Maggots, an efficient source of protein
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
It's the Snowpiercer food bar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKwL5G5HbGA
Some people find him a bit too preachy or wears his heart on his sleeve. However his battles for healthier food in schools is commendable.
There was a study in the 90s wherein the authors sterilized a cockroach and dipped it in some juice. Despite knowing the juice was perfectly safe rationally, most people would refuse to drink it. I find myself in that camp.
People also rejected fudge shaped like dog feces or soup stirred with a brand-new flyswatter.
Have you ever seen the popular Halloween party food "Cat Litter Box Cookies"?
Here's some examples: https://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/302/Litterbox_Cookies...
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/15195/cat-poop-cookies-ii/
In my experience, people don't mind eating them. We served them at a Humane Society event once.
I'm hoping that cultivated meat can make itself a viable commercial product. And then there's Air Protein, which should be acceptable to all: https://www.airprotein.com/
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore
Beef is really high at 48.89 kg CO2e, but pork is only 7.6 kg CO2e. Farmed fish is 5.98 and poultry is 5.7. If you can get people to switch from high-climate-impact meat to low-climate-impact meat, you've already reaped most of the possible climate gains from dietary change. To meet a given protein consumption target, you cut 88% of the emissions by getting protein from chicken instead of beef. Trying to get people to eat unfamiliar and potentially "icky" protein sources after they've already switched to chicken can only produce minor gains.
Though most people are reacting to the headline about how humans could eat maggots, the article says that these maggots are actually being fed to chickens, farmed fish, and other animals. That approach reduces waste streams, slightly reduces the already-modest climate impact of farmed fish and poultry, and doesn't have the enormous uphill battle toward regulatory and consumer acceptance that direct human consumption would face.
Places where we raise cows generally do not support other types of agriculture (especially milk cows in the mountains).
You may stop raising cows, but it doesn't mean you will be able to grow nuts or pulses in the same place. That causes big problems for food security and economic networks.
All the arguments around emissions or caloric efficiency are way too simplistic to accurately describe the problem.
- people already do eat maggot without noticing (and pretty sure some *do* notice)
- if you don’t know about cheese you wouldn’t believe I’m eating fat’s mold.
- our siblings ape, pigs and other animals eat them too, it’s a good nutrient source
- someone from the past wouldn’t believe modern humans eat stuff made from petroleum, animals from gigafactories
- being *not-vegan* is like a religion for some and I’m wondering if they would think about cannibalism before realizing they get plenty of nutrients from the plants already on the menu.At best this is destined to become a potentially higher-quality feed for chickens and pigs.
The birthrate is reducing everywhere, we produce more food than the current population can eat. The problem is not production, it's distribution.
Investors problems obviously. If you care about the ecological or moral aspect of meat consumption we already have way more than enough affordable/healthy/tasty solutions
The problem is not even the animal/maggot itself but the fact that it consumes ANYTHING. Old apples, coffee grounds, house plants, dead rats, everything.
The incentives to produce them more cheaply by feeding them trash (actual trash not mango peelings) is obvious and just too risky. When cost is the only reason they matter anyways, why waste money on quality ingredients or good QA?
> As maggots have been around a lot longer than humans,
Mushrooms and cows (ancestors) too, "evolution" is almost never a good argument for anything
Of course this only applies to species of flies that go for these food sources. Most fly larva (really most insect larva) look like "maggots", including for species like hoverflies that eat nectar. But these "maggots" are usually hidden in the soil or on the plant and don't show up in one place in large quantities. Thus there's an obvious association between maggots and rot.
But that's just one part of it: this turns waste product into food. Beans don't provide complete amino acids. I don't know if maggots do, but many types of animal flesh do.
Also, most people crave diversity in their diets. How long are you willing to live on an all-bean diet, even if we make it nutritionally complete? Diversity in diet is ideal for humans.
"I saw that. What do you farm?"
"It's a protein farm. Wallace design."
Agriculture is also responsible for its own level of emissions but only because the world has been conditioned to dairy, and by consequence beef. Those are hard dietary habits that won't be changed any time soon. Also rice cultivation is responsible for GHG emissions, so are we going to let 80% of the planet starve?
If you disagree, perhaps you're just one of the outliers they have determined they can ignore (for now). We see these threads on HN once a month, at least, and the comments are overwhelmingly positive. I will take a 15 point updoot hit just for the comments in this thread before midnight.
Also, I tried to buy insects to eat, and they were way way more expensive than most meat. Maybe the infrastructure isn't there yet.
My take is to use cultivated insects (Black Soldier Flies), duckweed, and algae as protein feedstock for chickens and fish. Along with more humane husbandry of them it should be an acceptable path for protein for people.
I can't believe this timeline sometimes. Cultivated maggots at scale.
https://hotlix.com/product/larvets-original-worm-snax/
They were left largely untouched.
NGOs trying to convince the rest of us to eat bugs to save the planet, while many of their members are soon going to be boarding private jets headed to Davos. Hard pass - I'll continue enjoying eating meat thank you.
I can’t think of maggots separately from thinking about what they eat.
Also, cut a maggot up, and pus-like fluids come out of it.
They also contain a lot of poop.
If you're not vegetarian you most likely eat animal fed with animal or insect "flours"
Unless you eat local meat from the farmer next door you would be extremely disgusted at how your meat is made too
However if they can be turned into nondescript foodstuffs like protein powder, I figure it will come down to cost; can it be sold cheaper than plant based powders?
Thats is a niche that could help the cultural perception of eating bugs
how much would you bet?
never crickets, definitely never maggots