View original postNo, the next big thing in western food culture should be whatever the price vs preference dynamic spawns. We've attmepted on several occasions to steer people towards a given food or away from one and it hans't worked out well.
OK. Still, creating incentives like the EU’s 3 million euro research grant is not steering, it's just people trying to explore new possibilities. If something neat comes out of that, cool. But I’m sure I’m more comfortable with the nanny state mentality than you are, anyways.
In theory, I have nothing against the government trying to steer people’s consumer habits to a healthier direction in a reasonable manner. In practice, the results just tend to be unreasonable, ironic and ridiculous. But what can you do with the food industry lobbing and lawmakers getting stupid notions.
View original postYou don't. They've been available as food, and eaten by some out of necessity or dare, long before we learned to domesticate animals or sow crops. They've rarely caught on, even in times and places where starvation was rampant, in part because it takes a lot of energy to harvest and consume a bug in terms of calories produced. People have been pushing it a lot of late, claiming it - without real evidence - as a more economical food source. It isn't. There are any number of plants or algae which produce protein cheaper and can be processed into a nourishing and appealing food source as easily if not more so. If people choose to eat bugs then so be it, but most I think would prefer to be vegetarians eating existing or GMO high protein plants or algae then bug eaters, which is preferable anyway.
The availability is one reason why insects are used for food in the global south, since warmer climate = more insects. I couldn’t find much info on the costs of farming, though, except that growing mealworms for chicken feed is 4,8 times more expensive than the production of ordinary chicken feed. Crickets are reared for human consumption in Vietnam and Thailand.
Can’t see why both options (insects and algae) couldn’t be advanced simultaneously. And with a nice publicity campaign, good marketing strategy and careful sensory evaluations to come up with the most acceptable dishes.. sure you could make bugs seem appetizing, to some people at least. They'd be a niche market, but still a viable idea.. Some people would eat shit if you shoveled it into a nice package and told them it was good for them.
View original postNo. Unless we radically alter human energy intake methods we will continue to have plants which produce parts of themselves which humans can not digest but other creatures can, and further we are not far off from being able to economically grow meat minus an attached brain. We are far more likely to see algae crops, current or GMO ones, as the protein crop then insects, it is blatantly superior economically and far more appealing to people, very few of whom would object to a shake or food made of processed algae more than a more expensive one made of processed bugs.
If the options are insects, lab grown meat and lab grown algae.. None of them sound terribly appetizing. I’d also be interested in how this affects our perceptions about food from a social sciences point of view, i.e. food as something more than just nourishment (traditions, friends and family, food as expression of one’s personality, etc.)
View original postChicken, they routinely eat grubs, and we eat chicken. That's part of polyculture, you derive your meat as food that's a byproduct or underutilized niche of your primary growth method. If there are things that humans can not eat, or prefer not to eat, which can be produced, you feed them to things without that limitation and eat them. This concept of bugs as a food source is yet another of the weird notions spawned by the flawed thinking of not realizing that we already produce food in the most economical method based on available resources. We don't grow less plants because people want meat, we grow as much plants as we can economically sell and use a small portion of the remaining land for livestock. In many cases we have excess land on which it is more economical to grow corn to feed to animals then it is to use as grazing land. We don't optimize for human calories per acre because there are 30 billion acres of land on this planet and we can grow a hell of lot more than 800,000 calories per acre a year (how much a person needs a year) of which there are only 7 billion. These calorie crises often border on pseudo-science, and more often jump into it entirely. It can easily be demonstrated that through available technology a far higher population can be comfortably supported, we simply do not have that population need and the places suffering from alleged 'over population' merely suffer from internal strife and corruption preventing proper infrastructure and land management able to handle the matter. As long as a civilization can produce 2000 calories of food for significantly less than a day of labor a higher population can be supported and the most economically viable methods and crops will be used, rather than the most rawly efficient in terms of Calories per acre. If people develop a taste for bugs, then it will become economically viable, and attend to itself without encouragement.
Very interesting. I’m trying to come up with a word that describes the belle époque worldview that science will solve all the worlds problems. Can’t come up with it now, it’s “development faith” in my language. I believe your cold hard fact that we can produce enough energy and protein to feed every person and more but from a practical point of view it’s not very comforting since people will continue to die and waste away because of undernourishment for countless years to come. All the while we are getting more and more obese and inflicting that on the developing world, too.
Btw, what is your opinion on eating meat, then? Do you agree with the people who say that the only ethical and sustainable solution is for the developed world to go vegan or do you think that we actually can afford to consume meat in greater quantities still?
