There's an rule in the EU that says you can't feed the insects pork and then let those insects go on to be fed to pigs (same for beef and chicken). This is intended to prevent the transmission of diseases like Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (like "mad cow disease"). As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe. Arnold van Huis and his team at Wageningen University are putting quite some energy researching the safety and lobbying the EU to change the rules based on the findings. At one of the talks those folks they said it's basically a black box of trying to get what kind of science the regulators will consider acceptable.
As you might guess, making sure the food waste you feed the insects doesn't have _any_ animal proteins in it is quite logistically challenging and so afaik nobody is doing that at a large scale.
I did quite a bit of research into the history of insects in the food system, especially in the Netherlands. While I was rooting for Ynsect and other big players to figure something good out I believe that it's a problem much better suited to a smaller scale (perhaps on the city level). Basically, have the food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects and then let those insects be turned into whatever (pet food, fish food, trendy protein bars).
You'd have thought it wouldn't be the proteins in the input, but the prions in the output they would care about. They're remarkably resilient, it's not unreasonable to be cautious.
Agreed, this is one area where care should be taken. The effects of CJD are absolutely horrendous, and it’s easy to imagine that this might be a way to transmit it.
At the time we didn't know prion disease could be transferred between species. There's no evidence that scrapie (sheep prion disease) or CWD (deer and moose prion disease) can be transmitted to other species. BSE is seemingly a unique prion disease that can affect other mammals.
Our city just had a compost program. Throwing away compostable material into the provided bin was free. They put it into the city managed compost yards and then every weekend you could go down there and pick up bags of the finished product to use at home in your garden.
It's also the case that many states already have a "garbage feeding" program that allows food waste to be diverted into feed for commercial animal lots. The food has to meet certain criteria and be fully cooked and ready for human consumption before being discarded.
Cooking does not destroy prions to any significant extent. They’re even resistant to autoclaving. It’s one of the big reasons that prion diseases are so pernicious. The garbage feeding you describe could absolutely spread prion diseases for the same reason that use of animal byproducts in feeds spread BSE in Europe.
> As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe.
We banned all kinds of such "forced cannibalism" after BSE, yes. And for good reason, I think - not just is it highly unethical IMHO, but because even a minuscule risk of a repeat of the BSE crisis of the late 90s/early 00s just isn't worth it. The destruction that BSE brought upon the European agriculture industry, the public outrage - I doubt non-Europeans could even understand the impact it had.
Just to clarify, pig -> insect -> pig wouldn't constitute cannibalism. But it's still a rather unusual (ie low frequency) food chain in nature so there's no reasonable assurance that it will be safe. Given how resilient prions can be and just how crazy some of the observed transmission pathways have been the current EU regulations seem quite sensible to me. (As a layman. To be clear I'm no expert on prion diseases.)
Yes, it is safer. Basically what we discovered in the 90s is that cannibalism (an animal eating others of its species) has a relatively high chance of leading to protein mis-folding in that animal, producing prions. Those prions can then cause additional mis-folding producing more prions, this time in a very direct way that is unrelated to who consumes the meat.
So pig > pig or cow > cow is known to produce prions. I believe it's also somewhat proven that, say, pig > cow > pig does not produce prions in the same way. However, insect digestion is very different from vertebrate digestion, so it's not necessarily safe to assume that pig > cow > pig being safe means that pig > insect > pig would also be safe. However, it does prove that pig > insect > cow > pig would still be safe - the insects don't add a risk in themselves, we're just not certain that they eliminate the risk the same way vertebrate digestive systems do.
> food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects
a. how does that solve the transmission problem?
b. amazing work by EU bureaucrats to regulate businesses that dont exist yet
c. they can export the feed to fish farms or china or whatever. the question is do the economics work. US soy bean is just incredibly productive (and subsidized)
> But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many > Westerners feel about bugs.
I think this is a weird wording.
I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners"
There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick"
factor.
And even for some of those who do eat insects, they are specific insects,
form specific places, prepared in traditional ways.
> I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.
Of course, this has nothing to do with “Westerners.” No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder. The fact that the company was allowed to operate and to receive massive funding is the real issue here.
For the longest time industrial and domestic livestock raising used to involve feed that included literally anything the animal would it. Free range birds today regularly eat worms and insects. Pigs were used as a sort of waste disposal system for anything they could digest, leading to a lot of health issues. Still nobody really cared beyond “I’ll cook it until it doesn’t kill me”, not the producers, not the consumers.
>The fact that Ÿnsect failed doesn’t mean the entire insect farming sector is doomed. Competitor Innovafeed is reportedly holding up better, in part because it started with a smaller production site and is ramping up incrementally.
>For Prof. Haslam, Ÿnsect exemplifies a broader European problem. “Ÿnsect is a case study in Europe’s scaling gap. We fund moonshots. We underfund factories. We celebrate pilots. We abandon industrialization. See Northvolt [a struggling Swedish battery maker], Volocopter [a German air taxi startup], and Lilium [a failed German flying taxi company],” he said.
For the moment ynsect was launched in France it was obvious that it was doomed to fail. Like often here, the only real goal was to suck public funding.
Normally, you would start a small business/factory and scale with your business. Especially growing insect doesn't require a "mega factory".
But here, from the onset, they started from scratch and announced a mega investment to build a giant factory. Obviously getting hundreds of millions or even a billion, most from public funding as we could guess.
Agree. It doesn’t have the futuristic vibe but an urban gondola type system is probably what would be best. Especially in a city where there may already be a network of structures to leverage (eg. The buildings/rooftops and elevators). It would require massive coordination or eminent domain type laws to force but end result could be pretty awesome
It’s moronic to have the government pick winners. Only private investors with actual skin in the game will pick those with true potential. This error happens again and again and again
How about funding some housing for the people? Why is it that every city had new huge neighbourhoods built en-masse until the 1990s, and then suddenly stopped (with a few tiny exceptions)?
IMO it doesn't make any sense for a startup company like this to get $600 million in funding before making a profit. It seems obvious that it could be proved out for a lot less before scaling up.
"Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. "
if you raise that much money and go under, its usually just fraud.
The french government has been heavily subsidizing private R&D (up to 50% of the cost, including engineer salaries). It was relatively easy to create a moonshot project worth a few millions, and have the taxpayer pay for half of it. Then you just need to find a sucker to pay for the other half, and collect the money (getting an actual result is optional).
How do I know? My company is a minority partner in one such project (wind energy, we would provide instrumentation). It's infuriating, the head company has been trying to make one of the big energy providers pay for half the R&D, with no success, and the project will be closed. Lots of taxpayer money wasted for no result, and we won't make sales.
Because of these abuses, the french government is changing the financing rules. They will only finance small proof of concepts first, then a pilot project, and only then industrialisation issues (instead of financing all in one go).
Similar like grass fed beef and dairy is a sign of quality and "naturality". I look forward to the day when insect fed chicken becomes a sign of quality. Because insects are part of a natural diet for chickens.
If the insects are fed naturally, it would probably be more cost effective to feed the chickens whatever you are feeding the insects. The only reason to introduce the insects would be if you were using something the chicken cannot eat, like wood.
Why do you think it’s not a VC idea? VC is necessary to scale up to large volume. It’s easy for me to believe that insect protein can be a good business at high volume but not low. At volume you can get economies of scale and efficiency and get your cost basis down, making things profitable that wouldn’t be profitable at lower volume. Makes sense on fundamentals without a lot of details. Sounds like they were just too ambitious and chased after a very large market with very thin margins. (Animal feed.) instead of a smaller market with thicker margins (pet food)
The fact that they were simultaneously pursuing animal, pet, and human product lines is just poor management. Exactly the kind of poor management that VC can encourage, mind you. Because VC pumps in tons of money and wants to see big plans.
But it is not a goldmine. Dogs, cats etc have better teeth and like to eat a lot of meat, that humans generally does not eat: rabbit ears, tendons, throats, noses, etc.
Insect food is not that cheap. A lot of pet stores give out free treat samples. My dog normally loves all treats, but refuses to eat the the insect treats (before I realize they are made from insects).
I am sure there are companies making a good living making insect pet food. But it is probably not that obvious a choice.
They already do this, at scale, feeding people, all over the world. There is no "unlock" to invent some tech that makes it magically more efficient, cheaper, or otherwise more adoptable.
The only difference between them and their existing, already on the market competition is they don't owe investors 10x returns.
Given that EU tech salaries are a lot more tame, it would be interesting to see how 600m were even used. Hopefully there’s some good R&D there and not some French alps retreats and Porches for founders
Yes. All of Europe was working for them, and we're now entirely jobless. The industries, governments, all refocused on insects, and now it's gone. We don't know what to do. Send help.
I find it remarkable, and depressing, that so many people just cannot handle the idea of insect protein. You get similar resistance to water reclamation from sewage and nuclear power. How are we supposed to change the world when we always hamstrung by all the mercurial and irrational whining?
I'm letting my mind wander and thinking what a French insect wrangler looks like. I'm kind of imagining a mix between French style, a cowboy hat, and lab gear.
Why not? Have you tried? I have, must've been almost 30 years ago now, at Wageningen University. They taste quite well, if well prepared (they were). Insect burgers are also nice. I liked Damhert's insect burger [1]. People just think too much it looks like [2]
I would happily eat cricket protein if it were more scalably environmentally sustainable. I’m fine with milk, but cows aren’t helping our greenhouse sitchu.
Not to mention the issues with pea protein and lead content.
I don't understand why everyone involved didn't immediately realize especially the first two of those whys. Eating bugs at scale is such a surefire way to get everyone allergic to random stuffs.
And it's not like it was never tried. There are tribes and cultures that do it at tiny scales, which means humans used to do it and quit at some point in the past. It's removing not an insignificant Chesterton's Fence.
I am baffled as to why cat food is labelled up as having "The great all-natural taste of beef and lamb that your cat loves!" because if my cat could naturally eat beef then that would be fucking terrifying, a 4kg cat that can eat a 600kg cow.
They should say "The great all-natural taste of mice and wasps that your cat loves!" based on observed behaviour.
Good riddance. Like the beyond meat implosion that was foreseeable from the far, it is another elitist dystopian dream getting smashed by the harsh reality of people's natural instincts.
These initiative's will be back though. Likely armed with their lessons learned, like making the government compulse us into eating it. Sugar coat it by telling us it's only once per week, or how affordable it is since we increased the prices of proper food through red tape and taxes.
There seems to be strong lobbying for insects as human food, in particular from companies that would be happy feed us with their own shit as long as it's cheap and they could get away with it
The green-left seems to enjoy that idea. Exactly why is hard to tell - especially on HN, but let's say I don't think it's rational.
The why is not that hard to understand - insects provide a lot of proteins compared to how much food they consume over their lifetime.
But yes, the obvious place to start is to use it for feeding chickens and not humans. Why chickens? Because insects are part of their natural diet when they are free. There is just a bunch of infrastructure problems that need to be solved for that to work as insects have pretty different problems to solve compared to other parts of the food production chain.
Oh my god eat some beans. Eat some tofu, eat some black-eyed peas, eat some green peas, eat some lentils, eat some northern beans, eat some lima beans, eat some chickpeas
There has never been a period where most humans would die at ~30.
While life expectancy at birth was ~30 for the whole history of humanity up until the mid 20th century, this doesn't in any way mean that average people died in their 30s. Instead, life expectancy was highly bi-modal: most people died as children (most before age 1, but still a large number before age ~15), and most of those that didn't die as children lived into their mid to late 50s.
Especially when you could have just fed them the grain directly:
…factory-scale insect production typically ends up relying on cereal by-products that are already usable as animal feed — meaning insect protein just adds an expensive extra step. For animal feed, the math simply wasn’t working.
This sounds like "draff", or distillery mash, where you get a huge lorryload of spent grain from brewing for very little money, which is still pretty damn nutritious for cows and sheep.
Better than letting it sit and rot, emitting massive amounts of methane in the process.
Not all agricultural animals are herbivores. Pigs and chickens are both omnivores. Also insects are probably good feed for some species of farmed fish.
There's an rule in the EU that says you can't feed the insects pork and then let those insects go on to be fed to pigs (same for beef and chicken). This is intended to prevent the transmission of diseases like Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (like "mad cow disease"). As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe. Arnold van Huis and his team at Wageningen University are putting quite some energy researching the safety and lobbying the EU to change the rules based on the findings. At one of the talks those folks they said it's basically a black box of trying to get what kind of science the regulators will consider acceptable.
As you might guess, making sure the food waste you feed the insects doesn't have _any_ animal proteins in it is quite logistically challenging and so afaik nobody is doing that at a large scale.
I did quite a bit of research into the history of insects in the food system, especially in the Netherlands. While I was rooting for Ynsect and other big players to figure something good out I believe that it's a problem much better suited to a smaller scale (perhaps on the city level). Basically, have the food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects and then let those insects be turned into whatever (pet food, fish food, trendy protein bars).
You'd have thought it wouldn't be the proteins in the input, but the prions in the output they would care about. They're remarkably resilient, it's not unreasonable to be cautious.
Agreed, this is one area where care should be taken. The effects of CJD are absolutely horrendous, and it’s easy to imagine that this might be a way to transmit it.
Or at least focus on not having neural tissue in the input. That wouldn't rely come from consumer waste, would it?
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Im not allowed to donate blood in N. America because I once lived in the EU for a few years.
Why?
Because feeding cows cows wasn't proved unsafe and therefore allowed in the food chain. Then people started dying. Oopsie.
But it's OK. It better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
That restriction on blood donation due to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was lifted in 2022. You should go donate blood.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
At the time we didn't know prion disease could be transferred between species. There's no evidence that scrapie (sheep prion disease) or CWD (deer and moose prion disease) can be transmitted to other species. BSE is seemingly a unique prion disease that can affect other mammals.
Given that the incubation can be in the decades caution is well deserved.
Our city just had a compost program. Throwing away compostable material into the provided bin was free. They put it into the city managed compost yards and then every weekend you could go down there and pick up bags of the finished product to use at home in your garden.
It's also the case that many states already have a "garbage feeding" program that allows food waste to be diverted into feed for commercial animal lots. The food has to meet certain criteria and be fully cooked and ready for human consumption before being discarded.
Cooking does not destroy prions to any significant extent. They’re even resistant to autoclaving. It’s one of the big reasons that prion diseases are so pernicious. The garbage feeding you describe could absolutely spread prion diseases for the same reason that use of animal byproducts in feeds spread BSE in Europe.
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> As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe.
We banned all kinds of such "forced cannibalism" after BSE, yes. And for good reason, I think - not just is it highly unethical IMHO, but because even a minuscule risk of a repeat of the BSE crisis of the late 90s/early 00s just isn't worth it. The destruction that BSE brought upon the European agriculture industry, the public outrage - I doubt non-Europeans could even understand the impact it had.
I was born in the UK during BSE, and as a result I can’t give blood in Europe. People forget it but the scars are still there.
Just to clarify, pig -> insect -> pig wouldn't constitute cannibalism. But it's still a rather unusual (ie low frequency) food chain in nature so there's no reasonable assurance that it will be safe. Given how resilient prions can be and just how crazy some of the observed transmission pathways have been the current EU regulations seem quite sensible to me. (As a layman. To be clear I'm no expert on prion diseases.)
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Soylent Green is people!
Better safe than sorry.
I had heard about that rule. But thought I had heard it had been overruled in the last 5-10 years. Maybe only for fishing feeding cycles?
Is pig > insect > cow (and reverse) any safer or have same concerns?
Yes, it is safer. Basically what we discovered in the 90s is that cannibalism (an animal eating others of its species) has a relatively high chance of leading to protein mis-folding in that animal, producing prions. Those prions can then cause additional mis-folding producing more prions, this time in a very direct way that is unrelated to who consumes the meat.
So pig > pig or cow > cow is known to produce prions. I believe it's also somewhat proven that, say, pig > cow > pig does not produce prions in the same way. However, insect digestion is very different from vertebrate digestion, so it's not necessarily safe to assume that pig > cow > pig being safe means that pig > insect > pig would also be safe. However, it does prove that pig > insect > cow > pig would still be safe - the insects don't add a risk in themselves, we're just not certain that they eliminate the risk the same way vertebrate digestive systems do.
4 replies →
As far as I understand, it is indeed safer, because different animals tend to be sensitive to different illnesses.
> food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects
a. how does that solve the transmission problem?
b. amazing work by EU bureaucrats to regulate businesses that dont exist yet
c. they can export the feed to fish farms or china or whatever. the question is do the economics work. US soy bean is just incredibly productive (and subsidized)
> But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many > Westerners feel about bugs.
I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.
And even for some of those who do eat insects, they are specific insects, form specific places, prepared in traditional ways.
Not a powder of insects
> I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.
Of course, this has nothing to do with “Westerners.” No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder. The fact that the company was allowed to operate and to receive massive funding is the real issue here.
Well, chickens tend to live off insects when you let them roam.
I don't really see how insect powder would be worse than the flour they get now. You don't even need to turn the bugs into a powder.
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> No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder.
Why?
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I am pretty sure most people don't care how their steak made it's on their table.
5 replies →
For the longest time industrial and domestic livestock raising used to involve feed that included literally anything the animal would it. Free range birds today regularly eat worms and insects. Pigs were used as a sort of waste disposal system for anything they could digest, leading to a lot of health issues. Still nobody really cared beyond “I’ll cook it until it doesn’t kill me”, not the producers, not the consumers.
>The fact that Ÿnsect failed doesn’t mean the entire insect farming sector is doomed. Competitor Innovafeed is reportedly holding up better, in part because it started with a smaller production site and is ramping up incrementally.
>For Prof. Haslam, Ÿnsect exemplifies a broader European problem. “Ÿnsect is a case study in Europe’s scaling gap. We fund moonshots. We underfund factories. We celebrate pilots. We abandon industrialization. See Northvolt [a struggling Swedish battery maker], Volocopter [a German air taxi startup], and Lilium [a failed German flying taxi company],” he said.
For the moment ynsect was launched in France it was obvious that it was doomed to fail. Like often here, the only real goal was to suck public funding.
Normally, you would start a small business/factory and scale with your business. Especially growing insect doesn't require a "mega factory".
But here, from the onset, they started from scratch and announced a mega investment to build a giant factory. Obviously getting hundreds of millions or even a billion, most from public funding as we could guess.
Where can I learn more about that ?
I think in the case of flying taxi's is just that it is a moronic idea tho.
Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).
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Agree. It doesn’t have the futuristic vibe but an urban gondola type system is probably what would be best. Especially in a city where there may already be a network of structures to leverage (eg. The buildings/rooftops and elevators). It would require massive coordination or eminent domain type laws to force but end result could be pretty awesome
What is moronic about the idea?
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Because noise?
It’s moronic to have the government pick winners. Only private investors with actual skin in the game will pick those with true potential. This error happens again and again and again
See SpaceX, Oracle etc for more government funded winners
Startups failed, now here's bob with the weather.
No monorail on the list?
How about funding some housing for the people? Why is it that every city had new huge neighbourhoods built en-masse until the 1990s, and then suddenly stopped (with a few tiny exceptions)?
But hey, flying taxis, right?
IMO it doesn't make any sense for a startup company like this to get $600 million in funding before making a profit. It seems obvious that it could be proved out for a lot less before scaling up.
"Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. "
if you raise that much money and go under, its usually just fraud.
The french government has been heavily subsidizing private R&D (up to 50% of the cost, including engineer salaries). It was relatively easy to create a moonshot project worth a few millions, and have the taxpayer pay for half of it. Then you just need to find a sucker to pay for the other half, and collect the money (getting an actual result is optional).
How do I know? My company is a minority partner in one such project (wind energy, we would provide instrumentation). It's infuriating, the head company has been trying to make one of the big energy providers pay for half the R&D, with no success, and the project will be closed. Lots of taxpayer money wasted for no result, and we won't make sales.
Because of these abuses, the french government is changing the financing rules. They will only finance small proof of concepts first, then a pilot project, and only then industrialisation issues (instead of financing all in one go).
Similar like grass fed beef and dairy is a sign of quality and "naturality". I look forward to the day when insect fed chicken becomes a sign of quality. Because insects are part of a natural diet for chickens.
If the insects are fed "naturally", though!
If the insects are fed naturally, it would probably be more cost effective to feed the chickens whatever you are feeding the insects. The only reason to introduce the insects would be if you were using something the chicken cannot eat, like wood.
2 replies →
Reminds me there are startups looking at vat grown protein using hydrogen and CO2 to feed nitrogen fixing bacteria.
An interesting thing is solar farms are maybe 30-50 times more efficient than corn. So the above isn't insane on the face of it.
This is like Juicero. It doesn't need a startup, investors or "tech". They already do this all over the world, and not just for animal feed...
It's not that it's not a good idea, it's already there. It's that it's not a VC idea.
And it seems the market prooved my point
Why do you think it’s not a VC idea? VC is necessary to scale up to large volume. It’s easy for me to believe that insect protein can be a good business at high volume but not low. At volume you can get economies of scale and efficiency and get your cost basis down, making things profitable that wouldn’t be profitable at lower volume. Makes sense on fundamentals without a lot of details. Sounds like they were just too ambitious and chased after a very large market with very thin margins. (Animal feed.) instead of a smaller market with thicker margins (pet food)
The fact that they were simultaneously pursuing animal, pet, and human product lines is just poor management. Exactly the kind of poor management that VC can encourage, mind you. Because VC pumps in tons of money and wants to see big plans.
Pet food might be more lucrative. Or fish food.
But it is not a goldmine. Dogs, cats etc have better teeth and like to eat a lot of meat, that humans generally does not eat: rabbit ears, tendons, throats, noses, etc.
Insect food is not that cheap. A lot of pet stores give out free treat samples. My dog normally loves all treats, but refuses to eat the the insect treats (before I realize they are made from insects).
I am sure there are companies making a good living making insect pet food. But it is probably not that obvious a choice.
For the same reason corn farming isn't.
They already do this, at scale, feeding people, all over the world. There is no "unlock" to invent some tech that makes it magically more efficient, cheaper, or otherwise more adoptable.
The only difference between them and their existing, already on the market competition is they don't owe investors 10x returns.
Meanwhile the "other" French insect farming startup seems to be doing fine (Innovafeed)
They should stick to snails.
Good. We do not need to bring even more animal suffering into this world. Especially when we have much better alternatives available to us.
Given that EU tech salaries are a lot more tame, it would be interesting to see how 600m were even used. Hopefully there’s some good R&D there and not some French alps retreats and Porches for founders
They had 600 million employees!?
Yes. All of Europe was working for them, and we're now entirely jobless. The industries, governments, all refocused on insects, and now it's gone. We don't know what to do. Send help.
> how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million
I find it remarkable, and depressing, that so many people just cannot handle the idea of insect protein. You get similar resistance to water reclamation from sewage and nuclear power. How are we supposed to change the world when we always hamstrung by all the mercurial and irrational whining?
The monster in Paris should not fear getting meat packed anymore!
I'm letting my mind wander and thinking what a French insect wrangler looks like. I'm kind of imagining a mix between French style, a cowboy hat, and lab gear.
Or maybe a guy with a large incredibly smelly cheese who is trailed by a huge cloud of flies.
“Make something people want” was supposed to be the motto.
Until the vegans make it mandatory through legislation, nobody is going to eat bugs.
> Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation
Yum, liquidised insects
No Flea Soup for You!
Ynsect-crushing reality - nobody really wants to eat bugs
“Human food was never the focus”
I eagerly purchase insect/grub kibble for my dog - both fly and cricket based. Also a lot of vegetarian kibble, I am a vegetarian myself.
But still your dog doesn't really want to eat the bugs, it's just there's no bowl of steak next to it
3 replies →
Why not? Have you tried? I have, must've been almost 30 years ago now, at Wageningen University. They taste quite well, if well prepared (they were). Insect burgers are also nice. I liked Damhert's insect burger [1]. People just think too much it looks like [2]
[1] https://www.jumbo.com/producten/damhert-nutrition-insecta-gr...
[2] https://www.theburningplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/0...
Yet most people over a certain age probably have without realising. Haribo, Tropicana, lots of fruit juices, sweets and dairy products used Cochineal.
People do however both keep pets and eat animals that eat insects, which is what the company was aiming for.
I would happily eat cricket protein if it were more scalably environmentally sustainable. I’m fine with milk, but cows aren’t helping our greenhouse sitchu.
Not to mention the issues with pea protein and lead content.
What are the problems with pea protein and lead?
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And here are some of the reasons why:
1. high risk of severe allergic reactions and cross-reactivity
2. contamination with pathogens, toxins, and heavy metals
3. digestive and nutritional drawbacks, including anti-nutrients (no pun intended) and imbalances
4. and last but not least, the good old precautionary principle: limited research on long-term human health impacts and emerging hazards
if you still want to eat zee bugz, consider yourself warned !
I don't understand why everyone involved didn't immediately realize especially the first two of those whys. Eating bugs at scale is such a surefire way to get everyone allergic to random stuffs.
And it's not like it was never tried. There are tribes and cultures that do it at tiny scales, which means humans used to do it and quit at some point in the past. It's removing not an insignificant Chesterton's Fence.
This is one of the posts on HN where I first read the dead comments. And they did not disappoint.
You will eat ze bugs
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Because the natural order of things is wild shih tzus hunting down cows?
Wolves did hunt aurochs, and apparently, shih tzus are one of the closest related dogs to wild wolves: https://www.dogingtonpost.com/8-dog-breeds-closest-to-wolves...
Why would that be? Killing and having them eat chicken and lamb is morally superior how?
Ask my dog, he knows
if u saw what goes into commercial animal feed u might feel different about trying to figure out better ways to do it...
Not the heckin doggos :((
…because most dogs just will eat bugs on their own, no outside influence necessary? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
I am baffled as to why cat food is labelled up as having "The great all-natural taste of beef and lamb that your cat loves!" because if my cat could naturally eat beef then that would be fucking terrifying, a 4kg cat that can eat a 600kg cow.
They should say "The great all-natural taste of mice and wasps that your cat loves!" based on observed behaviour.
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Good riddance. Like the beyond meat implosion that was foreseeable from the far, it is another elitist dystopian dream getting smashed by the harsh reality of people's natural instincts.
These initiative's will be back though. Likely armed with their lessons learned, like making the government compulse us into eating it. Sugar coat it by telling us it's only once per week, or how affordable it is since we increased the prices of proper food through red tape and taxes.
That's very good news. I hope all companies of this kind meet the same fate.
Rest assured though that they will be back.
And as always their blood of life against the public's natural disgust will be lobbying, powered by being rooted in elitist thinking.
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> bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.
How on earth did French taxpayers get roped into funding a moonshot startup whose entire goal was to make pet food out of insects..
Good question.
There seems to be strong lobbying for insects as human food, in particular from companies that would be happy feed us with their own shit as long as it's cheap and they could get away with it
The green-left seems to enjoy that idea. Exactly why is hard to tell - especially on HN, but let's say I don't think it's rational.
So I guess, successful lobbying?
The why is not that hard to understand - insects provide a lot of proteins compared to how much food they consume over their lifetime.
But yes, the obvious place to start is to use it for feeding chickens and not humans. Why chickens? Because insects are part of their natural diet when they are free. There is just a bunch of infrastructure problems that need to be solved for that to work as insects have pretty different problems to solve compared to other parts of the food production chain.
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> The green-left
You don't need left there, there is no green right
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You should look at the percentage of fish that comes from aquaculture and where the food that they are fed comes from.
Figures are all over the place, but the figures around public funding are around 50 millions (Euros) total, including EU, national and local.
They were clearly surfing on pure hype: green, local...
Because pet food is a large contributor to greenhouse gas emissions?
In Europe ist mostly crony capitalism.
Well connected people using government funds to finance their businesses.
Like in the US then?
French taxpayers need to revolt, and soon. Their situation is extremely bad
Nobody protests like the French!
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Oh my god eat some beans. Eat some tofu, eat some black-eyed peas, eat some green peas, eat some lentils, eat some northern beans, eat some lima beans, eat some chickpeas
What does that have to do with animal feed?
No.
no thanks
Animals served us well when human's life expectancy was 30yo
Centenarians i know are all on a plant based diet
Insects? why bother
I'd imagine they would be possibly able to self-regulate easier compared to plants
There has never been a period where most humans would die at ~30.
While life expectancy at birth was ~30 for the whole history of humanity up until the mid 20th century, this doesn't in any way mean that average people died in their 30s. Instead, life expectancy was highly bi-modal: most people died as children (most before age 1, but still a large number before age ~15), and most of those that didn't die as children lived into their mid to late 50s.
'Ÿnsect focused on producing insect protein for animal feed and pet food'
Surely nothing could go wrong feeding herbivorous animals a diet of insect protein...
Especially when you could have just fed them the grain directly:
…factory-scale insect production typically ends up relying on cereal by-products that are already usable as animal feed — meaning insect protein just adds an expensive extra step. For animal feed, the math simply wasn’t working.
They fooled investors with the sustainability angle. What a huge waste of money on a terrible idea cloaked in lies about sustainability.
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This sounds like "draff", or distillery mash, where you get a huge lorryload of spent grain from brewing for very little money, which is still pretty damn nutritious for cows and sheep.
Better than letting it sit and rot, emitting massive amounts of methane in the process.
plant protein is vastly inferior to animal protein. they don't feed livestock fishmeal for the hell of it.
The quote you make doesn't mention herbivores.
Cat food contains insect protein, and cats are carnivores. They even catch and eat insects themselves.
In contrast, cats are being fed grains which they wouldn't naturally eat.
Moreover, insects are a cheap source of animal protein.
Not all agricultural animals are herbivores. Pigs and chickens are both omnivores. Also insects are probably good feed for some species of farmed fish.
Cows and horses are opportunistic omnivores.
From the article looks like fish feed.
We have food waste -> black soldier fly larva -> chicken and fish feed companies, a financially sustainable ecosystem of companies globally.
They are currently fed fish protein. I fail to see a difference.
I mean most pets are carnivores or omnivores, it sounds to me like they just scaled up before they had really found product-market fit