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More people are eating bugs – but is it ethical to farm insects for food?

proc0 5y ago
> If one assumes, hypothetically, that insects are 0.1% as sentient as cows, or that the probability that insects can suffer is 0.1%, then killing 1,000 crickets has a similar ethical footprint as killing one cow. Ok... are we really doing this? Math of suffering? I'm not even going to go into it, but I will point out a simple fact. Most people in the developed world over-eat. The amount of calories people consume is excessive and unreasonable. People literally eat for pleasure. You want to be a moral human? Stop eating for pleasure, and stop over-eating calories. If everyone did this, we wouldn't even need to resort to meat alternatives. And yes, I am very sorry to point this out, but if this whole line of thinking is desirable...meaning we don't want animals to suffer as well as the logical conclusion that eating less would diminish this...being overweight is immoral. So here's my conclusion, the low hanging fruit in all this is people eating for pleasure, not controlling their calories and therefore gaining lots of weight, and as a consequence more animals suffer. I would like to stop seeing overweight people all over the place, and the whole industry of eating for pleasure gone, before considering if switching to insects is moral because they might or might not suffer as much.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  You make this about morality, but we feel pleasure when we eat nutritious food because this is how we can identify what we should and shouldn't eat. It is a mechanism that developed at a time when food was not plentiful and now that there is a lot more food to eat, it causes people to become overweight, because of course they can't turn off their sense of fulfillment and satisfaction from a plentiful meal! Nor their cravings for nutritious food. The food industry on the other hand takes very deliberately advantage of this human characteristic and stuffs its products full of ingredients that create a sense of pleasure withouth actually being nutritious: fat, sugar, salt and all sorts of taste, flavour and appearance enhancers (emulsifiers, colourings, flavourings, etc). Other animals are not any different than humans in that. If you've been around animals at all, pets or farm animals, you will know that when it's lunch time, they go absolutely crazy. Animals are wired to seek out the food that gives them pleasure just as much as humans are- and that's because humans are animals and our apetites are animal apetites. You make out the pleasure of feeding as all about morality, but it is a morality that is not grounded in material reality.
  - proc0 5y ago
    Right, you are outlining the precise problem here. There is a direct line to a solution to avoid mass farming, mass suffering of animals, which is the moral issue at hand. Instead of taking the most straight path which is eating less, and avoid over-eating for pleasure to solve the moral issue, society has favored and indirect, aimless path which creates problems in its path... let's continue over-eating, rewarding that industry by buying more and more food, and as a result more farms are needed, more chemicals in our food are needed, and also more doctors and medicine is needed to treat the illnesses that arise in parallel. > Other animals are not any different than humans in that. If you're going to lower the bar that low, then let's just do mass farming, and who cares if cows and pigs suffer? Animals don't care about the suffering of other animals. Just look up what chimpanzees to do other chimp tribes (it's pretty gruesome). If humans are just animals, then all this talk about making animals suffer is moot.
    - cheese_goddess 5y ago
      When you say "overeating", do you mean just overeating meat, or overeating in general? It sounds like you mean just overeating meat. But eating for pleasue doesn't mean eating meat for pleasure. For example, when I overeat it's usually pasta or fries and it's always vegan to boot (because I cook with olive oil rather than butter). So you can eat for pleasure, without eating any animal food and still overeat. My comment about humans being just like other animals is to explain that humans don't find pleasure in food because we are filthy immoral gluttons. It's because the pleasure we feel when we eat food is derived from our senses and has nothing to do with morality. Moral and immoral people are equally capable of deriving pleasure from food. And neither can "stop eating for pleasure" like you admonish in your first comment. In the same way that you can't turn off your sexual pleasure, you can't turn off the pleasure you get from food. Unless you damage yourself. > If you're going to lower the bar that low, then let's just do mass farming, and who cares if cows and pigs suffer? I don't understand what you mean. I said humans are animals. Why does that force us to do mass farming or ignore pigs' suffering? Also, why am I "lowering the bar"? The bar for what?
      - 5y ago

> If one assumes, hypothetically, that insects are 0.1% as sentient as cows, or that the probability that insects can suffer is 0.1%, then killing 1,000 crickets has a similar ethical footprint as killing one cow. Ok... are we really doing this? Math of suffering? I'm not even going to go into it, but I will point out a simple fact. Most people in the developed world over-eat. The amount of calories people consume is excessive and unreasonable. People literally eat for pleasure. You want to be a moral human? Stop eating for pleasure, and stop over-eating calories. If everyone did this, we wouldn't even need to resort to meat alternatives. And yes, I am very sorry to point this out, but if this whole line of thinking is desirable...meaning we don't want animals to suffer as well as the logical conclusion that eating less would diminish this...being overweight is immoral. So here's my conclusion, the low hanging fruit in all this is people eating for pleasure, not controlling their calories and therefore gaining lots of weight, and as a consequence more animals suffer. I would like to stop seeing overweight people all over the place, and the whole industry of eating for pleasure gone, before considering if switching to insects is moral because they might or might not suffer as much.

cheese_goddess 5y ago
You make this about morality, but we feel pleasure when we eat nutritious food because this is how we can identify what we should and shouldn't eat. It is a mechanism that developed at a time when food was not plentiful and now that there is a lot more food to eat, it causes people to become overweight, because of course they can't turn off their sense of fulfillment and satisfaction from a plentiful meal! Nor their cravings for nutritious food. The food industry on the other hand takes very deliberately advantage of this human characteristic and stuffs its products full of ingredients that create a sense of pleasure withouth actually being nutritious: fat, sugar, salt and all sorts of taste, flavour and appearance enhancers (emulsifiers, colourings, flavourings, etc). Other animals are not any different than humans in that. If you've been around animals at all, pets or farm animals, you will know that when it's lunch time, they go absolutely crazy. Animals are wired to seek out the food that gives them pleasure just as much as humans are- and that's because humans are animals and our apetites are animal apetites. You make out the pleasure of feeding as all about morality, but it is a morality that is not grounded in material reality.
- proc0 5y ago
  Right, you are outlining the precise problem here. There is a direct line to a solution to avoid mass farming, mass suffering of animals, which is the moral issue at hand. Instead of taking the most straight path which is eating less, and avoid over-eating for pleasure to solve the moral issue, society has favored and indirect, aimless path which creates problems in its path... let's continue over-eating, rewarding that industry by buying more and more food, and as a result more farms are needed, more chemicals in our food are needed, and also more doctors and medicine is needed to treat the illnesses that arise in parallel. > Other animals are not any different than humans in that. If you're going to lower the bar that low, then let's just do mass farming, and who cares if cows and pigs suffer? Animals don't care about the suffering of other animals. Just look up what chimpanzees to do other chimp tribes (it's pretty gruesome). If humans are just animals, then all this talk about making animals suffer is moot.
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    When you say "overeating", do you mean just overeating meat, or overeating in general? It sounds like you mean just overeating meat. But eating for pleasue doesn't mean eating meat for pleasure. For example, when I overeat it's usually pasta or fries and it's always vegan to boot (because I cook with olive oil rather than butter). So you can eat for pleasure, without eating any animal food and still overeat. My comment about humans being just like other animals is to explain that humans don't find pleasure in food because we are filthy immoral gluttons. It's because the pleasure we feel when we eat food is derived from our senses and has nothing to do with morality. Moral and immoral people are equally capable of deriving pleasure from food. And neither can "stop eating for pleasure" like you admonish in your first comment. In the same way that you can't turn off your sexual pleasure, you can't turn off the pleasure you get from food. Unless you damage yourself. > If you're going to lower the bar that low, then let's just do mass farming, and who cares if cows and pigs suffer? I don't understand what you mean. I said humans are animals. Why does that force us to do mass farming or ignore pigs' suffering? Also, why am I "lowering the bar"? The bar for what?
    - 5y ago