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I know it gets jokingly broached from time to time, but I'm honestly interested in exploring insects as a general animal protein source. Aquaculture can give you similar superior yields compared to traditional land based animals in terms of efficiency due to the buoyancy of water alleviating the need to spend energy fighting gravity, but there are very large water quality issues associated with aquaculture. Seems to me that in terms of energy and land footprint, insects really are a superior choice.
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Dec 19, 2014 23:53
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 07:30 |
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paragon1 posted:I was curious about this as well. What would the results be of essentially shifting ranching down a trophic level? Trade cows, pigs, and chickens for crickets? Would they be more efficient with regards to land use? Could you grow enough of them to feed the same number of people (or hopefully more) as traditional meat animals but with less harm to the environment? From what I've heard most insects people eat don't have much of a flavor at all, it tastes like whatever you cook it with. Texture can be off putting though, especially if you don't like bugs. computer parts posted:Chickens only have slightly more environmental impact than soy, and there's no cultural prohibitions against eating them. I guess it depends on how desperate of measures are called for. Chicken definitely beats pork and beef by a mile, but a quick look found the figure of 2.5 kg of feed per kg of chicken, while crickets are at 1.7 kg of feed per kg. A one third reduction in feed isn't exactly a minor savings. They both seem to have around the same land footprint though, and environmentally that's probably a bigger deal. Neither chickens nor crickets are going to drive deforestation in the way that beef does.
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Dec 20, 2014 00:35
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Torka posted:I imagine that processing the crickets into a form that people find palatable (protein powder or something) would take extra energy. Not everyone's gonna be cool with eating an insect that looks like an insect Yeah, but chicken is often already processed to hell and back. I mean, I honestly don't know how the energy balance would play out when you calculated in the energy saved by growing and transporting less feed, while on the opposite side you may have the need of more energy to process the crickets or mealworms or whatever into a widely palatable form. I think moving to more locally sourced food and encouraging vegetable rich diets are probably better objectives to focus on rather than immediately going full insect diet, but to me it seems as if it has some promise. edit: Nessus posted:What next, syn-foods? Fair enough that we should cut down on red meat and perhaps all meat, but I don't think the make or break thing for the world ecology is going to be that we decided to eat chicken (or similar fowls) instead of insects. Right, but I think this is from an industrial agriculture standpoint with battery farmed chickens and indoor vats of insects rather than for pastoral subsistence agriculture. The increase in efficiency really shows up in bulk production anyway. ToxicSlurpee posted:If you look at it overall humans will eat practically anything but one major issue that prosperity has led to is people being pickier. When was the last time you heard of an American eating brains or blood sausage? Maybe part of my openness to the idea comes from being the type of person who eats things like blood sausage (not brains though, prions worry me). You don't have to like everything, but everything should be tried at least once before writing it off. GhostofJohnMuir fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 00:54
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computer parts posted:It's not a 1/3 reduction if you're switching from red meat to a substitute, it would be like 85% versus 80% (made up numbers). I'm not sure I understand, the source I'm looking at, found with a bit of googling (report should be somewhere here: http://www.fao.org/forestry/edibleinsects/en/ ) says that for each kg of animal protein you need 10 kg of feed for beef, 5 kg for pigs, 2.5 kg for chicken and 1.7 for crickets. According to people I know in aquaculture, it tends to fall somewhere in between the chicken and cricket numbers. Unless there's something I'm misunderstanding, which is certainly possible, a certain amount of chicken only use 25% of the feed a comparable amount of beef would need and crickets need roughly 68% of what chickens need, thus a nearly 1/3 reduction in feed from chicken and over 4/5 reduction in feed from beef.
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Dec 20, 2014 03:37
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whitey delenda est posted:computer parts and GhostofJohnMuir you're both correct: computer parts is talking about metabolically, how much energy is required to grow a chicken full stop, and relative to the amount of energy required to grow an equivalent amount of cows his math checks out. Ah, ok if we're going by what percentage is edible what I'm reading up to 80% of the cricket is edible as opposed to 55% for chicken and pigs and 40% for cattle, which don't seem like minor differences to me. I mean, again I don't think this necessarily means that insect eating is the way to go, but these seem like some pretty significant gains if you shifted to crickets from any of the traditional animals, the type that can't just be brushed off with "they're icky".
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Dec 20, 2014 03:54
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Nessus posted:The big hurdle is that you would have to convince people to eat crickets. While you could probably convince people to eat less meat, I don't think - for instance - the rising affluent people in China or India would particularly want to get told, you know, 'hey, just so you know, you are going to be eating crickets because they're about 40% more optimal in terms of feed converted into edible protein.' They would probably say, "gently caress you, we're going to have chicken, at the very least." Yeah, it's very reminiscent of the struggle to get the public to embrace toilet to tap. It's really efficient, but a fair amount of the public has a huge gross out factor response to it and try to push de-salinization plants that use orders of magnitude more energy, but which seem nice and clean. Though interestingly enough you can usually get people to change their stance by showing them the sheer amount of technology separating waste water intake from the drinking water output. Maybe the chemical process whitey delenda est mentions would be useful in more ways than one by letting the public put a purifying technological step between the bug intake and the food output.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:36
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blowfish posted:Since much of the agricultural runoff enters the sea via rivers, it would be easier to reclaim it from said rivers. And with an operation like that you probably suddenly have member of the environmental wing concerned about the impediment such extraction operations would present to plant and animal life in the river. Physical obstructions or process that change the water temperature even a few degrees can have outsized negative effects. It's probably an issue you're going to run into with any large scale project, geo-engineering or other wise, and the split it will cause in the base for solutions to these problems will keep it from happening for the foreseeable future.
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Dec 22, 2014 09:10
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 07:30 |
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:You're right, we should try full communism (TM). A Five Year Plan sounds like exactly what our agriculture sector needs...
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Mar 18, 2015 00:45
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