Comment by ThinkBeat
1 month ago
> 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.
To be fair, chickens can see and discriminate between insects before putting them in their mouths. Powdered insects preclude that.
Likewise, cows would never eat a carcass cow, but as hamburger mixed with a lot of grass...
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Chickens eat anything they can. Sometimes including eggs and chicks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_poultry
Indeed we already feed them insects and we don't powder them. You can purchase bags of dried meal worms at the feed store. The carcasses are fully intact.
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.
> No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder.
Why?
There aren't really any farm animals that eat insects. Mostly they eat tough grasses and plants, the kind of things that we can't eat.
I am pretty sure most people don't care how their steak made it's on their table.
I think most people do care if it weren't very difficult, even illegal, to find out.
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Steak is the meat that people pay the most attention to in this regard! People will pay hundreds of dollars for a few ounces of steak solely based on how the cow was raised and fed.
For steak, I disagree with the article about stigma of eating bugs. Feeding cows bugs will save money, no doubt, and that might help cost on the low end of the beef market. Steak is a different thing though. A "bug-raised, bug-finished" steak would have to be incredible to overcome the stigma.
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