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Also, insect are hard to find in the winter, and much harder to raise at a reasonable quantity than cows and chickens. And if your 1000 sheeps escape in the wi

Also, insect are hard to find in the winter, and much harder to raise at a reasonable quantity than cows and chickens. And if your 1000 sheeps escape in the wild, you have a chance to get some back, and you will be able to protect you fields against them. It's practical. Plusyou don't have to care about venom when cookinh lamb.

Double_a_92 8y ago
> and much harder to raise at a reasonable quantity than cows and chickens. Doubt that. Livestock eats up much more energy than its meat gives back (i.e. you would have to feed 7kg of soy protein to get 1kg of meat protein). With insects such as Mealworms that's much easier. They basically eat anything and they turn it almost 1:1 into valuable protein. Also you can raise them pretty much everywhere, even in crammed indoor farms without it being cruel. It's sounded more like you were imagining wild crickets being collected from grass fields or something... which is obviously not a good solution.
- klodolph 8y ago
  > With insects such as Mealworms that's much easier. They basically eat anything and they turn it almost 1:1 into valuable protein. I looked up the feed conversion ratio for mealworms, I found values around 5:1. This is comparable to beef. Chickens are much better, somewhere around 1.5:1. Some other insects are better or worse in terms of FCR. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689427/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689427/
  - schwartzworld 8y ago
    Yeah, but you can farm mealworms in a plastic bin in your apartment. They only eat dry grain and food scraps. They are practical on a small scale in a way that chickens can never be.
- sametmax 8y ago
  The ratio is more like 5:1, beside, once you fried them, there is not much of it left because they are so small. But nobody wants to eat them raw.
- AngryData 8y ago
  With modern factory farming that is true, but older subsistence style farming is different. Cows eat grass and weeds, I however can't eat those. Chickens can be fed scraps and inedible seeds and bugs, I can eat some of that but not all of it and chickens will actively look for their own food if possible requiring little work on my part. Pigs will eat literal shit and rotten food like it was a jelly doughnut.
DrJosiah 8y ago
You should check out the industrial-scale cockroach farming going on in China. Mostly hermetically sealed buildings; you can put them in cold places, you pump food waste in one side, and get sterile, protein-rich cockroach out the other side. No comment on the taste, but you can do similar things for a variety of non-cockroach insects that may have different taste / texture / emotional connections. If someone makes a tasty product, I'll give it a shot. Until then, I am waiting for the vat-grown beef.
miluge 8y ago
My ex roomate was growing mealworms for his iguana and we even ate them. Raising it was super hard, it was in a plastic box with a few lights, fed our food waste and kept in a closet. The trick is to get people to eat them, I tried and it was tasting like chips but I wasn't too hard to convince, my girlfriend on the other end couldnt even look at them...We managed to sneak some one day and she liked it but lost any trust in the food my roomate or myself cooked.

Double_a_92 8y ago

> and much harder to raise at a reasonable quantity than cows and chickens. Doubt that. Livestock eats up much more energy than its meat gives back (i.e. you would have to feed 7kg of soy protein to get 1kg of meat protein). With insects such as Mealworms that's much easier. They basically eat anything and they turn it almost 1:1 into valuable protein. Also you can raise them pretty much everywhere, even in crammed indoor farms without it being cruel. It's sounded more like you were imagining wild crickets being collected from grass fields or something... which is obviously not a good solution.

klodolph 8y ago
> With insects such as Mealworms that's much easier. They basically eat anything and they turn it almost 1:1 into valuable protein. I looked up the feed conversion ratio for mealworms, I found values around 5:1. This is comparable to beef. Chickens are much better, somewhere around 1.5:1. Some other insects are better or worse in terms of FCR. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689427/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689427/
- schwartzworld 8y ago
  Yeah, but you can farm mealworms in a plastic bin in your apartment. They only eat dry grain and food scraps. They are practical on a small scale in a way that chickens can never be.
sametmax 8y ago
The ratio is more like 5:1, beside, once you fried them, there is not much of it left because they are so small. But nobody wants to eat them raw.
AngryData 8y ago
With modern factory farming that is true, but older subsistence style farming is different. Cows eat grass and weeds, I however can't eat those. Chickens can be fed scraps and inedible seeds and bugs, I can eat some of that but not all of it and chickens will actively look for their own food if possible requiring little work on my part. Pigs will eat literal shit and rotten food like it was a jelly doughnut.

DrJosiah 8y ago

You should check out the industrial-scale cockroach farming going on in China. Mostly hermetically sealed buildings; you can put them in cold places, you pump food waste in one side, and get sterile, protein-rich cockroach out the other side. No comment on the taste, but you can do similar things for a variety of non-cockroach insects that may have different taste / texture / emotional connections. If someone makes a tasty product, I'll give it a shot. Until then, I am waiting for the vat-grown beef.

miluge 8y ago

My ex roomate was growing mealworms for his iguana and we even ate them. Raising it was super hard, it was in a plastic box with a few lights, fed our food waste and kept in a closet. The trick is to get people to eat them, I tried and it was tasting like chips but I wasn't too hard to convince, my girlfriend on the other end couldnt even look at them...We managed to sneak some one day and she liked it but lost any trust in the food my roomate or myself cooked.