Mary Brown writes in WUWT Tips and Notes:
No more steak for you earth hating skeptics. Time to learn to eat sustainable crickets… so says the Washington Post. Of course it mentions climate change.
The article also says this…
“The industry leapt forward following a 2013 United Nations report warning that with nine billion people on Earth in 2050, current food production will have to double. Between a lack of space and climate change concerns, we’ll need more sustainable solutions. Crickets happen to be a great option.”
Interesting statement since the earth currently has 7.2 billion people, many of whom are clearly overfed already. I’m not sure why a 25% increase in population would require a 100% increase in food.
Also, the USA already produces food for 1.2 billion Americans and we waste 75% of it. Worldwide, food production is enough for roughly 14 billion people with 50% waste. Zero waste is unrealistic, but I’ll bet the food waste ratio approached zero in Europe in winter of ’45.
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I suggest sending all of our “progressives” over to Syria to fight in the climate jihad.
If they do not come back then that should solve their Malthusian “population bomb” problem/hysteria.
Lead by example. Michael Mann and Obama should go first.
Just exactly how is eating cattle not sustainable?
The insects, which are sustainable and nutritious
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if crickets are sustainable, why are cattle not? they both require vegetation to as feedstock. you might be able to grow more crickets on the same amount of food during summer, but you need to keep the crickets warm over the winter, which takes energy. Which is ultimately not sustainable.
Cattle are able to keep themselves warm year round on the food they eat, without any need to additional energy. So it could be argued that cattle are more sustainable than insects as a food source, as soon as you move outside the tropics.
regular old saturated fat isn’t bad for you at all
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this has been known for some time, but largely unreported. US war dead from WWII showed little or no signs of heart disease. US war dead from the Korean war showed advanced heart disease even in young men.
The major difference, the introduction of artificial (hydrogenated) fat during WWII – fat that did not rot at room temperature. Fat that humans were not genetically selected to eat. Why would anyone assume that food that did not rot naturally would be safe to eat? Isn’t digestion a form of rot?
The money quote:
“CONCLUSIONS:
A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648
SAVE THE CRICKETS! EAT BEEF! Would that make a good bumper sticker?
Rogerknights:
You could be right, although it is at Holyrood that our parliament meets.
ferd berple beat me to it.
That is, just how are the higher and lower latitudes expected to harvest bugs in mid-winter? 3 plus months is a long time waiting for the little pests to become edible. Not even cockroaches grow very well in winter, i.e. unless they’re closely sharing living space with us. Even then it requires a lot of roaches even when mood moderated with roaches.
If the eco-bats insist that cows, chickens, pigs and other regular meat products are sacred, I’d rather raise quail; they’re clean, can be raised indoors, fairly quiet, quick growing, eat modified grain products, lay gourmet eggs and darn tasty. A few ducks, geese, turkeys out in the yard would greatly round out the table; some types of ducks are prolific egg layers, nearly matching the most productive chicken egg layers. Hard to beat chickens that are fryers in six weeks, roasters in eight weeks or ducks that reach roasting size almost as quick.
Not forgetting that all of the above fowl love bugs of any kind. My best years for controlling Japanese beetles were the years I raised ducks; pea fowl and chickens are just as good at removing ticks from an area.
Pest control and delicious table food, what more could one want? (Geese and ducks are great at weed control, sort of; ducks often rightfully view some flowers as weeds. Duck also decided that my rhododendrons looked good one winter. I didn’t eat any duck eggs for a few weeks, but the ducks were unaffected.)
And that didn’t go to moderation, so back to the drawing board.
Crickets by proxy are delicious. This is the time of year I eat ’em as much as possible.
My garden is full of crickets due to the application of straw to reduce the need for watering. Crickets love the straw and fish love the crickets and I love the fish! Proxies indeed!
I wonder if the exoskeleton is digestible?
If it isn’t, it might be like passing a pipe wrapped in 80 grit sandpaper ;0)
Maybe it’s a one-time thing–after the moderator accepts it, it doesn’t get flagged again. (?)
PS: My comment above went into moderation.
I foresee problems however with the plan as demonstrated by this children’s nursery rhyme produced by the the British Council.
.
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Rather interestingly the good Dr Viner who is also so deeply concerned at cheeeldrens feelings about having no snow also now works for the British Council…..Is it a plot?
http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/david-viner/30/766/14a
Sincere apologies..He USED to work for the British Council but the nursery rhyme above is three years old.
Shrimp are aquatic insects.
Yeah, there is enormous waste of food in the modern industrial counties, but food also rots in the 3rd world due to lack or refrigeration/modern transportation. What would help the issue? Cheap, abundant energy –lots of it. One of the most nefarious things about the CAGW movement is how it causes so much unnecessary misery to the 3rd world, now and until this lunacy is seen for what it is. And when it comes to population reduction, the 3rd world is also the place with a bulls eye on it. My God have mercy on those that that create this unnecessary misery, and may He open their eyes to the truth.
Good news – I believe per Leviticus that crickets can be Kosher. You may eat winged swarming insects if they use their legs to hop on the ground!
The earth’s climate is such that large parts of it are only capable of growing grass. Humans can’t eat grass. Cattle eat grass. We eat the cattle. Problem solved.
@Newly Retired Engineer:
Yes, the machinations of abuse to the water supply are “an issue”. Gov. Moonbeam wants to put the Sacramento River into a $10 Billion hole in the ground (tunnel) and ship it to the L.A. area. (Shades of “Peripheral Canal”… but this is different, it’s underground and costs more…)
Never mind that the river is being sent out to sea to keep the bait fish happy (smelt) instead of being put on farm land.
Oh, the other bit of stupid: Folks have a “use it or lose it” attitude about water rights, so if you have been growing a water intensive crop ( like cotton or tomatoes) in the desert of Kern County, you need to keep on using up that water or it gets reallocated. Lots of high water use that isn’t really all that useful and / or could be used more effectively.
Final Rant: About 5% of all the water goes to cities. So what happens in a drought? All sorts of loony schemes to save water … in the cities… like not flushing for a day or two and letting things pile up. All so that about 5% of 5% can be “saved”…. And that after they flushed the water the dams stored in wet years instead of banking it for a dry year… Sigh.
Glad I’m gone from the place.
Per Insects:
Well, I’ve eaten a few. Some ‘unexpectedly’, like little weavils and wormy things in some cerial I didn’t look at too closely. Didn’t like the experience of “discovery” but the cerial was tasty 😉 Also, early on (about 7?) my sister fed me some Chocolate Covered Ants…. Seemed dissapointed when I asked if I could have more… Hey, it was chocolate … kind of like crunchy rice crispy treats in chocolate with a bit of tart tang to them….
I’ve likely eaten a few others, too, without noticing too much.
Per crawdads: Yes, first cousins of bugs, but… Lets just say that Mud Hens are a close cousin of pheasant too, but I know which one I want on the plate… (Not the one that tasts like mud, hence the name… Not all related species taste the same…)
@Mary Brown:
I’ve been pointing that out to folks for years. Glad to see the literature is catching up. It’s the trans-fats that were treated as the same as other “hard fats” (i.e. saturated) that are the issue. Not beef. (An early test of hydrogenated vs saturated experiment fed ‘tri-stearate’ fat and found no change to cholesterol.)
Eat eggs, beef, and roast chicken. Avoid any food with “Hydrogenated” or “mono-glyceride” or “di-glyceride” on the lable. Likely ‘inter-esterified’ too, though I’ve not investigated that one yet. Butter, cheese, even gravy (made yourself from real animal fat pan drippings, not with anything hydrogenated…)
@Chip Javert:
It is important to have some ruminant in the food production system. (Cows, goats, sheep ) Why? They can digest the cellulosic parts (leaves / stems / cobs ) that you can not. More total food is produced. You eat the corn, then they eat the ‘silage’ and you eat them…
Folks who advocate for vegetarian diets to make more food available are missing the optimum point. Yes, it is at far less than we eat now (and not corn fed cows / pigs…) but the optimum production point MUST have ruminants in the mix. (Though we grow so much stuff that having some chickens to eat the bugs and feeding a bit of corn to the pigs for bacon is well worth doing…) But a pure vegetarian system is always less than optimum.
(For those about to rant at me about the virtues of vegetarianism: About 1/2 my family is vegetarian. I cook vegetarian meals often. I’m fine with it as a personal choice and it can fix many health issues [while it can cause some others if you get the mix wrong]. It is just not true, though, to claim it is the optimum production point. It isn’t. Range Land is only efficiently usable as steak on the hoof… )
@ATheoK:
Once I had a horrible snail problem. (The French imported them to California as ‘free’ food source… I used to be mad at them for that, then found out they compete with our native slugs… I’ll take snails over slugs… but I digress…) My garden was a sad thing. There were hords of them under the fence rails and anywhere shady…
I got 2 ducks. (Indian Runner). About 1/2 year later, they went on their way. In between, they had studiously scoured the entire yard of any / all mollusks. It was a good decade later before I had a snail problem again… Lord I love ducks 😉
Per Moderation:
There’s no good way to tell why WordPress does what it does. A site owner can add a few words to a no-no list, or list folk to moderate 100%, but can not ‘un-moderate’ any of the things W.P. does on its own. Heck, I was shoved into moderation at my own site! a couple of times.
I think it is a huristic based on what the collective of all site owners flag as SPAM, ground up and digested through some alien DNA process 😉
Best it not to question why:
“Why? Don’t ask why. Down that path lies insantity and ruin. -E.M.Smith”
Just go with the flow…
I have eaten crickets when I worked in Mexico. They are considered by some, not all, as a treat. They were fried with lots of chili and salt added which is all you can taste. And yes, you can feel the texture of the wings and legs. And no, they did not make me sick. And no, I would not recommend them.
A Dutch professor and expert in agriculture has confirmed on numerous occassions that with current agriculture area and using all our expertise, the Earth can feed 40 billion people. We should definitely be able to feed 9 billion people atking into consideration that we waste a lot of food and on occassion we can definitely eat less.
After a month or so at sea, the mariners in the Hornblower and Aubrey books would tap the weevils out of their hard tack. But surely those weevils would be a source of complete protein, perhaps even some vitamin C.
Ditto barnacles from the hull. But don’t anyone here tell me that keel-hauled sailors didn’t look quite as healthy as the non-keelhauled. Method! Method!
Further thought: for anyone with a slug or snail problem, the answer is geese! Terrific watchdogs, too. And at the end of season you still get to eat those slugs and snails, but at second hand. Win-win, if not perhaps from the point of view of the slugs and snails.
I forget the exact numbers off the top of my head, buta few animals are super efficient at turning their food into meat, such as tilapia, and carp which can happily eat insects. I think its something like 1.2 pounds of food per 1 pound of growth in tilapia, you further loose a bit more when processing the fish, but if efficiency is the goal, then fish (or maybe conturnix quail) is something you might actually be able to convince people to do readily in this generation. Insects? marginal at best.
Of course Im not sure the real goal is efficiency…
“…current food production will have to double [for sustainable ethanol food for fuel program]/sarc off