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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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