Eating the bugs?
Eating the bugs?
Honestly I haven't tried it but I wouldn't mind certain things containing bug parts (on purpose) to make up for protein in them. And honestly that crunch sounds quite good.
26 comments
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It has one of the same inherent inefficiencies as animal meat: they need to eat something to grow. Therefore we need to use a lot of resources to produce a lot of food for them to eat, before we can eat them.
It always seems much more efficient to use those resources to grow food for us to eat directly. Also, getting Americans to eat a vegetable is slightly easier than getting them to eat a bug.
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I think the "magic" of bugs is that they can eat things that would be inedible or unhealthy for other omnivores (like pigs). If we can convert some of our food and paper waste into protein and chitin, it might be worth the investment.
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This only works for small farms but regular animals already fill that spot there too. Chicken and pigs are mainly fed kitchen scraps in these settings. The issue is once you go into large-scale commercial farming it becomes way too inefficient to use waste products and buying feed is more economical viable. Doesn't matter if it's insects or mammals or.
A lot of animal feed is already made up of a lot of "food waste". Rice bran, maize and wheat offal, fish meal, and bone meal, all of that are byproducts of food for human consumption and commonly found in animal feed. You can even find some that have things like sawdust or other wood products inside. There are even studies into using waste paper for cattle. And while this might sound wrong, it doesn't harm the animal. But the issue is, humans don't want to eat something that ate something we don't like. And I don't see that changing with insects either.
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Bugs are always a trophic level above plants. It's always more efficient to 'cut out the middle man' and eat plants instead.
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Might be a convenient talking point, but imho plant-based should definitely be the priority.
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I think this is a good alternative on paper, but aren't we in the sixth mass extinction and isn't the insect phyla the largest at risk?
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Tried mealworm, crickets and a few others.
Pretty terrible tastewise imo, not worth it past the novelty stage.
I don't really see the point honestly, I'd rather we stabilize our population rather than find ways to accommodate exponential growth a bit longer. We're hitting that wall eventually.
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God. Fucking carnis will eat anything other than plants. Like you can just eat plants and survive and thrive you know? Your "food" doesn't have to be sentient and be able to feel pain.
Seriously if you aren't vegan you aren't an environmentalist, your just a hypocrite.
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Remember to stay kind. Encouraging people to make small steps results in more positive change than caustic judgement.
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And this is the kind of behaviour I'd hoped people on lemmy would not continue on the solarpunk community
You've just continued the same kind of stuff that alienated a whole lot of users from r/solarpunk because they felt they couldn't participate without being attacked for their food choices
What's next, brigading posts with mass downvoting like you did on reddit to sway the visibility of comments in bad faith
If you can't interact nicely with other users than maybe you shouldn't be here
Solarpunk is not vеgаnism and while I don't mind if you personally participate in vеgаnism it doesn't give you the right to attack users here who don't participate in it and gatekeep any activity on this subreddit
Solarpunk has no inherent ties to veganism and vеgаnism doesn't have any ties to solarpunk
The mods previously back on reddit have said this subreddit is not r/vеgаn
Source: ___ ^^https://libreddit.nl/r/solarpunk/comments/tzoiqs/community_update_the_fine_arts_04_2022/
Be kind, and get along with your fellow humans nicely
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I was vegan for many years, people like you aren't the reason I stopped but I definitely don't miss the weird aggression either. (btw farming plants still kills A LOT of bugs, usually in more cruel and prolonged ways than slaughtering them for food)
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Yes it does.... But feeding the crops to animals just to eat the animals still consumes just as many crops as well as the animal who ate them.
It's more efficient to just eat the crops the other animals eat.
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I raise my own crickets on the farm and grow my own vegetables. It's basically a closed system, I compost everything. I add additional nutrients using seaweed.
How far do your plants have to travel to get to your plate? Last time I checked so-called modern farming uses a lot of petrochemicals. Organic farming isn't any better--they use so much plastic to block weeds and pests.
Also, most plant material I grow is not edible by humans. I cannot eat corn stalks. Maybe you can. It seems wasteful to compost all this biomass as there is still so much nutrition left over.
Sounds to me like your carbon footprint is higher than mine. Maybe you should try to create a farming system yourself. One that yields 100% of the daily nutrition humans require. It is not so easy.
I am glad you are vegan. Much better than eating cows. They drink too much water.
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You just made up a strawman and assumed a bunch of stuff about me.
Growing animals from food you can eat will always take more energy than just eating the plants yourself. Or if you can't eat it then growing plants you can eat that have protein instead of getting your protein from a sentient animal that again FEELS PAIN.
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26 comments