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Comment by petcat

1 day ago

> 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..

14 comments

petcat

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kpil  19 hours ago

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?

  • yxhuvud  12 hours ago

    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.

    • jimnotgym  11 hours ago

      None of which requires startups, science or factories.

      If you put cows on a field for a day, wait three days for insects to infest their shit, then put chickens on the field, the chickens scratch through the cow shit and eat the bugs. The cow shit gets nicely spread out and fertilises the soil more quickly.

      The problem with this system is that it doesn't allow rich people to screw mega bucks out of the government for doing no work at all.

  • ekianjo  14 hours ago

    > The green-left

    You don't need left there, there is no green right

    • tsimionescu  10 hours ago

      No, but there is a non-green left. And the greens do get most of their policy influence by associating with the rest of the left, since there are very few green parties that govern directly, or at least alone. So it's fair to say that such initiatives are successful because a subset of the broader left, the green-left, likes the idea.

LunaSea  8 hours ago

You should look at the percentage of fish that comes from aquaculture and where the food that they are fed comes from.

wiether  12 hours ago

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...