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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Lobsters too. Can you imagine steaming and eating a two-pound cockroach? But that's basically what a lobster is.

I predict that techniques will be found to make good plant-based meat substitutes or other artificial meat before anyone figures out how to make us happy with eating insects.

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> Can you imagine steaming and eating a two-pound cockroach? But that's basically what a lobster is.

Cockroaches are insects. Lobsters are not. There is a huge difference there.

They meet up much closer in the evolutionary tree than things like pigs or cows. What exactly is the huge difference? They seem fairly similar overall, aside from size and where they live.

But not as different as, say, lobsters and cows. Lobsters and Cockroaches are both nocturnal, omnivorous, scavenging, arthropods.

This is an absurd comparison in the context of food. When it comes to eating animals, we (Westerners) are used to eating muscle tissue. Cows and lobsters have large, edible muscles that can be separated from the rest of the body for consumption, cockroaches do not.

Not even if scaled up to the size of a lobster?

I have no idea about the cockroach's muscle:body ratio relative to commonly eaten animals. But again, this is following an absurdist line of argument.

Our culture will produce many food science innovations before we get around to engineering lobster sized cockroaches. (And even if we did, you are likely back to square 1 in terms of eating large, environmentally inefficient animals for protein.)

Insects are more closely related to lobsters and shrimp than they are to spiders and millipedes, and genetic studies suggest that insects evolved from crustaceans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod#Classification

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

Mycoprotien

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