I work at a farm that produces live feed, mostly for pet stores and zoos. I've been working there full-time for a year-ish, amd I have experience with the production of Tenebrio spp. (mealworm beetles), Galleria spp. (waxworm moths), and Acheta spp. (house crickets). This includes every stage of the life cycle: egg + larva + pupa + adult for the "worms", and egg + nymph + adult for the crickets. The "worms" are sold as larvae for optimum nutritional value and trophic return-on-input, whereas the crickets are sold as adults. My job is one of the "dirty jobs" at the farm. Well, everyone's job there is dirty, but I'm one of the ones scooping feed, breathing clouds of bug shit, handling the product and sometimes having it crawl all over us, being swarmed by moths and beetles and flies, and dodging cockroaches. It's not as terrible as it might sound but it's definitely not clean.
This is a throwaway account that I'll be checking as much as I can today and tomorrow and maybe Monday too. I do not do push notifications or phone notifications and I'm not extremely online enough to respond to everything within 5 minutes, but I'll be logged on at least once an hour for this today. I will respond to every single question if I can, it just might take awhile. If you know or have an inkling of what my main is, shh, plz dun dox. After this AMA is complete I may abandon this account, I only made it for this (plus the bit).
To clear a few things up, YES, I have eaten the product, and YES, I do have a deep hatred for the careerist, corporate-ladder-climbing administrative class. Any other resemblences to a similar username are coincidental.
-WwF
Insofar as a bug's preferences can be understood, are the bugs having a good time? Relative to living in the wild? Is there anything that could be done to improve the bugs' living conditions? Improve bug conditions while still being a viable food source?
The bugs all have an r/k value that means that, like most else toward the bottom of the food chain, most of them in the wild are going to die before reaching adulthood, or even full size as larvae.
All of our crickets live pretty full lives. For the mealworms and wax worms, the ones we keep to breed have absolutely bangin' lives: barely any predation or other threats, a nicely regulated environment, very good nutrition, and when they reach maturity they basically get to fuck and lay eggs all day until their bodies give out. The ones that get "harvested" get to reach full larval size in a low-stress environment. Idk what a bug wants but I can tell when nothing is going wrong.
So briefly, bugs' conditions are far better than in the wild, almost as good as they could possibly be, as long as my coworkers and bosses don't make mistakes....
Great! Thanks for answering.
It sounds like the mealworms and wax worms are having a better time than the crickets. Because I'm a giant baby, I'm much more enthusiastic about eating cricket meat than meal worms, so I'm curious about their situation. Is there something about cricket agriculture that should be improved?
(In case it's not clear, all these questions are more about "what if we all eat bug meat" than about your specific workplace.)
I am not concerned about farmed insect welfare the way I am concerned about farmed vertebrate welfare. For one thing, it's dubious as to whether insects have any feelings beyond "something is appealing" and "something is going wrong". For another, mostly due to their size, it's a lot easier to provide an insect with everything it needs to live well. Some larvae are well-accustomed to squirming all over each other while they eat plant matter and fatten up for metamorphosis. Keeping birds and mammals in enclosures 1.5 body lengths long, though, or in barns where they barely have enough room to stand, is fiendish.
Years ago I had my first taste of roasted spiced crickets and cricket cookies. We'd have to become an order of magnitude more efficient to be able to make them a major part of people's diets, though. But I'm not saying it's impossible.
Yeah, I also don't really value insect lives as highly as vertebrates' lives. But I know there are people who think it's abhorrent to draw that distinction. So, for their sake, I think your second point - that it's also just comparatively easy to care for bugs - matters quite a bit.
If we don't have a value system where we appraise things by their degree of consciousness, then the logical conclusion is that nothing should be allowed to predate anything else, and the only beings allowed to exist are autotrophs. And that probably means an end to all cognition unless we turn ourselves into sentient robots.
I could go on, but it would involve turning over some very uncomfortable big-picture thoughts... has this been BMF enough for you?
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I mean, we can acknowledge a broken world and still try to live as best we can. I'm vegan because I know that I'll kill fewer total lives (including plants) as a vegan than a carnist.
That said, I like your argument that the bugs lead better lives on a farm than in the wild, it's an interesting thought to play with
This is getting uncomfortably close to the longtermist discourse.
Bringing the wolves back to Yellowstone... good or bad?
What is longtermism?
Bringing the wolves back to yellowstone is good because it helps the community of animates thrive. Plants, Animals, and waterways and landforms don't suffer less because certain populations are allowed to explode and then collapse like in the absence of apex predators, instead they contend with mass starvation.
The difference is that humans aren't stabilizing environments by raising cattle, they're doing the opposite and contributing to suffering within and without the environments they've created.
I feel differently about grain fed beef where you're raising corn to die for cows and sustainably ranged cattle where you're forcing them to act like deer by moving them from pasture to pasture. That can actually allow for greater diversity in the ecosystems they're ranged in for the same reason that non anthropogenic predation does.
The trouble is, I've seen enough irresponsible ranging in my time as a guide that even the gold standard of ethical meat doesn't meet my standards.
I know that's a hella multilayered argument, and I hope I was clear, but realize i might not have been
Ultra-utilitarian philosophy that largely revolves around the suggestion that we should figure out how to make a reasonably happy sentient life, and then make as many of those lives as possible. Transhumanism meets Quiverfull meets Roko's Basilisk.
https://hexbear.net/post/147971
I agree with you about Yellowstone, I just was wondering how you would deal with the prospect of "less of A means more of B which means less of C which means more of D..." and vice versa.
To clarify, most people would say a long term future full of people having a massively good time is something to aim for, at least in a vague sense.
Longtermists say that having uncountably more people living a life just very very veeeery slightly better than death could be even better as long as you breed enough people for it to make the total amount of pleasure higher.
I'd like to point out many transhumanists, even very radical ones do in fact find this an abhorrent conclusion, and really only Robin Hanson and assorted silicon valley vampires take it seriously...
Once you reach a certain number of people, it becomes harder and harder for them to have a really good time while being fully cognizant beings.
Consider the Tinder effect, where the more people you have access to, the less likely you are to make deep connections with people.
This sentiment often gets taken the wrong way, but I really believe we should limit how many there are of us. Unlike eco-fascists, though, I think we should equitably taper off population growth and then have a fertility rate of 1.6-1.9 until the population shrinks back down to 2 or 3 billion, before bringing it back up to 2.01 (or whatever trajectory might be needed for a transhuman species).
I mean, I'm definitely a utilitarian by impulse, but I also think that you should never take an argument to its absolute conclusion unless you're getting paid to by the academy, and it's enough to say reducing suffering and killing is generally good.
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Our crickets probably have the "better" lives actually. They don't all get to make-a da baybee bugg, but they do get to reach adulthood before being either nommed by a herp or forgotten on a shelf or in a fridge, which is more than 98% of our meal and wax worms can say. An adult female darkling beetle (mealworm) can lay several hundred eggs. So we don't need to route that much of our operation to replenishing our in-house populations.