On a personal level: are you down for it?
On a social level: should we push it for environmental reasons?
Bugs are animals too and I think it would be cool if we didn't kill them unnecessarily. Plants have protein too.
The thing is it doesn't even make sense from a resource use perspective.
Like any farmed animal, you need to farm many multiples of the energy you'll get from them in the form of plant feed. Might as well just grow plants in the first place and eat those.
In theory you could feed them garbage, but guess what we don't have a way to make garbage-feeding insects food safe.
The thing is it doesn’t even make sense from a resource use perspective.
It absolutely does. If I grow vegetable protein every season the soil loses its nutrients. So I throw on a forage crop that lets the soil regain nutrients. While I can't eat it, my farmed insects can. Then I can eat the insects, thus indirectly eating the forage crop while keeping the soil fertile.
The other option is just throw the forage crop away or alternatively just use extra fertilizer which has its own environmental downsides.
If you got rid of animal agriculture you'd have so much land you'd never have to dick around with insects
Oh shit, I didn't realize that all land has the exact same fertility. The principle model of animal agriculture for the past 100 years has been to put the location on farmland that isn't productive anymore.
You're giving up land filled with lake sized puddles of toxic hog shit and you expect to grow beans there?
Is it a productive use of anyone's time to argue with someone who thinks that there is a single principal model of animal agriculture that has existed for a hundred years in the US, let alone across the world? No, it is not.
For others reading this, I am disengaging from this particularly rubbish line of argument because it suggests that - despite a huge percentage of land for feed crops being freed up - we would somehow be restricted to the comparatively tiny pig factory waste pools
This. We can't just lay out in the sun and photosynthesize. We've got to kill stuff that can process more basic forms of energy and nutrients and eat them.
Nutrition isn't just calories. Insects have B12 and might be useful for other nutrients that are harder to get from plants.
You can make all the B12 you could ever need in a vat (which currently happens for everything that's fortified with B12)
I don't think they are able to feel in the manner that even less intelligent lizards probably can.
If insects are off the table then so are fruits and vegetables tbh. Mushrooms are extremely complex organisms that rival lower-level animals but no one cares if you eat those.
After you get to fish, the entire argument for not eating certain animals just falls apart. Let alone things like insects.
I think you are saying that insects and plants are morally equivalent, though?
That evidence you're citing is a popsci blog that grasses respond to predation of other grasses? Fuck me dead
For the record, I don't really care about the moral impact of doing the animal agriculture holocaust to insects, but I do care about people with absolutely no qualification or ability to read a couple journal articles via sci-hub making ridiculous claims, like I think you did earlier in this thread comparing mushrooms to fish.
Grass does not feel pain dummy
Cant believe this nonsense gets propagated on hexbear.net
The distinction between plants and animals does seem more and more arbitrary as we learn more about how plants interact with the world. Like I'm willing to entertain arguments that some plants are capable of communication and problem solving but do it in a way that is so alien to us, and on a much slower time scale, so we don't recognize any kinship with them.
Well, I suppose like all things it is a topic of debate. Fish intelligence is still very contested afaik, since it's difficult to evaluate the intelligence of organisms who sense and interact with the world in such a different way from us. Honestly I think cephalopod research has only gotten as far as it has because manual dexterity and color are some of the easiest things for humans to understand. For a fish that doesn't have prehensile appendages and doesn't interact with color in an obviously complex way? It's hard to think of where to start.
then so are fruits and vegetables tbh.
Most fruits literally are designed to be eaten as a part of the plant's life cycle.
If you're going to make this argument, at least do what the Jains do and make a distinction between plant foods that you can eat without killing the plant, and ones for which you cannot.
god i cant fucking stand carnists. the mental gymnastics surely must be as exhausting for you as they are for normal people?
Most people already eat prawns and lobster.
On the other hand, my stick insects are friends not food.
Entomophagy is not new to the human diet, although it's new to a lot of people. Grasshoppers and other insects are eaten in Mexico, I've seen canned silkworm pupae in East Asian grocery stores in America, there are edible insect vending machines in Japan, and some museum gift stores in the US sell candy with insects in them as a novelty. Personally, I have never eaten them and don't intend to since I don't eat animals (I just indirectly kill them; vegetarian moment). There's a recent push by neoliberals to get white people to eat bugs, causing a lot of anxiety along the lines of "you will eat bugs and sleep in the pod", right? In the EU, they've even started approving putting insect powder in foods to fortify them.
I guess I lean against it. We should be moving away from eating animals and not just for sustainability sake. Are they even especially good at producing protein? And even if we can grow insects where we can't grow soybean, why not just grow single-celled protein? Then there's the fact that people are squeamish about bugs so instead companies are just turning them into protein powders to put into food. So soon vegetarians and vegans may have to worry about insect powder being in things that don't need them in addition to all the other pervasive ingredients (whey, bonito, oyster sauce, animal-derived monoglycerides, eggs etc.). And they will use lesser-known names to trick people into eating it.
In summary, just grow mycoprotein and yeast folks. :tofu-cool:
Are they even especially good at producing protein?
Oh yeah, I mean, I can get a pound of meat a day out of a bucket filled with Black Soldier Fly larvae. Think how much more compact that is than if I were farming cattle.
Yeah I figured they would be better than traditional meat sources of protein. But what about compared to high-protein plants, mycoprotein farming, or engineered yeasts and bacteria? Oh and also do chitin or other things interfere at all?
They're considerably better than other animals, but fungi and bacteria are just phenomenal, and we've only been doing those for a few decades
It would be kinda cool if long-term insect farming meant we developed some type of large goofy domesticated insect that I could keep as a pet, like the bug equivalent of a chicken
Personally, I would regard such an individual with deep suspicion. I have just petted my cat: "And how is this good little cat beast?" Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on his underbelly? "And here is my good big centipede!" If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
What the hell Burroughs just let me enjoy my little beetle. I'd call him the clickster.
Mister Clicks maybe.
edit: British voice my ickle clickles
The physical size of insects is largely based on the environment, but we might return to some giant insects depending on how we do with climate change
Plenty of people eat bugs and like it so it’s clearly just a hangup. Few times I’ve tried it it’s been good, chapulines or whatever.
As far as societal pushes go it’s definitely better than meat but there’s really no need to eat meat anyway so it’s probably more productive to push veganism, and you’re probably more likely to get people to abandon meat for seitan than for roach flour or we
I think it's an untapped resource for mutual aid orgs and should probably go hand in hand with things like community gardens. But yeah, long term we should probably be moving away from killing living beings for food. I'm operating under the assumption that community gardens aren't gonna be able to provide enough of an alternative food source to people given how much of the population are living in urban areas and bug raising can be done distributed and in spaces where gardening can't be done. In my mind, if we're ever gonna pull of mass strikes this would probably be the sort of infrastructure we'd have to think about.
Plants are living beings too, and there's hardly evidence that they think less than less-intelligent insects (zero in both cases).
There is significant evidence that insects have something analogous to pain in vertebrates, and the same cannot be said for plants
What is even the point of your comment? People who eat meat throw up as a fucking bazinga as though insects and animals eating plants and then being eaten is somehow less efficient than humans going straight to the plants (or via bacteria)
I agree, but when making assertions about facts of the world or moral systems, your statements become open to debate.
The point of this thread was to discuss eating bugs. I don't disagree with your message but it's hardly applicable.
I've had grasshoppers, crickets, and mealworms. They basically are all texture with no taste so they can be flavored pretty easily like Doritos.
I don't see myself eating them because I don't snack and they seem to be more of a snack food, at least in the US.
I'm not really a fan of eating bugs, I'd rather eat beans but I can recognise some cultures quite like a bug or two.
On a broader level, absolutely not. Industrial agriculture has not been good for the planet and we're already on track to wipe out a huge number of insect species over the next few decades so there's no need to push that harder through insect farming monoculture.
many groups of people eat insects, so it's not a bid deal. I've grown up in the West so I've not eaten insects (knowingly), but if I were to visit places where it is common, I would eat'em.
Maybe not insects, but I'd venture most people have at least tried prawns.
As a bug farmer...
Yes, I have eaten the bugs.
There is a modest niche for feeding agricultural byproducts to farmed insects. But as I've said before, if you're trying to meet global human nutritional needs, you'll want to not be going too high up the trophic ladder. And I think fungi are better at metabolizing ag byproducts anyway.
It seems fine. I've done it a few times.
Is probably better for the planet than beef, which people keep eating.
