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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."
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."
Honey is bee puke. They have a "many bees, one cell" puking, eating and re-puking party to make it.
Beans are the reproductive vessels of plants. We're eating innocent bean plants that could have grown and thrived.
Salad leaves are cut from their living bodies.
We're not plants. Inevitably, our food involves the death and destruction of other species, or biological processes, yes, including excretion, even if it's just your bread inflated by the microfarts of yeast.
Your glass of algae still has to decompose, it just does it in your belly instead, first at the hands of your stomach acids and enzymes, then it's passed through a festering mess of bacteria. As you note, microorganisms are vicious bastards that produce all kinds of toxins, far more than macroorganisms. One man's toxin is another man's glass of Chateau Lafite...
The notion that you can somehow strive for "cleanliness" in your food is just effete pretence. Even that bag of Soylent is the product of things writhing through dirt and striving to exist before they are cut down in their prime and ground up.
I implore you to get help for your food aversion - you're really missing out on some delicious stuff.
How often do you eat ground cow? No, not ground beef; ground cow? Heads, hide, bones, hooves, guts, and all? You never have and never will? Exactly.
You almost certainly eat mechanically separated meat, which includes all kinds of crap and is cleaned with ammonia.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.