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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

I will not eat the bugs, but I would eat fish or poultry that has been raised on insect protein. It's an interesting use case because fish farms (for common non-herbivore fish species) are traditionally fed on fish meal, which means that the protein is ultimately coming from the ocean one way or another.

I wonder if [plants -> bugs -> fish -> human] is more or less efficient than just traditional [plants -> {cows, pigs, sheep, goats}]. Also, the bug protein could be an additive to mostly plant based diets for traditional farm animals.

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Beef production (as well as meat produced from sheep and goats) is one of the most environmentally costly ways of producing food, because of methane emissions [0]. I don't imagine substituting bugs for grass would make much of a difference there.

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...

I thought that this methane emission was easily counteracted by some food additive, was it seaweed?

EDIT: yes, it was:

https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/case-studies/seaweed-suppleme...

Good point. But there are questions around the long-term safety of seaweed additives. And how many farmers would pay for seaweed while methane is free to emit?

Well, you can make it mandatory, the same way some countries require cattle vaccination, and other things. In the end it should be more acceptable to general public than just forbidding them to eat beef. And the seaweed shouldn't be too expensive, after all it is "weed".

And with more research they possibly could isolate that one tiny chemical substance from seaweed that does all the work here, and synthesize it, so we can produce it cheaply?

>easily counteracted

No, it's not easy.

This requires specific kinds of seaweeds to be effective, the species grows only in warm places(so not close to where we tend to keep cows) and it is not grown in large quantities yet, nor is the impact of doing that known.

We are quite some time away from doing this large scale.

All of these "beef is bad for the environment" articles are written by vegan activists, seventh day adventists, or other extremist groups who have a political agenda against meat.

The amount of methane emissions from all beef agriculture today is within a factor of like 3 of the natural methane emissions from American bison prior to colonization of the Americas.

All of these analyses completely ignore the base rate of methane emissions in the absence of cattle, whether from preexisting natural ruminants, from e.g. the fungal decomposition of plant matter that would have occurred on grasslands anyway, or from "meat substitutes".

Even if the methane emission was 10x the absurdly inflated figures that anti-meat extremists try to claim, it would still be overwhelmingly worth it for me to consume it for the health benefits. It would be better for society to spend Manhattan-Project-plus-NASA levels of our GDP on methane catalysis/capture technology, if it were actually necessary, than to stop eating ruminant meat.

Ah yes, the famously extremist BBC and their vegan agenda.

Even ignoring the environmental issues, high consumption of red meat has been linked to a number of adverse health outcomes. Processed meats even more so. [0] But I imagine you'd call Harvard Medical School extremist too?

[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee...

If you think the BBC is apolitical, you are frankly a fool. The author of that piece is a specialist in churning out low-information articles on various progressive concerns for low-information readers. https://muckrack.com/isabelle-gerretsen/portfolio

> high consumption of red meat has been linked to a number of adverse health outcomes

The epistemic value of current nutrition "science" is less than garbage. It's one of the worst-replicating fields that claims to be scientific.

Did you even read the article you linked, or did you just do something like google "red meat bad" and copy/paste the first link? If you actually read it, you should be saying to yourself, "huh, sounds like they don't really have very strong evidence".

The methane emissions from farming do not matter in the slightest anyway. They can only release what they already absorbed from their feed. We should stop adding more ghg to the atmosphere that hasn't been there for millions of years, allowing the carbon cycle to continue with that ghg currently in atmosphere does no harm.

The people crying about this are simply serving an agenda of people who want to force the average citizen to eat bugs to make literal pennies more in profit for them and their family. It's absurd. We won't do anything about climate change by stopping agriculture, it will simply ruin food supply.

But if the cows were not there, what they eat would not be cultivated in dire circumstances. Instead that place would sequester carbon. And even if it would not be allowed to sequester it would largely be emitted as co2 and not methane which is a lot less potent greenhouse gas.

None of that matters. Plants only sequester carbon that was already in the atmosphere and it goes right back into it when they die. Methane breaks down to CO2 in a number of months/years and has no effect on geologic timescales.

The only solution to climate change is to stop introducing carbon that was sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago. Championing causes like 'you need to eat the bugs' is not a productive use of time and does nothing to change the status quo in the end.

>All of these "beef is bad for the environment" articles are written by vegan activists, seventh day adventists, or other extremist groups who have a political agenda against meat.

[Citation needed]

Most soil for where nowadays cattle grace farm is not anaerobic so not sure how that could work with methane emissions. Also about 90 percent of the food that cattle eat doesn't come from there but from south America where conditions are clearly different. Animal farming is incredibly inefficiënt and the health claims are dubious at best.

> [Citation needed]

Why do you think posting something like this is a valuable use of anyone's time? What are you expecting here, an article that exactly restates my claim? If such an article existed, would you even read it or take it into account? There are only two possibilities here, neither of them good:

1. You are looking for an "authoritative" source making exactly the claim I'm making, so you can outsource your entire thought process to someone else. Besides being extremely risky, this also precludes you from ever absorbing a novel or semi-novel conclusion that isn't widely known enough to have an NYT article written about it or something.

2. You are arguing in bad faith, trying to waste my time finding a "citation" that inevitably you would find some excuse to ignore in any case.

The proper response here is to say "huh, that's interesting, maybe I should check on that claim next time I see something from the USDA, or maybe I could google it for 5 seconds".

Lucky for you, here is a convenient source so you can turn your brain off. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/9/251

You broke the site guidelines extremely badly with this post. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly, and we've already had to warn you many times. I don't want to ban you, but if you keep doing this, we'll eventually have to.

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules going forward? We'd appreciate it.

(Btw, the parent comment also broke the site guidelines, which ask people to omit internet tropes such as "citation needed", and I've replied to them too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300759. But they didn't get aggressive the way your comment did, and that's a big difference.)

There if a third option: Namely, that extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence. If you cannot supply it you are simply doing unsubstantiated talk.

Furthermore I know a number of people who study Biogeomorphology who fall in none of the categories you listed and also have posted similar articles thereby disproving your claim.

>Lucky for you, here is a convenient source so you can turn your brain off. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/9/251

That is not proof that all beef = bad for environment articles are written by vegan activists, seventh day adventists, or other extremist groups who have a political agenda against meat.

Just that the seventh-day advertist church has had influence on diet. Which is a much much smaller claim.

Bugs are very common additives to chicken feed in smaller farms. Not sure about commercial operations. As a backyard chicken owner, meal worms are a regular thing I feed to my chickens.

I keep a compost pile going in my chicken run to supplement the chickens food. They can't survive on only bugs though, there's a lot of minerals they need that come directly from plants. Some people may be surprised to learn that chickens will eat just about anything, including you.

>I wonder if [plants -> bugs -> fish -> human] is more or less efficient than just traditional [plants -> {cows, pigs, sheep, goats}]. Also, the bug protein could be an additive to mostly plant based diets for traditional farm animals.

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

What if ground crickets were added to like 75% ground beef? You'd never know and it be healthier and have less impact on the environment.

I'd wait until some longer term studies come out on the meat. Humans have no tradition of eating them (edit: looks like i was wrong on this point). I'm not conceived it's healthier and I'm totally convinced the people pushing it don't care about us.

I'd also like to see the ultra-wealthy social planners eat bugs, at least at the opulent summits where they plan it for our class of people. As long as they're eating steaks it's a bad look (same as them owning yachts, taking a private plane to an event then biking the last two blocks and talking about how private car ownership needs to be abolished).

> Humans have no tradition of eating them

Bugs are very common food in Asian, African and South American cultures.

Edit: I also remember seeing some ant stuff in Mexico. And I’ve read about indigenous cultures in Australia and North America also having insects as part of their food. I’m sure if I look for it, I’ll find something on European cultures as well. Modern food is just a representation of food that got commercialized, but in reality human diet used to be much more varied than we are used to seeing now.

I wasn't aware of that. Are they similar and eaten as a significant source of protein?

Yes. There’s plenty of YouTube channels exploring this if you’re interested.

https://youtu.be/nZ3Zc1DJOgY

"Humans have no tradition of eating them"

Of course they do. Try some survival courses, our ancestors ate everything, they could stomach. Only (or mostly) the western culture stopped doing it for whatever reason.

"If you think eating insects is gross, you may be in the cultural minority. Throughout history, people have relished insects as food. Today, many cultures still do."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/eating-bu...

The same cultures that recoil from eating bugs also pay top-dollar to eat shrimp, crab, and lobster, the latter of which used to be considered garbage food unfit to be served even to prisoners.

Cultural value plays a major role even with traditional kinds of food. Tuna was considered garbage catch in the US, only good for cat food, until sushi became popular, and tuna became premium, on par with trout.

"Entomophagy has a long and rich history in human culture. In fact, insects have been a part of human diets for thousands of years, with evidence of their consumption found in prehistoric archaeological sites." [0]

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10455489/

Also chiming in on the insects bit: most mass produced food can contain insect remnants (among other things).

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...

Humans eat bugs for a very long time, and are doing that right now. Read a bit about bugs in native Central African and South American cuisines.

I apologize if this seems blunt and incurious, but I think I can speak for MANY people when I say: absolutely not.

Chances are you, and everyone youre speaking for, has likely surreptitiously already eaten many unsavory things

There's a big difference between eating trace amounts of stuff you can't totally eliminate (at least not easily) and making it a component on purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Defect_Action_Levels

Why? I have no problem with this.

There was an experiment done where they stood outside of a supermarket and asked people if they would buy dolphin friendly tuna only. The vast majority said yes. Then they compared that to actual sales and discovered that people basically voted with their wallets, with the vast majority picking the cheaper can of fish regardless of dolphin status

(Aside, dolphin friendly tuna is a scam, don’t believe it.)

And this is also how we got Walmart and Amazon.

The discourse around the subject seems to be overwhelming disgust by the people who would be victimized by it and unending enthusiasm by the rich who would not be forced to eat bugs.

I think at this point it's sane to say that if this trend continues the only option left will be violence against the people pushing this (as well as their beneficiaries) onto broader society, if government will not step in to stop businesses from pursuing this agenda.

Replace "eat bugs" with "verb thing" and you've pretty much described the entire dynamic of class struggle spanning several centuries. The "verb thing" baseline has just shifted as humanity makes some progress.

Too late, if you're in the US. The FDA has an allowable level of insects or insect fragments in much of the food you eat. So you're probably getting a decent amount of insects and other things (probably best not to think about) in your food. A ground beef/insect blend only adjusts that ratio upward, and would be more transparent about it. Bon appetite, lol.

The amounts allowed by the FDA are restricted to certain food types, and vastly lower amounts than would be present if it were an intentional additive.

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