3 thoughts on Crunch Time: Insects Are Not Going to Save Us Recent bankruptcies suggest the edible insect bubble could soon burst

• Jeremy Cherfas mentioned this post 2 months ago.

  Somewhat sad to see Marion Nestle, with whom I almost always agree, linking, without question or comment, to an article in a pet-food trade journal…

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• Aaron Davis commented 3 months ago.

  There’s just one fly in the ointment, so to speak. Most of the food that insects are fed isn’t waste at all, and after absorbing large amounts of investor cash, some of the biggest companies have gone bust. Dustin Crummett, executive director of the Insect Institute, shared his many reasons for saying that eating insects will not save the planet.

  Crunch Time: Insects Are Not Going to Save Us – Eat This Podcast by Jeremy Cherfas

  Many years ago, I remember eating a bag of crickets cooked in oil and garlic in Phnom Penh. I have always wondered about the prospect of insects ever since. This is clearly not the case.

  The discussion of feed used to develop insects reminded me about Johann Hari’s discussion of processed food in his book Magic Pill:

  Thirty years ago, it took twelve weeks for a factory-farmed chicken to reach its slaughter weight, but now it only takes five to six weeks. Broiler chickens are three times higher in fat today than they were when I was born, and the standard factory-farmed turkey now has such an obese chest that it can barely stand up.

  So how did they do it? It turns out it was partly by restricting the animals’ movement—lots of them can’t even turn around in their cages. But even more importantly, they totally transformed their diets. If you feed a cow the whole food it evolved to eat—grass—it will take a year longer to reach its slaughter weight than if you feed it something different: a newly invented kind of ultra-processed feed, made up of grains, chemicals, hormones, and antibiotics. Because the animals don’t like the taste of this fake food, the agricultural corporations often add artificial sweetness to it—Jell-O powder is popular, especially with a strawberry-banana flavoring. When you mix a sweet-tasting formula like this into their processed food, lambs will rapidly add 30 percent to their body weight.

  If you deliberately want to make an animal fat, you take away what its ancestors ate and give it an ultra-processed and artificially sweetened replica instead. In other words—Big Agriculture does to animals precisely what the processed food industry is doing to us and our children every day.

  Source: Magic Pill by Johann Hari

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• Μαλάκαlypse :catPOWER: liked this post 3 months ago.

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