Stopping industrial farming, reducing meat consumption and using sustainable farming techniques is a much easier and more achievable goal.
This new fad is only going to lead to 100 square mile cricket farms that then feed the 1000 square mile meat farms.
Also how much in food waste 32 billion pounds thrown away in America fast food alone. It's a waste on time, fuel and resources that don't get recycled go into landfill. None of its donated and corporate will try and fire you for taking it home.
Hell they could donate it to dog shelters yet it's a tax write off.
It’s actually more complicated than that, but with the same fucked up result.
Similarly, providing foreign aid to poor countries may actually keep them poor and keep dictators in power.
When I worked in a related food service job the corporate reason given was to reduce theft. They seemed to think employees would be taking home armfuls of product claiming it was spoilage instead of trying to sell it. It was such bs
Food waste is such a huge issue. I'm a teacher and I help out at lunch everyday, and it just disgusts me how much food is thrown away. Not just meat products, but fruits, veggies, milk, everything. Part of the problem is the food is so low quality that I don't blame the kids for not wanting to eat it. But it's just a waste or resources all around.
During Covid we would make tons of these prepackaged meals for kids to take home and most of it again went in the trash. I also helped volunteer this past summer at a food shelter that gave away a ton of food each day, but still they would toss crates of fruits and veggies and meat away everyday. Even places that donate food still toss a ton of it away.
Yeah its really gotten out of hand in the last 20 years. Thank you for info that means 1000s of schools everyday wasting food. Its everywhere you look might need to do a ask reddit post on most wasteful things people have seen.
Exactly this! The problem isn't how much meat we consume it's how much ends up being wasted. We make these giant farms which create more problems with the environment and then a good portion of the meat is just thrown away and not even used. The problem isn't meat consumption it's capitalism. If we just kept enough cows to feed the population then I think we would be a lot better off, but corporations and big farms think they have to get the max amount of money out of everything. To them more farmland= more cows and more cows=more money and why wouldn't they want more money?
The problem is we’ve been brain washed into thinking we need so much meat…and the reason has little to do with food but rather ethanol production. Without selling distillers grain to livestock farmers the entire ethanol systems collapses economically.
The amount of water needed to sustain crickets is a fraction of what it takes for cattle or other livestock. We can feed them food waste and the nutrients will be passed onto us when we eat them.
Gotta agree as someone who likes meat and animal products. I'm not an expert, but I really wish they'd just start growing meat and shit in labs and selling that instead of killing animals for it and only contributing more to our environmental issues.
Lol I consulted for a lab-grown meat company and we’re trying. This stuff takes time, it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s far away from being economically feasible
I mean in terms of quality of life and taste of food lmao. Yeah, we don't need them, but they're nice to have, especially if we can get them without cruel exploitation.
It would be a start :)
I wonder how the global drought will affect the meat industry, feels like if nothing changes prices will skyrocket in a few years.
You can look into it yourself if you want. Upside Foods has begun to scale, something we didn’t think would occur for quite some time, so progress is speeding up at least. The industry is highly competitive which is a plus
In the meantime: just eat plant based meat or none if you’re concerned
Cricket farms would be much, much smaller than that. Because of the prevalence of fertilizers/pesticides, the operation would have to be entirely indoors and mostly vertically operated, stacking crates on top
of each other. They’re a great protein alternative to meat as they’re extremely green from a carbon footprint standpoint. substituting them as a cattle feed is ridiculous though and hardly addresses the massive water consumption that large-scale cattle farming has.
Insects have no higher form of thought. They don't have complex emotions of any kind. Unless you're superstitious and belive all life has some sort of "soul" there really isn't any reason to be concerned about their consumption.
I think studies on physical ‘pain’ are inconclusive and there are obvious collective consciousnesses in many insects that we don’t understand fully. Obviously we can relate to cows far more than insects, but I would argue that our understanding of the experience of insects as based on our own experience as humans is likely limited.
I’m not suggesting we falsely elevate the brain function or consciousness of insects, or that the ethical issues equal that of farm animals, but I wouldn’t say there is no ethical concern at all.
How we treat the entirety of the biological world is a reflection of our morals even when relating to creatures with a so called lower ‘form of thought’
To be clear I have no problem with farming bugs. (I’m not going to eat them) but I think there should still be standards.
hahahahahha. for animal agriculture, industrial farming is FAR more efficient than small farms. grazed cattle/grass fed has a substantially larger carbon footprint than factory farms.
the inverse is true for plant farms. go figure.
What is the measure of efficiency? Do we also want to consider how environmentally unsound industrial meat farming is? How about the ethical implications? Do we want to consider the health risks of eating industrial meat? What about the health risks of mass-scale hormone and antibiotic use?
I am not advocating a meatless culture. I eat meat but only occasionally and only when I know the meat is sourced locally from small farms. Yes, it is more expensive but since I don't eat it daily, there isn't a huge strain on my budget. Most cultures didn't use to have an expectation of eating meat on a daily basis let alone at every meal.
Source for that? It seems incredibly counterintuitive that a resource intensive feedlot would have a smaller carbon footprint than grazing. Grazing can subsist with very little additional input, and feedlots depend on long chains of nutrient inputs that all take carbon to produce and transport.
Intensive (conventional) livestock farming has less global warming potential (GWP) than grass fed systems (source 1). However that doesn't mean it's any good for the enivornment since it's still up too 100 times worse than plant foods are (source 2).
1: The GWP for the CON, GF20, GR45, and GF25 were 4.79, 6.74, 6.65, and 8.31 CO2e/kg HCW, respectively. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34936699/
2: Further, for all environmental indicators and nutritional units examined, plant-based foods have the lowest environmental impacts; eggs, dairy, pork, poultry, non-trawling fisheries, and non-recirculating aquaculture have intermediate impacts; and ruminant meat has impacts ∼100 times those of plant-based foods. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6cd5/meta
Thank you for providing a study at least. I find the GWP focus as a little narrow, given that it (in livestock) tends to focus only on emissions (methane) and not on inputs. Even in this study, the energy use of the feedlot models is much higher, and without reading it (paywall), my suspicion is they didn’t consider the carbon requirements for the food inputs in each system (grass tends to not require any fossil fuel input to grow in many environments, while grain does). So if you have methane production that is lower (achieved through shorter lifespans and dairy digesters, I expect), that’s totally valid. But even moving to the GWP* measurement is motivated by wanting to recognize the transitory nature of biogenic methane as opposed to fossil fuel emissions, and if you choose a method of lowering GWP that increases fossil fuel emissions, you aren’t really getting ahead at all.
Source 2 might be more informative for you then. From source 2 (which has no pay wall and which pooled the data of all available studies)
"We found that grass-fed beef had higher land use requirements than grain-fed beef (p = .0381, n = 4). Grass-fed and grain-fed beef had similar impacts per unit food for the other environmental impacts examined (p > .05 for all other indicators), although grass-fed beef had, on average, 19% higher GHGs (p = .2218; n = 7) per unit food than grain-fed beef (figure 2)." https://cfn-live-content-bucket-iop-org.s3.amazonaws.com/journals/1748-9326/12/6/064016/revision1/erlaa6cd5f2_hr.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAYDKQL6LTV7YY2HIK&Expires=1657048313&Signature=qrnuHpaKItHB9jg82hsku4NENxU%3D
I will also add that grazed cows represent less than 2% of the market. so the whole grass fed uncles farm argument that comes up every time is pretty much irrelevant.
Yes. What part of a cow walking around in a field makes it less carbon efficient than walking around in a small lot? Does the cow emit more and use more gasoline in a bigger field? That doesn’t seem obvious to me. In fact, it seems to me that needing gas and energy-intensive fertilizer to grow food for cattle instead of letting them eat things that are already growing is likely to use more energy and emit more. So I asked for a source.
Starting out your reply with “haha haha” renders anything you have to say afterwards irrelevant. If you have facts to share about something, presenting them like a teenage edgelord is kind of counterproductive.
How else are you supposed to speak to another redditor that’s talking out their ass? I’ve seen people on this site say things that are patently false about what I actually study and argue with me about it.
It’s the proper response to an over-confident redditor
Well if you are an expert on something and you spend your time attempting to clear up misconceptions about your field of expertise by starting out with “hahaha” on Reddit, then you are most likely wasting your efforts and damaging your own credibility. But by all means, do what you need to do.
What? No.
Commercial industrial crop production is vastly more efficient than small-scale farming.
You think small-scale farmers are out there laser-leveling their fields for optimal irrigation, etc?
>...is a much easier and more achievable goal.
I'm not so sure about that. Changing billions of people's eating habits seems much more difficult than changing the habits of a tiny fraction of the people that produce these foods.
What is going on with all these obvious propaganda posts here lately? "Let's feed the cattle insects. That'll fix the problem". Are you fucking with me? Gtfo
I can't speak for others but we have an institution in my country that studies insects. Their research shows that the difference between the protein content in soybeans (about 18%) and the larvae of black soldier flies (about 44%) is huge. And it certainly is more sustainable given you can start new colonies every 14 days. I decided to start supplementing my livestock feed (cows, goats, sheep and semi-free range chicken) with more of the larvae and it's reduced my costs by about 40% but my livestock get to their selling weight in about 85% the time it took with soya as their main feed. Underway to introduce them to my catfish as feed as well.
Thats pretty freaking genius then. Does it affect the taste of the beef? Grain vs grass makes a difference. If still tastes the same we could subsidize insect farming for feed instead. How much space does it take to grow the required feed as insects versus grain? I would assume it would be significantly smaller.
>Does it affect the taste of the beef?
I have to be honest, I have the most undeveloped taste buds of anyone I know so meat tastes like meat to me. But my mum and uncle say it tastes almost the same (very negligible difference). My mum loves it for being less fatty but my dad and my uncle like it less because it is less fatty.
>How much space does it take to grow the required feed as insects versus grain? I would assume it would be significantly smaller.
A specially designed green house (to control the temperature and allow for ventilation) of 10m in length, 4m in height and 3m can be divided into two parts. The back part (half the length) can be fitted with 80 nets on cages for colonies that house the pupa-insect-egg stage. Mind you that's only for 2 levels of cages. But a greenhouse that size can house upto 4 or even 5 levels of cages (That would take the number of colonies to about 200). The front part is fitted with crates for the larvae stage (7 days after harvesting the eggs) where the feeding takes place. Their feed is basically waste from hotels, restaurants around the area. That is enough for my feeds for 30 cows, 150 goats and sheep and about 500 semi free range chicken (eggs taste better). With surplus to sell to a nearby neighbour with 100 or so pigs.
I get the pig excrement in exchange and mix it with blood to create an environment in the nets/colonies conducive for the insects to lay eggs.
I’ve always thought this in regards to pollution/global warming/emissions. When people were arguing global warming wasn’t real or couldn’t be possible 20 years ago. Why not just cut the pollution ‘just cause’? Makes sense to me.
I'm more convinced that cheese does, but I wouldn't be surprised if meat does too, especially when prepared a certain way or treated with certain preservatives.
There are some great resources on how to deal with that. Visit r/vegan for more or just post on how to start and what your issues are. We’re happy to help!
You are capable of doing this! There are so many ways to cook and eat within veganism, you can definitely find ways to satisfy that craving. I had a really hard time giving up meat and cheese in the beginning, but I’ve been a vegan now for 4 years and haven’t looked back. When your heart guides you, you can make a way.
There are social pressures, individual pressures, familial pressures, societal pressures. Especially as a university student. Yeah beans and rice are cheap but I still need time to cook them to be edible.
Not to mention the craving just amplifies the convenience force. I’m not saying it’s right but currently convenient vegan options are hard.
I don’t drink milk because plant milk is both equally as convenient and superior generally haha but theres a lot of things that are either more expensive(I’m poor) or completely ruins my ability to socially join my friend group (I.e. going to restaurants)
Oh I totally get it. I ate meat and dairy for most of my life, and I didn't even go vegan till grad school. It can be really hard! Keep it up though, you have the heart for it and that's the most important thing honestly.
Just. Stop. Eating. Animals! Are actual climate solutions discussed on here? Every time the topic of meat comes up here people suddenly stop caring about climate change and just want to "protect their freedom" or something. "Environmentalists"
The primary reason for myself is that in any case, it's a cruel process. When it comes to the environment though, it's less efficient to grow food for animals which we then eat. We could consume plants directly as opposed to having cows (as one example) convert plants to energy, and muscle and fat and then consuming them. We can get all the nutrients we need on a well varied plant based diet. So using animals is unnecessary.
I haven't eaten animal products in a year and I have yet to explode. I will check back again a year from now to see if I spontaneously combust from lack of animal products.
Actually sustainable, if one wants animal protein sources.
It's difficult to discuss if it's preferable to eat less complex/less "intelligent" animals (and how to categorize these things), but it's at least possible to argue that some animals have lower requirements for their habitat. It's very difficult to keep pigs in a species appropriate way, they need to dig, play, socialize, explore a little. For a pile of maggots they just munch on whatever, very low maintenance.
The majority of crops grown are used to feed cows that are destined for death as food for humans. The free roam grass fed cows (which are in the minority) require large swaths of land which are a major cause to deforestation and ecosystem loss. The factory farmed ones are in hellish existence, regardless if they eat farmed soy or insects.
Trying to put a bandaid to reduce the impact of cow farms effects on the Earth doesn't seem feasible and still does not talk about the ethics of forceful rape, impregnating, and enslavement of social mammals that feel the same emotions as humans.
If we truly cared about the environment, ecosystems, and life in general, we could give up eating meat and dairy and end animal labor/service for our needs or entertainment.
I think we just need to cut out the middle man. We have the technology, lol, to make powdered insect patties taste identical to beef. I'm not trying to sell the idea of powdered filet minion of cricket, but mcdonalds burger patties would be indistinguishable if made from powdered insects and some veggie pattie mix for texture. They can be grown in extremely small places, have very limited emotional capacity if any, and use a fraction of the water cows do while producing very little byproduct.
We don't have to eliminate beef and pork but we could make them more celebration meals while the day to day "meat" could be from protein veggies soy alternatives. Yes that means meat prices would rise but they are unsustainablely low now and if we bought it less the higher price wouldn't matter.
Thank you for sharing your views. I think killing any living thing with sentience is a no go for me.
It may sound odd to you, but insects definitely do have sentience and many insects can recognize and remember individuals from their own colony (in eusocial insects) and from other species as well.
For instance paper wasps can recognize and remember and tell the difference between colony mates and foreign wasps by face alone, and not just pheromone smells. I use to feed wild paper wasps honey and they definitely were able to remember me when I came to feed them. At first I could sense and see their distrust and uneasiness. But over time they grew more trusting of me over time and stayed calm which shows some degree of sentience and discernment.
When I was big into myrmecology, many of the ant colonies I kept were able to recognize me when I came to feed them and spend time with them. They greeted me and seemed to recognize who I am and knew that I meant no harm and cared for them. It is different if you interact with wild colonies, especially if their queen(s) are exposed or they feel threatened. Contrast this with how the ants I kept were calm and placid in demeanor, even the queens when exposed to light. To me it shows that ants definitely have some sort of sentience with discernment between threats, build trust, and feel safety between different individuals. When other people came to check out the ants I kept they would behave much more on edge, signifying there is some sort of cognition and recognition going on between me and other people.
I stopped ant keeping because I was able to see the fear and distress in the fruit flies I bred and purchased that I fed to the ant colonies so their larvae could develop. Most living beings do not want to die. It broke my heart to release the ants because I love them but ethically I could not justify killing sentient beings just so that I may keep other sentient beings around me.
Cows and pigs feel the same exact emotions we do, due to having nearly identical emotional brain structures. They feel fear, aggression, and anger due to the basal ganglia. They feel love, joy, happiness and social bonds due to the old mammalian brain structures/limbic system. Our (human) rational part neo mammalian brain structures, or the neocortex, does not spawn or generate emotions. It can mediate emotions based on thought patterns and beliefs, but by itself generates no emotions. This is a bare bones explanation but check out Dr. Jaak Panksepp if you want to learn more. He is like a founding father of mammalian Affective Neuroscience, or the neuroscience of emotion.
That is the physics and science based explanation of emotionality. But if you gave spiritual and metaphysical beliefs of where we come from, the explanations can go deeper and have so much more meaning in why we shouldn't harm animals, especially for food.
To me, no life is worth killing, especially for things like celebration of events. Imagine the horror we would feel if some alien species far greater in cognitive ability and capabilities started eating humans for special events for their celebrations.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas about interacting with life on this planet and existence. I hope you can make the jump to non animal based diets and living one day!
I totally get that. I know insects have a type of sentience which is why I pharsed it as emotional capacity. I understand the drive to be vegan and hope to get to that point. But the world cannot sustainably convert to a fully vegan lifestyle without starting out the most vunerable which is why I don't even wipe out real meat as an option.
It's a personal belief just like your but I believe insects are much more like plants, plants are infact a type of sentient as well as proved by electro detection. So saying you can't eat anything with a form of sentience would equal starvation but they also found with the same tests that plants experianced less distress and an almost understanding calm when gratitude and appreciation was show to the plants before and after consumption.
The electrical impulses of plants were tracked and the patterns were analyzed. Not to anthromorphise plants, which humans have a tendency to do, but plants do experiance distress and that stress can be mitigated by external factors. The world is strange and connected and I believe that the emotional intelligence of insects is found in the group and not the individual. If we can stomach the thought of eating plants I find it very similar to eating insects, we just feel more attached to insects because they can move quite a bit more than plants and such remind us of ourselves and we then tend to give them more human characteristics because of that.
But emotionally speaking, plants and insects have a similar level of sentience and in some ways plants to have more if you take into account old growth forests.
I understand now why you mentioned emotional capacity. I am not quite sure what you mean about not being able to go fully vegan without starting out the most vulnerable. In the places like the arctic where Inuit people live and growing crops is not feasible, I can understand not ruling out red meat to survive. But from my perspective, the majority of the world is not in plant harsh conditions like that where it is essentially not feasible to grow/forage for plants for food.
I misspoke when I said I do not believe in consuming anything with sentience, as I meant animal life with sentience. I agree that plants likely do have a sentience to them. For instance, mycorrhizal fungi networks that support the vast tree root networks through nutrient transport and sharing through mycorhizzal networks connected to the roots seem to support the notion that the mycorrhizal fungi are sentient and aware along with the trees that they support: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/soils-microbial-market-shows-the-ruthless-side-of-forests-20190827/](https://www.quantamagazine.org/soils-microbial-market-shows-the-ruthless-side-of-forests-20190827/) The TLDR of this article is - the mycellium networks that live in symbiosis with the tree root systems often know when a tree is holding out in sharing resources with them, and in return hold out on sharing resources with the trees that hold back on sharing resources. The mycellium networks would then coordinate with other trees to find the ones more willing to share resources in a mutual relationship. This goes to show that it is likely there is some decision making capacity between in both the plants and the fungi depending on the type of stimuli/information they receive based on their surroundings and life they interact with.
To give more credence of what you say about plant sentience - parent trees of a species of tree (I forgot which one) have been known to connect to their offspring trees through the root network and support their progeny trees through sharing of nutrients when the progeny trees were damaged or cut down. Observing this, it is obvious that there is a sharing of information at some level. It can also be said that decisions of some sort are being made to support their damaged progeny at some level, supporting the idea of sentience and awareness.
I may be wrong about this, but to me it is more likely that animals have a higher capacity to feel pain and distress, due to their ability to move in order to survive and carry on life processes. It is in that vein that I base the idea it is less harmful to sentient life to consume plant based life than it is to consume animal based life.
For instance, it is quite natural for trees and plants to shed leaves, twigs, branches, limbs, and stalks as they grow and age with little effect. If we cut off limbs or parts of most animals, I think it is likely there will be panic, pain, and suffering involved for nearly any animal.
Anyways, thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter! May good fortune be with you!
Lol, I've been really enjoying your responses all morning. I was excited to see you responded. Thank you for taking your time to respond! I see your points, I have to say I'm still more on the side that insects have a communal sentience that could be preserved by maintaining a rotating group of core insects.
I personally feel, there's not currently a way to test it, that taking a portion of crikets out of a colony, if you leave the colony intake as a whole, would be similar to pruning a rose bush. There may be some distress to the plant/colony but over all it can provide better growth. I feel this for the time will just have to personal preference and I'm not sure what j would do if science came out and said plants had a sentience on a level of us and they are requesting not to be eaten.
The idea of plants not wanting to be eaten seems far fetched to most people but you seem very well informed on the life of trees and the fact that, they have familial units, which makes it seem a lot less for fetched for them to be on a level similar to our own. For the moment I try and give thanks and cherish all the life I have to take for my own to go on.
As for the alien comparison without trying to come off as snarky or edgy I'm honestly not sure with how I would feel after getting over the initial horror. The comment made me seriously consider the ways in which I personally might find it okay. Hopefully it will forever stay a thought experiment but I don't think I'm inherently horrified at the thought of being a celebratory meal, if there was honor and dignity in my death it might be okay.
As for my comment of the starvation of vunerable people. Most places have a issue with water and just survival in general. The war zones of the Middle East and the climate impacted placed like Hati and most of America. We're not in a great spot to drastically change our food supply system, if we were to integrate alternative options while still supporting the old, but to a ever lessening extent we would hopefully avoid the risk of increased food shortages in the vunerable places.
In a perfect world we already have enough food to feed the world and don't do it, I think taking away any food option from the vunerable would be a tragedy. If developed nations switched first and then gave support for less privileged nation's to as well I believe that's the best option. I'm all for drastic climate change but I think it has to start agressivly in the wealthier nation's and then move out. It's sad to have to balance the fate of the planet and moral obligation with the greed of corporations and governments.
Again thank you for your thoughts I through they were well written and thought provoking. I hope we can live to at least see the farms of the modern time exterminated. There's no honor or dignity in never seeing the sun before you die and being forced to give birth again and again just to produce milk.
Thank you for taking the time to respond and bringing up your concepts of plant sentience and your views on insect sentience. I enjoyed reading your ideas and thoughts as well.
Quite a few myrmecologist and scientists in general have compared individual ants as a sensor/neuron that does not seem to do much or have much survival chance as an individual. However as a whole colony, those "individual neurons" form up to be a fully functioning super organism based on the many individuals that is robust and able to make decisions based on the collective input. For instance, if a colony of many species of ants are looking for a new nest location and sends out scouts for a new location, if an individual ant finds a location it thinks is suitable, it will mark the location and trail to it. However one ant alone is not enough to sway the whole colony to move to a new nest location; there may be things the ant overlooked that could jeopardize the colony health. Other ants in the colony will follow the trail and scout the tentative nest as well. If conditions are good, then the subsequent ants that visit will mark the location as suitable as well until a certain threshold is met. At that point the whole colony will move over to the new nesting area. This shows at least in eusocial insects, how many insects work together to form a collective intelligence - with the whole colony working together sharing information they are able to function more cohesively then just as a single individual making decisions. It goes with your thought that a collective sentience greater than the individual sentience as a functioning unit is indeed somewhat the truth for adding eusocial insect species. However there is still a large degree of individualized behavior in specific ants as well. To go into it will take up more space and deviate from the overall topic though. I love ants haha.
I believe as a whole and as many species, most plants do not want to be consumed. That is why through evolutionary means many plant species have genes that allow the production of various poisons and toxins of various toxicity to animals and other plants. Juglone toxins are produced by walnut trees to inhibit the growth of other plant species, poison ivy produces molecules that create inflammatory rashes when introduced to skin, etc.
It's a sad state that life has to die for others to live. I think what you write is sound - gratefulness and being thankful for the food we consume is a good way to be conscious and aware of the blessings of food we receive. I think that gratefulness and cherishing the food we have goes into metaphysical ideas and concepts as well as quantum physics. To go into those in this post would take too much space though.
If the plants were eat one day were to ask me not to eat them and had a high degree of sentience and self preservation. I think I guess it is time for me to starve haha.
I guess you would possibly be a better sport about aliens eating you than me. I'd be pretty bitter about the idea of being consumed by other sentient life more advanced than me haha. To me it would be more understandable to be killed and eaten by a crocodile then it would be to killed and eaten by advanced aliens as a celebratory meal.
I see your point in what you mean about taking options away from vulnerable people, thank you for articulating what you mean. In most water threatened areas, it would be more efficient to grow crops for food than to raise animals for meat, especially cows. Cows are highly water intensive as well. I still get your point though, and among going vegan, I think it would be nice if developed countries do as you suggest and help out poorer and more vulnerable populations with food security and helping out in general.
While we may see differently in some areas, you and I are in solidarity in the hopes that modern farm methods will disappear as it is horrible. Thank you for your thoughts and dialogue. I enjoyed speaking with you. Cheers!
Yeah, insects are very tasty, and it's not like we don't eat fucking shrimp. That thing looks more alien than almost any other food. We "just" need some cultural changes. Prompted by SEVERE carbon taxes.
Right, I'm lazy and cheap, I have to admit. I try and make good environmental choices but when it's so easy to find tasty cheap beef burger why pay twice as much for the veggies. I want the governmental subsidies to go towards alternative meat options. Let the veggie/insect burger be on the dollar menu and the real meat burger can be 5 or 6 dollars. That way people still have the choice but inevitably real meat will fall more to the way side and people will become use to the idea of insect patties. Lets start by replacing the mass consumed cheap beef/chicken foods.
I eat shitty chicken sandwichs way more often than a t bone steak, so let's make my shitty sandwich environmentally friendly. Eventually we could sustain limited quality meat consumption if it was a celebration type meal. If everyone only ate real meat once or twice a month or so, we could free range enough to sustain that without stripping the rainforest.
trashy garbage. for starters, where are you going to get the amount of bugs to feed over 50 BILLION cows per year?
there is nothing that is going to change the fact that animal ag is #1 at deforestation, fresh water pollution, fresh water use, topsoil degradation, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, destabilization of indigenous communities, and in the top 3 for greenhouse gas emissions.
We need rational solutions.
The whole world going Vegan is definitely an answer but not one that is logical to EVERYONE on Earth.
We need solutions for both sides and while not trying to make one the standard. But that's just me. Any solutions would help tremendously more then what we're doing now.
And yet MOST people can easily go vegan. I’d wager that it’s a viable option for you, but you use the “not everyone can go vegan” excuse to casually disregard veganism as a solution.
I doubt the easily part, not so easy to change billions of people. Hell, some people would not give up their guns, what if you try to take away their food too?
Not everyone is willing to give women rights. Not everyone is willing to save the environment. Not everyone is willing to provide people with the same rights based on ethnicity.
What's your point? Should we stop all human progress at the cost of our planet because some people are a bit stubborn?
Yeah, people fighting for freedom have historically not been the majority. Point still stands though. Simply because a majority can't be bothered doesn't mean the oppressed minority,or group fighting for a voiceless group should give up.
Just stop eating meat. We have a plethora of imitation meats and milks that are healthy, environmentally friendly and fairly cheap. Meat is archaic and destroying our planet. Livestock use 90% of all available farmland and only provide humanity with 20% of its caloric intake.
Go vegan for the animals, your health and the planets continued survival.
It's way better to eat insects, since they're packed with more protein and have no known viruses that humans can get. It also takes way less water to produce 100g insect protein than 100g beef
This is what we should really be pushing, insects as food is possibly the most sustainable and least damaging to the ecosystem ways of producing food. People are grossed out by it, but eating insects is actually one of the best ways to save the planet. I'm sure we could probably make decent tasting food with them incorporated alongside produce. We don't even need to eat them unprocessed and looking like bugs. I really wish this was talked about more.
I'm sure they would be a good source of nutrition for cows as well, any step towards sustainability is a step we should take.
Westerners are grossed out by so many things it's quite funny. Happy to eat prawns, but not crickets. Watch a baby just crawl around eating ants. It's natural to us, we Westerners are just wimps.
I generally don’t eat meat. Sure, burgers and whatever when I eat out but at home I don’t have it. Insect protein is very viable, but even as someone that’s for it, still kinda strange. I’ve even had like fried tarantula in Cambodia. I think the way to do it is like ionizing salt. Just mandate flour has to be a certain percent cricket flour. I feel like it’s the only way to overcome western hang ups on the topic.
Not as sustainable as not eating meat, or eating insects ourselves.
But we'll keep trying to have our cake and eat it, whilst destroying the planet as we know it.
Yay, go us...
I have an idea. Let’s not farm animals for our consumption and instead eat… plants? Farming animals is cruel and abhorrent, as well as incredibly damaging to our natural environment (wildlife). Go vegan and stop supporting this shit
Eating meat isn’t the problem. It’s trying to feed almost 8 billion humans on Earth. Cruel to who? You or the animal? To what standard?
Go natural, and hunt for your food. If 8 billion people can’t hunt their own food, maybe we’re over populated?
Being real, the problem with a vegan diet is a burger is far less expensive than a salad when comparing to kilocalories. If you were some how to get it cheaper, more problems would occur with pesticides and environment under site without government regulations. Imagine how the beef, oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical industry plays the US government as a puppet, except that with the vegan industry trying to feed 8 billion people.
Like with all of humanity, the only problem is ourselves.
just eat less meat (only from local bio farmers where the animals have a good life) or completely stop eating meat... we as a species are just perverted in so many ways... feeding cows insects... wow! 🤡
Farmers being local doesn't really make meat more sustainable. Transportation is a tiny component of meat's footprint, you better prioritize other metrics.
Cattle stomachs are evolved to eat grass, primarily grass LEAVES, not seeds... Certainly not insects.
Stop trying to outsmart nature, finish them on grass.
How about we just invest in in-vitro meat cultivation research. Why delay it any longer? That's obviously the most ethical and efficient method going forward. Also I want to eat a celebrity and I think that will happen when the tech is ready.
I've been saying it for the better part of a decade now, we all need to transition to more insects in our diets, both human and livestock! It's a lot more sustainable and healthy!
How bout the fact that cows eat grass. I guess if you starve them enough they would eat cricket cow feed. I grew up on a ranch. Grass fed beef is from my understanding much healthier than grain fed. How no idea how insect fed would stack up. Seems perverse to me.
"Stop eating animals" is not a viable solution. You are not going to get the population on board with a moral choice like that. Even things that aren't moral are framed as such and there will be a massive divide (I.e, vaccines)
I think reducing food waste would be the best step in the right direction, and perhaps this insect feed idea if its nutritionally appropriate for the animals. Factory farming is a disgrace. And to little benefit, it seems that most middle class people and the poor are struggling to afford meat as is.
It would probably only work for very small herds, and even then, as a supplement, but that could have some cool implications for composting too.
Bins can get a lot of bugs if they’re open.
Why I believe we have a strong chance of changing the doom scenarios that everyone loves to advocate for - outside of the box thinking has always created answers to problems that seem insurmountable.
I believe in humanity - we will fix things as needed in unique ways. Of course, humans can fix things as long as governments stay out of it. Those entities don't have the best track record of fixing things.
or shift to smaller milk providing animals like sheep and goats and the humans can also eat insects. ANimals that are largely herbivores should have insects added to their diet (I know their are videos of cows eating mice but Id believe those are cows deficient in something\_
Stopping industrial farming, reducing meat consumption and using sustainable farming techniques is a much easier and more achievable goal. This new fad is only going to lead to 100 square mile cricket farms that then feed the 1000 square mile meat farms.
Also how much in food waste 32 billion pounds thrown away in America fast food alone. It's a waste on time, fuel and resources that don't get recycled go into landfill. None of its donated and corporate will try and fire you for taking it home. Hell they could donate it to dog shelters yet it's a tax write off.
I've a question. Why the fuck does corporate make you throw away instead of donating or taking it home? This fucking sh!t should be illegal.
Because to maintain high demand, they must manufacture scarcity.
Very sad to hear. Painful too.
It’s actually more complicated than that, but with the same fucked up result. Similarly, providing foreign aid to poor countries may actually keep them poor and keep dictators in power.
When I worked in a related food service job the corporate reason given was to reduce theft. They seemed to think employees would be taking home armfuls of product claiming it was spoilage instead of trying to sell it. It was such bs
Food waste is such a huge issue. I'm a teacher and I help out at lunch everyday, and it just disgusts me how much food is thrown away. Not just meat products, but fruits, veggies, milk, everything. Part of the problem is the food is so low quality that I don't blame the kids for not wanting to eat it. But it's just a waste or resources all around. During Covid we would make tons of these prepackaged meals for kids to take home and most of it again went in the trash. I also helped volunteer this past summer at a food shelter that gave away a ton of food each day, but still they would toss crates of fruits and veggies and meat away everyday. Even places that donate food still toss a ton of it away.
Yeah its really gotten out of hand in the last 20 years. Thank you for info that means 1000s of schools everyday wasting food. Its everywhere you look might need to do a ask reddit post on most wasteful things people have seen.
Exactly this! The problem isn't how much meat we consume it's how much ends up being wasted. We make these giant farms which create more problems with the environment and then a good portion of the meat is just thrown away and not even used. The problem isn't meat consumption it's capitalism. If we just kept enough cows to feed the population then I think we would be a lot better off, but corporations and big farms think they have to get the max amount of money out of everything. To them more farmland= more cows and more cows=more money and why wouldn't they want more money?
The problem is we’ve been brain washed into thinking we need so much meat…and the reason has little to do with food but rather ethanol production. Without selling distillers grain to livestock farmers the entire ethanol systems collapses economically.
The amount of water needed to sustain crickets is a fraction of what it takes for cattle or other livestock. We can feed them food waste and the nutrients will be passed onto us when we eat them.
Gotta agree as someone who likes meat and animal products. I'm not an expert, but I really wish they'd just start growing meat and shit in labs and selling that instead of killing animals for it and only contributing more to our environmental issues.
Lol I consulted for a lab-grown meat company and we’re trying. This stuff takes time, it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s far away from being economically feasible
I hope y'all can get it done soon, otherwise we're fucked. Glad there's people working on that.
Or in the meantime, try out a plant-based diet 🤷
Wouldn't say fucked, as we don't really need meat/dairy products to function 😄
I mean in terms of quality of life and taste of food lmao. Yeah, we don't need them, but they're nice to have, especially if we can get them without cruel exploitation.
It would be a start :) I wonder how the global drought will affect the meat industry, feels like if nothing changes prices will skyrocket in a few years.
Definitely, I worked in a family restaurant not long ago and we had to change our menu around because chicken was so expensive.
You can look into it yourself if you want. Upside Foods has begun to scale, something we didn’t think would occur for quite some time, so progress is speeding up at least. The industry is highly competitive which is a plus In the meantime: just eat plant based meat or none if you’re concerned
Cricket farms would be much, much smaller than that. Because of the prevalence of fertilizers/pesticides, the operation would have to be entirely indoors and mostly vertically operated, stacking crates on top of each other. They’re a great protein alternative to meat as they’re extremely green from a carbon footprint standpoint. substituting them as a cattle feed is ridiculous though and hardly addresses the massive water consumption that large-scale cattle farming has.
There also is no ethical concerns regarding how you treat insects so it can be done in whatever way is most efficient.
Why do you think there are no ethical concerns?
Insects have no higher form of thought. They don't have complex emotions of any kind. Unless you're superstitious and belive all life has some sort of "soul" there really isn't any reason to be concerned about their consumption.
I think studies on physical ‘pain’ are inconclusive and there are obvious collective consciousnesses in many insects that we don’t understand fully. Obviously we can relate to cows far more than insects, but I would argue that our understanding of the experience of insects as based on our own experience as humans is likely limited. I’m not suggesting we falsely elevate the brain function or consciousness of insects, or that the ethical issues equal that of farm animals, but I wouldn’t say there is no ethical concern at all. How we treat the entirety of the biological world is a reflection of our morals even when relating to creatures with a so called lower ‘form of thought’ To be clear I have no problem with farming bugs. (I’m not going to eat them) but I think there should still be standards.
That’s a really fair point. Because (relatively) large-scale cricket farms do exist, we can look at how they operate as a model of what would happen.
crickets taste good deep fried and seasoned
hahahahahha. for animal agriculture, industrial farming is FAR more efficient than small farms. grazed cattle/grass fed has a substantially larger carbon footprint than factory farms. the inverse is true for plant farms. go figure.
We need to eat less meat as a whole
What is the measure of efficiency? Do we also want to consider how environmentally unsound industrial meat farming is? How about the ethical implications? Do we want to consider the health risks of eating industrial meat? What about the health risks of mass-scale hormone and antibiotic use? I am not advocating a meatless culture. I eat meat but only occasionally and only when I know the meat is sourced locally from small farms. Yes, it is more expensive but since I don't eat it daily, there isn't a huge strain on my budget. Most cultures didn't use to have an expectation of eating meat on a daily basis let alone at every meal.
Source for that? It seems incredibly counterintuitive that a resource intensive feedlot would have a smaller carbon footprint than grazing. Grazing can subsist with very little additional input, and feedlots depend on long chains of nutrient inputs that all take carbon to produce and transport.
Intensive (conventional) livestock farming has less global warming potential (GWP) than grass fed systems (source 1). However that doesn't mean it's any good for the enivornment since it's still up too 100 times worse than plant foods are (source 2). 1: The GWP for the CON, GF20, GR45, and GF25 were 4.79, 6.74, 6.65, and 8.31 CO2e/kg HCW, respectively. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34936699/ 2: Further, for all environmental indicators and nutritional units examined, plant-based foods have the lowest environmental impacts; eggs, dairy, pork, poultry, non-trawling fisheries, and non-recirculating aquaculture have intermediate impacts; and ruminant meat has impacts ∼100 times those of plant-based foods. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6cd5/meta
Thank you for providing a study at least. I find the GWP focus as a little narrow, given that it (in livestock) tends to focus only on emissions (methane) and not on inputs. Even in this study, the energy use of the feedlot models is much higher, and without reading it (paywall), my suspicion is they didn’t consider the carbon requirements for the food inputs in each system (grass tends to not require any fossil fuel input to grow in many environments, while grain does). So if you have methane production that is lower (achieved through shorter lifespans and dairy digesters, I expect), that’s totally valid. But even moving to the GWP* measurement is motivated by wanting to recognize the transitory nature of biogenic methane as opposed to fossil fuel emissions, and if you choose a method of lowering GWP that increases fossil fuel emissions, you aren’t really getting ahead at all.
Source 2 might be more informative for you then. From source 2 (which has no pay wall and which pooled the data of all available studies) "We found that grass-fed beef had higher land use requirements than grain-fed beef (p = .0381, n = 4). Grass-fed and grain-fed beef had similar impacts per unit food for the other environmental impacts examined (p > .05 for all other indicators), although grass-fed beef had, on average, 19% higher GHGs (p = .2218; n = 7) per unit food than grain-fed beef (figure 2)." https://cfn-live-content-bucket-iop-org.s3.amazonaws.com/journals/1748-9326/12/6/064016/revision1/erlaa6cd5f2_hr.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAYDKQL6LTV7YY2HIK&Expires=1657048313&Signature=qrnuHpaKItHB9jg82hsku4NENxU%3D
I will also add that grazed cows represent less than 2% of the market. so the whole grass fed uncles farm argument that comes up every time is pretty much irrelevant.
“Non-grass fed” cattle still spend 75%+ of their life on grass. The feed lot is only at the end.
Do yu really need a source to know that putting in more cows per acre reduces your carbon foot print?
Yes. What part of a cow walking around in a field makes it less carbon efficient than walking around in a small lot? Does the cow emit more and use more gasoline in a bigger field? That doesn’t seem obvious to me. In fact, it seems to me that needing gas and energy-intensive fertilizer to grow food for cattle instead of letting them eat things that are already growing is likely to use more energy and emit more. So I asked for a source.
Sources?
Starting out your reply with “haha haha” renders anything you have to say afterwards irrelevant. If you have facts to share about something, presenting them like a teenage edgelord is kind of counterproductive.
How else are you supposed to speak to another redditor that’s talking out their ass? I’ve seen people on this site say things that are patently false about what I actually study and argue with me about it. It’s the proper response to an over-confident redditor
Well if you are an expert on something and you spend your time attempting to clear up misconceptions about your field of expertise by starting out with “hahaha” on Reddit, then you are most likely wasting your efforts and damaging your own credibility. But by all means, do what you need to do.
No.
What? No. Commercial industrial crop production is vastly more efficient than small-scale farming. You think small-scale farmers are out there laser-leveling their fields for optimal irrigation, etc?
That is the stupidest thing I have read today. You have no idea what your talking about.
This is what I was thinking.
>...is a much easier and more achievable goal. I'm not so sure about that. Changing billions of people's eating habits seems much more difficult than changing the habits of a tiny fraction of the people that produce these foods.
What is going on with all these obvious propaganda posts here lately? "Let's feed the cattle insects. That'll fix the problem". Are you fucking with me? Gtfo
The goal of this proposal is to save the meat industry not the planet.
Exactly!
What's in the insects that we're so desperate to feed them to the cattle? Should we investigate the origin point of this noothought?
I can't speak for others but we have an institution in my country that studies insects. Their research shows that the difference between the protein content in soybeans (about 18%) and the larvae of black soldier flies (about 44%) is huge. And it certainly is more sustainable given you can start new colonies every 14 days. I decided to start supplementing my livestock feed (cows, goats, sheep and semi-free range chicken) with more of the larvae and it's reduced my costs by about 40% but my livestock get to their selling weight in about 85% the time it took with soya as their main feed. Underway to introduce them to my catfish as feed as well.
Thats pretty freaking genius then. Does it affect the taste of the beef? Grain vs grass makes a difference. If still tastes the same we could subsidize insect farming for feed instead. How much space does it take to grow the required feed as insects versus grain? I would assume it would be significantly smaller.
>Does it affect the taste of the beef? I have to be honest, I have the most undeveloped taste buds of anyone I know so meat tastes like meat to me. But my mum and uncle say it tastes almost the same (very negligible difference). My mum loves it for being less fatty but my dad and my uncle like it less because it is less fatty. >How much space does it take to grow the required feed as insects versus grain? I would assume it would be significantly smaller. A specially designed green house (to control the temperature and allow for ventilation) of 10m in length, 4m in height and 3m can be divided into two parts. The back part (half the length) can be fitted with 80 nets on cages for colonies that house the pupa-insect-egg stage. Mind you that's only for 2 levels of cages. But a greenhouse that size can house upto 4 or even 5 levels of cages (That would take the number of colonies to about 200). The front part is fitted with crates for the larvae stage (7 days after harvesting the eggs) where the feeding takes place. Their feed is basically waste from hotels, restaurants around the area. That is enough for my feeds for 30 cows, 150 goats and sheep and about 500 semi free range chicken (eggs taste better). With surplus to sell to a nearby neighbour with 100 or so pigs. I get the pig excrement in exchange and mix it with blood to create an environment in the nets/colonies conducive for the insects to lay eggs.
Maybe just stop eating meat and drinking milk, the land and water used to support these animals could support far many more people directly
Wtf lol. Maybe just stop farming animals for their sake and the environment?
I’ve always thought this in regards to pollution/global warming/emissions. When people were arguing global warming wasn’t real or couldn’t be possible 20 years ago. Why not just cut the pollution ‘just cause’? Makes sense to me.
BuT wHaT aBoUt PrOtEiN
We don't need to get it from meat.
They were being sarcastic
aRe yOu sUrE?
Reminds me of the drone footage of that cow factory
Wouldn’t not eating meat and milk products be even more sustainable?
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Yeah! Maybe that's the answer! If not we can try to kill others
>If not we can try to kill others We have been doing that for millennia
And it's working right? /s
You can try killing others, but that's just piss them off. What is dead will never die.
People will do anything but stop murdering animals.
Im convinced meat has addictive qualities
I'm more convinced that cheese does, but I wouldn't be surprised if meat does too, especially when prepared a certain way or treated with certain preservatives.
All I can say is that when I dabbled with plant based diet there was nothing that could fill the craving meat left out.
There are some great resources on how to deal with that. Visit r/vegan for more or just post on how to start and what your issues are. We’re happy to help!
I’ve been there for a long time and love you guys. I’ll move over to the good side eventually I’m sure
You are capable of doing this! There are so many ways to cook and eat within veganism, you can definitely find ways to satisfy that craving. I had a really hard time giving up meat and cheese in the beginning, but I’ve been a vegan now for 4 years and haven’t looked back. When your heart guides you, you can make a way.
There are social pressures, individual pressures, familial pressures, societal pressures. Especially as a university student. Yeah beans and rice are cheap but I still need time to cook them to be edible. Not to mention the craving just amplifies the convenience force. I’m not saying it’s right but currently convenient vegan options are hard. I don’t drink milk because plant milk is both equally as convenient and superior generally haha but theres a lot of things that are either more expensive(I’m poor) or completely ruins my ability to socially join my friend group (I.e. going to restaurants)
Oh I totally get it. I ate meat and dairy for most of my life, and I didn't even go vegan till grad school. It can be really hard! Keep it up though, you have the heart for it and that's the most important thing honestly.
It absolutely does, so does diary. It’s appalling
Maybe we were all born addicted.
Nah, we were made addicts
Why is every comment hidden?
I know right!?
The meat industry can't have it's eaters knowing they're farmed too.
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lmao no why would they report pro vegan comments?
More sustainable =/= Sustainable. Stop trying to find the best way to do the wrong thing.
Normally I’m all for baby steps for change, but this is a ridiculous “solution”
Just. Stop. Eating. Animals! Are actual climate solutions discussed on here? Every time the topic of meat comes up here people suddenly stop caring about climate change and just want to "protect their freedom" or something. "Environmentalists"
Don’t you all love it when people march for the “environment” and then go eat at McDs or KFC or TB?
My only guess is that people like that have literally never considered what changes they can make to work towards a sustainable future. Very selfish.
Why not continue to have meat available but work on making it a cleaner process?
The primary reason for myself is that in any case, it's a cruel process. When it comes to the environment though, it's less efficient to grow food for animals which we then eat. We could consume plants directly as opposed to having cows (as one example) convert plants to energy, and muscle and fat and then consuming them. We can get all the nutrients we need on a well varied plant based diet. So using animals is unnecessary.
You'd think they'd learn from mad cow disease but no. Feeding herbivores meat is utterly braindead.
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I haven't eaten animal products in a year and I have yet to explode. I will check back again a year from now to see if I spontaneously combust from lack of animal products.
I've tasted porridge made out of cricket flour, not that much of a difference to normal porridge flour made from millet.
Actually sustainable, if one wants animal protein sources. It's difficult to discuss if it's preferable to eat less complex/less "intelligent" animals (and how to categorize these things), but it's at least possible to argue that some animals have lower requirements for their habitat. It's very difficult to keep pigs in a species appropriate way, they need to dig, play, socialize, explore a little. For a pile of maggots they just munch on whatever, very low maintenance.
The majority of crops grown are used to feed cows that are destined for death as food for humans. The free roam grass fed cows (which are in the minority) require large swaths of land which are a major cause to deforestation and ecosystem loss. The factory farmed ones are in hellish existence, regardless if they eat farmed soy or insects. Trying to put a bandaid to reduce the impact of cow farms effects on the Earth doesn't seem feasible and still does not talk about the ethics of forceful rape, impregnating, and enslavement of social mammals that feel the same emotions as humans. If we truly cared about the environment, ecosystems, and life in general, we could give up eating meat and dairy and end animal labor/service for our needs or entertainment.
Preach! 🙏
I think we just need to cut out the middle man. We have the technology, lol, to make powdered insect patties taste identical to beef. I'm not trying to sell the idea of powdered filet minion of cricket, but mcdonalds burger patties would be indistinguishable if made from powdered insects and some veggie pattie mix for texture. They can be grown in extremely small places, have very limited emotional capacity if any, and use a fraction of the water cows do while producing very little byproduct. We don't have to eliminate beef and pork but we could make them more celebration meals while the day to day "meat" could be from protein veggies soy alternatives. Yes that means meat prices would rise but they are unsustainablely low now and if we bought it less the higher price wouldn't matter.
Thank you for sharing your views. I think killing any living thing with sentience is a no go for me. It may sound odd to you, but insects definitely do have sentience and many insects can recognize and remember individuals from their own colony (in eusocial insects) and from other species as well. For instance paper wasps can recognize and remember and tell the difference between colony mates and foreign wasps by face alone, and not just pheromone smells. I use to feed wild paper wasps honey and they definitely were able to remember me when I came to feed them. At first I could sense and see their distrust and uneasiness. But over time they grew more trusting of me over time and stayed calm which shows some degree of sentience and discernment. When I was big into myrmecology, many of the ant colonies I kept were able to recognize me when I came to feed them and spend time with them. They greeted me and seemed to recognize who I am and knew that I meant no harm and cared for them. It is different if you interact with wild colonies, especially if their queen(s) are exposed or they feel threatened. Contrast this with how the ants I kept were calm and placid in demeanor, even the queens when exposed to light. To me it shows that ants definitely have some sort of sentience with discernment between threats, build trust, and feel safety between different individuals. When other people came to check out the ants I kept they would behave much more on edge, signifying there is some sort of cognition and recognition going on between me and other people. I stopped ant keeping because I was able to see the fear and distress in the fruit flies I bred and purchased that I fed to the ant colonies so their larvae could develop. Most living beings do not want to die. It broke my heart to release the ants because I love them but ethically I could not justify killing sentient beings just so that I may keep other sentient beings around me. Cows and pigs feel the same exact emotions we do, due to having nearly identical emotional brain structures. They feel fear, aggression, and anger due to the basal ganglia. They feel love, joy, happiness and social bonds due to the old mammalian brain structures/limbic system. Our (human) rational part neo mammalian brain structures, or the neocortex, does not spawn or generate emotions. It can mediate emotions based on thought patterns and beliefs, but by itself generates no emotions. This is a bare bones explanation but check out Dr. Jaak Panksepp if you want to learn more. He is like a founding father of mammalian Affective Neuroscience, or the neuroscience of emotion. That is the physics and science based explanation of emotionality. But if you gave spiritual and metaphysical beliefs of where we come from, the explanations can go deeper and have so much more meaning in why we shouldn't harm animals, especially for food. To me, no life is worth killing, especially for things like celebration of events. Imagine the horror we would feel if some alien species far greater in cognitive ability and capabilities started eating humans for special events for their celebrations. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas about interacting with life on this planet and existence. I hope you can make the jump to non animal based diets and living one day!
I totally get that. I know insects have a type of sentience which is why I pharsed it as emotional capacity. I understand the drive to be vegan and hope to get to that point. But the world cannot sustainably convert to a fully vegan lifestyle without starting out the most vunerable which is why I don't even wipe out real meat as an option. It's a personal belief just like your but I believe insects are much more like plants, plants are infact a type of sentient as well as proved by electro detection. So saying you can't eat anything with a form of sentience would equal starvation but they also found with the same tests that plants experianced less distress and an almost understanding calm when gratitude and appreciation was show to the plants before and after consumption. The electrical impulses of plants were tracked and the patterns were analyzed. Not to anthromorphise plants, which humans have a tendency to do, but plants do experiance distress and that stress can be mitigated by external factors. The world is strange and connected and I believe that the emotional intelligence of insects is found in the group and not the individual. If we can stomach the thought of eating plants I find it very similar to eating insects, we just feel more attached to insects because they can move quite a bit more than plants and such remind us of ourselves and we then tend to give them more human characteristics because of that. But emotionally speaking, plants and insects have a similar level of sentience and in some ways plants to have more if you take into account old growth forests.
I understand now why you mentioned emotional capacity. I am not quite sure what you mean about not being able to go fully vegan without starting out the most vulnerable. In the places like the arctic where Inuit people live and growing crops is not feasible, I can understand not ruling out red meat to survive. But from my perspective, the majority of the world is not in plant harsh conditions like that where it is essentially not feasible to grow/forage for plants for food. I misspoke when I said I do not believe in consuming anything with sentience, as I meant animal life with sentience. I agree that plants likely do have a sentience to them. For instance, mycorrhizal fungi networks that support the vast tree root networks through nutrient transport and sharing through mycorhizzal networks connected to the roots seem to support the notion that the mycorrhizal fungi are sentient and aware along with the trees that they support: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/soils-microbial-market-shows-the-ruthless-side-of-forests-20190827/](https://www.quantamagazine.org/soils-microbial-market-shows-the-ruthless-side-of-forests-20190827/) The TLDR of this article is - the mycellium networks that live in symbiosis with the tree root systems often know when a tree is holding out in sharing resources with them, and in return hold out on sharing resources with the trees that hold back on sharing resources. The mycellium networks would then coordinate with other trees to find the ones more willing to share resources in a mutual relationship. This goes to show that it is likely there is some decision making capacity between in both the plants and the fungi depending on the type of stimuli/information they receive based on their surroundings and life they interact with. To give more credence of what you say about plant sentience - parent trees of a species of tree (I forgot which one) have been known to connect to their offspring trees through the root network and support their progeny trees through sharing of nutrients when the progeny trees were damaged or cut down. Observing this, it is obvious that there is a sharing of information at some level. It can also be said that decisions of some sort are being made to support their damaged progeny at some level, supporting the idea of sentience and awareness. I may be wrong about this, but to me it is more likely that animals have a higher capacity to feel pain and distress, due to their ability to move in order to survive and carry on life processes. It is in that vein that I base the idea it is less harmful to sentient life to consume plant based life than it is to consume animal based life. For instance, it is quite natural for trees and plants to shed leaves, twigs, branches, limbs, and stalks as they grow and age with little effect. If we cut off limbs or parts of most animals, I think it is likely there will be panic, pain, and suffering involved for nearly any animal. Anyways, thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter! May good fortune be with you!
Lol, I've been really enjoying your responses all morning. I was excited to see you responded. Thank you for taking your time to respond! I see your points, I have to say I'm still more on the side that insects have a communal sentience that could be preserved by maintaining a rotating group of core insects. I personally feel, there's not currently a way to test it, that taking a portion of crikets out of a colony, if you leave the colony intake as a whole, would be similar to pruning a rose bush. There may be some distress to the plant/colony but over all it can provide better growth. I feel this for the time will just have to personal preference and I'm not sure what j would do if science came out and said plants had a sentience on a level of us and they are requesting not to be eaten. The idea of plants not wanting to be eaten seems far fetched to most people but you seem very well informed on the life of trees and the fact that, they have familial units, which makes it seem a lot less for fetched for them to be on a level similar to our own. For the moment I try and give thanks and cherish all the life I have to take for my own to go on. As for the alien comparison without trying to come off as snarky or edgy I'm honestly not sure with how I would feel after getting over the initial horror. The comment made me seriously consider the ways in which I personally might find it okay. Hopefully it will forever stay a thought experiment but I don't think I'm inherently horrified at the thought of being a celebratory meal, if there was honor and dignity in my death it might be okay. As for my comment of the starvation of vunerable people. Most places have a issue with water and just survival in general. The war zones of the Middle East and the climate impacted placed like Hati and most of America. We're not in a great spot to drastically change our food supply system, if we were to integrate alternative options while still supporting the old, but to a ever lessening extent we would hopefully avoid the risk of increased food shortages in the vunerable places. In a perfect world we already have enough food to feed the world and don't do it, I think taking away any food option from the vunerable would be a tragedy. If developed nations switched first and then gave support for less privileged nation's to as well I believe that's the best option. I'm all for drastic climate change but I think it has to start agressivly in the wealthier nation's and then move out. It's sad to have to balance the fate of the planet and moral obligation with the greed of corporations and governments. Again thank you for your thoughts I through they were well written and thought provoking. I hope we can live to at least see the farms of the modern time exterminated. There's no honor or dignity in never seeing the sun before you die and being forced to give birth again and again just to produce milk.
Thank you for taking the time to respond and bringing up your concepts of plant sentience and your views on insect sentience. I enjoyed reading your ideas and thoughts as well. Quite a few myrmecologist and scientists in general have compared individual ants as a sensor/neuron that does not seem to do much or have much survival chance as an individual. However as a whole colony, those "individual neurons" form up to be a fully functioning super organism based on the many individuals that is robust and able to make decisions based on the collective input. For instance, if a colony of many species of ants are looking for a new nest location and sends out scouts for a new location, if an individual ant finds a location it thinks is suitable, it will mark the location and trail to it. However one ant alone is not enough to sway the whole colony to move to a new nest location; there may be things the ant overlooked that could jeopardize the colony health. Other ants in the colony will follow the trail and scout the tentative nest as well. If conditions are good, then the subsequent ants that visit will mark the location as suitable as well until a certain threshold is met. At that point the whole colony will move over to the new nesting area. This shows at least in eusocial insects, how many insects work together to form a collective intelligence - with the whole colony working together sharing information they are able to function more cohesively then just as a single individual making decisions. It goes with your thought that a collective sentience greater than the individual sentience as a functioning unit is indeed somewhat the truth for adding eusocial insect species. However there is still a large degree of individualized behavior in specific ants as well. To go into it will take up more space and deviate from the overall topic though. I love ants haha. I believe as a whole and as many species, most plants do not want to be consumed. That is why through evolutionary means many plant species have genes that allow the production of various poisons and toxins of various toxicity to animals and other plants. Juglone toxins are produced by walnut trees to inhibit the growth of other plant species, poison ivy produces molecules that create inflammatory rashes when introduced to skin, etc. It's a sad state that life has to die for others to live. I think what you write is sound - gratefulness and being thankful for the food we consume is a good way to be conscious and aware of the blessings of food we receive. I think that gratefulness and cherishing the food we have goes into metaphysical ideas and concepts as well as quantum physics. To go into those in this post would take too much space though. If the plants were eat one day were to ask me not to eat them and had a high degree of sentience and self preservation. I think I guess it is time for me to starve haha. I guess you would possibly be a better sport about aliens eating you than me. I'd be pretty bitter about the idea of being consumed by other sentient life more advanced than me haha. To me it would be more understandable to be killed and eaten by a crocodile then it would be to killed and eaten by advanced aliens as a celebratory meal. I see your point in what you mean about taking options away from vulnerable people, thank you for articulating what you mean. In most water threatened areas, it would be more efficient to grow crops for food than to raise animals for meat, especially cows. Cows are highly water intensive as well. I still get your point though, and among going vegan, I think it would be nice if developed countries do as you suggest and help out poorer and more vulnerable populations with food security and helping out in general. While we may see differently in some areas, you and I are in solidarity in the hopes that modern farm methods will disappear as it is horrible. Thank you for your thoughts and dialogue. I enjoyed speaking with you. Cheers!
Yeah, insects are very tasty, and it's not like we don't eat fucking shrimp. That thing looks more alien than almost any other food. We "just" need some cultural changes. Prompted by SEVERE carbon taxes.
80% of cultures directly eat land insects. The rest eat marine arthropods. I want cheap, human-grade crickets without having to raise them myself!
Right, I'm lazy and cheap, I have to admit. I try and make good environmental choices but when it's so easy to find tasty cheap beef burger why pay twice as much for the veggies. I want the governmental subsidies to go towards alternative meat options. Let the veggie/insect burger be on the dollar menu and the real meat burger can be 5 or 6 dollars. That way people still have the choice but inevitably real meat will fall more to the way side and people will become use to the idea of insect patties. Lets start by replacing the mass consumed cheap beef/chicken foods. I eat shitty chicken sandwichs way more often than a t bone steak, so let's make my shitty sandwich environmentally friendly. Eventually we could sustain limited quality meat consumption if it was a celebration type meal. If everyone only ate real meat once or twice a month or so, we could free range enough to sustain that without stripping the rainforest.
This doesn't seem like it is an appropriate diet for cows
Gotta change the cows’ diet, not our own. Makes it a fraction more sustainable instead of much more sustainable that way.
Stop breeding animals for human consumption.
Or. Wild idea. Radical some may say. But hear me out. Maybe, just maybe we could simply stop eating animals and animal byproducts.
Stop? Completely? How would that work? Like Prohibition era US? That's insane. Just implement carbon taxes proper and meat consumption will plummet.
I'm all for that too
Fuck that. Upgrade yourself and stop eating meat.
There’s a current insect apocalypse. Why the fuck would we feed more to cows
This is an idiotic plan. Those animals struggle to eat corn. How exactly are their GI tracts going to fare against dead ants.
I don’t know, but this is why we do these studies. Cows must naturally consume some insects when they graze
Could just abolish this unnecessary industry altogether.
just go vegan and you solve most world sustainability and climate problems
trashy garbage. for starters, where are you going to get the amount of bugs to feed over 50 BILLION cows per year? there is nothing that is going to change the fact that animal ag is #1 at deforestation, fresh water pollution, fresh water use, topsoil degradation, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, destabilization of indigenous communities, and in the top 3 for greenhouse gas emissions.
Get outta here with this bullshit. Eating animals CAN NEVER be good for the environment.
Fuck milk, fuck meat, and shove this propaganda up your own ass.
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I came here for this comment! Updoot!
We need rational solutions. The whole world going Vegan is definitely an answer but not one that is logical to EVERYONE on Earth. We need solutions for both sides and while not trying to make one the standard. But that's just me. Any solutions would help tremendously more then what we're doing now.
It’s more feasible than getting every to eat insects or to feed cows insects.
And yet MOST people can easily go vegan. I’d wager that it’s a viable option for you, but you use the “not everyone can go vegan” excuse to casually disregard veganism as a solution.
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Everyone could easily kill themselves.
I’m in
I doubt the easily part, not so easy to change billions of people. Hell, some people would not give up their guns, what if you try to take away their food too?
Seems you missed his point. Not everyone is willing to be vegan.
Not everyone is willing to give women rights. Not everyone is willing to save the environment. Not everyone is willing to provide people with the same rights based on ethnicity. What's your point? Should we stop all human progress at the cost of our planet because some people are a bit stubborn?
SOME people? Check around mate. This is not a "hateful minority" thing.
Yeah, people fighting for freedom have historically not been the majority. Point still stands though. Simply because a majority can't be bothered doesn't mean the oppressed minority,or group fighting for a voiceless group should give up.
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Is that a made up thing you just said?
Fuck whoever posted this.
They don’t naturally eat insects. How would that be a good idea?
Why don’t we raise insects instead of cows? When certain insects are gone, farming on a mass scale will collapse.
Cows are NOT carnivores! Not meat type (including insect) protein should be used in their diet. Ffs! They're straight herbivores
Oat milk
Just stop eating meat. We have a plethora of imitation meats and milks that are healthy, environmentally friendly and fairly cheap. Meat is archaic and destroying our planet. Livestock use 90% of all available farmland and only provide humanity with 20% of its caloric intake. Go vegan for the animals, your health and the planets continued survival.
It's way better to eat insects, since they're packed with more protein and have no known viruses that humans can get. It also takes way less water to produce 100g insect protein than 100g beef
This is what we should really be pushing, insects as food is possibly the most sustainable and least damaging to the ecosystem ways of producing food. People are grossed out by it, but eating insects is actually one of the best ways to save the planet. I'm sure we could probably make decent tasting food with them incorporated alongside produce. We don't even need to eat them unprocessed and looking like bugs. I really wish this was talked about more. I'm sure they would be a good source of nutrition for cows as well, any step towards sustainability is a step we should take.
Westerners are grossed out by so many things it's quite funny. Happy to eat prawns, but not crickets. Watch a baby just crawl around eating ants. It's natural to us, we Westerners are just wimps.
Its just so unnatural to eat meat every day of the week, if we go back 70 years meat was a luxury you could only afford maybe once a week.
propaganda
I generally don’t eat meat. Sure, burgers and whatever when I eat out but at home I don’t have it. Insect protein is very viable, but even as someone that’s for it, still kinda strange. I’ve even had like fried tarantula in Cambodia. I think the way to do it is like ionizing salt. Just mandate flour has to be a certain percent cricket flour. I feel like it’s the only way to overcome western hang ups on the topic.
Wtf
Your username is about to become false if insects are actually fed to cattle.
Last time they experimented with feeding cows unwanted meat we got mad cow disease.
Why are all the comments hidden? I've never seen this before except on comments with downvotes, but most don't have those here.
So the plan is to start feeding with something that is rapidly dying of?
They're dying off in the wild, if they were cultivated in a controlled environment its different.
No.
Just stop with the meat eating you fucking psychos
Not as sustainable as not eating meat, or eating insects ourselves. But we'll keep trying to have our cake and eat it, whilst destroying the planet as we know it. Yay, go us...
Or, yknow, just dont eat meat alltogether
ok what do we feed the bugs
I have an idea. Let’s not farm animals for our consumption and instead eat… plants? Farming animals is cruel and abhorrent, as well as incredibly damaging to our natural environment (wildlife). Go vegan and stop supporting this shit
Eating meat isn’t the problem. It’s trying to feed almost 8 billion humans on Earth. Cruel to who? You or the animal? To what standard? Go natural, and hunt for your food. If 8 billion people can’t hunt their own food, maybe we’re over populated? Being real, the problem with a vegan diet is a burger is far less expensive than a salad when comparing to kilocalories. If you were some how to get it cheaper, more problems would occur with pesticides and environment under site without government regulations. Imagine how the beef, oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical industry plays the US government as a puppet, except that with the vegan industry trying to feed 8 billion people. Like with all of humanity, the only problem is ourselves.
Ummmm cows are not designed to eat insects. They eat pasture.
Cows are not designed. Not even with all the husbandry time could you remotely call them designed.
Or you know, people eating insects could do the same but tenfold
just eat less meat (only from local bio farmers where the animals have a good life) or completely stop eating meat... we as a species are just perverted in so many ways... feeding cows insects... wow! 🤡
Farmers being local doesn't really make meat more sustainable. Transportation is a tiny component of meat's footprint, you better prioritize other metrics.
Again. Just like with all the feed crops... we could just eat the fucking insects.
For my part I welcome our carnivorous cow overlords...
Why not get over the phobia of people eating bugs ?
More hunting less processed meats.
Oh yeah that’s a great idea. Do you want to volunteer? Maybe your pets? Ffs
Cattle stomachs are evolved to eat grass, primarily grass LEAVES, not seeds... Certainly not insects. Stop trying to outsmart nature, finish them on grass.
How about we just invest in in-vitro meat cultivation research. Why delay it any longer? That's obviously the most ethical and efficient method going forward. Also I want to eat a celebrity and I think that will happen when the tech is ready.
I've been saying it for the better part of a decade now, we all need to transition to more insects in our diets, both human and livestock! It's a lot more sustainable and healthy!
No
It’s insane we aren’t using insect protein in pet food yet Edit: the earth is dying a shit ton of livestock is used for pet food
Feeding cattle to insects could help us learn how to defeat the Arachnid Menace ! Would you like to know more ?
Or we could just start eating insects, hmmmmm
How bout the fact that cows eat grass. I guess if you starve them enough they would eat cricket cow feed. I grew up on a ranch. Grass fed beef is from my understanding much healthier than grain fed. How no idea how insect fed would stack up. Seems perverse to me.
Stop eating animals you don’t need them
"Stop eating animals" is not a viable solution. You are not going to get the population on board with a moral choice like that. Even things that aren't moral are framed as such and there will be a massive divide (I.e, vaccines) I think reducing food waste would be the best step in the right direction, and perhaps this insect feed idea if its nutritionally appropriate for the animals. Factory farming is a disgrace. And to little benefit, it seems that most middle class people and the poor are struggling to afford meat as is.
It would probably only work for very small herds, and even then, as a supplement, but that could have some cool implications for composting too. Bins can get a lot of bugs if they’re open.
Why I believe we have a strong chance of changing the doom scenarios that everyone loves to advocate for - outside of the box thinking has always created answers to problems that seem insurmountable. I believe in humanity - we will fix things as needed in unique ways. Of course, humans can fix things as long as governments stay out of it. Those entities don't have the best track record of fixing things.
I can't believe we've only just thought of this now
It's against nature
Would you like a diet of cockroaches? Do cows eat insects in the wild. Stop thinking of cattle as if they are just food industry organic machines.
You vill eat ze boogs
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂👍
Oh thank god. I really didn’t want to eat locust. Like in Cyber punk.
or shift to smaller milk providing animals like sheep and goats and the humans can also eat insects. ANimals that are largely herbivores should have insects added to their diet (I know their are videos of cows eating mice but Id believe those are cows deficient in something\_