Tiny Farms Raises Seed Round as Cricket Farming Heats Up(agfundernews.com) |
Tiny Farms Raises Seed Round as Cricket Farming Heats Up(agfundernews.com) |
The key difference is size. There's a lot more meat in your typical prawn, and this allows you to peal and prep it in a way that distances you from its natural appearance. There's less meat inside the cricket, so you pretty much have to eat it whole, shell and all. The resulting texture is less meaty and more mealy/crunchy.
In my experience eating crickets, I've always been aware that I'm eating crickets. There is no fantastic way to mitigate the texture and the mouthfeel, shy of grinding up the crickets into a powder and reconstituting them in some other form.
(The texture doesn't bug me per se, but it sure does seem to bug a lot of people who've tried crickets. No pun intended.)
An approach to making it more tractable to meet food needs is to integrate it back into our urban/suburban environments and take advantage of advanced indoor farming which can be carefully monitored and tended by humans or robots, which can dramatically reduce resource usage for agriculture and greatly improve land use.
https://bioteaching.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/gigantism-in-in...
Also: Jurassic Park is BS for the same reason. The T Rex would not function in earth's current atmosphere -- at least not without tampering with their physiology and/or some kind of extra support system.
We were obviously very interested in the study! It turns out that the paper missed some crucial factors that make insects a sustainable, efficient protein source.
I guest-wrote this post with some details; do take a look if you're interested.
For one thing you can go more 3D with crickets, whereas with chickens you would have to build additional levels if you wanted to 'stack' them.
Also, many people care about the welfare of the animals they eat, such as making sure they have space to roam and live some kind of life before they are slaughtered. I doubt anyone will care if you cram crickets in so tight they can barely move. So at least in terms of space, I imagine you're going to need much less land for a cricket farm.
[1]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
http://www.care2.com/causes/cow-versus-chicken-the-true-carb...
Pun intended??
Every food has protein in it. Bananas have protein. Tomatoes have protein. All plant foods have a complete amino acid profile fit for human consumption. In fact, protein is the easiest macronutrient to get enough of, provided caloric needs are being met. So it's perplexing why eating insects is billed as a 'sustainable source of protein'. Is it more sustainable than say, rice or potatoes?
That's a really weird phrase. I guess suggestions that a protein complete diet is easier when eating meat are also a bit overwrought, but it's possible to eat plants and end up not getting all essential amino acids which is usually what is meant when "complete" is mentioned together with protein.
No, that isn't possible. You could eat nothing but potatoes, or even mangoes, and still get enough protein. There isn't a single whole plant food which is completely lacking in any essential amino acid. How could it? Plants can't "hunt" and "eat" other plants - they must synthesize all amino acids themselves. The "complete protein" myth is one which has been debunked for decades, yet somehow refuses to die.
The study says that crickets are not that much more efficient converters of plants->protein. The "clarification" accepts and applies the information from the study. It then takes into account an understanding of current processes in chicken cultivation to argue that overall impact on the environment would still likely be substantially reduced, especially with better technology.
http://listverse.com/2013/01/14/10-prehistoric-bugs-that-cou...
The huge dragonflys were still only somewhere between a crow and raven in size.
> the idea you can get sufficient protein by just eating any old plant is.... wrong.
You're quite mistaken. If what you say were true, a warning of it would be clearly made by medical and nutritional authorities. Alas, no respectable organization says it, precisely because it's a myth. You can easily search on Google to find evidence which contradicts your post. Here are just the first two results I found when looking at potatoes as an example:
> The high nutritive value of potato protein can be understood when its composition is compared with that of whole wheat (Table 2). Apart from histidine, it contains substantially more of all the essential amino-acids ; this superiority is particularly striking for lysine, the amount present being similar to that in a typical animal protein.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13536266
> For a 120 pound adult, five potatoes (960 calories) supply over 100% of the recommended intake for all essential amino acids.
> It's pretty difficult for an adult to eat a plant-based, vegetarian diet that doesn't provide all EAAs, as long as caloric needs are met.
> Finally - The pool of AAs that our body uses to manufacture its own proteins isn't limited by what we eat. Normal daily turnover of our cells provides a substantial pool from which to draw amino acids. Bacteria that line our colon also manufacture AAs, including EAAs, that we can utilize.
> It is a misconception that plants provide "incomplete protein", regardless of what Ms. Lappe advanced in her 1971 book, "Diet For A Small Planet."
http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/2008/04/if-all-you-ate-were-...
But I weigh over 200 pounds. So 9+ potatoes a day from me to get all the essential amino acids. That's a pretty high starch to protein ratio and would be nearly my whole intake in calories to get a bare minimum of amino acids. Essentials aside, is that enough protein? Also at that point I would have fulfilled my daily requirement of calories but be still be short vitamins A, K, E, calcium, selenium, fatty acids and who knows what else.
That aside, potatoes are one plant. I don't dispute you can eat certain plants or combinations of plants to get all essential amino acids. To restate "the idea you can get sufficient protein by eating just any old plant is... wrong". It is. You'd be in serious nutrition trouble if you tried to live on just broccoli or lettuce. You have to carefully balance your diet as a healthy vegetarian and it is far easier just to add some animal protein.
For the record I still eat a "mostly" vegetarian diet. But not completely. And I feel a lot better and have more energy than when I did ate a full vegetarian diet.
People are willing to pay high prices for meat because meat is tasty and features in numerous delicious recipes, as well as being a source of protein. Crickets would have to be much, much cheaper than meat if the intended market is cricket flour for protein supplementation.
- Crickets are slightly better than poultry at converting poultry feed into protein.
- Crickets are great at converting processed grocery store waste into protein; poultry can't do this at all.
- Both species are awful at converting low quality food waste (a mix of chicken poop and straw) into protein.
- The efficient feed conversion of modern poultry comes only after years of research, development and breeding; the efficient feed conversion of insects comes "out of the box" and will only improve over time.
Wait - what? Do farmers really try to feed their chickens with chicken shit?!
A British and Irish inquiry into BSE concluded the
epizootic was caused by cattle, which are normally
herbivores, being fed the remains of other cattle
in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), which
caused the infectious agent to spread
> Usual dietary combinations of plant proteins are complete; specific plant proteins may be low in specific amino acids
> There is no evidence that amino acid imbalances per se are important; possible imbalances can be created by inappropriate amino acid supplementation, but this is not a practical problem.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost...
And probably diabetes too!
> there is little evidence that total carbohydrate intake is associated with the development of type 2 diabetes. Rather, a stronger association has been observed between total fat and saturated fat intake and type 2 diabetes
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/9/2266.full
> The available data support the idea that consumption of diets high in total carbohydrate does not adversely affect insulin sensitivity compared with high fat diets. Animal data suggest that simple sugars, in particular fructose, have adverse effects on insulin action, but adverse effects have not been shown conclusively in humans.
It's not unusual for farmers to add amino acids as a supplement to feed. It's one of the targets for high-nitrogen (amino acid) GM corn.