I was not advocating eating bugs in place of meat (I don't like the idea either). I was saying that if for some reason we had to forfait meat, I think it would be easier for the average person to have a proper diet if it included bugs than a vegan one.
That said, I agree with you, those that advocate such a change are the last ones willing to do it (let's guess when meat will disappear from EU Parliament canteen).
It wouldn't, but insects are a promising source of animal protein with less environmental impact than other forms of livestock. There are many plant and fungus based sources as well, of course, and in general there is an obesity epidemic and we can easily reduce the amount of protein we eat without having to replace it with anything.
Right wing propaganda then turns that into "they want to force you to eat bugs".
- there are people than those here in the western/first world
- insects could/should substitute animal meat to save ressources and the decrease negative effects of our livestyle (soil erosion, to many nutritions in water bodies..
A lot of what we eat (steaks, chicken nuggetts, hamburger, bacon) is dissasociated with the source form of the meat. This should probably be the inroad. If people get used to the idea that they're ingesting insects anyhow, then maybe the rest gets easier?
So it's nice to think that maybe this could work to turn food waste back into edible protein, but is this actually more efficient than just composting the waste and using it to grow crops? Sure, maybe this is a good source of protein, but so are, say, beans, right?
I would hazard a guess that for most western cultures, it's probably easier to convince people to replace meat with plant-based food than it is to replace meat with bugs. So if we want insect-based foods to take off, I feel like there's got to be some fundamental advantage over just switching to a vegetarian diet. Maybe that advantage exists; I just don't know what it might be.
I think the issue is that plant based protein is plentiful, but people want meat. Insects are kind of in between in terms of production efficiency and meat-like consistence.
Understood. I think most people would start eating plants for protein before they resort to insects unless the insects are processed beyond recognition and relabelled. :)
Here's a reality you aren't addressing: people don't really want to eat insects. Here's another: about 2 years ago a president was elected in my country partly by promising that the poor would get to eat meat regularly once again.
Make people miserable at your own peril. The simple fact is nobody really wants to be reduced to eating worms and bugs. No one really gives a shit about how "scalable" it is either. Whoever finds a way to provide what people want will have enormous power.
> If people find an alternative that looks, tastes, and acts like meat
Pretty big if you got there. The "alternatives" so far don't really fulfill any of those criteria. They also have the added bonus of offending a person's basic dignity with the knowledge that they're eating insects. There are literal animals out there who receive better treatment.
The imminent insects-as-food transition has been "just around the corner" at least since I was reading Popular Science magazine in middle school.
Always with the same scare-pretext of "whelp, we'll have no choice! get ready to knock back some crickets whether you like it or not ;)". Then it plots out how much meat Americans eat and shows how it's unsustainable.
It just doesn't follow logically to me.
What seems more likely is that we will ween off of the idea that we need meat in every single meal. And once you also factor in the possibility of pricing in externalities, meat will become – at least – a dinner treat.
Meat is already subsidized by animal neglect, sketchy tactics, and mass pollution. I wouldn't mind if we were paying the honest price of meat at the market today. We'd get this cultural change on the roll, and we'd probably have something better already. And it won't be bugs.
I saw this TED talk a while back in which the speaker argues we should lower our meat consumption by increasing our insect consumption. He says insect meat is just as nutritious as mammal meat (if not more), and it also takes a lot fewer resources to produce it commercially.
I believe he said it takes 10 kg of feed and other resources to produce 1 kg of cow meat, while it takes 1 kg of inputs to produce 1 kg of grasshopper meat.
I ordered some canned mealworms off of Amazon the other day just to try them, and they actually weren't that bad with some butter and spices.
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