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The Lepsis Is a Terrarium For Growing Edible Insects At Home
An anonymous reader writes "A recent UN report suggested that people should be eating more insects, because they're much less harmful to the environment that traditional meat. In response, designer Mansour Ourasanah has created the Lepsis, a small insect breeder that could be used to grow and harvest grasshoppers in urban homes."
I wonder what it would take to raise shellfish indoors. Probably not worth it economically, but I can't imagine home insect rearing would be cheaper than buying them from a large producer.
I will not be incorporating any insects aside from water crustaceans into my diet. They may be nutritious, may be tasty, but the "yuck" factor is simply too great to overcome.
Maybe I could if they were processed, but surely someone will make a big deal about the loss of nutrition with processes insect products.
-> I dislike sigs...
Now excuse me while I rip apart this lobster!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
It could also be used to breed extra-noxious stink bugs for en-masse deployment at bachelor parties, graduations, and other prime prank targets.
Or would the NSA brand me a terrorist?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
What's wrong with soy, tempeh and other alternatives? Don't tell me people need to eat meat to live, look at places like India.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
You can always feed the bugs to pigs: http://www.pereanu.com/comic/entomophagy/
They do it well.
also if you have a yard, you could parcel off a small bit of it for a chicken coop for not too much money and grow your own eggs / chickens
I think I'll probably try things like that before I raise insects for food.
I'm sure my HOA won't mind at all if I set one of these up and create a personal plague of winged insects to fill my belly and do my bidding.
"Fly, grasshoppers! Vanquish my enemies and bring back all the yummy meat from their refrigerators!"
Hmmm... This Lepsis thing might actually work.
More meat for everyone else.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
and because 'eat some bugs' gets clicks, slashdot cant stop peddling it.
full disclosure: im vegetarian
most bugs dont contain anything more than protein and a bit of fat, and the ones that do are hands-down unapproachable by a consumer whos traditionally a meat and potatoes person.
http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectnutrition.html
if you want some calcium, it would mean getting used to this guy in your mouth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belostomatidae
Its absurd, but hey so is the chicken nugget/finger/ring and its violent extrusion the KFC "double down."
Are we seriously so opposed to broccoli and other vegetables much loathed as children that we're going to eat bugs instead? we already have alternatives to meat that are cheaper, more nutritious, and widely available. The issue at hand is that we put meat in absolutely everything whether it needs it or not. Speaking for the midwest, even salads have cold-cuts liberally interspersed between the nutritionally devoid iceburg lettuce trucked in from new mexico and california. "lets eat bugs" is not a solution to the "meat is expensive" issue because it ignores the underlying problems of factory farming, monocultural foods, and a population of nutritionally ignorant and chronically obese adults and children. until we solve that shitstorm then no matter what we select as our meat methodone its just going to go down the same route.
Good people go to bed earlier.
What's next sewer rats?
I used to grow crickets to feed a pet leopard gecko. They smell. I wonder how they will handle this issue, especially as it is designed to be, and I paraphrase, "Attractive enough to sit on your kitchen counter".
Other than that, insects are not a bad snack. If you bake them first, all their little parts fall right off with some shaking. They are nice and crunchy with a bit of a nutty flavor. I have sampled some smaller ones, and I could easily see myself throwing them on a salad. What gets me are meal worms, grubs and the like. The sensation of biting through the skin and having the guts squirt into your mouth was enough to make me instant vomit.
I spend hours getting the bugs out and you want me to GROW more?
No. No no no. I assure you. It isn't.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Well the UN and the ones who wrote the report can eat all the bugs they like. I'm going to stick to my Steak,Fish,Turkey,chicken diet thank you very much. I dont care what they taste like smell like or how nutritious they are i aint eating no stink-in bugs.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Enough said.
Insane UN recommendation spawns insane product recommendation. I'm not eating bugs, and I don't see anyone rushing out to start changing their diet to incorporate more insects. I have seen people farm insects at home. They do it to cultivate a steady supply of fishing bait and pet reptile food. They always wouldn't bother with this over-designed piece of junk; you can make something like this out of fine mesh, a few wooden posts, and some cardboard egg crates.
So they can eat steak
We should use a donkey cart
So they can go first class in their private jumbos...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I wonder if authors of this kitchen invention have ever actually grown amount of grasshoppers that's suitable even for occasional light snacks. If they have, they should know in swarms of any mentionable size - hundreds or thousands - those critters cause intolerable noise. If not to you, to your urban neighbours. It's nice to be green, but please be realistic. It won't take long before you really get tired of that noise.
Just go to your neighbourhood Chinese food shop and buy your insect snacks there. Grasshoppers are nice, but it's quite a massacre having even a small snack, and you should know how much noise even a single critter at your home can cause.
I'm looking for a new home now, so it's good to keep the cancerous liability of city ordinances in mind.
Food is food. I couldn't care less about how many legs it has or used to have.
I like the idea of growing my own protein sources at home, and I don't much mind what it looks like as long as it tastes fine and keeps me goin'. Y'all can stick to your revulsion, but really this is just a proposal for the people with open enough minds to try new things instead of saying "Ew, this looks so gross I'll never try it."
People are already squeamish (right or wrong) about chomping on bugs. Does it make sense to produce a product that rhymes with Sepsis?
Just mash them and make them look like a hamburger. It's not like we need to process these bugs in a way that they still look like bugs.
You live next to a guy who decides to turn is backyard into a giant chicken coop and I'm sure you'd change your mind about that. Those zoning laws are about expectation for home buyers. It's one thing if you're rural, totally another if you go "hog wild" in your suburban back yard.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I tell you what, when the UN converts all its restaurants and cafeterias to raise and serve insects then get back to us.
I've been raising B. dubias as a food source for a couple years. I fry them (after killing them in the freeze and removing wings/legs) with a bit a soy sauce and some spices. They taste kinda like shrimp and go great with salad. I feed them entirely with my table scraps.
Honestly, western culture is so bizarre. We're fine with eating bottom feeders and drinking bovine lactation mixed with pus, but insects are gross? We need to get our shit together.
The only people who are going to go out an eat a bug are the very daring Fear Factor types. Heck, I know rural kids who won't touch seafood because they never grew up w/ it and the smells/sights are off-putting. But, in a country were there's nothing close to a food shortage, good luck promoting a new, very small, very gross alternative!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
When McBurgers are readily and cheaply available I doubt you'll see a huge increase in insects in our diet. The parts of the world where bugs are common in the diet are also places that can't afford to raise cattle and pigs etc. As contrary and diverse as our Western culture has become it might be possible to introduce this as a 'cool' alternative, at least in part. Personally I've eaten grasshopper and ants. Both were presented as delicacies, the ants as chocolates and I don't even recall how I ate the grasshopper, but I didn't just catch it flying by and pop it in my mouth. I did watch a special on I believe African food and they showed them peeling open a very large beetle to eat, which almost caused me to lose my lunch. It's all in the presentation I suppose.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
See, you don't get it. We live far enough away so that if the guy turns his backyard into a giant chicken coop we don't even notice.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Enough is enough! How dare they suggest we cage those happy go lucky free range cute little buggers and raise them for our FOOD! What's wrong with them? I am hereby announcing the formation of PETI, People for the Ethical Treatment of Insects. We need to treat the insects humanely and not cage them. It's bad enough that we poison them, zap them, or otherwise murder these helpless little creatures when all they are doing is trying to survive in this cruel world. We need to show our support for our little friends by letting the termites eat our houses, the cockroaches raid our pantries, and treat those mosquitoes, leeches, and ticks to a fine blood meal. This is how we can show them thanks for all they do for us.
perception and packaging. We aren't use to eating insects and as such we don't find it appetizing, even though in many parts of the world, they have found them to be delicacies. But, say for example someone makes a chocolate flavor protein shake where the protein comes from insects, that will be palatable. I would have a hard time trusting myself to eating insects, especially considering the amount of pesticides these creatures are subject too.
Sure it looks nice next to your kitchen aid blender right now, but these bugs will make it look like crap in a few days.
I spent a good many years of my life taking care of reptiles. Part of this involved growing all kinds of food items from fruit flies to cockroaches. Most of these things turn their housings into a shit encrusted shell relatively quickly. it's not the kind of thing you want in the kitchen. It also quickly turns into a ton of work. You'd have to be feeding your bugs every day, cleaning up the shit, removing dead bugs.
It was a ton of work to raise crickets and mealworms to keep a few lizards alive. It would be even harder if i was raising them to feed me. I've got no issues with eating bugs. I've done it a lot actually. I'd prefer to just pay someone to raise them for me though.
Aquaponics. Grow vegetables and fish symbiotically.
I grew up nearby a field in the country side and used to go catch grasshoppers and pan fried them. They're the best tasting food ever.
The OPPOSITE is true: Vegetarians have to look out to get all nutrients. (Disclaimer: I'm talking about real meat. I won't even touch the TOPIC of what's sold as "meat" in US supermarkets, even less that stuff itself) Google "vitamins meat vs vegetables", don't take my word for it. Also, common sense.
"The Lepsis Is a Terrarium For Growing Edible Insects AT HOME" So you may be right but YOU are offtopic, not the others :)
1) This is much too small to grow enough bugs to make anything but a light snack once every few weeks/months.
2) Bugs stink. Any kind of bug- try raising them in any quantity and you'll quickly be turned off by the smell.
Soylent Green!
Why would you eat something as repulsive as insects when you can eat spirulina? It's a perfect food. You could eat nothing but spirulina for the rest of your life and have all your nutritional needs satisfied. It's an easy additive to smoothies, puddings, soups, and anything else. It doesn't taste like much on its own, so it blends well with other ingredients. So it's a much lower bar than eating a worm, grasshopper, or any other insect.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
A lot of people around the world enjoy eating snails (l'escargot). And, apparently they are quite easy to grow for yourself! Don't bother going to an expensive French restaurant and paying tens of dollars for six or twelve snails. Spend that cash on a terrarium, put some various stuff in it, put snails in, and feed them regularly on a diet of fresh greens. Soon they'll be big enough to chow down on.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Let's say I'm gungho for incorporating bugs into my diet. Seriously, let's just make this assumption to consider things a bit here. Next, let's assume I'm completely selfish and care not at all about "the environment". That is, let's just even the playing field and evaluate "bugs" just on the merits regarding two factors: nutritional benefit; cost (to me).
Now... why would I want to eat bugs again? For protein? Let's assume so. These days, it seems protein goes from about 4 cents a gram (dairy, etc.) up to 9 cents (high quality meat). If I buy freeze-dried mealworms of the quality you feed birds, it seems to work out to about 6 to 8 cents/gram of protein. And some seem to suggest if you want such for human consumption, you may need to pay more for higher quality. I cannot easily find where to purchase grasshoppers in bulk, but it seems grasshoppers would be more expensive. Crickets may be cheaper though.
In essence, however, if you're willing to eat what you feed your pets the cost seems to be in the same realm as "normal" protein sources. If you want "better", you'd be paying in the range of high quality meats. So, no... bugs aren't persuading me on cost alone.
What about nutrition overall? Some tout the protein/fat ratio of some insects. Let's be honest. This doesn't matter at all unless you're willing and able to replace most or all of your protein intake with insects. Until then, you can manage your daily fat/carb/protein mix at a higher level. But that brings me to the next point...
It would seem you could reduce this cost to next to nothing by growing these critters yourself, as in the Lepsis. But that's silly. You still have to feed the critters. So your cost isn't zero. But more important for consumption purposes... what RATE can an eager bug-eater produce these things? I can see nothing here that states the expected rate of production here. I would imagine if I wished to incorporate this into my diet, I would start with at least 1oz/day. If I wanted full protein replacement, I'd need about 20oz/day. It would seem difficult to imagine home production of such.
As far as I can tell, this product is a cute novelty with no real practical purpose.
Please don't eat the ants especially covered with chocolate, honey pot species, etc. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Step 1: come up with a better name than Lepsis. Shh! - as if eating insects wasn't a marketing challenge already!
Let them eat cake.
Like the production part.
The carminic acid used to produce the pigment can also be extracted from various microbes engineered for the purpose. Microbes are dissolved in a containment structure separate from their cultivation vats, and then allowed to settle out. The liquid and suspended carminic acid is then siphoned off, and metal salts are then added to give a lake pigment in a procedure that is mostly identical to the procedure for acid extracted from insects.
Also, the European Union bit:
As of January, 2012, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has changed the way they manufacture Carmine E120 for pharmaceutical products. The EFSA had raised concerns, over the increasing number of allergic reactions to Carmine derived from insects (E120.360), when used within the British pharmacopeia. Pharmaceutical products which had previously contained insect-derived carmine, have been replaced with a synthesised version of the food colorant.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine#Production
The carminic acid used to produce the pigment can also be extracted from various microbes engineered for the purpose. Microbes are dissolved in a containment structure separate from their cultivation vats, and then allowed to settle out. The liquid and suspended carminic acid is then siphoned off, and metal salts are then added to give a lake pigment in a procedure that is mostly identical to the procedure for acid extracted from insects.
Aslo, it has been synthesized since the '90s.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Or small sharp stones?
Chickens don't have teeth.
Instead, they ingest small stones, sand, and other coarse material and they keep it in their gizzard to grind the food with.
If you were keeping them on a concrete or grassy surface they were very likely forced to eat their own poop just to fill their gizzards with anything coarse.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Since the '90s the US has eaten this synthetic & has also gained a massive obesity spike. Its synthetic nature benefits no one. We don't need fake color to confuse minds into thinking they're seeing fruit.
Would love to see the studies you're basing that claim on.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I have an idea, let's name it like a horrible medical condition!
That'll get consumers to accept it!
I guess you could clip the leg at the joints, then push the meat out with a stiff wire. Each grasshopper will yield two specs of meat for a burger. This will take a very long time.
Or were you expecting me to eat them whole, including the poop? That's not how I eat a chicken. You're asking for way more that just "eat bugs". You're telling me to eat shit.
... your onus is showing.
But as I am good sport... I'll give you not one but TWO examples.
And to think that George Carlin died without (probably) learning about that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The goals of dies & flavors (as a concept) is to confuse bad for good. A confused population is less free to make self-interested choices.
What is your goal in encouraging this?
My goal in this response chain is to denounce dies. If any one is a medicine, it should be just that.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I can see this doing well for those that have a small aquaponics home set up. A few bugs every now and then would be a great treat for your tilapia or pike. Insects generally form a very important part of the food chain, so why not culture them and then transfer that protein up into a more palatable form. Here is a useful excerpt from permaculture guru Bill Mollison. Bill Mollison: "Yes, well sometimes you walk on the land and you have the crop. People say, “I’ve just bought some land I want to develop a crop.” I’ll give you and example. I had a young bulldozer operator in Australia. He’d just bought some really run-down cattle land. He had a bulldozer and he put some dams in. Then he said, “Will you come onto my farm and tell me what I ought to do here?” He had nice dams there which he had stocked with trout. ”How are they going?,” I asked him. ”Fine,” he said. ”I got some eight pounders out of them.” ”When did you put them in?,” I inquired. ”Last year,” he replied. And the place was swarming with grasshoppers; it was overgrazed. I said, “You’ve got your crop; your crop is grasshoppers!” On a 1.8 to 1 conversion ratio you can get a pound of trout for every pound and a bit of grasshoppers. You can trawl those grasshoppers just like you trawl fish. So, the other thing is, grasshoppers go for yellow, so if you float yellow balloons on the dams, you get a rain of grasshoppers into the water. So that’s what he did, and he had his crop. The land might already have its crop on it, and yet you might want to change that crop, and you will come out worse off. For instance, we have a pasture grub that runs at 20 ton to the acre living in the first four inches of the soil. If you covert it into turkey, you’re talking 5 ton of turkey to the acre, just for a small soil-skimming operation daily. But they’re still trying to get rid of the pasture grub! And yet that land can barely sustain a sheep on four or five acres. So where’s the trade off between a 120 tons of protein and 40 pounds of protein as sheep? So, wherever we see that the crop is already there we’ve come out on top. And we have nothing to do." I also heard him say that anacondas have the highest protein conversion rate in the world, if you are looking for a more exciting crop.