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UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects?
PolygamousRanchKid writes in with news about a U.N. plan to get more bugs in your belly. "The U.N. has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now: edible insects. The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of the insect world as an underutilized food for people, livestock and pets. Insects are 'extremely efficient' in converting feed into edible meat, the agency said. Most insects are likely to produce fewer environmentally harmful greenhouse gases, and also feed on human and food waste, compost and animal slurry, with the products being used for agricultural feed, the agency said. 'Insects are everywhere and they reproduce quickly,' the agency said, adding they leave a 'low environmental footprint.' The agency noted that its Edible Insect Program is also examining the potential of arachnids, such as spiders and scorpions."
I say "Because OMFG, gross!!!"
I started carefully reconsidering my emotional response on insects as food when I really considered the use of the term "mud bugs" for delicious little crawfish. It's totally apt: those little things (and most of the shellfish I eat) aren't really all that un-bug-like. Now I'm quite looking forward to trying some if the opportunity arises.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I say "Because OMFG, gross!!!"
If you live in the United States, you likely already engage in accidental entomophagy. Allow me to introduce you to the USDA's guide to what are the acceptable levels of insects in your food. Go head and CTRL+F on that page for 'insects.'
Having particularly good eyesight, I don't think I've ever eaten a blackberry that didn't have thrips or aphids on it. Guess what? They're delicious on blackberries!
Of course, getting my Wilderness Survival merit badge on my way to Eagle Scout gave me the opportunity to forage for edible insects and I would actually recommend the fly larvae that attach to grassland stalks and form 'bulbs' around them. Taste like walnuts! Too bad it takes forever to harvest them or I'd make a product out of that for the granola-brains community.
My work here is dung.
Because they don't have Whole Foods stores whence to get their environmentally-conscious tofu.
In case you didn't notice, agriculture is difficult in these countries that are ruled by warlords and have intemperate climates.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
There is a good reason if given choice we eat meat , because it is tasty, because we have the taste bud for it. Because our stomach is also made to consume various stuff including meat, we are omnivore, not vegetarian or carnivore. Now why not insect ? Giant Grasshoper grilled and dunked in honey. Eggs from spider. Various insect I tried. They all taste OK-ish. But compared to a good prime ribe steak ? No way they taste as good.
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What do you think plants feast on? Then we eat the plants or the animals that eat those plants. It might not be human waste we tend to use as fertilizer, but it's got roughly the same "ick" factor.
I have been told that roasted spiders taste just like shrimp.
I will never know first hand of course.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
I have just had enough of all this!!!
Look, if we preserve the way we do things as civilization, there is never going to be enough. Of anything. Ever.
At this moment there is enough food to feed well the whole humanity. Period.
At this moment if we stop our Ponzi scheme of a civilization and continue to develop technology while the need for ever increasing number of people and consumption per person is gone we will have ever more per person. Do you hear me? Finite demand in infinite Universe - is that so hard to understand?
Why is everyone hailing the "green revolution"? What did it do to us? Allowed us what, 2 decades of "phew, we fed the world" warm feeling? While replacing food with tasteless accelerated growth watery fodder! You know, people pay premium prices for "biological food", but in fact this is food. Not biological , just food. The other stuff is different - processed food. This should be the division - food and process food, rather than food and biological food.
Without going into discussion why and what , here is a statement for you - the green revolution did not "save people from starvation" Those people where already there. Understand! Noone started developing the revolution in anticipation of an increasing population. The increased population was already there. It existed, therefore it had food to eat. Instead the green revolution increased the yield so we can throw the food in the sea to keep the price "right". The revolution helped very little (if at all) the actual people that were lived with malnutrition.
So now we will eat the bugs. Then the fungi and the rest of the microorganisms. And then what? "Low environmental impact"? Are you kidding me? So 1 billion people eating beef or 3 billion eating insects - what is the difference. As I said it many years ago here - there is no "low environmental impact" as long as the Ponzi scheme works. More efficient engines - cars get cheaper - people buy more cars. Better plane engines - cheaper prices - people fly more. And so on...ad infinitum.
We are trying to cheat reality! It won't work!! It never does!!! Why nobody hears?! The whole issue is as usual heavily distorted by political and business interests. Why am I surprised...
Wild insects are loaded with insecticides.
This word "insecticide". I don't think it means what you think it means.
No sig today...
I think that's the biggest problem by far. For most meats like beef and so forth we have rigorous food safety standards and testing facilities. Adapting those to both the very different biology, very different scale (in terms of physical size, and number of creatures we'd need to test), and very different diseases related to insects is going to be where the problems are.
You actually can buy flower wit ground up meal-worms currently.
Obviously, in affluent countries you will have to make them expensive, not cheap.
Insects aren't so different from shrimps, and apparently grasshoppers have a similar taste. Here is an article on the taste of insects: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniella-martin/what-do-bugs-taste-like-a_b_901775.html
You are worried about parasites in an insect but happily eat other mammals whose parasites are far more likely to be evolved to infest us?
Parasites in insects can be dealt with in the same same humans deal with almost parasites in our food, we cooked the meal first.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Incorrect. Insects have successfully adapted to a wide variety of both natural and man-made insecticides which, though no longer fatal for them, may still be harmful to us.
Nonaggression works!
I see your point, but as someone that travels a lot to 3rd world conditions to help the poor (Kenya tomorrow), I can tell you that the UN often doesn't think things through well. The problem with this is two-fold: 1) Insects can digest and carry more disease than plants. The fact that insects are animal and not plant allows them to be carriers...like Malaria for mosquitos. 2) The insects are actually crawling around in the crap. Plants aren't. Food needs to be prepared carefully. This care of washing and cooking to the right temperature and separating raw meat cutting surface from cooked meat surface is not well practiced around the world.
While there may be same "value" in this food, I would easily imagine more people getting sick from trying to eat the insects and digesting the bad stuff inside and outside them.
Want to see other bad ideas from the UN, look up their Perma-Culture. While the concept is proven and helpful, try to going to poor people barely growing enough food and convince them to go 4 year with below normal crops in hopes that 7 years from now you will have a bumper crop...oh, yeh, then through in a drought every 7 years and see how much this idea helps.
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Farmed carnivorous fish right now get fed bycatch, a slurry of little fish of no commercial value that fishermen pull out of the sea. There are many problems with this, one of them being the mercury that concentrates in the farmed fish and eventually humans. I wonder if they would be able to feed on farmed insects, which could be obtained in a much more responsible way, and clean of poisonous metals.
Never been to India? Members of the Brahmin caste in Hinduism have survived on a pure vegetarian diet for forever. Fat can be had from milk. Indian cuisine prominently features vegetables like lentils that are high in protein.
Surviving on a purely vegan diet has not been possible for the human race until recently. However, there are centuries of evidence to show that populations can survive on a pure vegetarian diet.
If you eat or drink anything red, you're probably eating ground up insects.
From that very article: "As of 2005, the market price of cochineal was between 50 and 80 USD per kilogram, while synthetic raw food dyes are available at prices as low as 10–20 USD per kilogram."
So most red things probably aren't coloured with cochineal.
If they don't taste good, or if you can't gin up appealing recipes for them, nobody'll eat'em
I accidentally ate chocolate coated ants once. My wife had left half a mars bar neatly wrapped in the console, I spotted it while driving and with one deft movement popped the whole thing into my mouth without taking my eyes off the road. At first I thought I had hair on my face but it soon became apparent some ants were also feasting on the chocolate. I wound down the window and spat the ball of half chewed insects and toffee out the window. For the next half hour if felt like I had hair stuck at the back of my throat.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Even if you price them cheaply, there is still a price floor from costs of transportation to bring them to market.
I wonder how you'd market this product?
Wrong sales tactic. You need to set the price as high as possible to sell otherwise unsellable stuff. Caviar, escargots, oysters....
bickerdyke
Humans cannot survive on full veg diet for long.
There are only 2 essential things human body needs: 1) protein 2) fat.
You don't need carbs, you don't need vegs. These 2 are what you absolutely need to survive. Eat only vegs without any protein, and all your muscles are gone within a year. Don't eat any fat for a year and you die.
Humans aren't vegetarian race, and that's why we don't eat that way. Some choose to do so on ethical basis, but these people need to get essential stuff for us that's only got from meat, from other sources, usually pills. Like B12 vitamin. Drop that and you drop dead pretty quickly.
Humans are not carnivores either they are omnivores. It is one of the secrets of our evolutionary success. If it looked like it could possibly be edible humans would try to eat it. Humans have even developed methods for making otherwise toxic fruit, vegetables and meat edible that are so complex it make you wonder how they figured them out in the first place. If you try to subsist only on a diet of meat you will start feeling some effects just like if you go vegan without supplements. The first one is probably going to be scurvy unless you start eating your meat raw or rather rarely cooked and start eating parts of the animal that are normally not eaten by modern westerners but that contain vitamins such as certain internal organs, eyeballs, spinal fluid (you suck it out of the spine like a straw) and the skin. Of course these would have to be eaten raw or cooked very rare since too much cooking will break down the vitamins. Are those fruits and vegetables starting to look good yet? And before you answer keep in mind that raw or rarely cooked meat can contain some nasty parasites.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I'm sure nobody here's interested, but here goes.
In Islam, insects are prohibited as food. Locusts are an exception (the only one AFAIK), so they may be eaten.
What about the other major religions?
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There's some soup on my fly!
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography
I'll go for this when the dining rooms at the United Nations serve insects instead of Foie Gras Terrine with Brandied Cherry, on pretzel bread or Lamb Tartare on Japanese cracker with Tsar Sturgeon Caviar. And not insects as an option, either. I'm talking all the other stuff is off the menu.
Oh, it won't be happening? You mean we proles get to eat insects while the UN gets Seared Beef Filet with Onion Soup Boule, Asparagus, and Bearnaise Sauce or Roasted Veal Medallions with N.Y. Pretzel Crumbs, Bockwurst, and Mustard Sauce? Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought. Fuck you, UN.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We have that down for mammal meat.
We have that down for everything. Unless they are infested with extremophiles, then 80C will do the job. And the happy thing is that (a) extremophiles are archaeans and (b) there are astonishingly no known pathogenic archaeans.
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Thank you for demonstrating my point. Though this article, quoting the UN, talks about insect farming AS ONE OF THE OPTIONS, they want to promote this as an alternative for more people around the world who are suffering from malnutrition, the article says. Here is the how this would play out:
People that are malnourished are often so because of lack of money to purchase food. If people start eating more insects, the poor (and malnourished) will try to get the bugs themselves or farm them (they won't have the money to purchase them). The result will be a more dangerous diet.
While many will look at this article in the context of their own living situation, the common failure of the UN is understanding how this will translate in the poor around the world.
Perma-culture, since you doubt it, too, can be easily looked up. I was in Zimbabwe last summer in areas where the UN had already been working with farmers. They were all talking about the UN reps and their plan to use perma culture as a way to improve yield. Not one of them was even going to try it, nor could they, unless they wanted their family to starve in the first three years.
My point is to step outside of our worldview when proposing ways to help and understand what will really happen when we head down a road. This is not a good idea and will be shot down by people that have real practical experience and knowledge in 3rd world conditions.
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"(b) there are astonishingly no known pathogenic archaeans."
To be fair, there was also nothing known quite like AIDS until someone decided it'd be a good idea to start eating the local monkeys and it crossed over into humans.
I think we'd have to accept that increasing our diet of insects is going to increase the possibility of new and fairly unique diseases. Things like the most nasty strains of bird flu we've seen have come about largely because of the way we farm chickens, the quantity of them, and the proximity of humans working with them. We can't preclude the idea that increased exposure to insects in greater numbers and possibly equally as unsanitary conditions as we farm chickens wont lead to super-strains of Malaria or whatever.
I'm not saying I'm against the idea or anything, but I absolutely think it's something we shouldn't jump into blindly without considering the possible implications and mitigating the risks. I don't think it's something we could start just doing tomorrow without any consideration as to how we're going to do it safely - if we start farming insects by the billions you have to keep in mind that that's billions of new hosts for diseases to propagate and mutate in at a way faster rate than they can in the natural environment given the confined spaces we'd likely be farming them in, and also, if done in the proximity of humans there's much greater risk of interspecies transfer.
World hunger is not a production or availability problem. It is a distribution problem. America alone can already grow enough grain to feed the entire planet a couple times over. Doing so, however, would make the bottom drop out of the grain market and have disastrous economic consequences. That is exactly why the American government pays farmers to not grow food.
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Bee excretia anyone? Excretia, not excrement. There is a difference. More like bee vomit. By the way, I'll take any honey you don't want any more.
It is very interesting to see the negative reactions here to the prospect of eating these non-traditional insect foods. (In the West. Or perhaps I should I say "The North?") Anyway, such food aversions can be very powerful. People have died rather than eat survival foods like bugs and other bush tucker. Literally starving to death in the midst of plenty -- even when they are presented with the option by knowledgeable companions. As Spock would say: "Fascinating."
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy