Public service announcement from the vegan community: Cutting out meat doesn't mean you have to eat bugs, or any other gross animal byproducts. Plants are plenty nutritious.

Hypothetically, would this still be the case if eating bugs was better on environmental and animal welfare/displacement metrics over plant agriculture, and those considerations were motivations for someone being vegan?

That really needs rebranding. We already eat plenty but of insects… we just call em things like crustaceans, shrimp, and crayfish.

I also had this thought once, but then looked it up, and found that it is completely wrong. It's basically like saying "we already eat plenty of fish... We just call em things like beef, pork, and bird meat".

Except that fish are much more closely related to mammals than crustaceans are to insects (same phylum, different class). Here is an example of an animal that is as closely related to a cow as a grasshopper is to a lobster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salp

Edit: Even more, dietary preferences tend to focus on a single species. Plenty of people eat chicken but not turkey, or eat pork but not boar. There are even people who eat lamb but not adult sheep. And no one eats wolf or eagle meat. To then come and say "hey, you already eat one arthropod, why not another" is pretty absurd.

I'm not at all against eating insects, I'm just pointing out that the fact we eat shrimp has 0 to do with it.

Not true as of about 10 years ago. The taxonomy changed.

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

That's still at best relating insects and crustaceans at the level of (most) fish and mammals. I'm also unclear on where this pancrustacea clade comes in, as most Wikipedia articles for specific species don't even list the clade, just the phylum and class - and fish are still the same class as mammals, while insects and shellfish are not.

Either way, while we eat some mammals and birds, we still don't eat the vast majority of mammals or birds, and we barely eat any reptiles or amphibians or fish.

“ As of 2010, the Pancrustacea taxon is considered well accepted, with most studies recovering Hexapoda within Crustacea.”

Hexapoda are all of the insects.

We also eat plenty of other bugs and insects which just get into the way of processing plants ;=)

(crustaceans are a good example as traces of them tend to get included into algal based food, but less pleasant sounding examples are e.g. from time to time small worms being in fruited pressed for juice, sound terrible but isn't really that terrible and impossible to avoid without using pesticides which are worse then that by far)

Snowpiercer vibes

Clearly there are at least two readers who've never seen the movie, and the scene when they discover the source of the protein bars.