My biggest concern about bugs as food is the potential for parasites or infection in the stock.
We already have issues detecting some of those in animals larger than us, I don't want to see what kind of maintenance hell it's going to be when a single box contains like 1000 "disposable" crickets. Bad employees surely won't help (if they can treat chickens and cows worse than objects for no reason, imagine bugs).
I also get this feeling that once the industry really kicks in, corners will be cut, farms will boom and sleazy techniques by owners could end up with something as environmentally damaging as beef, even if for different reasons. There's also the risk of break outs. I'm pretty sure a million bugs escaping at once because of some accident won't be an easy fix.
Sure, I know we already do operations at a similar scale with shrimp farming or so, but for aquatic creatures you can kind of control their environment much better by testing the water and such. Something like crickets need an environment that can't be controlled as easily, and I kinda don't see someone going in there to clean up every day and check for molds or fungi that could come into play (and it'd be easily covered by a cluster of bugs feeding on it with the inspector being none the wiser because it's a literal swarm inside)
I can be entirely wrong of course. In fact I'd rather be mistaken here, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it's a baseless concern, even cows have had problems that spread to humans (and at least in my country it's the reason you can't buy bones for soup anymore, just in case), and now that the market is more open you could end up with contaminated product and that bug flour was delivered to 25 countries and used as cheap additive in 450 different products before anyone noticed.
More than anything I'd like to see what people thinks about this. Is it a baseless concern or is it something that could happen?
> Nor are large insect farms producing meat for human consumption.
Isn't this just a matter of adaption? The "insects->chickens->humans" problem seems like a temporary one and not the ultimate fallacy. I would love to eat insects. The few I've tried in Southeast Asia were very tasty.
In Nigeria, when the annual rains brought out hordes of large termites flying into the air, people would knock them down to collect and fry. They tasted ok to me although I felt squeamish. My brother always said they are “like popcorn” and happily munched on them.
I don't get it, why eat insects over something like a cow?
Cows provide fertilizer, provider highly nutritious meat and have the same neglible environmental impact as other wildlife. Essentially the emissions of ruminants on US soil is indistinguishable from the emission of ruminants 200 years ago.
The studies that proved that cows consume huge amounts of water or emit methane were highly flawed, either comparing the usage of naturally occurring water as water consumed, or comparing whole lifecycle of cow emission to tail pipe emission of a car (compare CO2 of all things a person uses in lifetime to another persons CO2 emission of CO2 during their life).
Animal industrial complexes destroy ecosystems. The amount of urine and manure is massive, it's a problem in itself. You can't just dump all that on farms.
> and have the same neglible environmental impact as other wildlife
Wildlife does not reproduce at the unsustainable scale that we force cows to do so. There are some 40k cows in the USA alone¹ (and many more pigs and chickens, which people eat more of).
> The amount of urine and manure is massive, it's a problem in itself. You can't just dump all that on farms.
We make mega-tons of fertilizers, so presumably this urine/manure can displace some of the fertilizer? At most, this is a question of cost/regulation/externality?
> Wildlife does not reproduce at the unsustainable scale that we force cows to do so
Well, yeah, true. But maybe u want to go back in time and tell your parents to have one less child? Let hope we find a balance over the next decades
That doesn't counter what I said. Sure they destroy ecosystems, but only as secondary effects. A field of almonds in a desert will destroy more ecosystems than cows being fed corn or grass.
> Wildlife does not reproduce at the unsustainable scale that we force cows to do so.
Sure it does, it's just the question of keeping wildlife in check via predation. When wolves disappear so do forests, because deer (or other ruminants) run amok.
The way I see it, what US did is convert the biomass of wildlife into the biomass of cows.
Insects contain the most protein in proportion of body weight, their food is whatever low-quality biomass you throw at them, their production doesn't take much space... They are simply more efficient.
Even if for some reason you don't believe that beef has a much worse environmental impact, or don't believe that this matters, I think it's hard to argue against that cows are much more intelligent and much more capable of suffering than insects.
What guarantees do you have that insects don't possess intelligence we aren't able to measure? E.g. how do you know that locust don't have higher cognitive functions. For example bees can count, disbelieve each other and are great spatial navigator.
If empathy were the primary concern, perhaps the working conditions in Foxconn iPhone production lines or violence underpinning the petrodollar might rate higher on the list of concerns.
Perhaps these issues don't offer the same performative opportunities to signal one's virtue. There's also the central planning aspect to consider.
He’s pointing out an unspoken assumption that is incorrect.
Namely, that a creature’s intelligence has any bearing on how they ought be treated.
It obviously doesn’t.
The most intelligent animal of all is routinely enslaved, overworked, and discarded.
Thus, the assumption is not as universally accepted as many posters suggest.
Arguing about the relative intelligence of insects or cows or dogs or horses or whales with the end of concluding by that we ought or ought not eat them is silly. If it tastes good, people will eat it. Likewise, if someone is good at making iPhones or picking cotton, that’s what they’ll be forced to do regardless of their IQ.
Insects can be delicious if cooked correctly (often just toasting them will do the trick).
And as others have stated they are protein rich and pretty efficient to raise. I wouldn't be surprised if within the next 5 to 10 years some insect eating fad breaks out with some popular tic tok'r and suddenly our perception on them starts to flip. Social media might actually redeem itself.
It’s funny you mention that because I personally have sympathy for the “nice” insects like bees and butterflies. I’ve even gone out of my way to help a few bugs for no reason other than I wanted to be kind to them. But that being said I have no issues culling an entire hive of wasps, laying down fire ant poison, and stomping cockroaches. It’s not logically consistent but then again what facet of humanity is?
I'm with you, and for arachnids as well. Spiders always get a free pass in my house because I see them as helping to get rid of flies, etc. That said, I'm conflicted regarding the spiders with very long thin legs that primarily predate the 'good' spiders.
Going a bit on a tangent here as far as the topic of the article, but... It's mind-blowing and depressing to realize that there are apparently millions of Americans who believe that dogs can't feel pain.
The average American who may not care that much is one thing.
But it's even more mind-blowing how many vegetarians believe fish can't feel pain, so while they reject eating pork, beef or chicken because the poor animals suffer, they still find it fine to eat fish.
Those are the informed people! If they don't understand, why should the uninformed ones?
"But it's even more mind-blowing how many vegetarians believe fish can't feel pain, so while they reject eating pork, beef or chicken because the poor animals suffer, they still find it fine to eat fish."
I know this trope, but I have actually never met a vegetarian who think like this.
I know vegetarians who eat fish, because it is further away, from humans, DNA wise. Or in general they just feel fine with eating fish and they do what they feel fine with, which makes sense to me. But I never actually met a person who believe fish (or animals in general) can't feel pain. I met many who are ignorant of pain of others, yes, but I never met one who actually believe that. Is this a US thing?
IMHO if you eat fish youre just not a vegetarian but pascaterian. There are strong roots for this behaviour in the Catholic faith, which prohibits eating non-fish meat on certain days. Funnily enough that doesn't include beavers, platypuses and some other water-dwelling animals [1].
It gets worse. Did you know that most doctors once believed that infants couldn’t feel pain?
“Until as recently as the 1980s, researchers assumed newborns did not have fully developed pain receptors, and believed that any responses babies had to pokes or pricks were merely muscular reactions.” [https://time.com/3827167/this-is-a-babys-brain-on-pain/]
As a result, doctors would perform surgeries without anesthesia on newborns. This is absolutely mind boggling.
A person in my neighborhood experimented for years with several different insects and food waste products. His conclusion was that it was not viable because there is no reliable stream of food waste in The Netherlands. Everything that is edible or valuable already has a purpose. It would be viable if the insects themselves were the end product, put the market for whole insects is negligible. Right now the insects are mostly an ingredient that competes with existing proteins.
All animals we eat eat plants. If you want to reduce "plant suffering", then we can optimize our diets to require less plants. And the diet that requires less plants is... a plant based diet. Big animals are a very inefficient way at creating nutrition.
Ooh, so it's not only about killing but overall suffering. Because they do kill the bugs but animals don't generally eat the whole plant, only part of it. The plant still survives.
The argument still holds: a vegetarian diet requires way less plants (and thus killing of small animans) because an intermediary is eliminated. Cattle and other animals are good at converting low-grade plant food and leftovers into meat (and milk). But it's more efficient to use insects for that, or to just grow the high-grade plants already.
Yeah, I get that. I was only commenting on the fact that arguments about whether plants feel pain is moot while producing them on the quantities required kills animals which we can all reasonably agree do feel pain.
Is a false problem. This is not about quantity, is about quality.
There are 50-100 species of wild flowers in a meadow and probably other 500 species of invertebrates. In a soy field they is one plant, zero insects and some chemicals, therefore is a worse (not better, worse) option in terms of sustainability or ecology.
Both farming and agriculture can be bad or good. The dichotomy agriculture=good / farming=bad is a ideological construction and a nonsense.
Depends on how narrow your definition of "pain" is.
Take a plant and put a sharp needle into its growth path. Many plats will avoid it and adjust their growth path, once they got into contact. Just like a human, a dog or a fish. The time scale is different, the effect is the same. It's a sensation that leads to avoidance of a certain negative stimulus.
So, we are regressing to food patterns of primitive civilizations and the newspaper propaganda industry hails it as something noble (not this article, but many others).
Somehow words seem to be sufficient to get people to do anything.
> The primary argument for insect farming is environmental: promoters argue that insects have a smaller resource and carbon footprint than other animals raised for meat.
Insects aren't made of meat, they're mostly chitin and lymph. They don't have muscles or blood vessels, turning them into "meat" is not really possible.
"Edible insects contain high quality protein, vitamins and amino acids for humans. Insects have a high food conversion rate, e.g. crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and twice less than pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein. Besides, they emit less greenhouse gases and ammonia than conventional livestock."
I'm astounded that pigs and chickens are that efficient compared to crickets. I was thinking efficiency and body mass would have a close-to-linear negative correlation.
They most certainly do. [1] We could argue about whether the hydraulic structures of the wing count as "blood vessels" - probably not for this purpose, inasmuch as they do not really circulate - but muscles, absolutely.
I mean, yes, insects are arthropods, and there are a few of those (such as salticids, which anyway are arachnids and not insects) who use hydraulic pressure to power some movements. But even for them, that's a special case; mostly they use muscles to move, just like we do, albeit with a very different style of scaffolding.
And, just generally - have you never eaten crab or lobster? What did you imagine you were eating then, if not muscle? Why assume other arthropods would not be constructed in a fashion generally similar to those?
> have you never eaten crab or lobster? What did you imagine you were eating then, if not muscle? Why assume other arthropods would not be constructed in a fashion generally similar to those?
While you are ultimately right, it should be noted that the arthropods are a huge category of animals, and humans are much closer to fish (taxonomically) than insects are to crabs. In fact, insects and crabs are as close as we are to Tunicates [0]: the same phylum, Chordata for us or Arthropoda for them, but different Subphylums (Vertebrata vs Tunicata for us, Insecta vs Crustacea for them).
However, essentially all animals have muscles, from the simplest worms up. Sponges and a few other extremely simplistic animals do lack these, but they are minority exceptions.
If there was a bug big enough that you can remove the shell like a shrimp, that'd be nice. I hate the little bits you end up with between your teeth when it's the whole bug roasted or such.
I don't understand the focus on "meat". Most people looking for meat substitutes will get disappointed because the substitutes can't help but taste differently. Which is fine for me as long as the taste is still good.
At this price I can justify buying them as a high calorie snack for long distance hikes/cycles, but not for day to day usage.
The same product at 7 £/kg would become a lot more attractive as a daily food.