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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.
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.
Eat bugs? No thanks, I'll stick to birds, fish, and mammals. No escargo or grasshoppers for me, thank you.
It's possible that you won't have a choice.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That's your call to make.
While I've never eaten grasshopper, spider, or cricket, I do know people who have eaten them and they say that it doesn't taste that significantly different. Apparently, locusts taste like chicken.
Esgargots are similar to squid, I find... they don't really have much flavour on their own and get most of their flavour from how they're prepared. Fried up in garlic and butter, they're quite tasty.
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.
not all that different in concept than eating shrimp, crabs, or crawfish.
The thing that bothers me the most about it is that insects look like they contain a lot more gut and chitin, and a lot less meaty morsels compared to the other multi-limbed critters we eat regularly.
I would bet money you have eaten plenty of insects in your life. You may not have noticed, but check out how many insect parts are allowed in various kinds of processed foods one time.
The thing that bothers me the most about it is that insects look like they contain a lot more gut and chitin, and a lot less meaty morsels compared to the other multi-limbed critters we eat regularly.
They do. That's one of the reasons I've never eaten insects, despite having been in parts of the world where they are a part of the normal diet. And that's also something we don't consider in the western world: spiders are considered a delicacy in Thailand. Anything being discussed here is stuff that's already been proven healthy/safe to eat, just that it's kind of squick for people used to a different diet.
Larger insects do have more meat, though, and stuff like grasshoppers/locusts are more meaty to begin with. Ultimately, it's about improving protein availability, and we may not have a choice if the population continues to increase. If you're able to eat meat on a regular basis, you're part of the 1% in the world....
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
Personally, I've no problem with it, particularly if insect derived food were processed. For example, it could be presented in the form of burger. Having said that, I'd probably get used to seeing insect shaped food. Particularly if it were cheap and nutritious and tasty. I'm certainly willing to give it a go. Maybe one day we'll all be telling our grandchildren, to their horror, that we used to eat things that looked recognisably like the leg of an animal.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
ftfh:
Clinton Grants $1 Million To Edible Insect Farmers
why would anybody want to eat insect farmers?
http://xkcd.com/1268/
They can keep the water bugs, I'll stick to steak.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Why?
Because you think she said something about cake?
She said let them eat brioche, which in that situation made sense. French law at the time set the price for normal bread and to prevent bakers from not selling it they were required to sell brioche for that price if they ran out of normal bread.
The current defect levels handbook doesn't appear to say anything about mass. It says a maximum average of "74 insect fragments per 50 grams" for wheat flour.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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!”
Insects taste like chicken, insect farmers taste like pork, so it's really a matter of personal preference.
Delicacy = something rare and gross for the tourists to eat and make fun of behind their backs.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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").
Real vegans have health problems anyway, including being very irritable.
I think I'm pescatarian, plus poultry. And cheese. And well, I very rarely get fish as I'm under the impression it's overfished.
The general tendency, somewhat magnified recently, of government to tell us that for our own good (obesity, for the good of the planet, whatever is the issue of the day) we must modify our behavior, when our leaders have no intention of following suit. [1] The thought process appears to be, we should ride bicycles so there's plenty of gas for our leaders' armored SUVs. We should eat grasshoppers so there's plenty of steak for our leaders. And we should all reduce our energy consumption so our leaders can splurge.
Mind you, I've not had meat (except for fish) since the 1970's, my home is partially solar powered (with more to come as I can afford it) and my transportation gets substantially better gas mileage than a Prius. These efforts are worth while. What supremely annoys me is our fearless leaders telling us to cut back when they themselves have no such intention of doing so, except for the occasional photo op.
[1] Yes, Bill Clinton is the exception, being mostly vegan. (He admits to occasionally eating eggs and fish.) In his case, I think it was the triple bypass that decided him, rather than any particular concern about the planet, but he still deserves credit for the decision.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
You're just begging for an oblig, aren't you? ;)
I draw the line at badgers
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."