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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."
Get us commoners to eat insects while the ruling class gets steak.
capcha: liberals
First post?
Is this just for shock value to sell ads/papers or serious?
or, at least, i do. Renfield
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
sushi, raw fish, and tofu were once considered obscure products.
Sorry, but tofu is still gross - right up there with rice cakes.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Lobster and Shrimp...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
REAL Klingons only eat live Gakh!
was a major hurdle, so I was unable to back the full project. But I did back at a lower level...so we'll get some mealworms to try.
It's going to be difficult to get past many peoples' initial ick factors.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
I grow these for my chickens and they go absolutely berserk absolutely love eating these...
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.
The part they neglect to tell you: mealworms live exclusively on a diet of Kobe beef and caviar.
Were taken over by insects. And got some to eat bugs that burrowed into their brains.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
It's called "grazing". There isn't even a copyright or patent! Fully open source hardware!
Yet another advantage of not showering daily.
Oblig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
currently inefficient industrial-scale production of meat
Yes, it is *currently* inefficient, because *they are doing it wrong*!!!
1 - destroy millions of acres of ecosystem and drain rivers dry to monocrop grains
2 - force-feed feedlot cattle candy
3 - pump them full of antibiotics to attempt to combat their inevitable poor health
4 - bitch about inhumane livestock treatment and conditions
5 - go vegan/grow meal worms to think you've solved the problem
- or -
1 - graze cattle on the 70+ % of land *that is not suitable for monocrop agriculture practices anyways* but happens to be plenty fertile enough to grow stuff naturally that cows will happily, and healthily eat. Let the cows do the work of walking to their food, rather than spending fuel to grow candy and bring it to them.
2 - grow something more eco-friendly in the millions of acres currently being wasted on corn (say, the original natural fauna?)
3 - round up the cattle when it's time to slaughter--they will be healthy and have a much better nutrient profile for us as well
Notice anything missing from the list? antibiotics? feedlots? grains? clear cutting to make feedlot grounds? check check check check.
Read Joel Salatin's works for more info.
My Facebook is getting blown-up with stories about Syrian Refugees refusing food because it isn't good enough for them
Perhaps you need less douchebag-y Facebook friends.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Meanwhile, on Bizarro-Earth: "My Facebook is getting vlown up with stories about some of the Some-Christian-Country refugees refusing our pentagram-loaves because isn't good enough for them. Can you believe those ingrates?"
If only we had a seasonally appropriate story about middle-eastern people seeking refuge being turned away by the heartless...
Hello from Sputnik 2. I am receiving you.
That episode freaked me out when I was a kid!
Call it gagh and serve it with prune juice. Trekkies'll eat it.
They never go into detail in the book (I believe... pardon it's been an eternity since I've read it) but my assumption was always Soylent Yellow and Red were some artificially produced edible protein where it's entirely likely yellow came from insects and red maybe even came from real animals (rats?).
The way to get people to eat this stuff is to have it come out in NOT-INSECT-LOOKING form such as a cube of blended worm-meal.. maybe even with some artificial flavoring / coloring added. I mean... people eat Tofu don't they? (I don't... but some people do. ;)
If rice cakes are gross then you better not like rice krispies treats.
There's a HUGE difference between rice cakes and rice krispie treats, same as there's a huge difference between puffed rice (gross) and dishes made with rice.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
is it because they are posting about people fleeing a war and complaining about cuizine that bothers you??
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Seriously, are worms kosher/halal?
I don't know about worms, but I do know that certain species of locust are listed in the Torah as being kosher.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
There's too much talk about how to get people to eat this when it seems to me the smart thing is to use this for pet food first. Pets won't care at all especially since dry cat/dog food looks nothing like meat anyway and it would still replace a useful amount of traditional livestock.
He implied that they're not so much posting about people fleeing a war, but about refugees "refusing food because it isn't good enough for them", a framing meant to say "look at these ungrateful bugs!" when read between the lines. Nice try though.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
We need to make 10 new Tsar Bombas and drop them on Kentucky. What a festering shithole. Nothing but Muslims, Atheists and Wiccans.
... he said, for some reason, regarding a place that is severely deficient in Muslims, Atheists, and Wiccans.
That's more like it. Feed the worms to the chickens, then I'll eat the eggs and chickens. Chickens go nuts for fresh worms and insects of any kind.
One assumes you feed the worms kitchen scraps. Just a different path from pigs.
Kitchen scraps -> Pigs -> pork chops (yum).
Kitchen scraps -> Worms -> Chickens -> Eggs, Drumsticks.
Extra cycle of latency, but a two for one, and not just a one shot. Sounds good to me. Maybe I'll buy the box for the friend who's got chickens and regularly gives me eggs...
or fed to prisoners and the poor. http://www.lobsterhelp.com/lob...
One of the first thing you learn in survival school is you can eat a lot of things that you normally would not when you are very hungry. the second thing is a coach roach in a match box is a greta way to get a seat at a crowded bar. Take it out, take a bite, and be polite and offer to share it...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
No that was bubble yum. Or was that spider eggs?
Yeah, spider eggs.
I'll stick with chicken until they either come out with artificially grown meat or bugs that are big enough that you can strip out all of the nasty bits (exoskeleton, guts, brain eyes, etc). You can raise modern broilers in 5 to 7 weeks on about 5 lbs of feed each.
Wut?
We don't eat bugs because historically and culturally, bugs have been a sign of spoilage and infestation. Some cultures do eat mealworms, but this almost exclusively happens in places where agriculture is difficult and high quality protein sources are rare.
Another reason why we are averse to eating bugs is that they are eaten whole. There are few animals that we consume in their entirety.
Ways to get around both of these issues ultimately come down to processing. Chemical processing has the potential to extract the proteins while rendering the result into a form that is unrecognizable as being derived from an insect. But, for my own personal tastes, I am not any more or less inclined to want to eat a mealworm than I am inclined to want to eat the intestine of a cow. It's just that, on a cow, it's a lot easier to separate the muscle tissue from the organs.
This, for example, seems like a good idea of telling you what not to eat (or at least how it is is prepared)
The British Veterinary Association, along with citizens who have assembled a petition with 100,000[20] signatures, have raised concerns regarding a proposed halal abattoir in Wales, in which animals are not to be stunned prior to killing.
Concern about slaughtering, without prior stunning, has resulted in the religious slaughter of animals being banned in Denmark, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.
source
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
But if it has ten legs you can charge $9/pound for it if it's lobster, $15/pound if it's shrimp.
The distinction between crustaceans (like lobster and shrimp) and insects is literally academic. In fact about five years ago a paper came out suggesting that insects are crustaceans, although this has been tidied up by introducing a new clade to sit between the Arthropoda phylum and the Hexapoda and Crustacea sub-phyla: Pancrustacea.
And in point of fact eating insects has at some point in most cultures been considered normal. In Europe cheeses were often traditionally eaten with their accompanying insect populations -- the cheese mite for cheddar for example, or Piophila casei larvae for casu marzu in Italy. It has only been in modern times that its even possible to create such foods without insect hitchhikers, and we have come to associate insects with harmful contamination -- which they may be -- and consider them harmful -- which they may not be, any more than fungal growth is necessarily harmful (e.g. blue cheese).
In my lifetime I've seen a big shift in attitude in the US toward bacterial fermentation, which was also associated with contamination. Americans were introduced to yogurt around the time I was in middle school; it was exotic stuff. When James Beard published his "James Beard Cookbook" in 1959, he had to explain that "sour cream" wasn't the same thing as spoiled cream.
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It's called a Hot Dog. Sausage is good too!
Thank you.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
I find it rather shocking that rather than go for any of the vegan (and low-carbon) meat options, people would rather 'grow' and consume worms..? We've come a long way from blocks of tofu, check out the offerings from companies like Gardein, Beyond Meat, Viana and Fry's. They may not taste exactly like meat (although hot dogs aren't terribly hard to emulate), but they're generally pretty good in their own right. And no doubt they'll try turning them into burgers as well -- is a worm-based fake burger really more appealing than a veggie-based fake burger? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested if this is the case!
Make it into powder so that I will drink it with my soylent.
i've got no opposition to eating bugs. i'm not growing my own though. I'm not growing them in my house. I've done it enough in the past to feed my reptiles. the fact is these guys stink. crickets, mealworms, dubias, they all are dirty and stinky and require a ton of cleaning. No thanks. let me know when i can go to the supermarket and just get what i'm going to cook that day.
Remember when sushi was considered weird and adventurous? When I moved to Japan (1975) everybody's reaction was, "Ewww, think of what they eat there!"
No, I'm saying that if an Islamaphobic site publishes some bullshit story about a "refugees throwing away food", and people are sharing that story on Facebook, they are probably douchebags.
And yes, I realize you're just trolling at this point. But maybe not; maybe you're just an idiot and legitimately don't see how those people are douchebags. Your call.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
You get a delivery of half a dozen of these - along with a 55-galon drum of freeze-dried mealworms to tide them over until the "livestock" are producing.
Seriously: Mealworms are something like 50% protein. Chickens LOVE them. Mealworms and yoghurt are the chicken version of sweet-and-sour shrimp. The main problem with using them for chicken treats is that the chickens will eat enough to overdose on protein and destroy their kidneys.
We have a show hen that the breeder had to stop showing: The breeder had tried to train her, using a reward of mealworms, to assume an erect posture to impress the judges. The hen decided that if standing up straight was good for getting a mealworm, going farther would get her more. So she started doing backflips - which mostly impressed the judges as weird (and possibly a sign of impaired balance) rather than just enthusiasm.
Commercial mealworms are pricey and flour is cheap. We've considered growing our own mealworms for "the girls", but that's a bit more labor-intensive than we're into. If this gadget is cheap enough an automatic enough (and non-stinky enough) they've got a sale - and probably a lot of them once the chicken fanciers find out about it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sometimes that whole idea of consuming mammal excretions or animal embryos or mammal carcases, in various staged of partial decomposition, with varying levels of our own pollution stored within them, just seems more than a little repulsive or it's actual totally unpalatable state in my digestive tract where it is actually consumed.
The taste of crispy bacon on the tastebuds cures all such silliness. I've seen it happen. Seriously, I've literally seen it happen. To be fair, the hog was raised "at home" not in an industrial facility.
Just try getting locally sourced beef on the ISS.
You are on to something. A full sized heifer with the tenderness of veal. Thank you microgravity.
Cow farts, not a problem. Capture as fuel for reaction control system thrusters.
Humans are also historically warlike and racist.
Warlike, yes, racist, no. Try tribal next time, and the tribe being an extended family. Grow up in a tribe that includes multiple races and you almost certainly won't be racist. You will almost certainly fight to protect tribal member of a different race and kill outsiders of your race.
Why do you think racists are so fond of separating the races? Separation is needed to continue the racist meme.
Still disgusted. See you sometime next year to remind you that I'm still disgusted.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
No, you didn't. Humans evolved to need meat in small quantities. They didn't evolve to need war in any quantities.
Group on group combat has been a significant factor in our evolution. It continues to be an environmental factor, pacifism can only endure when there are non-pacifists willing to protect the pacifists for some reason. The ability to wage war, to engage in self defense, is a necessity for survival. We have not evolved beyond some point where police and armies are no longer necessary. Yes, it sure would be nice if we had, but we have not.
I think it's going to take time for humans to get over the "gross" factor of eating worms.
I mean, even the woman on the promo photos looks disgusted by what she's seeing. Great marketing there...
I'm a big fan of these projects, and at the same time I will never eat insects. She is right that it's a cultural thing, and for us grown up on western food, insects simply are not in the category of "food". It's pure semantics, but you can't change a life-long training easily.
I suspect like many major changes, it will take two generations. The next one might experiment with it here and there, which will make it acceptable for their children.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
WTF Michael?
I bet you can make Slurm from that thing.
We are ALL vegetarians... after all, meat is a just a highly processed vegetables. ;-)
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Of course everybody knows pentagram loaves aren't any good unless served with roasted un-baptised babies.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Isn't "less douchebag-y Facebook friends" an oxymoron? I thought the main point of facebook is for people to try and out douchebag everybody else, unless your a crazy cat person then you post cat pictures.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Mealworms are the larvae of darkling beetles. They have legs. Darkling beetles are those black elongated things, kind of like a cockroach only not as flattened and with harder and darker wing covers.
Here's a video of the darkling beetle life cycle, from worm to beetle to egg.
I would think the original poster (on facebook) is implying that those refusing food aren't refugees, my suspicion is they are refugees but the situation was instigated by unseen povocatures. There is a lot of hidden agendas, what seems obvious is almost certainly wrong.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
This is freaking awesome. The machine is ingenious.
I bet my son would love to take these to school for snacks!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
APK, if you don't believe that eating your words is good nutrition, why do you do it all the freaking time? You have been proven wrong so much, you should sue your grade school teachers for malpractice.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Did it hurt when you had your ass handed to you?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That was very well said. Too many people try something once and decide it's not for them. One of the things my kids have discovered is that things that they didn't like a year ago, they like now. And vice versa. Stuff they used to love, they have lost the taste for.
I've never had mealworms, but waxworms are delicious. Similar flavor to the lychee fruit. Unfortunately, the wax moth would be a lot harder to deal with than the darkling beetle. So I don't think it would work for a getup like this.
where is the desktop pc converted into an edible insect farm?
Your tasting the spices and preservatives. Bacon's a popular meat to fake with veg protein because of that.
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The rich Wall Street and Washington DC assholes already have us eating high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oils and other government subsidized, genetically modified garbage. If they're making jokes about the nasty "food" they've managed to put in our diets, the laughter has long since died down.
Nutritionally speaking, a few servings of mealworms would be an improvement in the diet of the average American.
Your tasting the spices and preservatives. Bacon's a popular meat to fake with veg protein because of that.
Spices and preservatives as in salt, pepper, sugar. Note the hog was not raised and processed in an industrial facility. Raised and butchered at home, cured at the local specialty butcher shop. It didn't taste like store bought bacon, it was far better. That is what cured our leftist's beliefs, got her past "it was cute, intelligent and had a personality" to "oh god it tastes so good".