3 ms·
My biggest concern about bugs as food is the potential for parasites or infection in the stock. We already have issues detecting some of those in animals larger
by falsaberN1 5y ago
My biggest concern about bugs as food is the potential for parasites or infection in the stock.
We already have issues detecting some of those in animals larger than us, I don't want to see what kind of maintenance hell it's going to be when a single box contains like 1000 "disposable" crickets. Bad employees surely won't help (if they can treat chickens and cows worse than objects for no reason, imagine bugs).
I also get this feeling that once the industry really kicks in, corners will be cut, farms will boom and sleazy techniques by owners could end up with something as environmentally damaging as beef, even if for different reasons. There's also the risk of break outs. I'm pretty sure a million bugs escaping at once because of some accident won't be an easy fix.
Sure, I know we already do operations at a similar scale with shrimp farming or so, but for aquatic creatures you can kind of control their environment much better by testing the water and such. Something like crickets need an environment that can't be controlled as easily, and I kinda don't see someone going in there to clean up every day and check for molds or fungi that could come into play (and it'd be easily covered by a cluster of bugs feeding on it with the inspector being none the wiser because it's a literal swarm inside)
I can be entirely wrong of course. In fact I'd rather be mistaken here, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it's a baseless concern, even cows have had problems that spread to humans (and at least in my country it's the reason you can't buy bones for soup anymore, just in case), and now that the market is more open you could end up with contaminated product and that bug flour was delivered to 25 countries and used as cheap additive in 450 different products before anyone noticed.
More than anything I'd like to see what people thinks about this. Is it a baseless concern or is it something that could happen?