Why companies are racing to build the biggest bug farm

All of those things are valuable and ecologically low-impact ways to provide resiliency to total human food supply.

The motivating factor for stuff like this is not meat consumption itself, but the problems invented by industrial meat production, which falsely promises cheap, uniform meat to everyone everywhere -- promises just as falsely made by industrial agriculture. The idea of scaling industrial agriculture to displace industrial meat production (yours) is not really all that different than what's suggested in the article. It's still just a patchwork fix to a much bigger problem, which is that industrially producing Modern Western Diet for the entire world is an unsustainable idea in itself.

If you want to advocate an environmentally conscious social change, it'd be to restore more geographically appropriate menus and not worry about whether people in (say) mountainous arid climates are eating local meats that could have been replaced by diesel-freighted Digicorn 3.0 shipped from Iowa.

Hold up, are you suggesting consumers want to buy processed grasshopper-protein over of processed vegetable-protein because they're so very emotionally attached to it coming from a squirming insect?

That seems like quite an unnecessary reach.

Surely a much simpler answer is that those options are simply not the same when it comes to culinary-science and/or manufacturing requirements.

Cooking is a major way in which families bond and connect with their ancestors. Traditional cuisine in Italy, France, the American South, etc. all prominently feature meat.

I remember talking to my mother about the ethical issues of animal farmimg once (we're both meat-eaters). She looked like she was going to cry as I explained to her that all the recipes she'd learned from my grandmother and then lovingly cooked for us for years were rooted in dystopian animal misery and environmental destruction.

I have huge respect for vegans and vegetarians. From a moral point of view, you folks are doing the right thing. That said, I'm more interested in reducing my meat intake and sourcing meat from hunters and small-scale local ranchers than I am interested in eliminating my own meat intake.

I think we generally feel equally strong attachments to almost every facet of behavior that is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history. We're animals and we evolved to want to do certain behaviors. Birds want to fly, moles want to dig, lions want to hunt.

If anything, we should be surprised that our society can remove us so far from the obvious fact of our animal nature that we consider these behaviors surprising. We're omnivores and meat is calorie dense. Of course we like eating it, just like we like exploring, sex, grooming each other, eating fresh fruit, etc.

Apes gonna ape.

That doesn't mean we have to do these things. But it should certainly be entirely unsurprising that we want to do them.

Food is not fungible. Proteins are not fungible. Fats are not fungible.

There are dozens of chemically and metabolically significant differences between what you get when you eat vegetables vs fruits vs bugs vs chicken vs beef. Protein uptake ratios, SFA/MUFA/PUFA ratios, indigestible protein (chitin etc.) ratios, etc.

It is, quite simply, not feasible to maintain the standard of health and vitality that I personally require while eating vegetables (or bugs).

> Is meat addictive like sugar?

No, it's addictive like water.

> Are meat and sugar so overwhelmingly pleasurable to us

Sugar is pleasurable because it's an unnatural hyperstimulus that we aren't well-adapted for. Meat is pleasurable because it's one of the most nutritious possible foods for humans (perhaps second only to milk). It's not a hyperstimulus at all; your body is accurately reflecting its nutritional value.

That doesn't mean that humans want to eat those grains, even if they were to consume the same kinds of grains.

You've probably noticed that human-grade grains are considerably more expensive. It is in the interest of the farmer to produce those higher quality grains for the sake of profitability, but sometimes the Mother Nature just doesn't play nice.

Sometimes all you can produce is animal-grade food. Being able to also capture those calories helps feed the large and growing human population.

Protein is really important for our diets. Many adults even in the first world are not getting enough of it. It's not some "luxury" macromolecule the we should just consume less of (like sugar). Most peoples diets (at least in the US) have too many carbs and sugars (plants) and not enough protein (meat). You can get the protein you need from plant based sources, but you have to be really intentional about it and work hard at it. Meat contains every nutrient your body needs besides vitamin C.

Dont forget the meat lobby and the government incentives in place. Its not just driven by consumers

I myself would quite happily try a bug-derived Beyond Meat burger or similar.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221214-what-is-the-lowe...

The trick here is that the bugs can (at least at the current scale) be fed using food waste which almost certainly makes it more efficient

Soldier fly larva will happily crunch away all the moldy or rotting household food waste you throw into a cold compost, but good luck getting a chicken to voluntarily eat much of it (and they'd probably get sick pretty often if they tried).

I assume industrial operations work essentially the same way, making use of the countless waste streams that livestock either won't consume or can't safely consume.

The bigger question for me is how they harvest at that scale. The hearsay I carry around in my head is that they just drown insect crops in chemical pesticide to harvest them, which I'm hoping is not the norm.

I'll trust your judgment on Beyond Meat vs dung. I'm sure you have much expertise on the nuances involved in dung's flavor, and certainly much much more experience than me in tasting it.