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Clinton Grants $1 Million To Edible Insect Farmers
An anonymous reader writes "Former US President Bill Clinton, through the Clinton Global Initiative, has awarded $1 million to a group of Canadian MBA students who are looking to solve urban hunger by feeding people insects. The students will use this as seed money for their start-up, Aspire Food Group, which aims to farm, produce, and sell edible insects as a way of solving world hunger, particularly in slums. Aspire says it will even work toward replacing livestock farms with insect farms in some areas." Insects as food aren't necessarily incompatible with conventional livestock, either.
Eat bugs? No thanks, I'll stick to birds, fish, and mammals. No escargo or grasshoppers for me, thank you.
Free Martian Whores!
The financial bullies are now getting around to making their favorite punching bags eat a bug.
Human teeth show every sign of being shaped, at least in part, to consume insects, and we possibly developed long fingers to dig them out of hiding places, too. I'm not religious, but sometimes I can't help but think of a monkey-like God looking down on all of mankind's problems with famine and hunger and yelling, "For My sake, mankind, I gave you the cockroach! An unlimited food source - you can't wipe the little bastards out if you try!"
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
They are developing a flour that is 30% ground insect ( farmed local varities of insects ) and 70% ground grain. In local tests the people enjoyed the 30% version and thought it tasted better than either 100% grain flour or the 90% grain 10% insect flour.
There's been a lot of this going around lately. From whence came the insect-eating meme? There's a woman I see in a coffee shop sometimes. She's an environmental activist, best known to me for manning the anti-GMO petition campaign in California, which failed. She mentioned eating insects that last time I saw her. I was like, OK... there's a meme going around, since environmental activists often rub shoulders with the same elite circles in which Clinton is involved.
The $64 trillion question is, "Can anybody trace the origin of the meme?". Yeah, people have been eating insects for thousands of years, and there have probably been much earlier suggestions that Westerners try it. I'm talking about a dramatic recent upswing though. What catalyzed it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Bugs aren't vegan.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Shrimp are, after all, arthropods. Some even call them "insects of the seas."
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Marie Antoinette is looking pretty good now, isn't she?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Whether some edible source of food is popular or not is a matter of public perception and PR, and focusing on giving bugs to poor people is probably going to result in many people refusing the help and the general public continuing to think of bugs as a disgusting food source. If they started with creating foods (e.g., burgers, "fingers"), good advertising, taste tests, etcetera, it's at least possible they could build some actual desire for the food rather than have it fighting a popularity contest with starvation.
It would have been shorter for you to state you are crazy.
Compared to cows, pigs and chickens some insects, especially in larva stage can convert plant cellulose and starches into proteins and fats many times more efficiently. This is the real benefit. In some cases this is more efficient than processing the plants for human consumption. Take corn as a feed, it is very inefficient for humans to ingest it but feed it to some insects and they will convert it at a very high rate.
We are not talking about insects being the equivalent to a Shmoo which reproduces asexually and only consumes air, but it makes sense to add them to agriculture. What I do not like is the premise that it could feed the poor, however they may be on to something with this approach also. During the second world war when the Nazis used slave labour from concentration camps they fed the slave on potato peels and vegetable top waste from the soldiers mess kitchens. When the SS doctors suddenly realized that the slaves that were there to be worked to death were actually getting to be healthier than the soldiers the practice was stopped and the slaves were then put on a deliberate starvation diet.
Just maybe our opulent fat diet of animal proteins and refined starches will make the rich who can afford it less healthy than the insect eating peons and lower class workers in the city slums.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
What makes some insect farmers more edible than others?
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
ftfh:
Clinton Grants $1 Million To Edible Insect Farmers
why would anybody want to eat insect farmers?
That insect farmers are edible, I thought, was already established. I guess that Clinton is giving money is news enough...
I sure hope the insects don't eat the seed money.
- pour shot of tequila
- sprinkle dash of salt on back of hand
- hold slice of lime in fingers
- pick up shot with right hand while throwing salt over shoulder and simultaneously squeezing lime in left eye
- While pain in eye has you distracted, toss insect in mouth and chase with tequila.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
No more chits for McDonald's. Here's your bugs and nutriloaf.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Maybe you could throw some money my way. I have a great idea for a basic urban foodstuff. It's called soylent green.
Stop throwing away so much food. Last numbers I saw was 40% is tossed out. All the scarcity is man made. People are being starved to keep the prices up.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
(Sorry)
Would be an improvement.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No, the market says you'll eat bugs when demand for meat outstrips supply.
(Welcome to macroeconomics, you must be new here!)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'll eat em right now.
Mmmm. Lobster. Crawfish. Mmmm.
To paraphrase Marie Antoinette: Let them eat yuck!
Doubtful. I'd go vegetarian before I ever considered eating insects, and I'm sure many others would as well. Some things are just so culturally repellant that they won't be accepted as an alternative except in extreme cases.
Insects for the poor. Eat your cockroach
Yeah unless you happen to be human. Humans require meat and vegetables in their diets. We are not simply furnaces that'll burn whatever you dump in there..
They want to live off of dead Beatles.
What?
Too soon?
No brain, no pain.
You're just begging for an oblig, aren't you? ;)
Actually, Wikipedia has meme pegged as "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."
Thus, my previous assertion that all memes are ideas is incorrect. FWIW, the hyphen in my subject line was unnecessary. Such are the pairels of posting extemporaneous rough drafts to the Internet.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That bill, which won't pass the senate, largely reinstates the requirements Clinton signed. The biggest one is that if you're 18-50 and have no kids, but want food stamps, you eventually have to do some job training so there's a chance you'll eventually get off food stamps.
Also worth noting, the cost of the food stamp program has doubled since Obama took office.
In 2001, it cost us $15 billion. This year, $75 billion.
So yeah, it's getting out of control and it's time to go back to common sense ideas that worked when Clinton agreed with the Republicans that unlimited taxpayer money for able bodied adults is silly.
Who would want to eat "insect farmers"???
I don't see grandma shoveling handfuls of giant Madagascar cockroaches in her mouth during Sunday night football - not anytime soon.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
psst: you realise you've been eating insect[-derived matter] all this time, right? Cochineal is the most common example, I think.
Here's another idea though: your culture finding it so repellant has no bearing on "many others". Trust me, there are many more people out there who do, or would eat insects than otherwise. Welcome to the minority!
He's already a vegetarian, moron.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I'd give Bill $50 to swallow a cicada.
Lube him up with a little gin first and I bet he would.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Just watched a show today there is a company already doing this..and approved for animal feed. It costs less the the corn meal mix They use Some kinda larger fly and it looks like they dehydrate the maggots or meal worms. So i think this might be old news and this guy has a big jump already by having it approved for animal feed. The only problem he has is he cant make enough of them he wants to open open plants in other stares. He also said the animals love the stuff i guess you could make it taste like anything as most food is artificial flavored anyways.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Sure, killing other animals to same others merely because they're the same species as us is a great solution. Because we don't have other thing we can farm, like crops, fruits and vegetables!
Sir, I am at the top of the food chain, and I don't plan on stepping down from this lofty perch.
I will not eat them in Siam, I do not like bugs in my ham.
Edible insect farmers are one thing, but really, it all goes back to Jonathan Swift.
It makes more sense to go vegetarian from a sustainability perspective. All animals, insect or otherwise are made up of what they eat. And most of what they eat is used to keep them alive. So its a very inefficient way to get what we need. Just eating the stuff we feed them is far more efficient.
Consider how much a ear of corn costs. Now consider how many ears of corn are used to feed a piglet up to slaughtering size and how much meat you get out of it. Meat right now is artificially cheap. Insects may be a little better from a food in food out ratio, but not much. Animals spend most of their resources in staying alive, not building muscle.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
1729 called. They want their satire back.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What's the allowed percentage of insects and rodent fecal matter in cereal products, vegetables, and the like? I seem to recall it's about 1% by weight.
And those fine brown flakes in your flour didn't start life as wheat.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
His first mistake was to trust a bunch of MBAs. These are people who believe in things like: trickle down economics, exploiting people to the limits of their sanity, that outsourcing is ethical, sweatshops just make good sense, tapping into pension plans to pay out their bonuses, and even running their own companies into the ground for short term gains all make sense.
I really hope that there is a clause in the contest that basically says they can be disqualified even post win if their are undisclosed issues such as stealing the idea. I would smile to my core knowing that these guys not only didn't get the money but were then marked for their entire lives as untrustworthy thieves.