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Scientists Advocate Replacing Cattle With Insects
rhettb writes "Scientists in the Netherlands have discovered that insects produce significantly less greenhouse gas per kilogram of meat than cattle or pigs. Their study, published in the online journal PLoS, suggests that a move towards insect farming could result in a more sustainable — and affordable — form of meat production."
Would they be more allergenic though?
I know more people who are allergic to arthropods than who are allergic to beef/chicken/pork.
Not sure why this is so- maybe it's the exposure to dust mites?
I've also heard it suggested that ostrich would be a pretty sustainable replacement.
A much bigger problem is the efficiency of food production: to produce one kg of meat you need many kgs of other foods. And while some of those foods may be inedible to humans (e.g. grass), cattle is also fed other foods that are grown specifically for them. Instead of growing cattle food, that same land could be used to grow human food, with a much better overall return.
If you're looking at plain food production per hectare (or even per farmer's effort) then meat is very inefficient. Crops that are human edible are much more efficient.
And for the greenhouse effect: the temperature increase is only a few degrees. Quite small differences, with potentially large impact. When you'd think of a similar but opposite effect it's not that crops start to freeze where it wasn't freezing before - the effect is much more subtle. It's more that winters start to last longer, or in case of global warming, that winters become shorter.
Countdown to breeding larger insects for human consumption starts in ...
With the meat being so far outside what's usually considered food ...so far outside of what YOU consider food. There are plenty of people around the world who enjoy insects.
Tastes are entirely cultural: the French enjoy snails, Swedes enjoy rotten fish meat... You may or may not like insects, but they're perfectly valid sources of food.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
According to this guy on TED, you eat lots of insects with processed foods already.
It is only because you have been brain-washed by the rightwing media that you believe otherwise.
I will use that as my signature from now on, ok?
Instead of coming up with moronic stuff of this kind, hoping that people will start eating insects, start a vegetarian movement. At least that has some chances of getting implemented.
Eating insects is quite widespread, apart from few areas of cultural oddity (highly visible though; and we do eat other invertebrates), not to mention at least an order of magnitude more efficient from vertebrate farm animals when it comes to transformation of resources into meat.
In the form of industrially-produced meat paste (for a start) it would be probably hard or impossible to taste a difference; maybe military could introduce it to its diets - I imagine grunts can't whine quite as much as a typical consumer, and it would be one good part of the puzzle towards solving this, might get acceptance from there.
As a matter of fact - you all eat insects every day; standards for grain, flour, vegetables, etc. generally speak of "maximum number of insect body parts per unit"
(and feeding the world in a sustainable way - not exactly an Idle-grade material)
One that hath name thou can not otter
*smug*Makes me even happier that I am a vegetarian*smug*
There, fixed that for ya!
America, Home of the Brave.
In places where large clouds of flies congregate, such as Lake Malawi, the locals net millions of flies and compress them into little cakes. Handy protein packs. I'm sure they may have some nice recipes.
You'd eat a lot less McDonalds if you KNEW where their meat came from, especially if it came from bugs.
You'd eat a lot less McD if you knew where their meat comes from and how it is processed, handled and cooked. No need for bugs in that particular equation...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It would be quite interesting to know how succeptable insects are for infections if farmed. One of the problems with livestock is the prophelactic use of antibiotics. This has its effect on the symbiosis further down the chain. If insects could provide a untainted protein source, then it shouldn't be too bad. We eat prawns already, don't we?
!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eat-A-Bug_Cookbook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Eating_Bugs:_The_Art_and_Science_of_Eating_Insects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy#Unintentional_ingestion (try to think about it during your upcoming meals, please)
Any other misconceptions?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Hmm, you come over all emotional. And not all that knowledgeable either.
There is a growing number of people in America that eat insects - why not check it out instead of airing your bigotry and insulting people in other cultures?
What is disgusting is simply a matter of what you are used to; humans being apes with less hair means that we throughout our evolution have eaten insects much more than chordates, so our metabolism is much more at home with insect protein and fat.
Remember the ribwich?
And how Krusty said in the end when asked what animal it was made of "Think smaller. Think more legs"?
It's all in the commercial, I tell you. Just don't tell people what they're eating, slap a lot of MSG-loaded sauce on it and it will sell.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
humans being apes with less hair
Technically, an average human has more hair follicles on his or her body than an average chimpanzee. The type of hair is responsible for visible differences, for "nakedness".
One that hath name thou can not otter
Cows are very efficient at converting grass inputs into human-usable protein, in the form of milk.
Cattle eat grass and weeds (high-quality protein!), and can operate on rocky slopes where John Deere can't farm.
While all cows start their life in a pastures, agribusiness finishes cattle on feedlots because it's much quicker to fatten animals up on grain than grass. ConAgra doesn't care that grain-finished beef has 1/2 as much beta-carotene, 1/5 as much Vitamin A, and 1/5 as much Vitamin E as cows that have eaten grass from start to finish.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Last time I was in Thailand, I made a point of trying various fried insects, which is very common staple in South Thailand (not so much around Bangkok). I was surprised at how good they tasted. However, not at all comparable with meat. It's completely different but not worse, IMHO.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
And who gets to implement these rules, and how ? Very few people will ever voluntarily accept to have reproduction so closely monitored and restricted. It would be inhumane, degrading, and hypocritical.
I do agree with the education and empowerement of women, but they will never be able to do this if they have 6+ children.
So how do you reduce familly size in a humane manner ? The answer might surprise you, as it is paradoxal : get rid of infant mortality. This has been proven in every developing country : the FIRST step to reducing population is to completely eliminate infant mortality. Once nearly all children reach adulthood, people have less children, simply because they don't need to have as many. Once this happens, THEN education steps in and teaches people about family planning. Family planning should be tought at an early age, with high school and elementary school kids learning about condoms and safe sex. They will then disseminate this information to their parents.
The rest of us will be eating healthy Ramen Noodles.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Quite frankly, you'd eat a lot less McD if you knew what well-prepared food tastes like.
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Then we need to get busy with the cultural imperialism, fast. Only two known methods to being a society's birth rate under replacement, the wealth associated iwth classical capitialism and the horrors of Communist China's One Child policy. So pick one. I think most people would prefer to be free and wealthy vs ground under the heels of Communist oppression.
Seriously, look up the stats, no Free Society with a well functioning, wealth creating (ignore the current recession) economy, is currently growing with the exception of the US and that is due to immigration. Take out the higher birth rates among the 1st generation immigrants and the US birthrate really sucks. The red states are outbreeding the blue states but they ain't exactly exploding anymore. Europe and Japan are on the verge of democide.
So yes a modern society has a higher per capita impact on the environment but there are upsides to balance it out. Not to mention that wealthy countries have the excess wealth to worry about environmental concerns. Note the cleaner air and water in western societies. The US actually has more trees than when the first European set foot here. Yes many are farm trees now, but that just means we can plan ahead and replant when we harvest unlike more lawless countries who just slash em down.
Democrat delenda est
While it's true that poikilotherms have a far more efficient conversion ratio when it comes to food because they're not burning off all that energy just to maintain body temperature like hot blooded animals do, I am surprised that the first answer from these scientists is culturally unacceptable (well in most western cultures anyway) insects. I mean, what happened to fish? I'm sure that the difference in energy consumption between insects and fish is not all that great when compared to say a cow, sheep or pig. Basically what you feed is what you get in weight gain, it only takes around 1.2kg of food (in some species) to produce 1kg of muscle in fish. That's very efficient. Plus pretty much every culture in the world already eats fish.
My only thought is that said scientists were worried about the huge water consumption of aquaculture. However they have completely failed to consider the up and coming field of aquaponics which is extremely water efficient (the only loss is evaporation). With aquaponics you also get delicious veggies with your protein - you have to; it's part of the system that cleans your water to keep your fish healthy. Hey but what do I know, I've only met the guy that invented it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You should use some mayonnaise, fresh onion and bread. If you like you can add yoghurt, horseradish paste and some aromatic sea weeds. Out of can :( t is a success not to puke.
The easiest way to make food from a grassy hill with poor soil is a grazing animal. Farm equipment requires flat land. Humans can't live on grass. What else would you do, bulldoze the hills and dump on lots of chemicals to make food crops grow?
Now consider the beans you so love. What about the rest of the plant? You're wasting nearly all of the plant if you don't eat it, but you can't really eat it because you're human. Feed that to an animal though, and now you have more food.
Ok, that is a freakishly un-informed response in terms of efficiency of meat.
Yes, it takes X Kg of Food to produce Y meat where X > Y. HOWEVER, what you are not factoring in, is the fact that more than 90% of X is derived from Plant sources that are inedible to humans, and Grow in regions that are impossible to farm and produce plant foods that humans can eat. scrub desert, mountainsides, and VAST portions of the world that you can't make a wheat seed eek out a living, or reach with a tractor to farm in the first place are the places where Cattle gain the vast portion of their total size. The whole "feeding of grain to cattle to make meat' Only occurs in the last month or less of their lives, and amounts to a tiny fraction of the total lifetime diet of the animal.
You may insist i cite sources on all of this, which is where I explain that I come from a long line of people deeply ingrained in the livestock trade, and have a full working knowledge of the process, from birth of an animal until it lands on your plate.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Real life isn't like a 4x strategy game where you can only focus on one possible advance at a time. Some people are thinking about sustainable foods, some about ways to stop pollution, some about more efficient ways to use other resources. There are even subgroups of each of those, looking at different ways to accomplish each of these things.
Your (not at all charming) naivete about who eats bugs and who doesn't aside, the fact that it squicks you out is pretty much irrelevant. Lots of foods that are seen as luxury items were originally considered food suitable only for the poor (because they looked hideous - I'm thinking of lobsters), and many foods we see as staples are actually quite disgusting if you spend even a fraction of a second thinking about where they come from.
As to the urine thing - what do you think you're drinking every time you have water? Recycled pee. What do you think you're breathing in every time you inhale? Particles of poop, and other things. Maybe if you educated yourself (or quit lying to yourself about just how gross the environment you live in is) you'd be less squeamish about eating bugs and able to appreciate things you haven't been conditioned to appreciate your whole life.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Most cattle here around are produced on field which are not used for wheat production that years (rotation) or downright never used for meat production (lotta sheep rising area are full of rock, don't matter for the sheep but make the field improper to any wheat/legumes mass production). There are some food fed to the cattle, but such food would not be produced if the cattle was not here to eat it up. Best example of it are some non-sweet corn, which are produced just for cattle feeding, because producing anything else (food/wheat) would be at a *LOSS*.
The bottom line is that we can , in the west, grow non feed stuff for cattle , and be inefficient at food production, because we are over producing and swamping all otehr market ! So yes, meat production is inneficient per hectare, but whore care when efficiency is not a factor in area where food is overproduced ? Remember the hunger problem is not a problem of producing not enough food, it is a distribution problem on where the food is produced, and where it is needed. Also quite a political problem, as when we *dump* our price on food (remember we over produce) we can sometime destroy local market in place where agriculture is not as extended, and destroy local people living.
In conclusion, all the rethoric on meat being inefficient , is rather missing the point. The place which produce the most meat, don't have a food production quantity problem. On the contrary we already destroy meat, legumes, fruit, and milk by the tons, and pay farmer to *NOT* produce more !
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They are more efficient partly because of their coldbloodedness according to the article. In places with sufficiently long growing seasons that won't be a problem. But you will have to transport the stuff to places with longer cold seasons, adding inefficiency. Cattle have built in warmers.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
*evenmoresmug*Makes me even happier that I am a vegan*evenmoresmug*
However when I think of big mammals in factory farns eating mostly grain and soy which can use up to 20 times as much land, fuel and water as producing plant-based calories directly, not to mention that it involves massive amounts of antibiotics and ends up dumping lots of fecal waste in clean water, switching to insects does not seem so bad. Shrimp and lobster are pretty much underwater insects and people love to eat them. I'm sure if there were some insect-mcnuggets available, you would not suffer from strange tastes.
Actually the world of fake meat is a marvellous one. There are Tofurky Sausages, vegan lamb (made out of tofu and mushrooms!), and of course veggy burgers! All of these things taste pretty @#! good and gain the same advantages over cattle as insects perhaps moreso... But it still sounds like eating bugs is better than eating cows as long as we dont unleash a plague of locusts or anything...
...once they work the bugs out.
See, you only need to change one letter on the Chick-fil-A cows' signs.
That was easy.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
False dichotomy for the loss!
the French enjoy snails
The French enjoy garlic butter. They add a token amount of snail to it because just eating lumps of garlic butter would be a bit weird.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There are some problems with mycoprotein. The most obvious is that it has a noticeably lower specific heat capacity than most meats (I believe this is caused by the lower fat content). It's sold as a meat substitute, so people try to use it in recipes designed for meat, but they find that it cools much too fast. The texture is also quite different (much more uniform than meat and you can cut it equally easily in all directions), so it seems a bit weird to eat. It's fine as a substitute for heavily processed meat, and you can do some nice things with it if you don't think of it as a stand-in for meat, but it's advertised as a drop-in replacement and it only works there for people who don't really care about how their food tastes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Only two known methods
To you.
Seriously, look up the stats
Yeah, please do that.
Being French, I know that France and Ireland have the highest rates of population growth in Europe when discounting immigration.
ground under the heels of Communist oppression.
BTW, Communism didn't prevent USSR population to grow as well as the current 'capitalist' Russia.
Not to mention that wealthy countries have the excess wealth to worry about environmental concerns. Note the cleaner air and water in western societies.
Do you mean the excess wealth to export actual production and pollution to less wealthy countries ?
The US actually has more trees than when the first European set foot here.
Do you have some reputable source for that ? All I can find is this, which doesn't support your statement (somehow, I'm not surprised) (the first European didn't set foot in Americas a century ago).
Now, please mod parent wrong. Or flamebait (you know, that contempt towards societies not acting "just like us" - and his sig doesn't help).
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
This ant for one welcomes our new human overlords.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu