting of posts. Just if it's not separated in paragraphs readers should so the small effort of doing it mentally, instead of complaining. Similarly I'm not against code comments (but strongly in favour).
Btw I replied for the sake of argumenting but the two things are not comparable. Just so this test: splitting text written by others in paragraphs is a very easy task you can do just reading the text one time. Commiting code you don't yet understand is impossible: many informations you should write are not implicitly in the code. It's the contrary actually: most good comments are about things that are not evident.
I still don't agree with your point fundamentally, but I appreciate your work immensely, and that is far more important.
Isn't it much easier to make an easy neutral change to your writing that will be positive for some readers than to assert their culture should learn to read better?
1) higher resolution (printed letters are better seen by the eye than the average letter on a screen)
2) narrower lines (easier to spot the next line)
3) at least a bit more spacing between lines
Finally, when the topic is not fiction, but stuff that requires a lot of attention to digest, perhaps paragraphs and newlines can improve the reading experience.
p.s. you probably meant offense with an "s" (I used to do the same typo, and we're both Italians)
Twice
Can you ELI5 what risk these pose to humans or species in close proximity to us?
Hmm. That would come with the more frightening risk of HN community scrutiny, a sort of indelible scabies of the retrospective consciousness. What the hell..
If you're 5, or any age with a palate for insects, especially centipedes [1], cook them first or consider sugar free gummy worms until mom can prepare them properly.
More seriously, it depends largely on behavior, ie personal hygiene, industrial standards, awareness, etc. Some factors are potentially impossible to control, such as invasive species or other environmental factors.
There are older reports similar to [1] where children initiated the infection (of lungworm and other deleterious parasites) by consuming insects, and in some cases spread them to adults. There are many cases of vegetables infecting people too, eg lungworm in Hawaii [2]. Also many other species in man..most other countries.
In one study I read, a large and eclectic sample of vegetables and fruits from scattered European countries showed a high prevalence of infectious parasites in a significant percentage of the batch. Similar studies showed similar and worse elsewhere. One particularly interesting study found a vegetable farm which was frequently down wind of a kennel housing a large number of x (I've forgotten the animal type). The crop was riddled with wind-disseminated infectious parasites -- I forget the type, but it was nasty and somewhat impervious to the elements.
Invasive species, interference with wildlife, development, animal agriculture proximal to veg ag, climate and much more is involved. For anyone who realizes it as a formidable danger, I think the risk is smaller. For most, it's probably not large, but growing and, I personally believe, an insidious factor behind some misdiagnosed conditions.
Parasites are everywhere, with most posing minimal risk. Pinworms, for example, infect a surprising portion of the mighty and developed US population, which is why you can find pinworm medicine on the shelves of any pharmacy. They often go unnoticed, but in some, cause severe itching and further complications if untreated over many years. Children are common carriers and the eggs can be spread on/via dust particles that enter the nose, and by the very fingers that scratch the itch. Thankfully, a single dose of parantel pamoate and a thorough housecleaning usually eradicates the problem.
If you do vist Florida, which has been ill-advised by my HN editor[3], watch what you eat raw. Raw panther would be a great way to get trichinosis, with +20% of them carrying it. Wild hogs too, which is often where the panthers get it. Whether in Florida or Florence, raw foods pose risk, which sucks because they can also be the healthiest.
Indoor/outdoor pets are a difficult situation too. There are more and less serious threats here. I remember finding my best friend with little grains of rice crawling all over his arse. They are a form of tapeworm where fleas are the vector. Oddly, I could have eaten one if I so chose and have remained unaffected. However, if I'd eaten an infected flea, I'd be infected. The progottids of that particular species generally need to be ingested while inside the flea for it to settle in a new host. Edit: If the cat had laid in or passed over infected raccoon droppings, things could be much worse (think baylisascaris p). The mentioned tapeworms were easily eradicated with a single dose. Nothing works well on the former.
Most American health professionals will dismiss the risk of parasites as trivial, if that is any consolation. But if you prefer to pursue your concern, there is much to read and learn, from entertaining videos of people examining live worms in their restaurant sushi or wriggling through the salmon at Costco, to hard scientific studies and case reports of human and animal infections of many varieties everywhere in the world.
If I've failed to ELI5 or convoluted the subject, it's because it's a huge subject and I'm a mnemonically challenged dilettante with one finger to communicate with today. My advice is to not panic, don't develop complexes, and instead, be aware and learn and apply what you learn practically. And to be extra safe, avoid Florida -- it's getting crowded anyway.
1. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/centipedes-can...
2. https://health.hawaii.gov/docd/disease_listing/rat-lungworm-...
3. Thanks to all for the feedback, attempted defense from it, and the editing. Sometimes I'm very fond of the folks on HN.
Two years ago I was bitten by many, many triatomines in a subtropical environment and have recently been seeing symptoms similar to chagas disease, but no doctor I've spoken to is interested in testing for it. I understand it's not an everyday concern, buy the resistance to even try surprises me.
Scopolamine and a cattle prod? Actually, if you travelled internationally, it shouldn't take more than a polite request.
I sincerely hope your fears are in vain. I know very little of chagas disease, but it seems early treatment is the most effective treatment. If you have it, you've wasted precious time.
Hindsight would have you plowing through such resistance and demanding the desired tests as you deserve. Perhaps you were too timid. This is slightly odd, with international travel being about the only thing that would have most American doctors considering parasites.
But it's two years after the fact. If I were in such a position, I would resolve to allay my fears and wrest a sure conclusion from the medical bureaucracy. I would take notes of all my symptoms, a chronology of progression, and also adequately inform and prepare myself to hold a compelling dialog with the doctor. Screw their interest. You are the patient and they have responsibilities beyond hurling pills at rote and familiar illnesses. If you test positive, then you may have lawsuit material. If you don't, it may be time to explore other causes or solutions to what ails you, and crucially, you'll have peace of mind about that specific fear. So if you are truly concerned, go demand a test.
There's definitely ample credible evidence that the risk is significant and your concerns valid.
I thank you for reminding me of this insect and the protozoa it carries. Credible sources claim it too will be posing problems, increasingly. Current policy, unfortunately, isn't considering it yet. The rising presence of the problem coupled with the tendency for initially asymptomatic infections but often inevitable demise of the host should be taken seriously.
The importance of this subject is underestimated and applies as well quite independently of whether humans eat the insects directly or not.
Consider the cuban tree frog for example, which has long since initiated its campaign in Florida to host and spread throughout the food chain the rat lungworm nematode. Rat lungworm (angiostrongylus) holds its own in the burgeoning presence of hideous and hostile parasites. It is highly infectious to many species and no picky eater, as it favors the entire body of the host, the brain and all.
Burmese pythons are another up and coming host in Florida, and while they might prefer a provincial life in the everglades, many other species will meander north and onward.
There are other nasties from nematodes to cestodes and more, gaining new ground. Baylisascaris procyonis is another terrible nematode found almost anywhere in the US, mostly in racoons, but in other species (humans included) with more varying and less frequency and it's often incurable.
A study showed that, if I remember correctly, 40 out of 250 wildlife rehabilitation personnel had been exposed, but symptoms varied by exposure load. Both rat lungworm and baylis ascaris are resistant to environmental elements that normally break things down, with baylis even surviving UV light, formaldehyde and extreme cold. Rat lungworm can be deposited on surfaces (eg vegetables), and snails are common vectors.
Lungworm is very difficult to remove by washing while baylis is so adhesive that wildlife control authorities advise disposing of rather than washing shovels or tools exposed to racoon latrines. The list goes merrily along with other nasties, but it would require time to refresh my memory and accurately describe more.
... the conclusion I got: don't move to Florida.
I've never encountered any references to rednecks and baylis, but I've met some that, in hindsight, might clarify and reinforce your note.
Insects are so small that it's practically impossible to inspect each individual organism. You can do sampling of the batch, but the odds of missing bad ones are still high.
Same with the fruits and vegetables, some are easy to inspect, others are almost impossible, or impossible to clean. There are kosher (insect-free) versions of lettuce and some berries which are much more expensive than non-kosher ones.
Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system. Religious dietary laws and cultural taboos are probably partly developed from disgust, and partly from trial-and-error.
And we're talking about sheep here, which is similar in size to pig. There are might be a confounding variables here though, i.e. some communities are mostly urban, others are more rural ones. Or maybe sheep meat is less popular among less infected. Or maybe the animals were smuggled from the "West Bank" which is endemic, and veterinary control services are not strict there if existing at all.
--
[1] they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone.
Eh? Given the location, I'd assume Jewish (Orthodox), Muslim, Jewish (Non-Orthodox), Christian, in descending order of dietary rule strictness. Not sure how that would offend anyone; the applicable dietary rules are hardly a secret.
So keep in mind the world eats basically European cuisine. It is for this reason that in Paris yes food is great but nothing is exotic because eg Duck á la Orange is known everywhere (and it was particularly exported in the 20th century, and particularly with the Green Revolution). And it's made to suit Europeans, so it seems like the restrictions are lax but actually European Christian diets are baked into the sanitary codes. So like shellfish. Wilbur Wright died of shellfish, and many others, he was the son of a bishop. The thing is Christianity and especially European Christians dominate the culture around food in the West, have tons of cultural export. So they're the default, so it looks like they don't care. But oh man do they care. When they travel they get special bottled water, say.
And it's the most typical thing to have dietary restrictions, for a long time I avoided fish for mercury while eating crazy doses of fish oil, a brain damage recovery diet, Christians accommodated that. It just never came up as a religious doctrine, it's fine. The Christian usually has idk type 1 diabetes, that's restrictions, or is an athlete, that's restrictions, or is a woman seeking to lose weight that's like 80% of women right there, that's restrictions. Bodybuilders are much more restrictive than Orthodox Jews.
Orthodox Jews seem very restrictive, and yes they totally are, but while it is partly because they make basically no concessions, and are part of a powerful ethnic group in America, meaning they have power everywhere, like newspaper editors, practically if not literally all producers, a good share of politicians, bankers, what else...well they also have been a fractionally small highly persecuted (on-and-off) minority for thousands of years.
In agreement, let me cite the exception that proves the rule: Charterhouse monks. Eat no meat absolutely ever. I think do eat fish, so fish on Fridays is a Christian thing.
And no problem with that, I am unique in my ability to prove my pro-Semitism. I like Orthodox intolerance of, essentially, being poisoned. They take the heat for a lot of society's pure food and drugs.
Also commonly accused of mental illness, you gotta look at both sides of the story.
I guess the reason people are like "no no no no!" is first, truth, second, not being afraid of being accused of bigotry--don't want to be bigoted, but also not willing to err on the side of not being accusable. Just being straight. Then, further you have the act of going through mental illness and coming out of it with a clean bill of health--unheard of. Afterward, hamming it up. I could if desired be totally neurotypical, without medication (I did hear one case of this), n I identified everything that was hosing me. F atoms especially.
But I love my poor beleaguered soul, it's been through so much, why change it?
For instance Spaniards (ethnic Visigoths) have near-total immunity to bad pork, whereas Jews (Jewish Diaspora, ethnic Jews) are very vulnerable.
Think of it this way: if there was a public service announcement by the early Jews, where would they write it down?
But like a Spaniard eating nearly raw pork doesn't die. Extrapolate for bad pork, he'll spit it out if it's bad.
.
And since when does your one-cent Google search trump my traveling to Spain in person?
In America it's irrelevant, the bacon is pre-cooked to high standards and comes from good sources. Partly because secular Jews eat that pork having no cultural norms around it, just driven by it being forbidden. They're vulnerable.
It's genetic, just like a certain tribe of Pacific Islander developed a partial immunity to prions, because they sometimes ate human central nervous system. It's genetic.
Survival of the fittest.
Visigoths probably drunk much more alcohol than Jews, which is a good disinfectant. In the old times it was even part of the soldier rations in some armies.
Some Visigoths converted to Islam and migrated to Morocco, but even after their conversion they still had a reputation of heavy drinkers.
For 10 years I was a pescetarian, until one time I tasted a beef carpaccio, and it was both edible and tasty (before that I wasn't even thinking about meat as a food). So I started eating raw meat dishes like steak tartar, but I always drunk a shot of something strong for safety, until one day I understood that it's unnecessary.
I'm afraid I don't see the connection between innate immunity and service anouncements or writing things down, but its probably me being thick even though I'd like to understand.
Perhaps the proteins in bugs don’t line up with humans though.
Grass plants bind, retain, uptake and transport infectious prions
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4449294/
"Prions bind to plants and bound-PrPSc efficiently sustain prion replication
Roots and leaves were washed thoroughly and analyzed for the presence of PrPSc by serial PMCA (Morales et al., 2012). The results show that even highly diluted PrPSc can bind to roots and leaves and sustain PrPC conversion (Fig. 1A). [...] However, both roots and leaves capture PrPSc efficiently, even at very small concentrations, equivalent to those present in biological fluids, such as blood and urine (Chen et al., 2010).
Animals can be infected by oral ingestion of prion-contaminated plants
After exposure, plants were extensively washed 5 times with water and animals fed with dried material orally. [...] All animals that ingested prion contaminated leaves and roots developed typical prion disease. Although the incubation times were significantly longer in animals ingesting prions attached to leaves and roots as compared with those fed directly with the brain material, the differences were not as high as one could have expected (Fig. 2A)."
---
Something developed sporadic prion disease (in humans its called "Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease": https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29887134/ ), died from it, plants grew on the fertilized land and were eaten by deer, the cycle repeats.
CWD-infected deer shred prions in urine, feces, probably saliva too (the aforementioned paper mentions that this is enough for plant-mediated infection), a trait shared with scrapie-infected sheep, hamsters and, i assume, BSE-infected cows.
Transmission and Detection of Prions in Feces
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2803675/
"Oral exposure to prion-tainted blood, urine, saliva and feces have been suggested as modes of transmission for CWD and scrapie among herbivores susceptible to these diseases. Both CWD and scrapie infection is thought likely to enter the body through gut-associated lymphoid tissues, in Peyer's patches in the alimentary tract. Moreover, the presence of the infectious isoform of the prion protein, designated PrPSc, in Peyer's patches suggests alimentary shedding of CWD and scrapie prions into feces. [...]
When noninfected Syrian hamsters were cohabitated with Syrian hamsters orally infected with Sc237 prions, we observed 80–100% infection rates within 14 days after oral challenge."
Also, birds can spread prions in their litter:
Crows don't digest prions, may transport them to other locations
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017181250.h...
"Crows fed on prion-infected brains from mice can transmit these infectious agents in their feces and may play a role in the geographic spread of diseases caused by prions, such as chronic wasting disease or scrapie."
Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...
There is possibility that ostriches can have some form spongiform encephalopathy:
Spongiform encephalopathy in a red-necked ostrich (Struthio camelus) (1991)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1887441/
Luckily, even most mammalian prions have some troubles jumping between mammal species.
For example, sheep scrapie can be transmitted to primates in laboratory, but to date considered non-transmissible to humans in nature (fortunately, as it is insidious and regulations on sheep and goats slaughter are laxer than on bovine):
Transmission of scrapie prions to primate after an extended silent incubation period
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4485159/
"However, one cynomolgus macaque exhibited obvious neurological signs more than 9 years (110 months) after intracerebral exposure to a high dose of a sheep classical scrapie isolate (25 mg of brain)."
BSE prions are much more infectious, not only for humans and ruminants, but for other species too, for example, cats and hamsters.
---
Personally, I don't expect fish or insects to be sources of infection, only potential (if relatively unlikely) transmitters.
That said, apparently nearly everything can be transmitter for prions:
* Fish have prion proteins too (currently, no fish prion diseases are known):
Fish models in prion biology: underwater issues
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20933080/
"To date, the occurrence of TSEs in lower vertebrates like fish and birds has received only limited attention, despite the fact that these animals possess bona fide PrPs."
---
* Birds can transmit prions in their poop, spreading them at great distances (keep it in mind when clearing bird feces):
Crows don't digest prions, may transport them to other locations
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017181250.h...
"Crows fed on prion-infected brains from mice can transmit these infectious agents in their feces and may play a role in the geographic spread of diseases caused by prions, such as chronic wasting disease or scrapie."
---
* Insects and parasites can be prion infection vectors:
Could ectoparasites act as vectors for prion diseases?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12786866/
"Fly larvae and mites were exposed to brain-infected material and were readily able to transmit scrapie to hamsters. New lines of evidence have confirmed that adult flies are also able to express prion proteins."
---
* Plants are acting as prion vectors:
Grass plants bind, retain, uptake and transport infectious prions
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4449294/
"Prions bind to plants and bound-PrPSc efficiently sustain prion replication [...] These results indicate that leaves and roots can efficiently bind PrPSc, which remains able to catalyze PrPC to PrPSc conversion, leading to prion replication. [...] After exposure, plants were extensively washed 5 times with water and animals fed with dried material orally. [...] All animals that ingested prion contaminated leaves and roots developed typical prion disease. Although the incubation times were significantly longer in animals ingesting prions attached to leaves and roots as compared with those fed directly with the brain material, the differences were not as high as one could have expected (Fig. 2A)."
---
* Excrements can transmit prions, thus coprophagous animals, insects included, can too:
Transmission and Detection of Prions in Feces
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2803675/
"Oral exposure to prion-tainted blood, urine, saliva and feces have been suggested as modes of transmission for CWD and scrapie among herbivores susceptible to these diseases. Both CWD and scrapie infection is thought likely to enter the body through gut-associated lymphoid tissues, in Peyer's patches in the alimentary tract. Moreover, the presence of the infectious isoform of the prion protein, designated PrPSc, in Peyer's patches suggests alimentary shedding of CWD and scrapie prions into feces. [...]
When noninfected Syrian hamsters were cohabitated with Syrian hamsters orally infected with Sc237 prions, we observed 80–100% infection rates within 14 days after oral challenge."
---
* Even dust can transmit prions:
Circulation of prions within dust on a scrapie affected farm
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25889731/
"Using protein misfolding cyclic amplification we demonstrate that scrapie PrP(Sc) can be detected within circulating dusts that are present on a farm that is naturally contaminated with sheep scrapie."
---
* Even ashes from not sufficiently hot cremation can transmit prions:
Infectivity studies of both ash and air emissions from simulated incineration of scrapie-contaminated tissues
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15575075/
"We investigated the effectiveness of 15 min exposures to 600 and 1000 degrees C in continuous flow normal and starved-air incineration-like conditions to inactivate samples [...] yielded a total of two transmissions among 21 inoculated animals from the ash of a single specimen burned in normal air at 600 degrees C."
I wonder, how bad is prion contamination of the Ganges river in India?
But then we ferment and rot lots of things intentionally and the products related to that are loved in some parts of the world and found disgusting in other parts of the world because they trigger the same reflexes as food that has gone off. E.g. a lot of Chinese people might not enjoy french cheeses and likewise the french might not appreciate some the fermented soybeans and eggs that are popular in China. And they eat snails, which with a lot of garlic and butter are actually not horrible but also not something everyone enjoys.
Anyway, if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that. Cleaning that is a percentage game. Likewise with organic produce you buy at the market. Small mites, spiders, etc. The occasional bigger bugs you might wash away. But a lot of smaller ones end up in your food. It's fine. We've evolved to be omnivores. Most of that meats with the acid in your stomach and gets broken down. Some of the parasites are a bit more nasty and actually can become an issue. Guess how those end up in your stomach. You eat/drink them.
Probably intensive farming of fish, ducks, chickens, or bugs does not result in the healthiest animals. Unhealthy animals get sick. Eating sick animals is risky. There are some signs that covid happened like that and there have been other examples of diseases spreading from animals to people via farmed animals traded in poultry markets or wherever.
One important difference: salt-water animals (including crustaceans) harbor parasites which are less compatible with humans, for them humans are dead-end, they can't close the complex reproduction cycle. Land insects and fresh-water crustaceans (e.g. crayfish) are much more dangerous for humans. Lobster sashimi is much safer than eating a raw crayfish from a river or lake. The latter can cause a serious lungs disease.
> if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that.
I once found a caterpillar inside an eggplant ;)
Nice point. The flip side is that with land based insects the parasites can close the cycle with humans/mammals and hence insect consumption can be more risky.
(Parent comment) > if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that.
Eating food with the occasional insect that has gotten through (e.g in a vegetable or salad) will not be as risky as eating large amounts of insect mass. The probability of then getting a parasite or disease then will be much higher. Its just mathematics.
Why increase your risk probability?
this will always be the case. we can "survive" on a very safe diet
--
Other freshwater fish like sturgeon are also served as sushi.
This is the most important bit.
Too many "rationalists" who otherwise preach evolution all the time forget to notice that our sense of disgust is also evolved just like everything about us for the purpose of survival and reproduction and is not just some annoying irrational quirk that gets in the way of doing the right thing.
> The disgust system is a psychological mechanism for producing pathogen avoidant behaviour [10–12]. In previous work, we have stressed the universality of disgust, showing that there is much that is similar about disgust responses between animals and humans, between humans and over historical time [11,13]. However, there is also much that differs between individuals and between social groups. In this paper, we look at disgust and disease avoidance behaviour in human individuals and in human social groups as an adaptive system. Natural selection has produced a solution to the problem of hard-to-detect parasites by designing a system that is sensitive to local information about infection risk. This system responds to parasite pressure not just over evolutionary time, but over lifetimes, using what cues it can. This may be information about an individual's current state, its history of sickness and exposure to disgusting experiences, or what it has learnt from the local culture and from the hygiene practices of others.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3013466/
I know a bunch of people who have gone off specific foods after being coincidentally sick and associating the two things.
The people who are using their brain to override their disgust system are probably doing something that's extremely maladaptive.
Now if you think you're a smart ass and decide to "override" the cultural "indoctrination" that makes you find insects disgusting, what do you think is the likelihood that you are the one who is right?
In all likelihood you will find out after some time that you made a huge irreversible mistake.
In the past, people in the west found yogurt, sushi, and lobsters absolutely disgusting. Now many will happily eat those foods, and even consider them delicacies.
Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.
The study above indicates that this is not just a correlation.
Curious if you've got a source for that, because I've lived with 3 infants and every one of them was delighted by the squishiness of poop and needed to be taught that disgust response.
Others are learned by experience. I used to like peppermint a lot, until one day in uni I poisoned myself by drinking half a bottle of peppermint schnapps. Ever since then, for many years, the smell of peppermint makes me dry heave and physically gag uncontrollably. I cannot tolerate peppermint at all, something in my brain 'learned' that peppermint is a poison and won't tolerate it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy_in_humans#Rejectio...
Lately I heard another explanation by Prof. Yigal Bin-Nun[1], that when so called "Judaism" became an organized religion it simply assimilated the previously existing dietary norms and taboos. And the pork wasn't eaten in the entire area even before the first mention of the Israelites. The exception being the Philistines who brought a European pig and wild boar to Canaan. Recently there was a DNA research paper which confirmed that the wild boars in Israel are of European origins, not local ones.
So according to this theory it might be that locusts "whitelisted" by "Judaism" when the Himyarite kingdom was converted, probably because locusts were already consumed before the conversion. Of course it's only my speculation.
The more traditional theory on Kashrut origins:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493194
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493915
EDIT: yet another theory is that pork was prohibited b/c swine shares some similarity with human anatomy and thus both species can share common diseases. So it was prohibited to eat in order to prevent epidemics/pandemics. There is some mentions of this in Jewish sources, but it mostly sounds like an afterthought.
--
[1] https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%99%D7%92%D7%90%D7%9C_%D7%9...
Never heard that argument, but it seems like a misunderstanding. Peter Singer made the point that oysters have no nervous system and are therefore as plant-like as animals can come and probably non-sentient. The fact that oysters clean the oceans would also be a pretty strange argument. That's why there are so chock full of contaminants and pathogens in most places and many countries have special allowances to make them street legal when virtually any other food with the same toxin contents would be banned.
So beef carpaccio, or steak tartar are perfectly Kosher. Exception are Ethiopian Jews who traditionally don't eat popular Ethiopian raw meat dishes.
IMO if something can't be eaten raw - it's best to be avoided in any form.
Some foods are changed by cooking. For example, kidney beans must never be eaten raw, but are tasy and nutritious cooked.
The only exceptions are: coffee beans for espresso and cocoa beans for dark chocolate ;)
When my Jewish grandparents came from Ukraine to the US in the 1930s they'd never even considered or been presented with the possibility of eating pork... so famously, my grandma who didn't speak English went into a butcher shop in Baltimore bought a bunch of bacon without understanding it was pig, and fed a piece of it raw to my father, who was a baby... and the butcher apparently shouted at her not to feed that raw to a kid. Which baffled her.
Equally baffling to me, I had a beer at the Munich Hofbrauhaus and watched a kid eat a pile of pork tartare.. which looked delicious.. but when I asked, he seemed shocked. He told me there's no trichinae in Europe now, and it's normal to eat raw pork in Germany..
The world comes at you fast, lol.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507527
Similarly like only after living 7 years in Israel I discovered that "white meat" is an euphemism for pork.
Also the reality is much more complex. We tend to project our current understanding into the past. The reality of keeping Kashrut back then wasn't as we understand it today.
--
The lifestyle of Eastern European Jews from the beginning of the 20th century until World War II - between keeping the mitzvot and secularization [Hebrew]
I don’t understand how that could occur, since a great deal of pork is produced in Ukraine, both now and historically.
how is that harmful in food?
the lifetime of a positron wouldn't be very long, or is the concern free radicals?
the tolerable limits in particle energies and doses are very high for truly tiny increases in induced radioactivity. its really marginal as long as the very conservative limits are respected.
see for example:
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1287_prn.p...
I wouldn’t have taken a chance based on that assumption, and cooking bugs seems like it would eliminate most of these pathogens, but still. I figured it would be safer.
I’d need to read a lot more to draw some kind of comparison between insects and animal agriculture (both seem to carry plenty of baggage), but it’s great to see research like this so it’s possible to begin doing so.
Salads can literally kill you via the listeria they bring.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/attribution-image.html#f...
Without manure being used the risk is diminished by orders of magnitude.
It doesn't seem to rank the causes it lists, but googling it suggests widespread contamination caused by fecal matter runoff from animal ag finding its way into irrigation water.
I suspect we rarely grow greens immediately after applications, but to say only backyard operations use animal manure isn't true.
Evidently this is a common and well-researched practice in the USA as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286297896_Animal_Ma...
The data is also from 2008. Things have likely changed since US households and food prep has been heavily focused on cleanliness around animal products but nowhere near as much focus is on produce. The 'pre-washed' pre-packaged produce is especially risky.
Above all I’d love to see better technology and attention for food safety, though. It’s stunning to see how many people suffer from food born illness today — something I’d thought was far more under control up until my mid 30s. It’s better under many circumstances and I’m not going to pretend it’s anything like it has been in the past. However, we could do much, much better than we do now and it would literally save lives.
It's better, but it's still not good. I don't drink organic alcohol, either; it's harmful to your health no matter how you slice it.
In terms of food safety and risk of pathogens, salad is far, far more dangerous than steak.
please stop with the weasel scare words.
We are exposing ourselves to dangerous substances every day due to bioaccumulation in animal foods.
If I remember correctly it was far better to eat organic vegetables/fruit and “normal” meat, than the other way around, and only marginally worse than all organic. The explanation being mammals have kidneys and a liver that we no longer eat (most of us at least).
From this one could guess insects could be worse than steak.
Sorry I don’t have a reference right now, or know if this research was heavily skewed somehow by the meat industry. I would be happy to hear more from someone knowledgeable on the subject.
Animals also accumulate things like heavy metals and the drugs they are given.
Plants can be washed of pesticides fairly well and they accumulate these chemicals at much lower rates, but meat can’t be washed of what has accumulated in it.
Overall the health outcomes of consuming plants appear to be better than those of consuming meat.
The primary contaminant in steak is E. coli. You are more likely to consume E. coli from a salad than from a steak.
A quick google search yields a few results, each pointing to the same conclusion:
https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/attribution/attribution-...
> Meat and poultry, a combination of four animal food categories, Beef, Game, Pork, and Poultry, accounted for fewer illnesses, but for 29% of deaths.
Poultry accounted for the most deaths (19%); many of those were caused by Listeria and Salmonella infections. This rate is partly due to three large Listeria outbreaks linked to sliced processed deli turkey meat; the last such large outbreak occurred in 2002.
Produce, on the other hand, accounted for 27% of deaths. However, it's important to distinguish here that produce accounts for 27% of all deaths, but animal products accounts for all of the rest. That's 73% of all food borne illness coming from animal products.
You are far more likely to die from food borne illness caused by animal products; especially agricultural animals.
Steak is significantly safer than other types of meat, and steak in particular is significantly safer than salad.
As your link notes, chicken is one of the worst offenders
Your data supports my point, not yours.
Cooking has been our food safety technology for millennia.
Even for milk, pasteurization is a way of cooking it.
If you as a human have been exposed to an extremely "clean" environment, your immune system will not have had the opportunity to get trained and strong. So you might get a severe infection at the first opportunity.
However, the other extreme can be very bad. I wouldn't recommend living in a lush tropical forest without any protection from novel viruses and bacteria spread from all kinds of insects and other vectors. Your body may not be able to take that kind of bio-warfare against it.
So, the million dollar question is: How much should we train our immune system by exposing ourselves to the natural environment and how much should we protect it?
Different people will put themselves on different sides of this spectrum.
The "middle" ground is of of course the best, some self-exposure to natural environment and some self-protection. But it is difficult to quantify this "middle" ground and that is why we have many of these arguments.
The way I see people handle food, I'm not surprised at all. People leave lunch meat out of the fridge for sometimes hours, cut the fungus off things and eat the rest (which is ok sometimes, but often isn't), rinse chicken breast in the sink, use the same tools and cutting boards to handle uncooked and cooked food... And I can keep going.
So many people have no clue how food should be handled, or willfully ignore what they do know.
I think a lot of the time when people say they have "food poisoning" what they really have is digestive distress from eating poorly handled food. There's an incredible lack of awareness around safe food handling (which is really very simple) and most of it stems from laziness or inattention. Even if you only have one cutting board, cut the chicken last, and clean the cutting board correctly, etc. Don't leave a knife on the counter and use it over and over. Wash it with the rest of the dishes. If it was used to cut meat, don't use it again until it is properly sanitized. Don't leave leftovers sitting on the stove or counter for hours, esp. things prone to going off. And so on.
Weird, my intuition was the exact opposite. The thought of eating bugs triggers a disgust reaction, similar to the thought of eating crap. Humans developed those reactions over hundreds of generations for a reason.
But look across the globe: I would posit that a large percentage of humans have a taboo against insect consumption.
If there are any counter examples that you can state from the world one must analyze how numerically large that community is within that country and the world.
In other words, don't count the number of cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption, count the population of the cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption.
I'm reasonably certain the idea of certain food being taboo is almost completely due to cultural norms.
So just because there is a taboo against a food group does not mean that it will definitely be bad for you. There is just a positive probability that it could be.
Taboos can also arise out of fashion and economics, irrational beliefs and moral considerations of a particular culture.
So when we see a Taboo, it is often good to analyze: could this taboo have arisen due to health issues (here pork is a good example because of the danger of tapeworm infection) ? Or could the Taboo have arisen out of cultural reasons e.g dogs/horses are beloved in many cultures so a taboo may have evolved that we shouldn't kill them.
> I'm reasonably certain the idea of certain food being taboo is almost completely due to cultural norms.
TL;DR: Sometimes it due to cultural norms and sometimes its due to negative health outcomes that get noticed due to trial and error over generations.
That doesn't mean this feeling is some kind of natural primal intuition, it just means I didn't grow up eating it.
Nowadays, we learned enough to overcome the dangers of pork but that's a result of modern society.
We don't know why religions banned certain meat. Anthropologists etc give us post facto rationalisations, and, to my mind, even the holy books might be retrospective excuses.
- to encode social and higienic rules as understood at the time
- to signal heressy, prohibiting a common practice carried out by heretics (double points if it is a practice central to those heretical beliefs).
For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled.
Is pork any more prone to spoilage, or spoilage-related health risks, than other meats?
My understanding is that the health risks from pork relate mainly to the transmission of disease and parasites in undercooked pork, not spoilage.
But the kosher prohibition isn't "don't eat meat slaughtered a week ago", which would be easy, it's about cloven hooves.
The other hypothesis I've seen put out there is that viruses tend to have an easy time jumping from (living) pigs to humans. We think of the flu as relatively minor now but without clean water it would be a big deal.
I am not going to get involved in a religious argument, but I didn't mention it was the only reason, I said it was one of the reasons.
If we compare contaminated meat, okay, maybe pork is more dangerous. If we compare what people actually encounter, pork appears much less dangerous.
The parasites from undercooked pork can be very dangerous.
Are you talking about trichinosis? I can see that being more problematic than salmonella in historical contexts, but again, it’s highly treatable today and rarely fatal if it isn’t treated.
Am I missing some other kind of infection?
Edit: Now I see it, you were referring to the past in the parent comment. I’ve confused this thread for another - sorry about that!
I know a lot of people have an aversion to mutton as it can have a very gamey aroma to it, but I wasn't aware people perceive pork as similarly intense.
I think turkey, duck, and chicken are distinct while cooking as well. I’d have a hard time distinguishing gamey meats, though. I couldn’t tell you if it’s venison or moose, for example.
I can also recognise cooked poultry vs beef by smell (more so when raw, but when cooked I'm sure I can figure it out as well).
I thought most people could.
I think a lot of the reactions we built over hundreds of generations need to be revised in the world we are in today, and in light of what we know now. One of the interesting one is our reaction to body sizes, and how we still have an instinctive reaction to tall people, when it makes no sense in most of the societies we live in.
Thankfully BSE (Mad Cow Disease) was not as transmissible as feared.
I prefer everything I eat to be properly cooked. I even usually avoid raw vegetables. I can't imagine eating a raw bug on purpose unless it was for a lot of money and I could chase it with a shot of hard liquor afterward.
They've been around forever, but somehow we share a mostly common disgust for eating bugs. Is it farfetched to assume that perhaps that disgust allowed us to survive.
99+% of humans incidentally consume terrestrial insects. Food processing is imperfect and insect contaminants are common.
"But the FDA allows up to 225 insect fragments per 225 grams of macaroni (yes, that's one piece of bug per gram) and 4.5 rodent hairs per 225 grams. Per 100 grams, the FDA allows either 10 fly eggs, five fly eggs and one maggot, or two maggots in most tomato products."
https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/fda-data-food-contam...
We are experimenting With various forms of maggot farms and meal worm farms which are then fed to our flock of chickens, which turn those food and energy inputs into eggs.
Disgust is largely a learned response, i.e. cultural. Many people find crutaceans disgusting to look at. Rodents are also extremely polarizing. Personally I find dogs mildly disgusting because they often drool, roll in dirt and residue of urine and fecal matter can cling to their coat since they don't clean themselves like cats do. On the other hand some people find cats disgusting exactly because they clean their butts with the same tongues they use to clean their coat and maybe you.
The reason most people find insects digusting isn't the insects themselves but that insects are a signal of decay. Spoiled and rotting food attracts flies and other insects, so food with insects on it is unappealing. Countries that don't have a tradition of dairy consumption often find cheese disgusting because it is practically rotten milk.
However they look to their parents when doing it, or about to do it and are generally quite good at picking up on even subtle facial clues. Since kids can easily be 1 or 2-shot learners about stuff like this it's very difficult to separate innate from learned.
Cook meat, make sure fruits and vegetables are not blighted, ferment dairy, various preservation methods from pickling to canning to smoking.
The list of methods is enormous.
We haven't been eating insects except in times of famine. We have not yet developed methods of dealing with it.
The ants and the scorpio are quite tasty IMO.
On the other hand, I know of places where their casual vegetables are dangerous because their hold traces of animals feces with pathogens but you couldn't tell when buying them.
And finally, I remember eating the best eggs ever from my mother old neighbourg for years. One day friends from the city come, and eating them, get sick. So there is a strong habit component.
The study on insects is interesting but more informations is needed to draw conclusions.
The startup Ynsect at the moment is targeting Fish Farming not human.
What would be the impact over many generations of that type of food ?
I’m scared of the “SuperBug” type of disease that would be resistant to antibiotics because it’s been dormant in us for too long...
If we want to know if insect consumption can be adopted, just looking at industrialized insect farms production given to city folks is going to give us a partial understanding of what's possible.
We need to know things like:
- are those parasites massively more presents in farms than in nature (it's the case for fishes) ?
- what's the probability of the parasites to infects the average consummer ? (We eat parasites all the time)
- if this probaility is high, can a population adapt over time so that this probability goes down ?
Etc
I'm in South Africa. I've never heard of the ants thing, but it is most definitely NOT NORMAL over here to eat those things; rich people may do it as a delicacy, like they would eat caviar, but it never was normal to eat insects over here.
"Indigenous Knowledge about Consumption of Edible Insects in South Africa"
>Edible insects are a nutritious diet and play an important role in people's livelihoods in rural areas.
Just how many rich people are out there in SA's rural areas?
> This might be the main reason why the consumption of insects is largely practiced in rural areas where high levels of unemployment and people with no formal education are found. In addition, people who are unemployed consume edible insects more because they have to do so to meet nutritional requirement needs.
Well, that actually explains why I have not seen or even heard of people eating insects in the 40-odd years that I've lived here: I'm not usually talking to unemployed people in rural areas who face famine without insects.
Unemployed rural people are still in the minority, and that still makes it 'not-normal'. The poor people and unemployed people I see in non-rural South Africa still don't eat insects.
Google for 'Hormigas culonas'.
The only reason it's not more common, is the price, they are quite expensive.
I lived and worked in Zambia for a while, and there — and possibly in many other countries in Africa — it was common to eat ants, grasshoppers, and caterpillars when they were in season. I never had the chance to taste the caterpillars — and it would probably have been a challenge for me — but the fried grasshoppers and ants were delicious.
The article at https://askentomologists.com/2015/02/09/why-dont-we-eat-bugs... suggests that eating insects is a “tropical” thing.
In my country for instance, people eat termites, crickets, caterpillars/larvae of rynchophorus, Augosoma centurus among others.
They are a considerable source of nutriments such as proteins and lipids.
It's not out of constrain that people have them in their diet, but it's part of their culinary culture.
Of course, as people get wealthier, new habits form, they are able to afford previously unattainable food, and surely they're will a shift in the diet, but eating insects will not be eliminated.
Literally a "What do you mean 'we' Tonto?" statement.
Here in one of the oldest continuously settled by the original arrivals outside of Africa parts of the world (Australia), foods such as the Witchetty grub and the Honey ant are nutrituous high food value, much sought after delicacies and not some kind of "only in a famine" fallback.
What does that even mean? Do you want to say that the probability is high?
Should we not believe the research above to contain 1/3 insects tested carried pathogenic parasites? Does this not strike you as extreme. Potentially an order or orders of magnitude more dangerous?
If more people are eating insects than before that might increase risks.
I don't really have any opinion on this, nor any horse in the race.
But, what does any of this have to do with exponentials?
> [...] the probability of catastrophic outcomes is exponential [...]
Exponential in what input variable?
``` probability(catastrophic outcomes) == e ```
/s
The lethality of of that type of outbreak become stronger the longer the we ignore that threat.
It’s just pure Maths to be honest.
Could you explain to me what is exponential about this process?
'Shaburn' made some claims that sounded like they want to be math, but didn't make any sense as math. Hence my confusion.
I recognise that people use terms colloquially, like 'exponential', but given all the (pseudo?) sophisticated, math-y language in the comment
> Given the rate of mutation and transmission in bugs with natural gestation and migration, the probability of catastrophic outcomes is exponential without a similar dataset in other human food sources.
I had hoped that Shaburn actually had a more concrete model in mind that they could explain.
Average lifespan of... A. Bacteria: 12 hours B. Insect: 12 months C. Mammal: 12 years (shortest being the primary disease harbinger, the rat).
I could find this study from 2015 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4552653/ which says:
> At least 2 billion people globally eat insects in over 113 entomophageous countries though this habit is regarded negatively or as revolting by others [4–6]. More than 1900 species are consumed by local populations globally but insect consumption (entomophagy) shows an unequal distribution.
There's roughly 8 billion people on the globe. Between 2 billion to 8 billion, there's not much room left for exponential growth.
It’s similar to how unconscious is now commonly used to mean subconscious (i.e. not unconscious) and literally is commonly used to mean not literally.
It troubles me that our specific words are getting watered down by pop usage, like sharp tools being blunted. This is different than my usual prescriptivist screeching.
> Given the rate of mutation and transmission in bugs with natural gestation and migration, the probability of catastrophic outcomes is exponential without a similar dataset in other human food sources.
This is not a new phenomenon; I think we've been able to cope in the past by either clarifying precision by context or adopting new words with the precision we need until they get watered down as well.
> literally is commonly used to mean not literally
I realize at least one dictionary disagrees with me, but I think that's a mistaken analysis of the phenomena. Literally is quite frequently used as an intensifier even when the utterance is meant figuratively, but if it were left out the utterance would not be intended or interpreted as more literal.
I think what is happening is that "literally" is being used as hyperbole, much like any other bit of English can be. It doesn't mean "not literally" in the same way that when someone says "you left me waiting for days" we don't say "days sometimes means minutes" and fret about how anyone will ever measure time again; we rather say that people sometimes exaggerate. None of this, of course, should prevent you from objecting to this use of "literally" on stylistic grounds, or from objecting to individual confusing utterances of any sort.
Freud and Jung used the term unconscious (das Unbewusste) - it is probably not a recent trend.
Basically, just because the words are constructed the same, doesn't mean you can translate one direct part-by-part into the other.
For a similar example of the principle that logical structure doesn't translate naively one-for-one:
"Du darfst schlafen." <-> "You may sleep."
"Du musst schlafen." <-> "You must sleep."
"Du darfst nicht schlafen." <-> "You must not sleep."
"Du musst nicht schlafen." <-> "You may not sleep." [Though this last one is ambiguous in English.]
At 1 we are all dead as well right?
In practice: in order for exponential growth (or any growth) to happen, things must have been smaller in the past.
Do you want to argue that the risks were so much in the past?
Eating insects is probably about as dangerous as it was ten years ago or twenty years ago. Not all that much has changed, or has it?
If more people are eating insects than before that might increase risks. Are you suggesting that the growth in number of people who are eating insects has been or will be exponential?
Or are you suggesting that risks are growing (exponentially!) from other factors?
Mass production and consumption of insects is a recipe for disaster based on this research. The increased rate of mutation between insects and mammals is key driver for concern. Fruit flies are studied for genetic research due to observable rate of change and mutation is one of the key ingredients in catastrophic diseases.
At this point I have to wonder, do you have any vested interest in the insect as food industry? I see you have accumulated many points over a decade and YC is running a few horses in this race.
And we are discussing public health and possible pandemic initiators predicated on nascent scientific research here, no? Dismissal through obfuscation and fallacious intellectual undermining leveraging local social clout?
This very conversation stands as of evidence of exponential adoption of disease transmission from bug consumption due to online media growth on the subject.
I don't really see how this conversation is proving anything of the sort. (If it did, could we please talk about eating a healthy balanced diet, too? I'd like to see an exponential increase in adoption of that, just from talking about it.)
Now, how do natural habitats compare? And in those do these parasites affect the reproductive success?
Also loved the computer program analogy.
Feudalism here we come!
[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> Despite, food preparation processes parasite allergens may still be detected.
Arguably, the wet markets in Wuhan wouldn't have been such a disease nightmare if the cages of live animals weren't kept one atop the other, dripping feces and other fluids between species and breaking the inter-species barrier.
Wetmarkets are diverse.
I've been to wet markets in a richer country than china, and it wasn't that clean.
Indeed, boiling down for a half hour or so would probably help.
This, Seaweeds, and directed precise fermentation are a big part of the 10B+ people solution.
[1] https://www.rebelnews.com/worlds_largest_cricket_farm_finish...
A better solution is not to have the problem in the first place
I think people generally agree now that the world population will decline well before 2100. So maybe sell your house before then.
Food Contamination - harmful Chemicals and Microorganisms in food : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_contamination
Foodborne Illness / Food Poisoning : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodborne_illness
You are making a sweeping statement by saying, "eating [all] the bugs" is dangerous and _contrary to our nature_. Also, you should be careful with the word "idiot".
Yes, especially when it's a certain minority of "modern" society that determines those needs for the society as a whole. I can assure you billionaires won't be eating bugs.
Aversion to lobster was an American phenomenon, lobsters have been considered a delicacy in coastal communities around Europe since the Roman era, possibly earlier than that. In the American north-east, people were initially averse to eating lobster because they were originally from inland parts of Europe and didn't know much about seafood. But they did figure it out as they developed their own coastal palates.
We've all been living alongside bugs this whole time. If they were good to eat, they'd be popular by now.
Tasty, tasty murder
So are bugs. It’s also worse because you have to kill more of them.
The point here is that insects are proposed as a new, high volume source of proteins, as a way to reduce meat consumption.
Humans have fairly good understanding of parastites, bacteria etc related to meat. And have established routines for raising animals and preparing meat to minimize the problems.
As far as I know, humans have not the same level of knowledge, nor processes related to mass production and consumption of insects.
The paper shows that there are substantial parasitical risks with eating insects. Something, at least as far as I am aware, is not generally known or talked about. Importantly things like applying heat (cooking), which generally works to reduce problems with meat, according to the artible, seems NOT to be effective against parasites in insects.
Let's focus on that discussion.
I don't see this in the article. They explain in a paragraph that cooking and/or freezing are effective, and that simple drying was "considered promising". With a little drop of caution.
> However, there is a need of thorough evaluation of insect processing methods, including temperatures and time of cooking / freezing to prevent possible parasitic infections
Let's say I propose cars as an alternative to motorcycles, and you respond by citing the enormous numbers of deaths from car accidents. Am I doing a whataboutism if I mention that motorcycles have accidents too?
edit: "whataboutism" is an anticommunist propaganda term meant to defend segregation, but to the extent that it has a meaning, that meaning is: When I mention thing A that you do, it's a distraction when you mention totally unrelated thing B that I do. It's not when I criticize you over doing thing A, and you mention that I also do thing A.
Also, everyone has heard at least one story of a young child eating an earthworm they found in the garden. It seems to be only after seeing the reaction of older children and adults that they learn to find that disgusting.
Not true.
Sure it is. Did someone have to teach you not to eat shit? Or green meat that smells like death? Certain smells and physical appearances trigger reactions in our bodies that tell us "stay away." That there might be certain groups of people that act in contrary ways is an exception, and doesn't disprove anything.
Oh it is and what til you hear about couple more fears we didn't have to learn through experience:
> Examples of innate fear include fears that are triggered by predators, pain, heights, rapidly approaching objects, and ancestral threats such as snakes and spiders. Animals and humans detect and respond more rapidly to threatening stimuli than to nonthreatening stimuli in the natural world.
Some adaptations are so worthwhile they get wired into our biology!
Those two things aren't the only two options, and no one is forcing anyone to do anything, which makes me think this is some attempt by the meat industry to paint all the people who are telling you to eat less meat (like your doctor) as authoritarian lunatics out to undermine civilization.
They of course will continue to eat meat, continue to own rural property, continue to drive cars and travel for leisure on jets. Their solution to all problems is to maintain their privilege while forcing the underclasses make all the sacrifices.
The kookier versions of anti-WEF arguments veer into conspiracy theory territory, but there’s something to be said about out-of-touch wealthy individuals attempting to wield their influence to reduce e.g. developing nations use of cheap-but-nonrenewable energy sources, or reduce their consumption of more efficient sources of protein.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-world-econom...
> Own nothing, be happy. You may have heard the phrase. It started life as a screenshot, culled from the internet by an anonymous antisemitic account on the image board 4chan. “Own nothing, be happy – The Jew World Order 2030,″ said the post, which went viral among extremists.
Well, that's reassuring.
Meanwhile, the actual content on the WEF site is monumentally boring:
> Greater action on food loss to ensure more food is preserved for human consumption
> According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, globally 13.8% of food is lost from harvest to retail. And, of course, mitigating food loss also brings cost savings and economic benefits, while reporting can help assess the efforts to minimise food loss.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
The author later clarified they were predicting a possible future, “for better or for worse”. They didn’t outright deny they supported that specific idea, though, nor does it directly contradict WEF’s stated goals (although it’s on a much shorter timeline).
And when intentionally publishing the plan for this secret conspiracy, on their website, cunningly disguised as a fictional take on the near future, they accidentally left in bits where they worried about digital surveillance which luckly the anti-semites on 4Chan noticed, and saved us from this dark future?
> Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
I agree. It's completely idiotic. Clearly, all those billionaire, industrialists and politicians have our best interests in mind. They simply want a better future for all. They would probably be more inclusive in their decision-making, but it's just that an average person out there is too dumb to make any important decisions.
> we don't pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.
It also posits that anyone who does not submit to this regime is simply left to rot in the countryside. Implying that they live the equivalent of 19th century life probably with no electricity, running water, or medicine. Sorry, you don't get any technology if you don't want to be a serf.
> My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
Living in this society also apparently means that everything you do or think is recorded and that it can be used against you, presumably by the people in power should your behavior ever displease them.
> I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
And apparently a whole lot of people died on the way to this utopia.
> We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.
No wonder a lot of people reacted poorly to this but I think that was the point. They wanted to do a limited hangout to gauge public reaction to some version of their envisioned future. That allows them to manage the blowback by saying it was just a silly article after which they delete it and then paint all of its detractors as racists and right wing nutjobs which is SOP at this point.
It was universally poorly received, which led to them removing the video/Tweet, and it's now being censored on platforms like YouTube. Their predictions, as stated in the video, to happen by 2030, include:
- You'll own nothing.
- You'll rent everything.
- You'll eat less meat.
- "Western values will have been tested to the breaking point."
The WEF, if you are not aware, is not just some random crazy think-tank. It's a collective that, as a whole, is arguably the single most influential group in existence. Their backing companies [1] include Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla, WalMart, the banks, and the vast majority of massive companies you can think of. Their individual members/delegates [2] include chief executives, heads of state, and so on. The sort of group that doesn't just make predictions, but makes predictions happen.
That such a group thought society at large would respond positively to that video is simply odd. That they hold the views expressed in that video are something much worse than odd. These people, are at a minimum, unimaginably far out of touch with a society that they overtly aim to puppeteer.
[1] - https://www.weforum.org/partners#A
[2] - https://qz.com/1787762/davos-delegates-are-categorized-from-...
Is this the same one that says "1 Billion people will be displaced by climate change"?
Because, that seems like a prediction of what might happen in the future, rather than a wishlist item of Bill Gates and the rest of the Pentaverat.
The video seems to be a very brief summary of this process:
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GFC_Annual_Report_2019_202...
I've already found their plans for another dystopia linked from there, they are so brazen:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/backcasting-from-a-fu...
https://archive.org/details/world-economic-forum-presents-th....
What's wrong with these predictions?
Is it because they're wrong and we think something else will happen?
Is it because they're right and we think the academics and politicians involved in coming up the predictions are to 'blame' for them?
I really don't get it.
When the exact people actively working to change the world in pursuit of these predictions make them, they are no longer predictions but goals.
Bummer. I was aquainted with some folks in insect farming who tried to get novel food regulations moving years ago that for whatever reason gave up and fell back to insect based flours/protein powders and animal feed. Some of them had pretty interesting proposals integrating insect farming with recycling urban bio waste that then gets turned into animal feed which looked good on paper but I always wondered if that was recipe for disease. That said, crickets taste pretty good fried, but for some reason I don't like the idea of the meat I eat being fed on crickets.
> Bummer.
You quote this as a bummer, but even if we change the 'may be' to 'definately is' I don't see how this is unexpected?
'Domestic animals' avoid a lot of parasite vectors that wild animals face, and if you have a pet reptile that eats insects, then there's not that many other places for it to get parasites from.
I searched the article (didn't read) for the words "ivermectin" and "treatment". Nothing specific, but it did have this to say:
> The high prevalence of selected developmental forms of parasites in the evaluated insect farms could be attributed to low hygiene standards and the absence of preventive treatments.
I kind of assumed that bugs raised for reptiles, etc. would be treated, but maybe not.
What do you think?
Either way, Jews and other middle eastern groups with picky dietary rules, do have a long tradition for eating it in non-desperate times too.
It's icky for us not used to it, but there's no reason to think parasites is a bigger issue with insects than with animals far more similar to us, which we do eat.
Remember this article is about pet food insects, often fed to pets raw (if not alive), and it notes some extremely unsanitary practices in pet shops that farm them, such as feeding them on the excrement of the type of creature they're fed to. It's not particularly relevant for insects considered for human consumption.
Plenty of humans don't eat plenty of meats and sea animals either. Traditions don't necessarily contain good wisdom.
I think seeing a bug feast on feces and then having it sneak up on your food stashes might trigger an obvious reaction (similar to pigs and the reason why some don't eat them)
What is the bad wisdom here, that eating insects, rats, various other disease harbouring vertebrates is actually misplaced medieval health & safety?
The study at hand specifically mentions that further research is required in order to reach the same level of safety for bugs as well.
I don’t think there’s an exact correlation between safety and “what we eat,” which is rather more a consequence of availability and customs. Lots of countries don’t eat horse meat or snakes. Neither one is particularly unsafe.
Heh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sty#/media/File:Green_glazed_t...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy_in_humans
I'm going to say you probably haven't traveled much to be drawing such conclusions. Eating bugs is a big tourist shtick in Mexico for example. And you can go to markets with heaps of them on display.
This is very wrong. Did you forget to ask outside your gated community?
We've not eaten half the things we regularly eat for most of recorded history either. That's not an argument.
It seems humans were evolved to scavenge animals as well as eating plants. It's not just protein, it's iron and fats, and a few other things.
I'm vegetarian,, and only for 3 or 4 years, but honestly there's nothing really missing at all for me.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country [1]: https://www.ndph.ox.ac.uk/news/new-study-finds-links-between...
How about "biodiversity"?
and/or: Different ethnicities evolved under different conditions?
Is it still possible? Sure, but giving up dairy/eggs would be a much bigger sacrifice to me than giving up meat, and it goes beyond just enjoying the foods - the effort required to maintain a balanced diet would have additional time and social costs that vegetarianism doesn't for me.
I think a much more fruitful avenue for persuasion (and this applies to vegetarianism too) is to encourage people to try cutting back on the products, perhaps start with one day a week meat-free. Different people may find it easier or harder based on a number of life circumstances, but the easier they find it, the more they may cut back.
When was the last time you ran a long distance to kill a deer? For the majority of people, it's mainly about long distance driving to the supermarket to pick up a cut of meat. The cognitive dissonance is pretty real here. There is no screaming to be heard at the supermarket checkout. If there were, I don't think we would be having this discussion.
> ... we can kill it humanely ...
That's some wishful thinking if I've ever seen it. I encourage you to actually look at how most animals are kept and slaughtered. Then again, after the "life" most of those animals have been living, death, in whatever form, is a relief.
I said we can kill them humanely and there are slaughterhouses that enforce good practices. I didn't say all animals are killed humanely and I didn't say we should favor the worst of the factory farming practices. They often produce substandard meat anyways. I don't think meat should be as cheap as possible but I also don't think it should be made so expensive that no one can afford it. So, yes there should be more regulation around how animals are raised and slaughtered in order to prevent cruelty and that will likely increase prices of meat and I'm ok with that. We should also do more to make sure that small producers aren't forced out of business by large factory farming interests since that's what's driving this race to the bottom and degradation of conditions.
> turns out that if you do that excessively
That's plainly a strawman argument. I didn't say we should be 100% carnivorous or eat excessive quantities of meat or spend 100% of our time hunting. It's also an argument against being 100% vegetarian by the way so you might want to be careful tossing it around.
> There is no screaming to be heard at the supermarket checkout
If your goal is to kill the animal humanely then there shouldn't be any screaming in the slaughterhouse either. As I said above, there are certainly many slaughterhouses where the animals are mistreated but I don't support this and think it should be regulated against.
This is certain. Even most animals considered "herbivores" will opportunistically eat meat when presented with an easy way to get it.
you might as well preach abstinence, like the previous iterations of church ladies did.
I for one will not stop eating animals, even though WEF (and by extent politicians and mass media) will push people to eat bugs.
global elites with their private jets, yachts, islands and castles preaching to us unwashed masses to tighten our belts and lower our expectations as they bring about the end to our peace and prosperity? yes, absolutely, they are my enemy - and yours, if you can see past your nose and realize these people don't give a flying fuck about the environment, social justice and all the other bullshit.
People were harping against meat long before the elites opened their mouths about it. For all you know, the elites' suggestion to eat insects is a ploy to get people like you to do the exact opposite. Maybe YOU'RE the useful idiot.
Multiply all that by orders of magnitude faster gestation cycle and thus the chance for mutation, aside from technology developed to support existing food chain, Number of mutations per lifecycle, increasing the chances of deadly DNA combination by 12x, so order of magnitude.
Average lifespan of... A. Bacteria: 12 hours B. Insect: 12 months C. Mammal: 12 years (shortest being the primary disease harbinger, the rat).
Full stop.
As others have stated, 2 billion people eat insects, surely not all of them eat legged insects, but I wonder how the ones that do deal with it. Do they just suffer through it? It's not exactly going to stop you if you're hungry
Just as a plant-only eater would want to ensure they are getting certain nutrients like B12 and vitamin D, meat-only eaters have their own share of things to worry about: vitamin C, calcium, boron, potassium, magnesium, etc. Yet if you follow carnivore influencers, you'd think beef has the nutritional breakdown of a multivitamin.
The real take-away should be to track the nutrients in the things you eat and then see if there's something you can add to fill the gaps.
> Up to 2,086 species are eaten by 3,071 ethnic groups in 130 countries.
The linked article sounds scientific, but the same author wrote this: "they" are trying to poison "us" rant.
That's not true though, the link you posted is authored by a completely different person.
Wait, who's doing this? All I've seen is advocation for eating insects, not people trying to make others do the same. The comments in this thread would make one think there's a government mandate to eat some ration of insects daily and to criminalize meat consumption. What did I miss?