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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

I clicked through to one of the retailers and grasshoppers are >$36/lb ... I can order more nutritious steak for less. Seems like the pricing is way off thus far.

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I've talked to one of the folks at Little Herds here in Austin (http://littleherds.org/), and he explained that he'd like to eat a lot more bugs than he does, because he enjoys them and they're nutritious, but the cost is still prohibitive even for him (who is involved in the farming of bugs for consumption).

I'm not sure I understand why that is. The argument is that scale is the biggest limiting factor, but I would think achieving scale would be so much easier. A million crickets is a lot easier to house than even a few hundred steer. I really want to see evidence that insects are sustainable and affordable as a food source before I dive too far down into that particular rabbit hole.

I'm a vegetarian for ethical and environmental reasons, but I'm not sure my ethical stance extends to include insects and arachnids (though I do take them outside rather than kill them). I already occasionally eat clams and scallops and oysters. I'd probably eat bugs, if they were sustainable to farm and if they were not for economic elites only; I also tend to opt out of luxury economies on ethical grounds.

You take arachnids outside? But they keep insects down! I'm perfectly happy to cohabit with them, so long as there's a clear and evident understanding that where I go, spiders don't, and vice versa -- I mind me of my childhood home, which we shared with a sizable black widow who made good use of the space behind the toilet tank; as long as you didn't go carelessly sticking your fingers in dark crevices, you had nothing to worry about, and that's a good rule in any circumstance. (And black widows really are lovely creatures, once you know how to treat them with proper respect -- not at all like the false widows now cropping up here in Maryland, which are so godawful ugly as to make you imagine they spring full-grown from the forehead of David Cronenberg.)

But don't take my word for it; try it for yourself -- next time you find that a spider's spun her web in a corner, leave her be, and you'll likely find yourself less frequently called upon to escort importunate insects out the door; she'll be happy to take care of the problem, to the benefit of both of you.

More importantly, indoor spiders don't thrive outside. They'll just try to get back inside. Outdoor spiders are different species.

Well, they should go buy their own motorhome. If they cause me trouble (like landing on my face, crawling across my food, hanging out on my pillow or toilet seat, etc.), they get a ride to the outside. Them's the rules.

Oh, I think you've taken my comment to be far more extreme than intended. I don't take all spiders outside. But, I live in Texas in a tiny house (a motorhome). Sometimes, this place just ain't big enough for the two of us, and the wolf spider or other big crawly needs to go outside. The ones that roam around too much also get taken outside. If they stay in their corner, we get along just fine. I'm just saying that when I have a choice between taking a "pest" outside or killing it, I take it outside unharmed.

Also, one time I came back to my motorhome after staying with family for a couple of weeks and found thousands of baby spiders crawling around on and hanging from the ceiling (and on my face and in my hair). That was another instance where it was me or the spiders, and the spiders got swept outside. I feel no remorse over this decision.

FWIW, killing an animal because you need nutrition is more deferential than killing an animal because it wandered near where you space.

So you might find an ethical niche in there.

I agree, but, I disagree that one needs to kill an animal to get the necessary nutrition in our modern society. Were I starving in the wilderness, I would likely make the choice to eat meat in order to survive. But, we live in a time and place where the decision is clearly not one of survival.

So, my decision to eat bugs would be considered on the ethics of the question, among others: Is it environmentally sustainable (and, in my case, it would need to be equal or greater than the sustainability of a plant-based diet)? Is it ethical (probably just whether the bugs suffer)? Is it healthy? Is it tasty?

I seen cricket for 50 cents/pound on street market in India.

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