Scientists Advocate Replacing Cattle With Insects 760
rhettb writes "Scientists in the Netherlands have discovered that insects produce significantly less greenhouse gas per kilogram of meat than cattle or pigs. Their study, published in the online journal PLoS, suggests that a move towards insect farming could result in a more sustainable — and affordable — form of meat production."
More allergenic? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know more people who are allergic to arthropods than who are allergic to beef/chicken/pork.
Not sure why this is so- maybe it's the exposure to dust mites?
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat [wikipedia.org]
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Funny)
Typical human selfishness trying to hog all the life on the planet.
Surely it is more generous to let your protein have a chance at sentience before you eat it - and we must eat it to survive.
I find it very nice that my protein (that I must eat) can walk around, be happy, find it's own food - even reproduce - before it is eaten.
Condemning so much of the protein we consume to a life in a tank could perhaps be the most selfish thing we have deliberately done as a species.
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Eating is a selfish act. Pretty much all of life is a selfish competition.
Either get over it, or take your argument to its logical conclusion and stop living.
I hope you were just trolling.
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I hope the "scientist" was just trolling.
But my point was to check the "green people" whose morals often seem un-bounded
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, we don't have true democracy anywhere in the world. We vote for leaders, rather than vote on issues. I usually think that I'd much prefer to vote on issues, but considering how ignorant or misinformed people are on scientific issues, it would in fact be a bad idea to let the general public best decide on issues like this.
Thinking that Democracy is the ideal solution in all situations is rather foolish.
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, we don't have true democracy anywhere in the world. We vote for leaders, rather than vote on issues
Is there some deficiency in how politics is taught in America that causes people to constantly conflate direct democracy with democracy and not realise that democracy and republic are orthogonal issues? Both direct and representative democracy are forms of democracy (rule by the demos - the people). Oh, and before you say we don't have direct democracy 'anywhere in the world', I suggest you visit some of the Swiss cantons.
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Some are less ignorant and misinformed than others. Scientists in particular are required to be informed and not ignorant in order to do their job. Politicians are required to be misinformed and ignorant in order to serve their masters (hint, the masters are not the people).
Scientists may be informed in their field, but they are likely ignorant about many other things, just like everyone else. This is why direct democracy, as we've seen California experimenting with, is a bad idea. On any given subject up for referendum, 90%+ of the populace is probably ignorant about it and will make poor decisions. With representative democracy, the representatives can consult with experts in the appropriate fields when making the decisions. Then you just have to try to prevent special i
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Interesting)
'If those guys over there can't handle the environment, then it's our right, no, our duty to invade them and make them care'. Luckily enough, not many people are paying attention to them.
And the vast majority of ecological minded people are still deeply rooted in democracy.
Please be careful not to lump them all together.
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I will try not to in future. But it is frightening to hear such things in mainstream Environmentalist discourse.
I don't usually agree with the extreme enviro-nuts, but it's silly to say that this position is "frightening". If me and my neighbour share a water-well, and he insists on dumping lead-paint into it on a daily basis, that's a serious issue for me. I'll first ask him to stop, and try to reason with him, but if he keeps doing it I have no problem at all with beating some sense into him. There's no question that environmental damage CAN be a reason to go to war - it just has to be severe enough to justify i
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Funny)
I absolutely agree.
In fact, the real problem with using insects for protein will be milking the jumpy little buggers. I mean, even if you can get 'em to squat over the bucket, ordinary fingers will just be way too big for those tiny nipples. We'll have to train squads of baby capuchin monkeys, and you know what a short attention span THEY have. In five minutes, their smocks'll be off and they'll be flinging poo and demanding very small bananas.
It'll never work. Madness, I tell you.
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Not only that aspect, but I was thinking...I generally prefer my medium rare ribeye steak to NOT be crunchy...
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Interesting)
The grossest thing about meat in the grocery store is all the chemicals they have to spray the meat down with to kill all the bad stuff and disease picked up from the animal from living in such poor conditions. These animals are sickly, yet we slaughter them, spray them down, and eat them. It's a terrible system, but it's what you get living in a society of heavy meat eaters that demand low cost over quality. It's really a shame.
Re:More allergenic? (Score:4, Interesting)
The grossest thing about meat in the grocery store is all the chemicals they have to spray the meat down with to kill all the bad stuff and disease picked up from the animal from living in such poor conditions.
Well that's a load of shit. Please, do tell us which horrible horrible "chemicals" are sprayed on these poor diseased carcases, exactly. Maybe you could also link to a peer-reviewed study showing the significantly higher incidence of disease amongst animals raised using different methods. Go ahead, I'll wait.
I can easily imagine without resorting to peer-reviewed journal articles that there are "conditions" that could result in higher and lower incidence of disease among animals. After all, we know from our own experience as animals that our own living conditions greatly affect the incidence of disease in our populations. Consider typhoid, a disease that all but disappears in areas with modern sanitation.
I see no reason to believe that animals raised in poor sanitary conditions, would be sicklier than animals raised in good sanitary conditions. Do you really need a cite? Really? You were just trolling with that one.
As for chemicals used in cleaning carcasses -- besides water and steam -- here's an abstract [nih.gov] from an article in the "Journal of Food Protection". Your wait is over!
Reports on the microbiological effects of decontaminating treatments routinely applied to carcasses at beef packing plants indicate that washing before skinning may reduce the numbers of enteric bacteria transferred from the hide to meat. Washing skinned carcasses and/or dressed sides can reduce the numbers of aerobes and Escherichia coli by about 1 log unit, and pasteurizing sides with steam or hot water can reduce their numbers by > 1 or > 2 log units, respectively. Spraying with 2% lactic acid, 2% acetic acid, or 200 ppm of peroxyacetic acid can reduce the numbers of aerobes and E. coli by about 1 log, but such treatments can be ineffective if solutions are applied in inadequate quantities or to meat surfaces that are wet after washing. Trimming and vacuum cleaning with or without spraying with hot water may be largely ineffective for improving the microbiological conditions of carcasses. When contamination of meat during carcass dressing is well controlled and carcasses are subjected to effective decontaminating treatments, the numbers of E. coli on dressed carcasses can be [less than] 1 CFU/ 1,000 cm2. However, meat can be recontaminated during carcass breaking with E. coli from detritus that persists in fixed and personal equipment. The adoption at all packing plants of the carcass-dressing procedures and decontaminating treatments used at some plants to obtain carcasses that meet a very high microbiological standard should be encouraged, and means for limiting recontamination of product during carcass breaking and for decontaminating trimmings and other beef products should be considered.
There are 10 more articles found with the search "cleaning beef carcasses" [nih.gov]at pubmed.
And that was just the first suggestion from Google.
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a much bigger factor: diet.
Free range farming means a much more natural diet for the animals and you can definitely taste the difference.
More-over it can even be seen with your eyes sometimes. I started buying exclusively free-range eggs some time ago (because frankly while I love meat I am opposed to senseless cruelty in the process and I can think of no crueler farming method than battery chickens) - and there is a clear difference.
They don't just taste different (more flavorful) but actually look different. Free range egg have a decidedly stronger yellow yolk than battery-farmed eggs break any one of each and compare the free range egg yolk is a darker, richer yellow sometimes even hinting toward light browns, orange and reds.
You can always tell the difference - the pale one is the battery-farmed egg.
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I can attest to this. I didn't start buying free-range eggs because I thought they would taste better or would be more healthy, just because I hated the way other eggs are produced, but it turned out that's exactly what I found out. Compared to the eggs I used to buy, which weren't even battery-eggs but what they call 'scharrel-ei' here (no idea what the translation for this would be, but it means the chickens have about 1m^2 of space per chicken, but still live in crap conditions), the 'real' free-range eg
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Look up battery cages. You have 8-10 chickens in a container about the size of a filing cabinet drawer.
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This is mainly down to carotene (the same chemical that gives carrots their colour) which the birds ingest from grass. Battery feed is not as rich in this stuff - this is the same reason that winter butter is paler than summer butter, because the feed the cattle get in winter does not have as much carotene as the grass they receive in summer.
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Informative)
You really can taste if the animal has been fed from pastures or from industrial feedstock; and you can taste if the muscles have been used by the animal moving around. Good life? Well, there's some correlation with these issues and 'good life', but happiness is not so relevant.
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Interesting)
yes, it's the fat.
And fat from grass/moss fed animals is way, way better tasting than from grain/feed fed animals.
The fat absorbs a lot of the taste of what the animal eats. Do Americans then taste of french fries and McDonald's?
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Informative)
you already eat bugs.
Eat anything preprocessed? insects are in them, ground up with the rest of it.
Do you sleep with a net over your head? no? you eat bugs at night.
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Eat anything preprocessed? insects are in them, ground up with the rest of it.
Some years back, there was an interesting Q/A in Consumer Reports on this. A letter replied to a recent article on the limits to allowed insect fragments in food, and asked what was dangerous about eating insects. The letters editor referred the question to one of their medical experts, who replied: Actually, there's nothing dangerous about eating most insects. In fact, they're quite nutritious, a good low-fat protein source. The only reason you'd worry about them in food is that, unless the insects ar
Re:More allergenic? (Score:5, Interesting)
Growing meat is like nuclear fusion. The principles are extremely well-understood, but the implimentation is surprisingly tricky. (I've heard that one of the current issues is texture. Unexercised meat* supposedly isn't any more satisfying to the teeth than Quorn.) PETA's $1m prize for commercial vat chicken is probably perfectly safe, given the 2012 deadline.
*Admittedly most food animals don't get a lot of exercise anyway, but it's still above zero.
Re:More allergenic? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm quite sure you could zap and/or stretch vat-grown muscle once in a while to get it in shape. It's being done to comatose patients, why not to bits of cow?
Re:More allergenic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that's the sort of thing they're thinking of doing. Exercise routines. I imagine that the whole thing would look rather horrific, we'll probably replace the whole "watching sausage get made" metaphor with something more general.
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I was picturing something more like a large, flat bath of culture solution, containing gently tensing and relaxing meat lumps about the size of a surfboard. You're right that in any case it would be much better than your regular slaughterhouse, with its tumbling viscera, but it's still creepy to me, precisely because of its alien-ness.
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Oh who am I kidding? I find it all icky in the extreme, though there is some part of me that can appreciate the engineering elegance in not growing a whole cow if all you want is rumpsteak.
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Probably could, but try doing all the things you need to do on an industrial scale while keeping it at least as cheap as using cattle.
Considered as a machine for producing meat, cattle are pretty darn good. They take in low-cost and low-quality raw materials most of the time. They do their own exercising of the meat. They'll carry the meat where you
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Relying on lentils as your sole protein source is a bad idea. Proteins from plants are always incomplete proteins, which means they're missing at least one of the essential amino acids. Lentils are missing methionine and cystine. You need to mix at least 2 sources (Rice and lentils, for example) to get useful complete protein.
warm climates only (Score:4, Insightful)
They are more efficient partly because of their coldbloodedness according to the article. In places with sufficiently long growing seasons that won't be a problem. But you will have to transport the stuff to places with longer cold seasons, adding inefficiency. Cattle have built in warmers.
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or lack of exposure to dustmites. According to the hygiene hypothesis, it may actually be our overly clean environment that is the cause of rising incidence of allergies in the most affluent parts of the world.
Or Ostrich (Score:5, Interesting)
I've also heard it suggested that ostrich would be a pretty sustainable replacement.
Re:Or Ostrich (Score:5, Informative)
Some say the same about kangaroos [nationalgeographic.com].
Re:Or Ostrich (Score:5, Funny)
In the short term we also have to factor in the costs of making our fences fucking huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge
Re:Or Ostrich (Score:5, Funny)
There's also the option of vertical farming. Not a good idea though. I'm sure it will all end in tiers.
Back to to the insects. Sky prawns FTW!
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Hey it works for chickens
Re:Or Ostrich (Score:5, Interesting)
Not if it's cooked *juuuust* right. but 5 seconds on the heat can make the difference between undercooked, just right, and overcooked with kangaroo. Having cooked it quite a few times it's just too damn annoying to bother again.
Exactly right. Kangaroo is very very lean so even a fraction too long on the grill makes it incredibly chewy. It's damn good when it's done right (and healthier than most meats). But getting it right is so hard that it may never be a mass-market commercial meat for that reason alone.
I've cooked kangaroo 3 or 4 times and only once did it come out 'perfectly', IMO. Then again I'm a 28 year old male - my cooking skills are not what you'd call 'good' ;)
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This is true of all wild animals. Game cheffs will tell you that game meat is simply not ideal for grilling or barbequing.
Flambe is a good option if you have the skills, else keep your game meats for stews and roasts where it can be slow-cooked with plenty of moisture to make up for the lack of fat and the toughness of the muscle.
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Ostrich meat is quite common in South Africa (since the bird is native here) where Ostrich farms are commonplace.
Most restaurants have some ostrich recipes (burgers on the low end and other dishes in the fancy ones) and we can buy ostrich meats of various cuts at most supermarkets.
I occasionally buy ostrich burgers or sausages.
It's one of the more delicious red meats and for what is still technically game - one of the most tender.
Not a great idea (Score:2)
Re:Not a great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
With the meat being so far outside what's usually considered food ...so far outside of what YOU consider food. There are plenty of people around the world who enjoy insects.
Tastes are entirely cultural: the French enjoy snails, Swedes enjoy rotten fish meat... You may or may not like insects, but they're perfectly valid sources of food.
Re:Not a great idea (Score:5, Funny)
the French enjoy snails
The French enjoy garlic butter. They add a token amount of snail to it because just eating lumps of garlic butter would be a bit weird.
Re:Not a great idea (Score:4, Interesting)
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A non-squeamish person sometime in the future: "Hey wait a minute guys! This tastes just like chicken!"
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eat-A-Bug_Cookbook [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Eating_Bugs:_The_Art_and_Science_of_Eating_Insects [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy#Unintentional_ingestion [wikipedia.org] (try to think about it during your upcoming meals, please)
Any other misconceptions?
brainwashed (Score:2)
It is only because you have been brain-washed by the rightwing media that you believe otherwise.
I will use that as my signature from now on, ok?
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oh my (Score:2)
Makes me even happier that I am a vegetarian.
Re:oh my (Score:4, Funny)
There, fixed that for ya!
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*evenmoresmug*Makes me even happier that I am a vegan*evenmoresmug*
However when I think of big mammals in factory farns eating mostly grain and soy which can use up to 20 times as much land, fuel and water as producing plant-based calories directly, not to mention that it involves massive amounts of antibiotics and ends up dumping lots of fecal waste in clean water, switching to insects does not seem so bad. Shrimp and lobster are pretty much underwater insects and people love to eat them. I'm sure if the
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You'll get used to it (Score:2)
*Clicking on TFA and looking at the giant freaking COCKROACH*
Ok, I take my words back. I'll never get used to it.
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Crab.. I bought a tin of it a little while back to see if I like it now (didn't like it much as a kid).. I managed to finish it, but I felt like puking half the time. Just ate it because it would have been a waste of money otherwise, and protein is protein.
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On the other hand, prawns are TASTY, so I hope they go more down that route :)
Yummy insects! (Score:2)
If only we could get over the gross factor.
But then in large parts of the world, I know at least Africa and here in Asia I've also seen them, insects are part of the menu already. Often considered delicacies even. So they're definitely edible.
Eat Them! (Score:5, Interesting)
Countdown to breeding larger insects for human consumption starts in ...
Netherland? (Score:2)
Isn't their cousine bad enough?
Vegetarianism anyone? (Score:2)
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What's funny - it is practically impossible to be a vegetarian if eating insects [wikipedia.org] disqualifies one...
Everyday... (Score:2)
Om nom nom (Score:5, Interesting)
In places where large clouds of flies congregate, such as Lake Malawi, the locals net millions of flies and compress them into little cakes. Handy protein packs. I'm sure they may have some nice recipes.
Use for animal feed (Score:2)
Hopefully there will be a lot of (good) jokes about the ability of the average consumer to "stomach" (ha ha) these critters.
However "unappetizing" that prospect may be, why not give them to Fido or Socks? From what I've seen of dog/cat food, it is so heavily processesd, flavored and dyed that they, being unable to read the labels, may not be able to tell the difference. I don't know what other domesticated/farmed animals are fed animal protein (fish farms?) but the amount could be significant.
Just trying
Less antibiotics in our diet (Score:2)
Cattle is here to stay (Score:2)
Most taste good, too. (Score:3)
Last time I was in Thailand, I made a point of trying various fried insects, which is very common staple in South Thailand (not so much around Bangkok). I was surprised at how good they tasted. However, not at all comparable with meat. It's completely different but not worse, IMHO.
Go ahead scientists ... chow down on them bugs (Score:3)
The rest of us will be eating healthy Ramen Noodles.
You're kidding, right? (Score:5, Informative)
While it's true that poikilotherms have a far more efficient conversion ratio when it comes to food because they're not burning off all that energy just to maintain body temperature like hot blooded animals do, I am surprised that the first answer from these scientists is culturally unacceptable (well in most western cultures anyway) insects. I mean, what happened to fish? I'm sure that the difference in energy consumption between insects and fish is not all that great when compared to say a cow, sheep or pig. Basically what you feed is what you get in weight gain, it only takes around 1.2kg of food (in some species) to produce 1kg of muscle in fish. That's very efficient. Plus pretty much every culture in the world already eats fish.
My only thought is that said scientists were worried about the huge water consumption of aquaculture. However they have completely failed to consider the up and coming field of aquaponics [aquaponics.com] which is extremely water efficient (the only loss is evaporation). With aquaponics you also get delicious veggies with your protein - you have to; it's part of the system that cleans your water to keep your fish healthy. Hey but what do I know, I've only met the guy that invented it.
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Most of the food pellets are wasted uneaten and dwells to the bottom of the ponds.
Which is why aquaponics is so beautiful - that "waste" food is metabolized by bacteria into minerals and nitrates, which then helps to feed your plants. So the real "waste" is quite negligible. Your input (food pellets) will be used by either the fish or the plants. The "waste" from the system is removed by you, in the form of fresh vegetables, potent fertilizer (compact solid fish waste) or fish.
Eet Mor Chitin (Score:5, Funny)
See, you only need to change one letter on the Chick-fil-A cows' signs.
That was easy.
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It sounds even more awesome than you can imagine. The bugs in the front are locusts. I prefer not to imagine what will happen if we "improve" them as we do with all domestic animals and the improved locust capable of living in let's say across the entire temperate zone gets our in the wild.
In any case - fair point about the lawns.
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Some domestic animals are even incapable of reproduction without our assistance...
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Hmm, you come over all emotional. And not all that knowledgeable either.
There is a growing number of people in America that eat insects - why not check it out instead of airing your bigotry and insulting people in other cultures?
What is disgusting is simply a matter of what you are used to; humans being apes with less hair means that we throughout our evolution have eaten insects much more than chordates, so our metabolism is much more at home with insect protein and fat.
Re:Where's that "fucking retarded" tag, again? (Score:5, Interesting)
humans being apes with less hair
Technically, an average human has more hair follicles on his or her body than an average chimpanzee. The type of hair is responsible for visible differences, for "nakedness".
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Real life isn't like a 4x strategy game where you can only focus on one possible advance at a time. Some people are thinking about sustainable foods, some about ways to stop pollution, some about more efficient ways to use other resources. There are even subgroups of each of those, looking at different ways to accomplish each of these things.
Your (not at all charming) naivete about who eats bugs and who doesn't aside, the fact that it squicks you out is pretty much irrelevant. Lots of foods that are seen as
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A much bigger problem is the efficiency of food production: to produce one kg of meat you need many kgs of other foods. And while some of those foods may be inedible to humans (e.g. grass), cattle is also fed other foods that are grown specifically for them. Instead of growing cattle food, that same land could be used to grow human food, with a much better overall return.
If you're looking at plain food production per hectare (or even per farmer's effort) then meat is very inefficient. Crops that are human
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Via insects - apparently around an order of magnitude more than via cattle. Even greater advantage when it comes to conservation of water.
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The amount of benefit a human gets from food is not measured in kilograms.
cattle are very efficient protein concentrators (Score:5, Informative)
Cows are very efficient at converting grass inputs into human-usable protein, in the form of milk.
Cattle eat grass and weeds (high-quality protein!), and can operate on rocky slopes where John Deere can't farm.
While all cows start their life in a pastures, agribusiness finishes cattle on feedlots [blogspot.com] because it's much quicker to fatten animals up on grain than grass. ConAgra doesn't care that grain-finished beef has 1/2 as much beta-carotene, 1/5 as much Vitamin A, and 1/5 as much Vitamin E as cows that have eaten grass from start to finish.
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So end the feedlots and produce meat the way it USED to be made, with cattle roaming the open range until someone decides they are fat enough and rounds them up to be sent to a factory and turned into Steak or Hamburgers.
Wouldn't that solve the problem of needing all that grain to feed all those cows?
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Yes, it takes X Kg of Food to produce Y meat where X > Y. HOWEVER, what you are not factoring in, is the fact that more than 90% of X is derived from Plant sources that are inedible to humans, and Grow in regions that are impossible to farm and produce plant foods that humans can eat. scrub desert, mountainsides, and VAST portions of the world that you can't make a wheat seed eek out a living, or reach with a tractor to farm
Partially correct only (Score:3)
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Think what would happen if all corn suddenly froze in the US several years in a row. Or that the yield dropped on other base food with 30%.
The #1 health issue in the US would be eliminated.
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Kind of what I was thinking. I try not to eat corn any more, though it's damn near impossible since everything seems to contain "maize starch", so I haven't eliminated it entirely.
Eating them is the NORM (Score:5, Informative)
Eating insects is quite widespread [wikipedia.org], apart from few areas of cultural oddity (highly visible though; and we do eat other invertebrates), not to mention at least an order of magnitude more efficient from vertebrate farm animals when it comes to transformation of resources into meat.
In the form of industrially-produced meat paste (for a start) it would be probably hard or impossible to taste a difference; maybe military could introduce it to its diets - I imagine grunts can't whine quite as much as a typical consumer, and it would be one good part of the puzzle towards solving this [wikipedia.org], might get acceptance from there.
As a matter of fact - you all eat insects every day; standards for grain, flour, vegetables, etc. generally speak of "maximum number of insect body parts per unit"
(and feeding the world in a sustainable way - not exactly an Idle-grade material)
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Relative availability of food nowadays and sustainable ways of producing it are two different things. So what that "for the most part the majority of land (especially in America) are completely empty and undeveloped" - have you seen the diagram? (and its sources) It doesn't stop a given place from using way more than is available, long term (without compromising future viability and/or taking hectares from the past)
Hypocrisy is probably a good description if somebody wants to ignore already present anyway e
Simpsons did it (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember the ribwich? [wikia.com]
And how Krusty said in the end when asked what animal it was made of "Think smaller. Think more legs"?
It's all in the commercial, I tell you. Just don't tell people what they're eating, slap a lot of MSG-loaded sauce on it and it will sell.
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You'd eat a lot less McDonalds if you KNEW where their meat came from, especially if it came from bugs.
You'd eat a lot less McD if you knew where their meat comes from and how it is processed, handled and cooked. No need for bugs in that particular equation...
Re:Added Bonus! (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite frankly, you'd eat a lot less McD if you knew what well-prepared food tastes like.
Re:How about: less people (Score:5, Insightful)
And who gets to implement these rules, and how ? Very few people will ever voluntarily accept to have reproduction so closely monitored and restricted. It would be inhumane, degrading, and hypocritical.
I do agree with the education and empowerement of women, but they will never be able to do this if they have 6+ children.
So how do you reduce familly size in a humane manner ? The answer might surprise you, as it is paradoxal : get rid of infant mortality. This has been proven in every developing country : the FIRST step to reducing population is to completely eliminate infant mortality. Once nearly all children reach adulthood, people have less children, simply because they don't need to have as many. Once this happens, THEN education steps in and teaches people about family planning. Family planning should be tought at an early age, with high school and elementary school kids learning about condoms and safe sex. They will then disseminate this information to their parents.
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Then we need to get busy with the cultural imperialism, fast. Only two known methods to being a society's birth rate under replacement, the wealth associated iwth classical capitialism and the horrors of Communist China's One Child policy. So pick one. I think most people would prefer to be free and wealthy vs ground under the heels of Communist oppression.
Seriously, look up the stats, no Free Society with a well functioning, wealth creating (ignore the current recession) economy, is currently growing wi
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Only two known methods
To you.
Seriously, look up the stats
Yeah, please do that [wikipedia.org].
Being French, I know that France and Ireland have the highest rates of population growth in Europe when discounting immigration.
ground under the heels of Communist oppression.
BTW, Communism didn't prevent USSR population to grow [wikipedia.org] as well as the current 'capitalist' Russia.
Not to mention that wealthy countries have the excess wealth to worry about environmental concerns. Note the cleaner air and water in western societies.
Do you mean the excess wealth to export actual production and pollution to less wealthy countries ?
The US actually has more trees than when the first European set foot here.
Do you have some reputable source for that ? All I can find is this [wordpress.com], which doesn't support your statement (somehow, I'm not surprised) (the first European didn'
eating meat: necessary to avoid waste (Score:5, Insightful)
The easiest way to make food from a grassy hill with poor soil is a grazing animal. Farm equipment requires flat land. Humans can't live on grass. What else would you do, bulldoze the hills and dump on lots of chemicals to make food crops grow?
Now consider the beans you so love. What about the rest of the plant? You're wasting nearly all of the plant if you don't eat it, but you can't really eat it because you're human. Feed that to an animal though, and now you have more food.