I Will Not Eat the Bugs (2021)
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
Oh, please. This post reads like a very smart person going to great lengths to justify why they don't want to try eating a new thing. Like, no one is making you my dude. You don't need to flex a Shakespeare quote to justify not wanting to eat something.
I don't eat shellfish because they look gross, no one needs to read an essay about it. That's my one beef (hehe) with the rational crowd, and I love 'em to death, but dude you don't need a dive into philosophy to justify why you like pizza better than milkshakes. Let life have some whimsy in it.
Also, this is the third time this week I've heard people fretting about being "forced" to eat bugs. It is a common alt-right conspiracy theory that "the left" is going to force everyone to eat bugs. So there are endless memes about how they should courageously eat even more meat to "own the libs". At this point I genuinely wonder if this isn't just an extremely effective marketing campaign by the meat industry to turn meat consumption into a form of protest, right when meat is getting almost unbelievably expensive. My dudes, it ain't "the libs" jacking up the prices of meat and bringing in record profits.
So when I see someone fretting about eating bugs I have a hard time taking it too seriously. If you don't want to, then don't.
From a financial utility, whey protein is expensive, and not everyone can consume it. The veg alternatives taste like chalk, so I know quite a few athletes who are quite interested in high protein insect flour. If you could spend half the price for a better tasting shake...
(I try to remind myself that I'm not immune to many of the same thought traps, though I'm unlikely to ever go alt right. As I age, I move ever more leftwards.)
* Usually.
From a European's perspective, we have times where everything is going very much to the left, so naturally the right wing will grow. There will be a balance, but more and more I see that what is called the right wing is the former centrism. That kind of right wing has to emerge for there to be a balance. And it is to the benefit of those who try to divide groups into smaller ones. I don't know which conspiracy theories you are talking about, but I myself watch with interest how efficiently they introduce some of them, in various ways.
What you are describing ("demonstrating intelligence") is low self-esteem & narcissism. Howling ego in space, as a counterbalance to an understated self-esteem. And it is more common on the left. Where there are the most parasites. On the principle of playing the victim, simply, so give me something, because I deserve it. All those amulets, prepositions. The left is more prone to creating its own false world, rather than aligning itself with the real one. And this is something you can act on and make money from. They have a hard life with themselves anyway, and to others they are just emotional vampires.
When someone is intelligent, they don't f around with things that you can see they're tryharding for. Because it is not intelligent. Truly intelligent people have no need to prove their intelligence to others, they even often don't want to. They are lazy and they know they are intelligent, so they won't waste their energy explaining things to people who can't see. They know they are right and they pathetically observe the downside of commenting on controversial topics.
All in all, from the perspective from a centrist in Europe, I think it's very good that such currents are appearing on the site and do what you want with it. Because an intelligent person will rarely want to explain to moron that he is a moron, therefore he should not vote because he will harm us all. Unless he sees the potential, which is again - quite naive.
This term is 'triggering' for me because it is such a thoughtless complaint. Between inflation and economic growth (and population growth), record profits are practically inescapable.
Further, I doubt that when people use the term, they actually spent the time looking at the financial statements for the businesses they're talking about. Did you? Or was it just a headline?
As an aside, the eating bugs thing is a meme that goes along with you will own nothing and be happy, which was a real article title about a potential future, written ahead of some WEF event. I don't think there's any conspiracy here, but it is somewhat amusing that WEF promotes futurism (own nothing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s..., eat bugs: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/how-insects-positivel...) that would reflexively sound dystopian to a lot of people.
Whey protein tastes pretty gross too. If there's a cheap insect alternative, I admit I'll try it.
We really need to get back into antitrust busting
https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-lawsuits-sysco-corp-...
Once I purchased a big sack of basmati rice. When I opened it at home, all the larvae came worming their way out. I mean there was a lot of bugs in this rice. And I knew this store tended to keep stuff on their shelves years beyond the expiration dates. So I took the sack of rice back to the store.
The kind proprietor told me it was a nothingburger and the bugs wouldn't hurt me. I said ugh. He said just to pick the bugs out. I said there's a lot of bugs. He insisted this is normal and no big deal. I think I finally managed to make the return. And I really didn't feel like shopping there again.
Growing up, my dad would say hilarious things, like "mmm, more protein" and lick his lips when he saw a bug on our food. Or, he would see a non-venomous spider in the house and say "he won't eat much." But I managed to develop a rather neurotic fear of pests. I adored beneficial insects when I was a child; I memorized all their Latin scentific names, and I purchased ladybugs and mantids at the nursery and I released them all into the garden. I would build ant farms, fascinated with their tunneling and behaviors. I used to catch butterflies just because they were beautiful. But show me a cockroach or a bedbug in my home, and I will go into a hissy fit. I don't feel like that's abnormal.
Morally, could I tell you why, like the author of this post tries to do? Absolutely not. I eat birds and mammals. I had a decade-long stint of vegetarianism and often thought about my moral responsibility as a conscious creature towards the other creatures on this Earth. But tossing the insects wasn't even a choice, and in retrospect, I don't think I could convince myself to eat them (even if the macros are good.)
I wonder how much of this aversion is learned/cultural, and if future generations will laugh at how squeamish we are today.
Though ultimately, that's not even the point. The larger point is that individual consumer choice does not actually shift the food industry structure, which, again, is neatly exemplified by this entire debate that kicked off these threads: humans don't -choose- bugs. This is a system change. Though of course the change involves better mass production capability and higher rates of profit on the industry side, not "care for nature". Industry doesn't care for anything but profit.
How is this possible? Cows must feed and they eat plants (inefficiently too)
There are two kinds of animal food aversions: disgust because the creature itself is considered disgusting, and horror because the creature is more often considered a companion animal or otherwise special. Anglo-Americans generally have a strong aversion to eating both mice and guinea pigs (horses, dogs), but for those very different reasons.
There were several cheese types in Britain that were traditionally full of maggots, and eaten that way. Modern food production techniques and refrigeration has allowed us the luxury of strong insect aversions.
In parts of Colonial America, prisoners and slaves were fed lobster, and free servants' contracts often stipulated that they wouldn't be fed it more than a certain number of times per week, because people with a choice didn't want to eat them. Cultures change! Now lobster is a luxury food everywhere in the US other than the areas they're caught in, where it's a cultural pride food.
Seafood is considered haram by the hanafis only. The Malaysians are shafi’is so they can eat shrimp.
Except that Bangladesh (hanafi) is a big exporter of shrimp, go figure.
And India exports beef in quantities comparable to the US and Australia.
This is a nice lie we tell ourselves, but it's obvious if you look into what we actually do, that we value small things like convenience and money over a small chance of killing someone. See cars for the easiest example, but there's many more.
Conveniently your chances of dying in a car accident are around 1% each year: https://www.rosenfeldinjurylawyers.com/news/what-are-your-ch....
That's very obviously wrong since that would mean the road toll for my city of 400k would be 4000/year and it's actually 12/year
I think you mean 1% each life
It does seem impossibly high now that I did math.
(36,096 / 331,000,000) * 100 ≈ 0.0109%
It's easy to mixed up with the percentage conversion. Still it's really high all things considered.
This seems a fundamental misunderstanding of Veganism, where I believe even Honey is considered non-vegan by the relevant authorities:
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan/honey-ind...
> And don't bugs have [...] passions?
Like what? Eating more dirt??
> In general, animal neuron number scales up slower than animal weight.
A brown bear and a house cat have similar neuron counts?
Additionally, assuming neurons are meshed, the ability gained from an additional neuron would be exponential, no?
Worms come in at like, what, 10,000 - 100,000 for their entire nervous system, compared to 221,000,000 for a fowl, not only is that 20,000x - 2,000x linearly, going with the assumption that each new neuron is probably more significant than the last, it would be more than worlds apart in ability to think.
> most factory-farmed insects are being raised as animal food and not for humans.
And therefore if you eat the chicken, you also must be aware of the moral cost of the fact that the insects were killed for the chicken, which was then killed for you. So, morally, just eat the bugs, don't do a double conversion, that's inefficient.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-28/slaughter... [3] https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...
2019: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/sep/30/research-red-me...
2022: https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-a...
Seriously though, it’s your choice how you live your life, but there’s no escaping that humans are omnivores and should eat both plants and animals for proper nutrition. The problem is that a lot of human diets go to heavy on the animals. I know that you can replace animal protein in your diet with several plant based supplements, but that is far from ideal or natural.
There are millions of vegetarians and vegans around the world.
I do not consider that buying plant protein extracts that are five times more expensive than chicken meat is an acceptable way of being vegan.
If that is excluded, then very few possibilities remain for ensuring an adequate daily protein intake without a simultaneous energy intake that would make me gain weight very quickly.
The consequence is that a fraction of my daily food menu is pretty much fixed, with little variation from day to day. The remainder of the food, which is chosen from various vegetables and fruits with little energy content, can be very varied, but nonetheless, on average what I eat as a vegan is noticeably less varied than before, because in comparison with a diet that includes animal food there are many constraints for ensuring enough proteins, vitamins and minerals, which limit the free choice of food and which require some planing of what to eat.
While this does not really bother me, there are many people who, especially when young, would not find acceptable to have to deal with such constraints.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cultivated-meat-grown-in-a-lab/
In practice, it would very hard for any company which makes any kind of highly processed food to make me trust their products, unless they would be extremely transparent and they would disclose their production process with a lot of details.
Obviously, for a new kind of food the producer might want to keep secret many details, but that would not be acceptable for me. There are many things that I buy without caring much about how they are made, but for anything that I introduce in my body I have to know the exact chemical composition and also the manufacturing process, to be able to assess its safety. If I could afford my own analytical lab, I would not care much about what the producer publishes, but as it is I need to see credible disclosures about everything that influences what ends in the sold product.
The second problem, after having adequate information about any kind of food, is that I would not buy any kind of staple food unless it is either produced locally or else it can be imported from many different countries. The rules for something essential like meat are obviously not the same as for a candy bar or for an exotic fruit, which are optional food items.
For a non-US citizen, to become dependent on some food produced in USA would be extremely stupid, because in recent years USA has demonstrated repeatedly that they can stop exporting any product at any time, despite any prior commitments or declarations, whenever they feel like it.
Before successfully switching to a vegan diet I would have been much more interested in news about lab-grown meat, but now, after managing to completely substitute meat, even if with the price of less varied menus, I would be much less enthusiastic about it.
I am skeptical that lab-grown meat will be produced with acceptable efficiency in the near future, by using the current methods. Acceptable efficiency implies a cost similar to chicken meat.
On the contrary, I believe that some kind of lab-grown food will become dominant in the future, but in a more distant future, perhaps a century from now.
The most efficient way to make food would be to capture the solar energy with photovoltaic cells and use it to reduce the carbon dioxide and dinitrogen from air, using water, and make a simple organic compound, e.g. a simple amino-acid.
Then this organic compound could be used to feed, together with minerals, some cultures of genetically engineered living beings derived from fungi or from parasitic plants, hybridized with various genetic material of vegetable or animal origin, and which would grow harvestable parts equivalent with the meat, seeds, fruits, roots, leaves etc. that are used now for food.
I have little doubt that this is the final solution, but we are still very far from it. The greatest obstacle is that we are far from being able to predict how changes in the DNA modify the growth of a multicellular living being. We need to be able to predict what genetic changes are needed in order to make a modified plant that will grow either beans or apples or muscles or whatever else is the intended product of the culture.
Until then, I prefer to eat only food that I cook myself, from raw ingredients, so I can be certain about its content.
https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...
Also, vegetarian encompasses a wide range of diets, some of which include eating animal proteins such as fish, dairy, or eggs. [2]
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...
[2] https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-exactly-is-a-vegetarian-3...
I invite you to eat the bugs and stop bothering other people what to eat. Likewise, the "food pyramid" popularized from the 1990s has been factually wrong and even harmful to males especially, and only recent studies which have been analyzing the problem for 5-10+ years have been able to 'uncover' this.
People are kidding themselves if they don't understand that >most< of the 'eat the bugs' and 'stop animal suffering' aren't schemes and attempts (make no mistake, of the rich and the 'elite') to transition industries because we(as in the west) have been losing the industry apparatus, especially the food one. Does not mean there are no 'legitimate' movements or people who actually care, but most of them don't, they're just made to believe they do. Same goes for the green push, oh but here come the downvotes...
The meatpacking industry is challenged due to a labor shortage from the growing anti-immigration sentiment and overzealous ICE policing. The extra border restrictions during the pandemic played a part as well. Can't say any of those are that popular with the vegan crowd. (I guess there are always a few outliers.)
So, abortion causes deaths of millions upon millions of babies yearly, the victims are always innocent, there are numerous medical complications, and God's wrath on the world is imminent and inevitable if we don't stop doing this right now, everyone, no exceptions, not even thinking about it. If you disagree, you murder babies, you are a horrible person, and you are the direct reason for the destruction of humanity.
How does this compare in a perspective?
I am vegan, but at least for me this only means that I am against killing any living being, and especially any sentient living being, without a good reason.
Killing an animal because I want to eat something or killing a human because I need some cash are not good reasons.
Unfortunately, there are also good reasons for killing some living beings, including animals and even humans, whenever the alternatives are worse beyond any reasonable doubt.
The only acceptable outcome of a conversation with an "outsider" is that they will switch sides and give up their lifestyle to broaden my cause.