Comment by raybb
1 day ago
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?
plenty if brsins for sale at the supermarket.
but, more important- prions are general. not specific to brain tissue.
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.
Wouldn't the worse problem be that humans are consuming it first? These aren't "animal byproducts" it's food meant to be served to humans in restaurants who ended up discarding it.
In any case, it truly is part of several state laws, including where I grew up, in Minnesota. You wouldn't believe what they feed pigs back there. All kinds of expired foods, pastries, candies, and other convenience store fare. That's what the law is meant to cover, including, "discarded or unused restaurant food."
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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.
> 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.
Might want to revisit the regulations of the country you're living in. Ireland [1] and, apparently recently, also Germany [2] at least have largely taken back the ban. If you're fluent in German, you can read the factual basis on which the RKI made its decision here [3].
[1] https://www.giveblood.ie/can-i-give-blood/keeping-blood-safe...
[2] https://www.blutspendedienst-west.de/magazin/blutspende/mehr...
[3] https://www.rki.de/DE/Themen/Infektionskrankheiten/Blut-und-...
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.)
Not direct cannibalism. It is cannibalism once removed though.
Soylent Green is people!
Scrapie (a sheep and goat prion) contaminates soil where sheep graze (and shit) and can persist for years in the soil.
Better safe than sorry.
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.
Let's not forget human > human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
While cannibalism is related to transmission in some cases I don't understand it to have anything to do with prion formation in and of itself. See scrapie for example. While highly contagious the underlying cause of scrapie is typically (afaiu) genetic and transmissible through the environment over fairly long periods of time.
Which is to say that things are likely even a bit worse than you seem to be making out.
Its only safer because of dilution - insects are less likely to have proteins that a prion can induce to misfolding.
But unless it is demonstrated that insect digestive systems have some magical enzyme that can do what autoclaves can't, that is break down prions, then it cannot be assumed safe.
Yeah and to be honest the research on it is still at the start. Maybe with the advances in protein folding computational research we'll be able to understand this better
Because that's the biological equivalent of that catastrophic bug that only happens in very weird and very specific conditions
As far as I understand, it is indeed safer, because different animals tend to be sensitive to different illnesses.
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?
> 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)