7 ms·

Ways to start eating insects

70 points by d_a_robson 11y ago

pilsetnieks 11y ago
I somehow don't think this is what they mean with "eating insects is the future" with the $700 worm hive and $300 ant booze.
- rl3 11y ago
  For that price, I'd want my $300 ant booze delivered via ants. Watching the bottle seemingly scoot itself across the bar counter would probably be far more satisfying than actually drinking the stuff.
- dvdcxn 11y ago
  Well there isn't much industrialization on this front so of course these things are a luxury, and cost as such. Before pineapples were able to be cheaply grown and imported so the masses could afford them, they were revered as a treat only reserved for the upper echelon of society. Now, they're just another cheap fruit in the supermarket.
  - pilsetnieks 11y ago
    Side note: sometimes they weren't even a treat for the elite, they were rented to display in parties, and then returned.
  - reqctomaniac 11y ago
    Except in the case of pineapples, it's not because of industrialisation, but because of almost slave-labour and smart tax evasions. http://www.bananalink.org.uk/pineapples-true-price-luxury-fruit-revisited http://www.bananalink.org.uk/pineapples-true-price-luxury-fr...
phreeza 11y ago
So why should we eat insects? The standard answer is: it is a cheap and sustainable source of protein. But I have yet to see a convincing argument that it is cheaper and more sustainable than soy protein, aka tofu.
- pheroden 11y ago
  Some soy is fine, but if we're talking as completely replacing your meat, it could be too much estrogen like compounds. Hence breasts in men and an increased risk of breast cancer in women. I haven't seen enough studies to definitively rule these out. Besides, variety is always good. It's never wise to put all your eggs in a single basket.
  - tomp 11y ago
    There's just one thing I don't get... Too much carbohydrates are supposed to be bad. Too much soy is supposed to be bad. But the Japanese live the longest, so obviously they can't be that bad. So one of these assumptions must be false: - Japanese eat a lot of rice and/or soy (or products made from them) - Japanese have different genetics that allows them to avoid the negative effects of carbs/soy. We could probably throw fish (mercury) in the mix as well.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - dmm 11y ago
      How much of the japanese diet is actually made up of soy? The numbers I've seen are <5%.
      - lifeformed 11y ago
        It seems like it'd be much more than the 100-200g/wk that they suggest. In China or Taiwan, every day you could drink a big bowl of soy milk for breakfast, and for lunch/dinner eat some mapo tofu, stir fried bean curd sticks, etc.
        ekianjo 11y ago
        I confirm it should be more than that. Miso soup is a daily dish in Japan for about one or 2 meals, and it usually contains 20g of Tofu at least. Then there's soy beans, used in many delicacies, soy sauce used for sushi, a number of dressing using soy as a base... 100-200g/week actually seem a rather low estimate in Japan.
lucozade 11y ago
6) Cycle with your mouth open
GordonS 11y ago
> what they’re doing is feeding fly larvae on food waste to raise maggots. The maggots are processed into meal, which can be used as a high-protein feed for chickens, fish and pigs. The maggot meal stands to be more sustainable Now this I find interesting! It would be a much easier sell than humans eating the insects. I'd like to know more about the sustainability claims though - anyone know anything about this?
- sawwit 11y ago
  This site has some numbers: http://www.kunger.at/161540/1591397/overview/farm-432-insect-breeding http://www.kunger.at/161540/1591397/overview/farm-432-insect...
xefer 11y ago
Mechanisms for sustainability and productivity - the Haber-Bosch process, genetic engineering, the "green revolution", etc. - are a bit of a two-edge sword in that they have allowed for massive population growth. New highways ultimately increase traffic through induced demand. Is not a similar effect at play with these technologies? I don't want to have to start eating bugs just to make room for a few billion more fellow bug-eaters.
- adwn 11y ago
  What a cynical, inhuman, and shortsighted comment. The right way to stop population growth is not to starve poor countries to death, but to bring them to a higher level of wealth, education, and stability. Do this, and overpopulation (and a bunch of other problems) will solve itself.
  - nsomaru 11y ago
    How have you relegated anyone who doesn't believe that supporting indiscriminate population growth with tech is always a good thing as 'cynical, inhuman and shortsighted'? Parent noted that these technologies are a double edged sword, i.e., having strengths and weaknesses. Nobody is asking that we starve poor countries. Population regulation through resource scarcity is a natural phenomenon and should be allowed to happen. I'm not sure what's inhuman about this? Are we expected to treat people who don't yet exist in a humane way? The fact of the matter is that the Earth is a finite place and resources are limited. Maybe there will come a time when we're space faring that it won't matter, but we seem a little far away from that goal.
  - xefer 11y ago
    I think you've wildly misinterpreted my point. Perhaps it's my fault for how I phrased things. I think these technologies, while undoubtably beneficial, have for many decades only pushed back the Malthusian limits imposed by nature which allowed exponential population growth while just as many people remained hungry and destitute. We're finally turning the corner where the population growth rate has slowed somewhat (recent UN population projections where increased significantly; e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is projected to have a population of 4.5 billion(!) by 2100) allowing people to get ahead of the rate of increased food production. But we're still basically just using up most of the increased production. Vaclav Smil has pointed out that population growth has been directly corollated to the amount of artificial fertilizers. He points out that even if every bit of arable land was used to its maximum extent, only 3 billion people could be supported. So just think, by 2100 when the UN projects a population of 11 billion, 8 billion of those people will only be alive because the proteins in their bodies use nitrogen from factories producing artificial fertilizers.
voidz 11y ago
And here you see why modern media is referring to computer issues as glitches instead of bugs: bugs are food!
KevinEldon 11y ago
I've eaten chapulines (grasshoppers). Their taste reminded me of what I think slightly toasted grass might taste like. I didn't care for them, but would try them again if someone who liked them recommended a different preparation and I wouldn't hesitate to eat them if I needed protein.
- jkaunisv1 11y ago
  They're pretty good with any kind of BBQ sauce (if you like a crunchy snack).
- jordigh 11y ago
  I find it weird that people do that with language. Did you also drink agua, breathe aire, walk on calles, or sleep on camas? Why is it we only do this for some things but not others?
  - thedavinci2000 11y ago
    Nothing wrong with that. Is rare enough that I think the name chapulin is OK. It says a lot. It means he is probably talking about a region of Mexico and that he is maybe from Mexico. It is an actual thing in Mexico to eat a certain type of grasshoper. There is another type of insect called a xumile that is eaten. No idea how you would call that in English. I'm not even sure if I havr the spelling right in Spanish.
  - pvaldes 11y ago
    And we say viva Las Vegas instead to 'cheer the river banks', also. Is because there is not an exact equivalent to the name 'chapulin' in english, and is a distinctive name, so is useful to keep the word.
    - jordigh 11y ago
      But chapulín means exactly the same thing as grasshopper. Anything that an English speaker would call grasshopper a Mexican would call a chapulín. I guess I understand why people do this. It's obviously not wrong, because nobody can speak incorrectly. It just strikes me as a bit of a cultural misunderstanding, but that's how things are.
bitwize 11y ago
"Your carbon footprint rating for this year is 'fair', but I'll raise your assessment to 'excellent' if you eat a bug."
nradov 11y ago
Why bother raising maggots on food waste and then feed them to pigs? Wouldn't it be easier to just give the food waste directly to the pigs? That's what my uncle always did. The pigs didn't seem to mind.
- alextgordon 11y ago
  Depends on the kind of food waste. Last thing you want to do is create Pig BSE.
FoeNyx 11y ago
The Carmine [1] — a red dye most often made from boiled and dried Cochineals [2] — is frequently used in a lot of food products like ice-cream, candy, yogurt, juices, cake, sausage, etc. So most of us probably unknowingly started to swallow insects laced food since long ago. Only became aware of it because one of my ex-colleague has severe allergic reactions to it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal
- ams6110 11y ago
  For that matter, there are USDA allowable limits for "insect parts" in most food.
aurizon 11y ago
We eat birds and animals because they have high efficiency skeletons and circulation systems so they grow to large sizes and so their muscles become larger. Insects have exoskeletons and the spiracle based (air pipes throughout their flesh) respiratory system places limits on their sizes. If grasshoppers grew to be as big as cows, I am sure they would provide harvestable muscle masses to eat. As it is, the work of harvesting 10,000 grashopper legs and extractin their muscles, just ruins the economics of it. Same with grubs, although the Australian witchetty grub. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchetty_grub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchetty_grub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNsCpRZXq68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNsCpRZXq68 is comparable to small shrimps as a edible lump. I am not sure if they need deveining, like shrimps where the lower intestine is removed from the tail to leave the entire peeled tail as high quality fat and protein. A 200 pound witchetty grub might offer witchetty steaks etc. If we selectively bred insects in high oxygen environment to grow them to large sizes, we might change the ease of harvesting grasshopper steaks etc - but that is for ~~100 years in the future
- shalmanese 11y ago
  You don't need to individually butcher insects. You can just dump a whole load of crickets into a deep fryer and eat them like potato chips.
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    That's not a meal, though. It's a somewhat unhealthy snack, comparable to pork rinds, perhaps (more protein and less fat, perhaps, but still unhealthy). A vision of a future that has humans consuming insects on a large scale needs to involve meals made of insects, not snack foods that are much more expensive and only moderately more nutritive than their plant or animal based alternatives. The environmental and economic cost has to be lower than the current alternatives (if not now, during the infancy of the market, then eventually, once mass production has been figured out), or it doesn't make sense to pursue it. It's already an uphill battle to convince people that bugs are food.
ams6110 11y ago
I'd rather we keep working on synthetically grown meat tissues. If we can grow the equivalent of a flank steak without needing to kill an animal to get it, eating meat becomes no more of an ethical problem than eating plants.
hyperion2010 11y ago
I figure we're all going to be eating mealworms in 50 years or many of us are going to be eating at all.
jamoes 11y ago
In terms of sustainability, I agree with Rob Rhinehart [1] that single-cell protein (e.g. from algae) is the best path forward. It doesn't have the gross factor that insects have, and once the process is perfected, it should be one of the most efficient ways to produce protein. https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/3afdfp/i_am_rob_ama/csc6fhp?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/3afdfp/i_am_rob_am...

70 points by d_a_robson 11y ago

I somehow don't think this is what they mean with "eating insects is the future" with the $700 worm hive and $300 ant booze.

rl3 11y ago
For that price, I'd want my $300 ant booze delivered via ants. Watching the bottle seemingly scoot itself across the bar counter would probably be far more satisfying than actually drinking the stuff.
dvdcxn 11y ago
Well there isn't much industrialization on this front so of course these things are a luxury, and cost as such. Before pineapples were able to be cheaply grown and imported so the masses could afford them, they were revered as a treat only reserved for the upper echelon of society. Now, they're just another cheap fruit in the supermarket.
- pilsetnieks 11y ago
  Side note: sometimes they weren't even a treat for the elite, they were rented to display in parties, and then returned.
- reqctomaniac 11y ago
  Except in the case of pineapples, it's not because of industrialisation, but because of almost slave-labour and smart tax evasions. http://www.bananalink.org.uk/pineapples-true-price-luxury-fruit-revisited http://www.bananalink.org.uk/pineapples-true-price-luxury-fr...

phreeza 11y ago

So why should we eat insects? The standard answer is: it is a cheap and sustainable source of protein. But I have yet to see a convincing argument that it is cheaper and more sustainable than soy protein, aka tofu.

pheroden 11y ago
Some soy is fine, but if we're talking as completely replacing your meat, it could be too much estrogen like compounds. Hence breasts in men and an increased risk of breast cancer in women. I haven't seen enough studies to definitively rule these out. Besides, variety is always good. It's never wise to put all your eggs in a single basket.
- tomp 11y ago
  There's just one thing I don't get... Too much carbohydrates are supposed to be bad. Too much soy is supposed to be bad. But the Japanese live the longest, so obviously they can't be that bad. So one of these assumptions must be false: - Japanese eat a lot of rice and/or soy (or products made from them) - Japanese have different genetics that allows them to avoid the negative effects of carbs/soy. We could probably throw fish (mercury) in the mix as well.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmm 11y ago
    How much of the japanese diet is actually made up of soy? The numbers I've seen are <5%.
    - lifeformed 11y ago
      It seems like it'd be much more than the 100-200g/wk that they suggest. In China or Taiwan, every day you could drink a big bowl of soy milk for breakfast, and for lunch/dinner eat some mapo tofu, stir fried bean curd sticks, etc.
      - ekianjo 11y ago
        I confirm it should be more than that. Miso soup is a daily dish in Japan for about one or 2 meals, and it usually contains 20g of Tofu at least. Then there's soy beans, used in many delicacies, soy sauce used for sushi, a number of dressing using soy as a base... 100-200g/week actually seem a rather low estimate in Japan.

lucozade 11y ago

6) Cycle with your mouth open

GordonS 11y ago

> what they’re doing is feeding fly larvae on food waste to raise maggots. The maggots are processed into meal, which can be used as a high-protein feed for chickens, fish and pigs. The maggot meal stands to be more sustainable Now this I find interesting! It would be a much easier sell than humans eating the insects. I'd like to know more about the sustainability claims though - anyone know anything about this?

sawwit 11y ago
This site has some numbers: http://www.kunger.at/161540/1591397/overview/farm-432-insect-breeding http://www.kunger.at/161540/1591397/overview/farm-432-insect...

xefer 11y ago

Mechanisms for sustainability and productivity - the Haber-Bosch process, genetic engineering, the "green revolution", etc. - are a bit of a two-edge sword in that they have allowed for massive population growth. New highways ultimately increase traffic through induced demand. Is not a similar effect at play with these technologies? I don't want to have to start eating bugs just to make room for a few billion more fellow bug-eaters.

adwn 11y ago
What a cynical, inhuman, and shortsighted comment. The right way to stop population growth is not to starve poor countries to death, but to bring them to a higher level of wealth, education, and stability. Do this, and overpopulation (and a bunch of other problems) will solve itself.
- nsomaru 11y ago
  How have you relegated anyone who doesn't believe that supporting indiscriminate population growth with tech is always a good thing as 'cynical, inhuman and shortsighted'? Parent noted that these technologies are a double edged sword, i.e., having strengths and weaknesses. Nobody is asking that we starve poor countries. Population regulation through resource scarcity is a natural phenomenon and should be allowed to happen. I'm not sure what's inhuman about this? Are we expected to treat people who don't yet exist in a humane way? The fact of the matter is that the Earth is a finite place and resources are limited. Maybe there will come a time when we're space faring that it won't matter, but we seem a little far away from that goal.
- xefer 11y ago
  I think you've wildly misinterpreted my point. Perhaps it's my fault for how I phrased things. I think these technologies, while undoubtably beneficial, have for many decades only pushed back the Malthusian limits imposed by nature which allowed exponential population growth while just as many people remained hungry and destitute. We're finally turning the corner where the population growth rate has slowed somewhat (recent UN population projections where increased significantly; e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is projected to have a population of 4.5 billion(!) by 2100) allowing people to get ahead of the rate of increased food production. But we're still basically just using up most of the increased production. Vaclav Smil has pointed out that population growth has been directly corollated to the amount of artificial fertilizers. He points out that even if every bit of arable land was used to its maximum extent, only 3 billion people could be supported. So just think, by 2100 when the UN projects a population of 11 billion, 8 billion of those people will only be alive because the proteins in their bodies use nitrogen from factories producing artificial fertilizers.

voidz 11y ago

And here you see why modern media is referring to computer issues as glitches instead of bugs: bugs are food!

KevinEldon 11y ago

I've eaten chapulines (grasshoppers). Their taste reminded me of what I think slightly toasted grass might taste like. I didn't care for them, but would try them again if someone who liked them recommended a different preparation and I wouldn't hesitate to eat them if I needed protein.

jkaunisv1 11y ago
They're pretty good with any kind of BBQ sauce (if you like a crunchy snack).
jordigh 11y ago
I find it weird that people do that with language. Did you also drink agua, breathe aire, walk on calles, or sleep on camas? Why is it we only do this for some things but not others?
- thedavinci2000 11y ago
  Nothing wrong with that. Is rare enough that I think the name chapulin is OK. It says a lot. It means he is probably talking about a region of Mexico and that he is maybe from Mexico. It is an actual thing in Mexico to eat a certain type of grasshoper. There is another type of insect called a xumile that is eaten. No idea how you would call that in English. I'm not even sure if I havr the spelling right in Spanish.
- pvaldes 11y ago
  And we say viva Las Vegas instead to 'cheer the river banks', also. Is because there is not an exact equivalent to the name 'chapulin' in english, and is a distinctive name, so is useful to keep the word.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    But chapulín means exactly the same thing as grasshopper. Anything that an English speaker would call grasshopper a Mexican would call a chapulín. I guess I understand why people do this. It's obviously not wrong, because nobody can speak incorrectly. It just strikes me as a bit of a cultural misunderstanding, but that's how things are.

bitwize 11y ago

"Your carbon footprint rating for this year is 'fair', but I'll raise your assessment to 'excellent' if you eat a bug."

nradov 11y ago

Why bother raising maggots on food waste and then feed them to pigs? Wouldn't it be easier to just give the food waste directly to the pigs? That's what my uncle always did. The pigs didn't seem to mind.

alextgordon 11y ago
Depends on the kind of food waste. Last thing you want to do is create Pig BSE.

FoeNyx 11y ago

The Carmine [1] — a red dye most often made from boiled and dried Cochineals [2] — is frequently used in a lot of food products like ice-cream, candy, yogurt, juices, cake, sausage, etc. So most of us probably unknowingly started to swallow insects laced food since long ago. Only became aware of it because one of my ex-colleague has severe allergic reactions to it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal

ams6110 11y ago
For that matter, there are USDA allowable limits for "insect parts" in most food.

aurizon 11y ago

We eat birds and animals because they have high efficiency skeletons and circulation systems so they grow to large sizes and so their muscles become larger. Insects have exoskeletons and the spiracle based (air pipes throughout their flesh) respiratory system places limits on their sizes. If grasshoppers grew to be as big as cows, I am sure they would provide harvestable muscle masses to eat. As it is, the work of harvesting 10,000 grashopper legs and extractin their muscles, just ruins the economics of it. Same with grubs, although the Australian witchetty grub. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchetty_grub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchetty_grub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNsCpRZXq68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNsCpRZXq68 is comparable to small shrimps as a edible lump. I am not sure if they need deveining, like shrimps where the lower intestine is removed from the tail to leave the entire peeled tail as high quality fat and protein. A 200 pound witchetty grub might offer witchetty steaks etc. If we selectively bred insects in high oxygen environment to grow them to large sizes, we might change the ease of harvesting grasshopper steaks etc - but that is for ~~100 years in the future

shalmanese 11y ago
You don't need to individually butcher insects. You can just dump a whole load of crickets into a deep fryer and eat them like potato chips.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  That's not a meal, though. It's a somewhat unhealthy snack, comparable to pork rinds, perhaps (more protein and less fat, perhaps, but still unhealthy). A vision of a future that has humans consuming insects on a large scale needs to involve meals made of insects, not snack foods that are much more expensive and only moderately more nutritive than their plant or animal based alternatives. The environmental and economic cost has to be lower than the current alternatives (if not now, during the infancy of the market, then eventually, once mass production has been figured out), or it doesn't make sense to pursue it. It's already an uphill battle to convince people that bugs are food.

ams6110 11y ago

I'd rather we keep working on synthetically grown meat tissues. If we can grow the equivalent of a flank steak without needing to kill an animal to get it, eating meat becomes no more of an ethical problem than eating plants.

hyperion2010 11y ago

I figure we're all going to be eating mealworms in 50 years or many of us are going to be eating at all.

jamoes 11y ago

In terms of sustainability, I agree with Rob Rhinehart [1] that single-cell protein (e.g. from algae) is the best path forward. It doesn't have the gross factor that insects have, and once the process is perfected, it should be one of the most efficient ways to produce protein. https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/3afdfp/i_am_rob_ama/csc6fhp?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/3afdfp/i_am_rob_am...