Cockroach farms multiplying in China
latimes.com
latimes.com
If growing them feeds people efficiently, we'll see it here soon enough.
Potatoes didn't exist outside the Americas until after 1492. Then many cultures viewed them as lowly and not worth eating. But you can feed more people per area than any other food and they grow in more types of land than many other edible plants. Cultures would reject them until a famine struck. Then the ruler would eat them out of necessity. Then everyone would eat them. Now potatoes are in more cuisines of the world than any other food.
If cockroaches are efficient, I would expect a few shocks in some commodity markets to put them on a few cultures' dinner plates, then to spread. Like roaches, if you'll pardon the pun.
I'd love to read more about this. Can you point me to a particular episode? The ruler is pretty much the last person I'd expect to eat something out of necessity.
The then head of state, Kapodistrias:
"Having ordered a shipment of potatoes, at first he ordered that they be offered to anyone interested. However the potatoes were met with indifference by the population and the whole scheme seemed to be failing. Therefore Kapodistrias, knowing of the contemporary Greek attitudes, ordered that the whole shipment of potatoes be unloaded in public display on the docks of Nafplion, and placed with severe-looking guards guarding it. Soon, rumours circulated that for the potatoes to be so well guarded they had to be of great importance. People would gather to look at the so-important potatoes and soon some tried to steal them. The guards had been ordered in advance to turn a blind eye to such behaviour, and soon the potatoes had all been "stolen" and Kapodistrias' plan to introduce them to Greece had succeeded."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioannis_Kapodistrias#Administra... (2nd paragraph)
Ironic considering the devastating effects of the reliance on potatoes during the Irish potato famine.
This is a somewhat amazing claim. It's bizarre for a population bottleneck in 1852 to have lasting effects (on the size of the population) over 150 years after the cause of the bottleneck ended, much as I don't expect the number of mosquitoes in 2014 to go down no matter how many I manage to kill in 2013.
Census records [1] tell a very interesting story:
Ireland's population apparently peaked in the 1840s at 8.2 million people. By 1851, that had crashed to 6.6 million, and by 1861, 5.8 million. By then it seems safe to assume that the famine was over (for one thing, it's supposed to have ended in 1852), but Ireland's population kept declining into the 1920s and then stayed flat for another 30-40 years (population in 1961: 4.2 million), whereafter it started growing at a fairly quick (indeed, accelerating) pace. The 2011 census shows 6.4 million people.
I can't think of a reason for a famine in the 1840s to cause the population to fall from 4.7 million in 1891 to 4.2 million in 1926. I have to wonder if what drove the numbers wasn't the famine but the demographic transition. Any idea when that took hold in Ireland?
My other guess would be that the mass emigration of the 1840s-50s created a long-lasting easy pathway for Irish to emigrate to the US, and that this proved so attractive that the population stayed low even in the face of high birthrates. But I wouldn't call that a misfortune for the people of Ireland.
[1] http://www.nisra.gov.uk/Census/Historic_Population_Trends_%2...
EDIT:
It's probably worth noting here that 30 million people recorded their ethnicity as "Irish" in the 2000 US census.
Not to mention that if you actually manage to reduce the mosquito population by 20 to 25% (as the Great Famine did in ireland) I'm sure you'll see an impact on the following years.
Look at this another way: over the last 50 years, the population of Ireland grew by 50%. Over the 50 years before that, it grew by negative three percent. And the famine happened 50 years before that. It seems very difficult to explain the 1911-1961 performance in terms of the famine.
> Not to mention that if you actually manage to reduce the mosquito population by 20 to 25% (as the Great Famine did in ireland) I'm sure you'll see an impact on the following years.
I honestly wouldn't expect that impact to last more than two years, if that. But that's a guess. (Consider again: in 50 years (roughly 2 human generations), Ireland's population grew 50%. If the mosquito generation length is one year, then at the same rate they could recover fully from losing 33% of their population in... two years. But insects generally follow a strategy of laying many, many more eggs than the environment can ever support as adults, so I'd kind of expect the effects to wash out in a single generation.)
But as something that happened everywhere[1], it's also hard to attribute to the famine. Then again, the only source I found (I didn't look hard) for Irish fertility data went back to 1975, so it might be hard to evaluate the theory.
[1] Demographic transition has not happened everywhere
A bizarre claim. Unless you factor in your inability to kill that many mosquitoes.
Else, if you kill enough of them (or all), their 2014 number WILL go down.
After all, there are species made extinct, as well as lots of species that had their populations shrink significantly as a result of human action (sometimes temporary).
If you kill less than that, then the 2014 population will be determined by the environment of 2014, mostly without reference to 2013. I pointed out below your comment that if mosquitoes could reproduce merely as fast as the Irish between 1961 and 2011 (and in reality they do it much faster; a female human can't have more than about 15 children, whereas a female mosquito can easily lay several hundred eggs), and their generation length were one year, then they would recover fully from a blow much larger than the potato famine two years after such a blow occurred.
Having looked into it, I see that the actual generation length of mosquitoes ranges from several days (!) to one month. So with very high confidence, I can say that the effects of a raging mosquito genocide will not be felt by one year after it has concluded, unless ALL the mosquitoes in the area were successfully killed.
You might find http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/21/if-i-hadnt-kille... to be of interest.
The usage of the word famine is a misnomer. Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. Records show during the period Ireland was exporting approximately thirty to fifty shiploads per day of food produce. As a consequence of these exports and a number other factors such as land acquisition, absentee landlords and the effect of the 1690 penal laws, the Great Famine today is viewed by a number of historical academics as a form of either direct or indirect genocide.
Oh? Not even onions?
It is incredibly rare for the "rulers" to have their personal food supply impacted by a famine.
Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for (I'm vastly over-simplifying) research that indicates only dictatorships have famines because the rulers are insulated from the effects and so have little motivation to fix the systemic problems that cause famines. The "let them eat cake" syndrome (although that quote itself is historically misleading).
The premise is that in a democracy the rulers still eat well, but there are other mechanisms for them to share in the suffering of famine so it never gets to that point.
Maybe free market is harmful for society in the sense that market segmentation creates a choice between high and low quality based on price, and this choice doesn't force people who can afford the more expensive solution to make a fix for everybody.
There is lot of anecdotal evidence about this. For example, there was article about school system in Finland, which is pretty much egalitarian. Still, the quality is great as a side effect probably because if someone improves the system, they improve it for everybody.
Similar things could be said about healthcare system. In fact, probably every successful government-run system is based on belief of participants that it should be egalitarian (and yes, they do exist).
We have negative examples of this as well. Most consumer product have awfully low quality, lower than what we could actually manufacture. The standard response to this is "you have a choice" and indeed, the knowledgeable people can buy quality for much higher price. But in doing so, they won't improve quality for those clueless, leaving them to buy lemons.
Interestingly, even the knowledgeable group is then affected. They have to pay higher price, because they get less market power, because they chose not to extend this power by leaving others to bad choice.
There is also Akerlof, who also won the "Nobel Prize". When people cannot recognize quality, they cannot buy it. Sure, every fool can compare "features". So when the producer is faced with a choice, build it 10% cheaper for half the quality, what do you think he is going to do? Most people won't know until it breaks.
It's also win for the producer. He can make two lines - one "consumer" line with half the quality, and the other "professional" line with the right quality, but two times as expensive. That's how modern market segmentation works.
Markets are not a god, an oracle, or a panacea. Markets don't work quite like they should in healthcare.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/why-markets-cant...
Use the right tool for the job. Egalitarian systems work great in some contexts (lifeboat) and not so well in others. (The New England town commons.)
Should we deduce that, by electing wealthy people, we ensure that they have no incentive to fix the systemic problems which cause a cycle of economic crises?
What you describe below, besides inaccurate (lots of very efficient food sources never made much dent to other cultures, potatoes are more of an exception than an example), is not capitalism, but hunger.
In a famine people will even eat rats (or fellow men).
That's not really about capitalism. It worked that way under every kind of economic system, including ones predating capitalism by milenia.
And exactly which economic systems predate capitalism by milenia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine-Augustin_Parmentier
""" Parmentier therefore began a series of publicity stunts for which he remains notable today, hosting dinners at which potato dishes featured prominently and guests included luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, giving bouquets of potato blossoms to the King and Queen, and surrounding his potato patch at Sablons with armed guards to suggest valuable goods — then instructed them to accept any and all bribes from civilians and withdrawing them at night so the greedy crowd could "steal" the potatoes. (These 54 arpents of impoverished ground near Neuilly, west of Paris, had been allotted him by order of Louis XVI in 1787.[3]) """
Regardless, plenty of cultures around the world eat insects, and our North American cousins south of the border eat crickets by the barrel. They're fantastic, once you get over what they are. So are silkworms, which I've scarfed down at Korean restaurants. I imagine roaches, properly prepared, eat like popcorn.
If there's a palatable and efficient way to harvest them, someone will figure out how to make it work. The concept of sushi was once considered exotic and borderline repugnant in the US, and now it's a lunchtime staple. To that effect, I could see the rebranding of the roach beginning at the high end of the market, rather than the bottom. Fancy restaurateurs will experiment with them, perhaps as much for shock value as for culinary effect. This will start a trend, and pretty soon, they'll be the hot new thing at hipster food trucks, expensive gastropubs, and boutique coffee shops.
Then again, maybe not. People have been trying to make insect-based cuisine happen in the US for many years now, and it's been very slow to attract any real attention or adoption. The humble cockroach probably suffers from the worst stigmatization of all the insects, though. So it's got a tough path to navigate to respectability. Others will probably have to pave the way before the roach can gain any appeal. Crickets, which are very closely related and can be a similar domestic nuisance, strike people as cute and charming for whatever reason (these people probably haven't seen the bigger ones). They will probably come first.
There's a Brooklyn company called Exo (Exo.co) which is doing just that after a kickstarter campaign + media blitz. Cricket flour is super high in protein, and also very sustainable. Could see it becoming the next acai, chia seed, quinoa, etc.
I realize this is irrational, and that fauna which feed on garbage like rats and roaches can be farm-raised in sanitary conditions. I'm still not going to eat a roach.
Now, technically I wouldn't, but I grew up considering, slugs, frogs, hedgehogs, rabbits and mixed small birds as great food. No bugs.
Yet, even though I tried bugs, I wouldn't want to eat them daily. If you can eat something once, the "cool story bro" mechanics kick in, but it's not the same as accepting something as integral part of your diet.
interesting fact: you can starve if your diet only consists of eating rabbit
And regarding cuteness - around here in farmers markets they are sold with the furry feet attached; It's a tradition so that people know that they're not getting cheated and getting a cat instead, but if cuteness matters then the sight might be a bit harsh :)
From my experience you can pretty much teach your pallette to like foods. I didn't like green tea, olives or whisky the first time I tried them. Now I love them.
Seems a stretch of the word 'natural' to me :-)
I have no problem with eating insects as long as the finished product doesn't leave insect grits in my teeth for hours after a meal.
Can you describe what it was like ?
By the way, I wonder if there are people who feel the same level of disgust when eating shrimps. Shrimps are not insects per se, but it's not very far from that either, and most people consider them to be a delicacy and have no problem eating them...
Related XKCD : http://xkcd.com/1268/
Yes. I forced myself to try and they don't taste bad at all, but I will not get close to them again. They'd be quite close to spiders if I had to order potential food by how repulsive it looks.
Probably the thing that wigs me out with insects is the thought of eating their guts - digestive track and such. I know it is irrational, but there it is. Just the general ooze that is inside them - ughh. On the other hand, the idea of eating a tiny steak taken from the leg of a grasshopper seems perfectly fine and palatable to me. Eating a lobster claw? Not so much. I know none of that is rational.
This was about 10 years ago, but I still have a vivid recollection of eating them. I think I had the Hotlix brand; they came in a little box like this with 3 or 4 white chocolate-covered crickets:
http://www.candyfavorites.com/chocolate-dipped-insects
For the first one, I popped the entire thing in my mouth; the chocolate tasted terrible (like really cheap, stale, Advent calendar chocolate) and overpowered the taste of the cricket. I swallowed it after a few bites, so the texture didn't really bother me.
For the second one I wanted to see what it'd be like without the chocolate, so I sucked it all off until I was left with just the cricket itself. You can see here what it might have looked like:
http://www.chocablog.com/reviews/hotlix-chocolate-covered-in...
It was the real deal; wings, legs, the abdomen, and the head. It was fairly dried out, so it was a bit flaky, feeling like it'd turn to dust if you overhandled it. I started with the head, which was kind of weird; it sort of...popped, like a grape does when you bite into it. Chewing it broke it down into a sort of powder that got stuck in my teeth. I hated the wings, which reminded me of eating wood shavings, and the legs were pretty gritty. The abdomen was kind of soft and chewy, which wasn't so bad, but it left even more little pieces in my teeth (they weren't as bad as eating fig seeds, which in my opinion is like chewing on sand, but I didn't like the texture at all).
The taste was actually quite plain; I definitely wouldn't compare it to meat. I don't even know how to describe it, because there was barely anything there. To me, the main thing that sticks out is the texture. Maybe it had something to do with the way the product was stored, or that the chocolate coating dried it out or something; given the opportunity I think I might try something fresher.
I actually really like shrimp, crab, and lobster, but the thing about them is that they're a lot more uniform; the parts that you eat all have the same texture, and aren't broken up into a bunch of little pieces (except for crab I guess). Maybe Hotlix should take a cue from seafood, and serve crickets with melted butter?
I'm pretty open minded, so I think I'd try eating almost any insect; well, except for spiders or these cheddar cheese "Larvettes":
To my generation, not just another insect.
?????????
As I see it, 150元 is seven and a half times as much as 20元. I didn't use any exchange rate of any sort to compute that.
Seven and a half times $3.25 is $24.375 . Using the most charitable interpretation I can think of, that's a return of $21.12 on an investment of $3.25, but put in the same terms as the original quote, I'd call it investing $3.25 and getting back $24.38. What happened there?
That said, a single quote, even with conversion, doesn't help much here - if a reader wanted to start a farm now it doesn't give them any idea of whether 20 yuan is the minimum or the maximum investment (I presume it's below the minimum anyway).
BUY SELL
USD 6.1538 13.3636
I don't find it reprehensible at all. It's not like the cockroach farmer is saying he wants to be a party leader so he get lucrative contracts for his friends. He seems to be just selling a product.
I feel it used to be the same in the US at some point in time. Getting rich was seen as a reward since you provided a good solution to consumers and therefore you could gain from the overall value you provided to society.
On HN, I'm not sure what is the trend, since you see people saying that "profit is evil" and stuff in that line of thought, as well as folks cheering for SpaceX, Tesla Motors' CEO Elon Musk who is getting very rich through the process of what he does - and it does not seem to bother many people in these kind of situations.
I don't think that's ever been the case in the US. There's long been an ideal that anyone can become prosperous, in the sense of upper-middle-class; that's the "American Dream". But people have also long been skeptical of the very wealthy, and in the early US there was even an ideal (though a pretty counterfactual one) that the US didn't really have any super-rich, in contrast to the British, but rather was a nation of approximate equals, everyone a tradesman, shopkeeper, yeoman farmer, etc.
The 19th-century industrialists were very unpopular among the general population, especially in the period before several of them made extensive efforts to improve their popularity through PR and philanthropy. Some of the industrialists themselves were even conflicted about the role of extreme wealth in society, which motivated writings like Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth", in which he argued that the wealthy had an obligation to spend their wealth to improve society through philanthropy, and ought not to either spend it purely on personal luxury, or to keep it and produce hereditary family fortunes in the old European style.
It's interesting you say that because European right wingers always depict the US as a paradise where people can be wealthy (which they equate to successful) and respected for it.
"On HN, I'm not sure what is the trend, since you see people saying that "profit is evil" and stuff in that line of thought, as well as folks cheering for SpaceX, Tesla Motors' CEO Elon Musk"
I don't see any contradiction. Most people feel one should be rewarded based on their contribution to society, and have respect and admiration for skilled and ambitious persons.
What is usually debated is: how much should be the reward, and how to assess everyone's contribution.
What's interesting about it? And I have no idea why you start putting politics inside here - that was not the point. You are right about one thing, in Europe people are despised if they have money, no matter if they deserved it or not.
What is usually debated is: how much should be the reward, and how to assess everyone's contribution.
Vote with your wallet/dollars. What else is there to measure ? Honestly I don't see who would be in position to decide "what should be the reward" or these kind of things. That's why we have market systems, to avoid stupid solutions to this kind of issue.
Or alternatively, perhaps we can respect other peoples world views without judging them within our own limited set of cultural values.
Why wouldn't it last?
Why can't some members be incompatible with others?
Why must there be a framework to make judgements on others?
The United States is a good example (in a lot of ways) of successful multiculturalism (it's a bad example in some ways as well). But no official language, no restrictions on belief, the only consistant thing is a 'rule of law', is that what you mean by a framework for judging?
That's fine to not like it your self... but to condemn others... That seems more than just intolerant, that is verging on bigoted.
But if you went inside, you were likely to find all the trappings of 1980s affluence (all sorts of consumer electronics, nice art on the walls, gorgeous furniture).
China today has a nouveau riche that consumes conspicuously, but it's not a universal trait.
But such a topic did make it here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5750173
[0] - assuming you currently live in US, not in Malaysia :).
On saying goodbye at the end of the day, he added a final rejoinder.
"You will regret your whole life not trying them."
Whenever I travel, I do my best to eat like a local. In my sheltered life, I never ate sushi until I first visited Japan. There I had sushi so fresh it was still moving. I ate Balut [1] when someone handed me an egg in Manila. But I think my cultural adventure would have stopped at the same spot as the aforementioned journalists.
It was quite fascinating. Children in Mexico would pick up a stink bug and eat it raw, a sour-crunchy snack. In Southeast Asia there's a large beetle about the size of a Snickers bar that in fact tastes like a Snickers bar. In Africa some folks like to eat large termites, a high protein food source. In Australia, there's a type of grub that lives in the roots of certain bushes that aborigines will cut open and eat. In Japan there are some "interesting" dishes.
I've tried grasshoppers, sold in tiny packets, salted and spiced to the point where you only taste the spice and salt. Bear Ghrylls demonstrated eating ants as a survival technique (remove the head first).
Insects are superior to meat in many ways--low fat, high quality protein and other nutrients, low on the food chain so they contain fewer toxins which tend to accumulate in herbivores and even more in carnivores.
You can harvest grasshoppers in the wild using nets. Just be careful that they haven't been chewing on poison ivy or other toxic plants which may do you harm.
I've long had it in mind to start an insect food business and this article was rather inspiring. This guy just started a cockroach farm and is making money.
It may sound disgusting to us squeamish Westerners, yet think about the notion of eating a pig or a cow, higher mammals which are fairly intelligent, creatures who exhibit emotions, who dream, who are evolutionarily our second cousins when compared to insects.
Just don't eat dragonflies (a popular skewered dish in a part of Indonesia). They keep down the mosquito population.
If they change their names and brand them as something else, they could probably sell very well as expensive food, too.
There's not so much you can trust anymore out there when it comes to drugs.
Give me one industial sector where greed - nature of man - is not a problem.
The motivation of your friends may be noble, but that's probably because they don't work in the functions which directly relate to these activities. Just open your eyes (and the news).
I did not want to argue with you that there is no dirty business in pharmaceuticals or chemistry. All I am saying is that dirty tricks and evil strategies are found throughout the industry, and not only in the medical sector. It is just in the medical sector that one sees the most dramatic consequences.
Go to car development, pre-emptive war, OS software, taxi drivers, banks, and I am sure you will find some good examples of low humans can fall.
In the car industry, if you make a crappy car, people will notice it and will stop trusting your brand. In pharmaceuticals, you will never see that. I even wonder how companies like that are allowed to keep operating when they are found blatantly lying about serious health consequences. They should be put out of business.
Ok, I can accept this argument. Basically, there is an incentive to trick the system. Unfortunatly, I am not a doctor, and as such I do not have the experience to judge the effectiveness of various medical treatments and give an example how well or bad the pharmaceutical industry is really treating us.
What is the the real gain of our health risk insurance systems? I know enough people who are dependent on daily medication of strong systemic substances, and they can live a life without too much suffering while not worrying that this flow of medicine might stop because their bank account is empty. In some way, society has to step in when individuals - even in large amount - fail to live within the system.
Having said that, how would it be possible to improve this status quo?
The advantages of Gomutra are: It works as antibacterial agent Boosts the immunity of the body Useful for heart patients and obesity Lowers cholesterol levels Reduces fats Improves brain power Repairs and regenerates damaged tissues and cells Cures children’s cough and other diseases Increases life span and purifies the blood.
More recently a well known spiritual organization started selling sakthi drop - a cure for all medicine too. http://artoflivingupdates.artoflivinguniverse.org/2011/11/ne....
And there is no limit of mantras and yanthras on the market for the believers.