Honestly I haven’t tried it but I wouldn’t mind certain things containing bug parts (on purpose) to make up for protein in them. And honestly that crunch sounds quite good.
I was vegan for many years, people like you aren’t the reason I stopped but I definitely don’t miss the weird aggression either. (btw farming plants still kills A LOT of bugs, usually in more cruel and prolonged ways than slaughtering them for food)
Remember to stay kind. Encouraging people to make small steps results in more positive change than caustic judgement.
Its not about making excuses, its about meeting people where they are. Perfectionism sets people up for failure, and leaves many people feeling like it’s not worth doing anything because they can’t do everything. Encouraging people to take any steps they can helps the movement overall.
Welcoming new environmentalists and staying kind when having discussions helps the movement. It does take emotional labor, and its okay to take a step back sometimes. It is also okay to vent about how you’re feeling in an appropriate space (such as a post in the vegan community, during the weekly how you’re feeling thread on beehaw, with friends, in your journal, etc). However, taking that frustration out on random people in an innocuous post about bugs is neither helpful nor healthy.
So yes, please stay kind.
I raise my own crickets on the farm and grow my own vegetables. It’s basically a closed system, I compost everything. I add additional nutrients using seaweed.
How far do your plants have to travel to get to your plate? Last time I checked so-called modern farming uses a lot of petrochemicals. Organic farming isn’t any better–they use so much plastic to block weeds and pests.
Also, most plant material I grow is not edible by humans. I cannot eat corn stalks. Maybe you can. It seems wasteful to compost all this biomass as there is still so much nutrition left over.
Sounds to me like your carbon footprint is higher than mine. Maybe you should try to create a farming system yourself. One that yields 100% of the daily nutrition humans require. It is not so easy.
I am glad you are vegan. Much better than eating cows. They drink too much water.
Using logical fallacies in bad faith doesn’t make you look good
I am aware that users like you throw around logical fallacy terms in your comment all the time when you feel your being called out
I’ve observed it on reddit before multiple times
If you can’t be nice you should just give up
This is not the space to aggressively attack users
This is not a strawman argument and you know it, your just trying to throw “strawman” in response because you don’t like the response you’ve been given
I’m nice to my crickets though. You don’t have to hurt them, you just place them into the freezer and they fall asleep like it’s winter time. And then you roast them and mill them into flour. Okay that part does hurt them, but they’re asleep. Seems kinda peaceful.
I get that hurting a mammal with complex emotions is very unethical, but where’s the limit?
What about fermented food? Tiny bacteria are alive when you eat them. They probably don’t feel pain but I can’t imagine they’re thrilled to meet their doom.
How about mushrooms? They aren’t plants, and they apparently communicate with the trees. How do you know they don’t possess some kind of sentience?
What about harvesting plants? Everytime you run a combine through a field it’s like an insect genocide. Even if you’re only eating plants you’re still eating insects because they get caught by the harvester and milled into the final product. The FDA allows up to 50 insect parts per 1/4 cup cornmeal.
What about hurting a tree? They’re not sentient and cannot feel pain but I still believe it is unethical to harm a tree. Do they not deserve our empathy because they lack our human conception of sentience?
Being a good human is hard. I feel like in principle you’re right but I don’t know how to exist and not hurt anything ever. You’re right, I don’t know you. Maybe you’re just a better person than I am.
And this is the kind of behaviour I’d hoped people on lemmy would not continue on the solarpunk community
You’ve just continued the same kind of stuff that alienated a whole lot of users from r/solarpunk because they felt they couldn’t participate without being attacked for their food choices
What’s next, brigading posts with mass downvoting like you did on reddit to sway the visibility of comments in bad faith
If you can’t interact nicely with other users than maybe you shouldn’t be here
Solarpunk is not vеgаnism and while I don’t mind if you personally participate in vеgаnism it doesn’t give you the right to attack users here who don’t participate in it and gatekeep any activity on this subreddit
Solarpunk has no inherent ties to veganism and vеgаnism doesn’t have any ties to solarpunk
The mods previously back on reddit have said this subreddit is not r/vеgаn
Source: ___ ^^https://libreddit.nl/r/solarpunk/comments/tzoiqs/community_update_the_fine_arts_04_2022/
Be kind, and get along with your fellow humans nicely
I definitely do not want to… I‘d rather die, sorry. To each their own, but if everything else became unaffordable and I‘d be left with bugs, you‘ll find me smuggling veggies and growing them in the city parks, or on company properties or wherever I can find space.
I’m not really talking about eating them out of desperation but rather just as an additive in food, however I see where your coming from and it’s a pretty reasonable response.
Yeah sorry I got a bit emotional, I‘m just grossed out by bugs a lot, including the popular sea ones. Though I guess if they are in a powder I wouldn‘t mind as an additive.
It‘s mostly for me the issue that a lot of right wingers are also using these sort of articles to push the “the left wants to force us to eat bugs” narrative, which is untrue (there is no force at all), but I wouldn‘t actually put it past some state‘s politicians to go like “let them eat bugs” as a response to rising food prices either.
In which case I would like to respond by aggressively planting vegetables.
I hope you don’t feel triggered by my question, I am genuinely curious, I swear. No judgment. Here my question: since bugs are part of this planet’s life like all other life forms, don’t you think that there is something wrong being so triggered from bugs?
I mean, it’s normal to respect or to feel a kind of repulsion to some kind of insects, it is natural instinct that saved us from death, but being grossed by bugs in general sounds a bit too much to me.
I had a kind of phobia but when I realized that we are all part of the life on this planet, insects included, than something changed in me. I do not love insects, but I definitely do not feel reputation or fear anymore. I feel respect for some kind of insects (big spyders for example) and I try to build biodiversity in my garden for some others.
Sorry, I don’t want to bother you or judge you, is it totally ok the way you are. I just kind of saw myself some years ago in our emotional answer.
Of course you can ignore this comment and it will be perfectly fine :)
Gross. No thanks.
It has one of the same inherent inefficiencies as animal meat: they need to eat something to grow. Therefore we need to use a lot of resources to produce a lot of food for them to eat, before we can eat them.
It always seems much more efficient to use those resources to grow food for us to eat directly. Also, getting Americans to eat a vegetable is slightly easier than getting them to eat a bug.
1 is they’re a lot more efficient at producing calories vs calories eaten compared to larger animals, and insanely more water efficient. And 2, which varies by insect, is what they eat and the results of it. Many insects eating habits have positive impacts on environmental health and are sought after for that purpose. Earthworms are a famous example, but there are all kinds of insects that play a composting role in nature, eating decaying organic matter and converting it into nutritionally rich soil for plants. Pollinators are another example.
I think the “magic” of bugs is that they can eat things that would be inedible or unhealthy for other omnivores (like pigs). If we can convert some of our food and paper waste into protein and chitin, it might be worth the investment.
This only works for small farms but regular animals already fill that spot there too. Chicken and pigs are mainly fed kitchen scraps in these settings. The issue is once you go into large-scale commercial farming it becomes way too inefficient to use waste products and buying feed is more economical viable. Doesn’t matter if it’s insects or mammals or.
A lot of animal feed is already made up of a lot of “food waste”. Rice bran, maize and wheat offal, fish meal, and bone meal, all of that are byproducts of food for human consumption and commonly found in animal feed. You can even find some that have things like sawdust or other wood products inside. There are even studies into using waste paper for cattle. And while this might sound wrong, it doesn’t harm the animal. But the issue is, humans don’t want to eat something that ate something we don’t like. And I don’t see that changing with insects either.
For me the exciting part about bug farming isn’t really their use as food (for humans or animals) but more their potential to eat “real” waste (like things that birds and mammals shouldn’t eat) and then be turned into non-food items - like chondroitin or have other derivatives made out of their chitin.
Right now it’s not very efficient but with some selective breeding (or faster, GMO mealworm gut bacteria) they could start working on the landfill issue. Their poop would have to be incinerated since it would concentrate flame retardants and other toxins, but we might be able to get something useful out of them.
edit: i have a box of mealworms that I wanted to try feeding just styrofoam to to see how many generations it would take to have mealworms that thrive (not just survive and turn to cannibalism) on the stuff, but i felt bad, now they eat kitchen waste and shredded paper.
I’ve eaten quite a few things with bugs. Mostly powdered and in something else – cricket bread is quite good and very high protein. Grasshopper too. Even black fly casings can be ground up and added into things (though I wasn’t as big a fan).
I think insects are a good option for low cost protein. They can be cultivated vertically, and don’t require as many resources as some other proteins. I think they add some nice nutrient diversity to diets trying to limit meat consumption. Plant proteins are great, but you can only eat so many forms of soy before it starts messing with your body.
I hope it catches on more. I think once people see and try products where the bug body isn’t as noticeable, they’ll get over some of their ‘ick’ factor.
