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.
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.
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.
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)