Grow Your Daily Protein At Home With an Edible Insect Desktop Hive

HughPickens.com writes: Fast Coexist reports on the Edible Insect Desktop Hive, a kitchen gadget designed to raise mealworms (beetle larva), a food that has the protein content of beef without the environmental footprint. The hive can grow between 200 and 500 grams of mealworms a week, enough to replace traditional meat in four or five dishes. The hive comes with a starter kit of "microlivestock," and controls the climate inside so the bugs have the right amount of fresh air and the right temperature to thrive. If you push a button, the mealworms pop out in a harvest drawer that chills them. You're supposed to pop them in the freezer, then fry them up or mix them into soup, smoothies, or bug-filled burgers. "Insects give us the opportunity to grow on small spaces, with few resources," says designer Katharina Unger, founder of Livin Farms, the company making the new home farming gadget. "A pig cannot easily be raised on your balcony, insects can. With their benefits, insects are one part of the solution to make currently inefficient industrial-scale production of meat obsolete."

Of course, that assumes people will be willing to eat them. Unger thinks bugs just need a little rebranding to succeed, and points out that other foods have overcome bad reputations in the past. "Even the potato, that is now a staple food, was once considered ugly and was given to pigs," says Unger adding that sushi, raw fish, and tofu were once considered obscure products. "Food is about perception and cultural associations. Within only a short time and the right measures, it can be rebranded. . . . Growing insects in our hive at home is our first measure to make insects a healthy and sustainable food for everyone."

Comments

Protein from plants, not animals

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get all the protein you need (and more) from plants. Protein isn't the reason to eat animals. Look it up:

http://cookforgood.com/blog/2014/3/5/how-much-protein-is-enough-what-are-the-best-sources.html

Re:Protein from plants, not animals

[quenda]

Some of the highest protein sources out there are vegetable-based.

The problem is not the total amount of protein, but about getting all the nine essential amino acids (ones our body cannot make).
These are present in the right amounts in meat, but not vegetables. It is possible to get the right balance by combining different vegetable proteins, but not all vegans make the effort consistently, and are often deficient in methionine and lysine.

Re:Protein from plants, not animals

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation needed.

Citation given:

http://cookforgood.com/blog/2014/3/5/how-much-protein-is-enough-what-are-the-best-sources.html

Those graphs in that blog posting are from the USDA National Nutrient Database. Notice how many plants provide more protein per calorie than, say, chicken. The real surprise to me was how people think scrambled eggs give them a lot of protein, and they just don't. The frellin' Egg Council (or whoever it is) has effective advertising, I must say.

Re:Protein from plants, not animals

[Rei]

Apparently you don't know the meaning of the word "based". Heck, some vegatable-based foods (such as gluten, often used in Chinese cooking) are nearly pure protein. Most meat substitutes are based around things like TVP, which is overwhelmingly protein. Seitan is 80% protein.

Even common things like tofu have far more calories from protein than carbs (your standard). But really, that's the wrong standard: it's calories from protein vs. calories from "everything else". The majority common vegan ingredients are in the 20-50% protein range - your green leafies (lettuce? 36%; broccoli? 33%; spinach? 50%; collards? 38%; etc), legumes (peas? 33%; lentils? 31%; beans? ~25%; etc), some grains, etc, plus tons of secondary products) are in the 20-50% protein-calories range. While lean fish and skinless chicken cooked in non-fattening manners around 80%-ish percent of their calories from protein, most meats are much lower. A hamburger patty, 80% lean, 20% fat, broiled? 38% from protein. Batter-dipped fried chicken? also 38% protein. Bacon, fried? 27%. Etc. These are just the first "common" things that come to mind, do your own searches. Common meat dishes have the same sort of percent of their calories from protein as common vegetarian dishes.

Re:Protein from plants, not animals

[Beck_Neard]

Our diets weren't as diverse as vegetarians like to think. If you look at the diets of most major human populations, there are some common themes: A mix of gathered plant matter, including roots, leaves, fruit, and nuts. And hunted meat including insects, birds, and large game. Even Inuit ate lots of plant food, contrary to the widely-circulated myth that they just ate meat (an important part of the Inuit diet is the half-digested plant matter found in the stomachs of wild game). But meat seems to be a constant. You can not find a major human population that didn't eat meat. They all did. They HAD to, because paleolithic plants were not nearly as nutritious or calorie-rich as modern agricultural inventions like potatoes and corn. None of these modern agricultural marvels existed for our ancestors. But they had buffalo.

The average caloric mix seems to be about 70% plants and 30% meat.

Re:Protein from plants, not animals

[sexconker]

Animal proteins are complete proteins.
Plant proteins are not.

Eating certain things together can give you a complete proteins (which is how the Mayans survived), but no one does that.

Industrial processing of soybeans can turn it into a complete protein. We call this tofu. Tofu and fortified/enriched staples (such as bread and salt) are what make the modern vegetarian fad possible.

Without complete proteins humans are physically incapable of building (or rebuilding) muscle tissue, and WILL wither and die.

Re:Protein from plants, not animals

[Attila Dimedici]

A "complete protein" is one which provides all of the amino acids which the human body is unable to manufacture from other substances. As a general rule (I am unaware of any exceptions, but there may be a very few), foods derived from plants are missing one or more of those amino acids.

Well.. they're not too far removed from

[Rinikusu]

Lobster and Shrimp...

Re:Well.. they're not too far removed from

[deepkat_chopra]

We used to use those awful creatures as fish bait, but now it is all exported to those weirdos in Japan who'll eat anything.

No. The big lobster-eating countries are the US, Canada, and European countries like France, Spain, and Italy. Not Japan.

Link to the "actual" product: [Kickstarter.]

[mythosaz]

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

I enjoy fried mealworms as replacements for salty snacks, like any other pop-and-crunch food covered in chili powder.

Re:Inefficient because they forgot how to do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Never actually been on a ranch I can see....

There is a reason we have those feed lots as inefficient and stinky as they turn out to be. Mainly they are FAST and a cheaper way to generate the meat the consumer wants.

Most folks don't like grass fed beef. They want their beef with lots of fat, as young as possible, and as quickly as we can produce it. That says "Feed Lot" where we do the best we can to get the cattle to eat as much as they can convert to fat/meat as we can arrange. If you preferred grass fed beef, that's what you'd be getting. Trust me, it's easier and a lot less messy to kick them out to pasture to snap up as much grass as you can put in front of them. Rancher's would love it, they'd be keeping their own steers, feeding them all the grass/hay they could find until they reached slaughter weight and just sell them to processors direct. As it stands, they sell their yearling steers to feed lots, who take them to slaughter weight as quickly as possible.

Personally, I've had grass raised beef. It's not bad but it's an acquired taste I'm afraid. You end up making more hamburger because it's way too lean and tough in places, but over all it works if it is cooked right. However, I prefer grain finished beef. That extra bit of fat and marbling is much nicer and makes for better tasting steaks. I've raised my own beef both ways, and obviously the feed lot model produces better results.

The antibiotic issue is not really a problem for feed lots, who generally don't go around just shooting up all the steers with antibiotics as a matter of course. Of course they DO use them in dairy operations quite a bit and you are more likely to find them in milk than meat. Dairy operations also use a lot of growth hormones to boost production which is worrisome if you ask me. Feed lots get in on this as well, but not to as much and they are really just adding on as a supplement a hormone that's already present naturally. I find this hormone augmentation more of a worry than antibiotics which cannot be given within a set timeframe of slaughter.

So... Until folks acquire a taste for grass fed beef, feed lots are where the bulk of your beef will come from. That's just based on what the American pallet will accept and the cheapest way to produce what we want to eat. There is not much else that's going to happen so get used to the idea.