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Future Astronauts May Survive On Eating Silkworms
sciencehabit writes "Science reports that silkworms may be an ideal food source for future space missions. They breed quickly, require little space and water, and generate smaller amounts of excrement than poultry or fish. They also contain twice as many essential amino acids as pork does and four times as much as eggs and milk. Even the insect's inedible silk, which makes up 50% of the weight of the dry cocoon, could provide nutrients: The material can be rendered edible through chemical processing and can be mixed with fruit juice, sugar, and food coloring to produce jam."
Now we just have to solve this space radiation issue and how to shield astronauts from it.
Do you D?
so what do they taste like??
can we make them taste like bacon?
If you can find a way to properly polymerise their silk, you could even make plastic knives and forks (or better, a spork) out of their silk to eat them with.
Breed larger silkworks and you could even use them to make the plates to eat them from! BONUS!
They started drinking their own pee, and now they're gonna eat silkworms? No wonder why kids don't dream of becoming astronauts anymore, this thing is more awful than Survivor!
You just got troll'd!
"What's for dinner tonight, Dave?"
"Oh, I don't know, Frank, how about... MORE FU(#1NG WORMS!?"
"Just calm down and pass the worm jam."
Silkworms. Aaaaggghhh...
Sig this!
Fear Factor: Astronaut Edition
Yuri, I'm cold, can you go crap me out a nice sweater?
Conservative, mod down for violating
Now Hershey's can spin this nasty incident as test marketing of their new Space Brownies!
~Philly
Why bother with silkworms and such stupid things, when soilent green is availble, eh?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And if you get really bored in your new space habitat, you can make sexy underwear to keep your colony's population rising. :)
meh
"Oh, they are very tasty, tender baby vorms cooked in holy corn oil, that is oil from the corns of holy men, or as it is known your country, poly-unsaturated ghee."
Excerpts from TFA.
TFA:
"Each astronaut would need to consume 170 silkworm pupae and cocoons a day to fulfill their animal protein needs."
Article:
The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of Bombyx mori, the domesticated silkmoth. ... In Korea they are boiled and seasoned to make a popular snack food known as beondegi. In China street vendors sell roasted silkworm pupae.
Seen 'em all over the place in Korea from street carts. They always have this particular insect trifecta: Silk Worms, Crickets, and freshwater Snails:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Real astronauts drink Tang.
Do we really need to waste precious cargo space and weight to bring up food coloring? I suppose astronauts might want green or purple catchup too.
Benchilada eats silkworm pupae live on video, So You Don't Have To. (not mentioned in the video is the fact that his friend, helping him, started throwing up convulsively soon after they finished filming the episode.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Real astronauts eat'tang.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Astronaut 1, "But where in my contact does it say that I have to eat the same food for breakfast everyday for three years?"
Astronaut 2,"Paragraph 47, subsection 19, cause 9a. You can find it in the index under S.U.A.E.I."
Astronaut 1,"S.U.A.E.I.?"
Astronaut 2,"Shut up and eat it."
Apologies to Babylon 5.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Even better is the Spnife: round enough to hold soup, but sharp enough to slice your mouth.
so what do they taste like?? can we make them taste like bacon?
Last year I was in Korea where the streets are lined with vendors frying up silkworm pupae on the street as an, *ahem*, delicacy. The smell wafting down the road can only be described as a cross between death and pus. I would eat my fellow astronauts over silkworms.
The big issue with space missions in mass. Silk worms aren't going to magically create silk worm meat (or whatever you call it) from nothing - for ever 1 kg of silk worm that you grow to eat, you will have to bring along at least 1 kg of silkworm food. So why not just bring human-edible food instead of silk worm food?
SLURM! (SiLk wURM)
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
Given that it costs more to raise an animal on vegetable feed than you gain by eating it, why not just eat the food that they're feeding the silkworms ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So the next generation of astronauts will be able to weave their own Vera Wang spacesuits? Sign me up!
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
This should be great for their fledgling space program and will prove they're committed to a peaceful future. They have vast quantities of old Silkworms laying around ready to be made into food. Gives a whole new meaning to the term explosive diarrhea though.
"Make dinner, not war" is what I always say.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I guess I took it for granted that 170 silkworms would be easier to raise than 170 chickens.
I can see the B movie now....
A group of humans heads off to some far off planet out of our solar system. Earth loses contact. Hundreds of years later we finally head out to the planet only to find spider people who think we are their gods.
Perhaps those spider people are those from Verner Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky.
+fragbait
Nobody likes me
Everybody hates me
Going into space to eat worms!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
...I'm fairly confident that insects are going to become a staple food source here in the next few decades. We need only break out a calculator and read a few books on agriculture to understand that it's much more cost effective to raise mealworms on grain than it is cattle. The return on grain-to-protein from mealworms vs. cattle is staggering. I've seen data that suggests as much as 5-to-1.
I've seen individuals take and grind mealworms up into patties with various spices. They make delicious burgers. There are many other options with insects. Stir frys, soups, etc. The best part of all is that ANYONE can raise them in a clean, sterile environment for very little in the way of captial.
With the economy in the state that it's in, I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising young businessperson doesn't try to get a company off the ground here in the US in the next couple of years to produce insects en masse for American consumption.
Trust me, naysayers, insects are delicious. You just need to get over your media-engrained, cultural and psychological bias.
Good one.
Just wanna point out that we had always been eating insect parts in jams, canned fruits, and other products, without being aware.
That said ... EEEEWWWW!! Over my dead body!
The romance of space travel just went down in flames.
it's much more cost effective to raise mealworms on grain than cattle.
Simple solution: eat the cattle, rather than feeding them to the mealworms.
ANYONE can raise them in a clean, sterile environment for very little in the way of captial
I dunno. To me, "clean, sterile environment" means "no bugs."
Scratch astronaut off my list of things I want to be when I grow up. That leaves only cowboy or truck driver.
I'm not doing any Mars excursion after filling up on a big bowl of silkworms. Stop cheaping out, put a freeze unit in the space ship and gimme a few cow carcasses.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
My bearded dragon eats these things...we even have a small colony of silks that we raise. Mulberry (which is what you feed them) is actually kinda hard to get some seasons though it does come in a green brick mulch form, I personally wouldn't want to eat silks, as I've seen the beardie eat them live and its damn right icky. Personally I'd rather eat tofu...
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Are these human or klingon astronauts we are talking about?
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
Anybody that's walked past a bondegi cart in South Korea knows this won't work - the astronauts would open an airlock just to get away from the rancid stench of these things. They are seriously nasty smelling!
But if you really want to try them, you can sometimes find them in a can in Korean markets in the US.
Reminds me of this funny blog.
http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000398.php
I'll happily (well maybe not at first...) eat insects ground up and made into something that tastes good. I just dont want to much them raw, the same way I dont want to run into a field and take a bite out the backside of that cow over there...
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Peanut butter and silkworm sandwiches!
I think I'll stay with grape.
Spend those years in space fruitfully and learn new arts and crafts, while you have your tasty snack. Make yourself some nice silk underwear, shirts and payamas for the really hot days on Venus. Or light up that dreary spaceship with home made furnishings: "Silk's elegant, soft luster and beautiful drape makes it perfect for many furnishing applications. It is used for upholstery, wall coverings, window treatments (if blended with another fiber), rugs, bedding and wall hangings". (Quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk)
Is this some sort of dis-incentive to astronaut service?
.. because everybody loves a good curry, it will hide the taste (but not the texture)...
hmmmmmmm!
because jam tastes much better when it's colored!
Regarding my application for the astronaut program:
Nevermind!
okthanksbye
dont know the details for sure but cant slashdot mods delete irrelevant junk like this? I was reading a pretty old article yesterday and this same junk is still there in the comments.
Pretty sure no message has ever been deleted off of /. they've had requests from microsoft to do so in past which were summarily ignored. If you change your browse settings you don't have to see posts rated -1 making all the junk posts invisible.
If the worms run out of food, will the astronauts refuse to eat them? Or is this not even about consumption, rather their beds will be made of eating silkworms (and what are the worms eating?)?
Oh. Thanks a lot. Thats helpful cos usually only the most useless spammy posts are -1's. thanks again
On the flip side though, they probably can get girlfriends.
So I wouldn't rule chickens out completely. Think how quickly you can get around a big space station using a chicken for propulsion! Not to mention the chickens are sure to be happy about their new-found flight capability. And if I know anything about poultry it's that a happy chicken is a tasty chicken.
-- The reader anything less than completely failing to not misunderstand this sig is cursed.
A Navy friend of mine worked on a Sub for many years. He always thought it was ironic that for a mission that required stealth they always seemed to have some of the loudest food you could find. Even MREs are edible, normal food.
Nothing in the exploration of space requires such nonsense self-depravation and oddities that keep getting leaked. I swear this is just a poly for more money.
Flour Torillas and refried beans is a remarkable compact food with spreadable cheese (think like butter) is easy to make. Even in zero G. Microwave it and you are good to go. The ideal of using silk worms is laughable when canned pastes and flat breads store very densely.
Here is a great "at home" experiment. Make a PBJ upside down. Doable with jelly in a squeeze bottle.
I mean seriously this is the most idiotic thing I have heard.
Can of refried beans is a more dense food source.
Suppliments can handle any short comings in the food supply.
How about:
Peanutbutter
Refried Beans
Tuna
beef jerky
whole grain frozen bagels
squeezy cheese
triscuits
Pringles
etc...
All of those can be packed\frozen\thawed with little trouble in dense formats.
Hell I know body builders that live on nothing but hard boiled eggs, whole grain bagels with peanut butter, diced chicken, milk, and tuna fish. 7 days a week. Years on end (excluding unusual meals on dates, holidays, etc.)
Chicken meat can be processed much like Spam and con be stored in a very compact space. Taking a cue from Tuna packaging you can use lightweight, vaccum sealed mylar bags to store the food. I have not tried freezing a hard boiled egg and thawing one to eat but bagels and even peanut butter seem to survive the freezer ok.
The key is density and as usual all things can be measured against SPAM for food density... :)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Plus silk worms go down smooth.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
Relying on a miniature ecosystem for my survival would scare the hell out of me. Rockets I can trust for the most part. But wouldn't it suck to find out that you carried in some bacteria or fungi that caused a collapse of your ecosystem just after you left Earth's gravity well?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
What, no spice?
Seems ideal... What other food makes its own napkin? --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
recycling anyone? I doubt these silkworms produce nutrients out of sunlight, so I guess they must eat crap. St pattys day taught me a little food coloring can make a round trip (at least the green stuff.) Choose one color, it exits the same color, the worms web becomes colored the next trip, qty of coloring needed is reduced...
Mission Commander: Andrew Zimmern.
Any other volunteers?
Anybody?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I try to avoid ingesting "soil".
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Looks like some people are preparing for the Greater Depression ahead of the curve.
Among the joys of the coming economic collapse: American people eating grubs in milk instead of cornflakes.
It has happened. Apparently Co$ scares even our CmdrTaco overlords...
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/16/1256226
NASA has replaced TANG with Slurm!
I guess Chris Moriarty's novel "Spin Control", where a good deal of the biomass for a long-term space mission was silkworms, was ahead of the curve.
Steve over at The Sneeze posted his experience eating silkworms. I can't say they look overly appetizing.
"Buzz, you pig! Now I'll never have my designer sweater in time for the Mars landing. It'll be all over fricken TV.
Table-ized A.I.
I actually tried some of this while in Korea. Really it was the dried cocoon, I'm pretty sure. Not bad - kind of tasted bland, but had the texture of a chip.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Why not come up with something along the lines of soy protein. Something you can grow that is renewable that can easily be molded and flavored into a food that people not from China or Korea are likely to find palatable.
Oh...that's right....the public still doesn't know that we already have stargates and FTLS antigravity craft. The black-Op projects of the military industrial complex are so cool with their secrecy and hidden agendas...and they fool people into thinking about propaganda like this stupid silkworm story.
Boy, this makes me want to sign up right now to go on a long-term mission. No sex, eating silkworms, yeah this sounds like fun to me.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
The mulberry trees around here grow 40 feet tall. How will they fit one of those in a space ship?
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another
Gross is indeed relative. Somewhere in the world somebody is going to be freaked out what you consider lovely and normal and natural.
A girl I knew quite put me off eggs for a while after describing them as "chickens' periods" and somebody else said they found cheese a bit hard to eat when you consider it as congealed, old, mouldy animal milk. As for what goes into sausages and burgers and meat paste?
As for meat, a friend of mine worked in a factory and told me about the machines they used and how they really get every last bit of animal product off a carcass and out of the skulls...
You forgot the final two steps... - ??? - Profit!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
and for that, you get rated a 0
I was Seoul last year and I had a soup that was made with silk worms. I swear they tasted exactly like a potato skins after they've been baked
Time for the Human League to release a megamix of "Being Boiled" and "The Dignity of Labour"
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
mmmmm..... silk worms.....
"Even the insect's inedible silk, which makes up 50% of the weight of the dry cocoon, could provide nutrients: The material can be rendered edible through chemical processing and can be mixed with fruit juice, sugar, and food coloring to produce jam."
This sounds a lot like "The material can be rendered edible through chemical processing and then mixing it with jam to produce jam.
Shouldn't silkworms be called "space kittens"? Somehow, I don't think that any vegan astronauts were involve in this study - they never are.
NEVER eat the dentic!
=P
No mulberry trees, no silkworms.
That insects (like ants for example) are much healthier than meat is old news. That they don't crap as much is even older news. But why silk worms? The silk needs to be processed to become edible. Why not other worms?
If you are going to do truly long duration flights (where you have to grow your own food) you also have to worry about replacing things, like clothes, o-rings, cables, etc. If you could bioengineer silkworms to provide some of this (well, of course the clothes might as well be silk, so you may be done there), then you would really help make long-duration flight sustainable.
http://xkcd.com/419/
Because human guts cannot process cellulose?
I'm sorry to break your vegan delusions, go eat some silkworm before the last of your functioning neurons shuts down from hypoglycemia.
As the first actual space cowboy I will be the first person to start an underground cattle ranch on mars. They will eat the silk worm jam and then I will eat the cow. My cow poop will also produce methane for power and bone/hide for making furniture and other essentials. Sometimes the most inefficient food can be the best. Besides, how much more inefficient is a cow than a person. Plus they will eat silk worms and like them while I get to eat my tastey beef!
That would probably be more interesting if it isn't a piece of news that has been posted almost 8 years ago...though well, anyways, let's use the opportunity and speak some truth: the Co$ sucks.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
We look to the menues of third world countries?
Xaotik Designs
Eggs don't come out of the butt. Eggs come out of the vagina. Only excrement comes out of the butt.
Or did you mean "butt" generically as any orifice in that general region?
Seems to me that if they really do not care what they eat, that pure chemosynthesis would be the way to go. There is hardly a single molecule that cannot be created inorganically now. The few that are left can be provided a enough pills to last a decades, so why bother with living food? For that matter, if you want to eat living things, why not just engineer algae to have the needed nutrients. Were talking a very few extra genes. That gives you double the bang for the buck. Food and Air.
We will now be eating the worms instead of the worms eating us.
I've raised silkworms in captivity (as lizard food) and you really need to be anal about it. They are very easily killed by contamination of their living environment, so the paste that you make from the powered mulberry leaves must be changed constantly. Their waste, which would normally drop off the bush they inhabit needs to fall away from ther eating area, so it's common to raise them on a layer eighth or quarter inch wire mesh ("hardware cloth") so that the waste falls away. They create a lot of waste too. Luckily it's tiny dry pellets and doesn't smell bad.
One mistake though and you can end up with a lot of dead silkworms.
Once you've eaten some and set the rest aside to pupate they'll spin the cocoons and around 3 weeks later the moths will appear. I've never seen one fly (or even attempt to) so I don't know if it's been bred out of them by domestication. They're surprisingly cute.
Once they lay the eggs you collect them, and keep them in a fridge for at least a month. This prepares the eggs for hatching, and then you can incubate them at around room temperature.
At any stage they're pretty easy to kill off, so hopefully the astronauts would have multiple generations in "refridgeration stasis" for recovery of the food suppy.
Also, as far as I know they only eat mulberry leaves, so it's either grow those in space or take a lot of powder up with you.
Really? I would think earthworms would be more appropriate! :)
sri
With zero G etc it will be very hard to farm silkworm food. Algae is a lot easier to groaw and is more efficient and contains a huge amount of protein etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Wasn't meant to be interesting. Was meant to back up my assertion that the post I was replying to was mistaken: messages HAVE been pulled of slashdot in the past.
I'm a vegetarian , you insensitive clod!
they only have to grow mulberry trees aboard.
Worms move around. This requires energy.
conservation of energy anyone? thermodynamics?
If the worm food to people food conversion you people are talking about is accurate then physics and biology are wrong and world hunger has been solved.