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> 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 w

> 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.

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.