11 ms·

I Will Not Eat the Bugs (2021)

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Several years ago, I lived very close to the University and there were several Desi stores nearby. So I would shop in them and try out my Indian cookbook all the time, it was great. They had the best fragrant spices and the really good yogurt drinks. Once I purchased a big sack of basmati rice. When I opened it at home, all the larvae came worming their way out. I mean there was a lot of bugs in this rice. And I knew this store tended to keep stuff on their shelves years beyond the expiration dates. So I took the sack of rice back to the store. The kind proprietor told me it was a nothingburger and the bugs wouldn't hurt me. I said ugh. He said just to pick the bugs out. I said there's a lot of bugs. He insisted this is normal and no big deal. I think I finally managed to make the return. And I really didn't feel like shopping there again. Growing up, my dad would say hilarious things, like "mmm, more protein" and lick his lips when he saw a bug on our food. Or, he would see a non-venomous spider in the house and say "he won't eat much." But I managed to develop a rather neurotic fear of pests. I adored beneficial insects when I was a child; I memorized all their Latin scentific names, and I purchased ladybugs and mantids at the nursery and I released them all into the garden. I would build ant farms, fascinated with their tunneling and behaviors. I used to catch butterflies just because they were beautiful. But show me a cockroach or a bedbug in my home, and I will go into a hissy fit. I don't feel like that's abnormal.
- luminen 3y ago
  I looked too closely into a bag of frozen spinach I had been using for smoothies and discovered it was about 10% small green caterpillars... I threw it out and never bought it again. Morally, could I tell you why, like the author of this post tries to do? Absolutely not. I eat birds and mammals. I had a decade-long stint of vegetarianism and often thought about my moral responsibility as a conscious creature towards the other creatures on this Earth. But tossing the insects wasn't even a choice, and in retrospect, I don't think I could convince myself to eat them (even if the macros are good.) I wonder how much of this aversion is learned/cultural, and if future generations will laugh at how squeamish we are today.
  - Shaanie 3y ago
    It's probably mostly learned behavior; many westerners have the same reaction to eating things like chicken heart or fish eyes, which other cultures eat without hesitation. That being said, usually insects being in your food is probably a bad sign (e.g. maggots in rotting meat), so there could be some innate skepticism perhaps?
    - ImAnAmateur 3y ago
      Don't forget that it was unexpected and not identified as a specific species.
  - bigger_inside 3y ago
    which also brings back the old insight that harvesting greens kills a lot more animals than producing steak does. Though I guess with symbiotic species living inside organisms, that may become debatable? In any case, there is no food consumption without death involved. Though ultimately, that's not even the point. The larger point is that individual consumer choice does not actually shift the food industry structure, which, again, is neatly exemplified by this entire debate that kicked off these threads: humans don't -choose- bugs. This is a system change. Though of course the change involves better mass production capability and higher rates of profit on the industry side, not "care for nature". Industry doesn't care for anything but profit.
    - pantojax45 3y ago
      > harvesting greens kills a lot more animals than producing steak does How is this possible? Cows must feed and they eat plants (inefficiently too)
    - worstestes 3y ago
      I find this a bit dubious, particularly that a large part of the agricultural industry is dedicated to _feed_ for livestock.
      - 3y ago
illirik 3y ago
This is a solved problem - don't consume animal products. Doing so causes cancer in the consumer [1], untold suffering for the human producers, who are often children [2], and the deaths of billions of animals per year in the US alone. [3] [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(15)00444-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-28/slaughterhouse-scandal-sends-blackstone-firm-s-debt-tumbling-44#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-28/slaughter... [3] https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...
- ralfd 3y ago
  Regarding your link from 2015 this was about red meat, not all animal products, and further had to be rolled back in recent years: 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/sep/30/research-red-meat-poses-no-health-risk https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/sep/30/research-red-me... 2022: https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-associated-consumption-unprocessed-red-meat-burden-proof-study https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-a...
- lockhouse 3y ago
  If we weren’t meant to eat animals then why are they made of meat? Seriously though, it’s your choice how you live your life, but there’s no escaping that humans are omnivores and should eat both plants and animals for proper nutrition. The problem is that a lot of human diets go to heavy on the animals. I know that you can replace animal protein in your diet with several plant based supplements, but that is far from ideal or natural.
  - zvmaz 3y ago
    > Seriously though, it’s your choice how you live your life, but there’s no escaping that humans are omnivores and should eat both plants and animals for proper nutrition There are millions of vegetarians and vegans around the world.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
ajuc 3y ago
> What if there's a 99% chance they're an android? Still seems like you should avoid the torture-murder, for the 1% chance they're human. 99.9999999% chance? At this point I think it becomes less pressing, but it's still a little bad to hurt them. This is a nice lie we tell ourselves, but it's obvious if you look into what we actually do, that we value small things like convenience and money over a small chance of killing someone. See cars for the easiest example, but there's many more. Conveniently your chances of dying in a car accident are around 1% each year: https://www.rosenfeldinjurylawyers.com/news/what-are-your-chances-of-dying-in-a-car-crash/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20National%20Safety,103%20for%20any%20given%20year https://www.rosenfeldinjurylawyers.com/news/what-are-your-ch....
- carrolldunham 3y ago
  >your chances of dying in a car accident are around 1% each year That's very obviously wrong since that would mean the road toll for my city of 400k would be 4000/year and it's actually 12/year
- f5ve 3y ago
  > 1% each year I think you mean 1% each life
  - ajuc 3y ago
    > According to the National Safety Council (NSC), your chances of dying in a car crash are about one in 103 for any given year. It does seem impossibly high now that I did math.
    - carrolldunham 3y ago
      Look at the crapsite you copied this text from - it's spam garbage. Please be more discerning when you see 'facts' given online.
  - JackMorgan 3y ago
    Divide the number of fatalities (36,096) by the population (331,000,000) and multiply by 100: (36,096 / 331,000,000) * 100 ≈ 0.0109% It's easy to mixed up with the percentage conversion. Still it's really high all things considered.
helpfulmandrill 3y ago
I ate some. They were fine.
its-summertime 3y ago
The trolley problem but its 1 chicken vs 3000 worms. > And don't bugs have [...] passions? Like what? Eating more dirt?? > In general, animal neuron number scales up slower than animal weight. A brown bear and a house cat have similar neuron counts? Additionally, assuming neurons are meshed, the ability gained from an additional neuron would be exponential, no? Worms come in at like, what, 10,000 - 100,000 for their entire nervous system, compared to 221,000,000 for a fowl, not only is that 20,000x - 2,000x linearly, going with the assumption that each new neuron is probably more significant than the last, it would be more than worlds apart in ability to think. > most factory-farmed insects are being raised as animal food and not for humans. And therefore if you eat the chicken, you also must be aware of the moral cost of the fact that the insects were killed for the chicken, which was then killed for you. So, morally, just eat the bugs, don't do a double conversion, that's inefficient.
JackMorgan 3y ago
> "First, people keep trying to say you should eat insects to save the environment / help animals / be vegan. I don't want to do this. That makes it very convenient that it also seems to be potentially morally wrong." Oh, please. This post reads like a very smart person going to great lengths to justify why they don't want to try eating a new thing. Like, no one is making you my dude. You don't need to flex a Shakespeare quote to justify not wanting to eat something. I don't eat shellfish because they look gross, no one needs to read an essay about it. That's my one beef (hehe) with the rational crowd, and I love 'em to death, but dude you don't need a dive into philosophy to justify why you like pizza better than milkshakes. Let life have some whimsy in it. Also, this is the third time this week I've heard people fretting about being "forced" to eat bugs. It is a common alt-right conspiracy theory that "the left" is going to force everyone to eat bugs. So there are endless memes about how they should courageously eat even more meat to "own the libs". At this point I genuinely wonder if this isn't just an extremely effective marketing campaign by the meat industry to turn meat consumption into a form of protest, right when meat is getting almost unbelievably expensive. My dudes, it ain't "the libs" jacking up the prices of meat and bringing in record profits. So when I see someone fretting about eating bugs I have a hard time taking it too seriously. If you don't want to, then don't. From a financial utility, whey protein is expensive, and not everyone can consume it. The veg alternatives taste like chalk, so I know quite a few athletes who are quite interested in high protein insect flour. If you could spend half the price for a better tasting shake...
- omniscient_oce 3y ago
  I don't really understand why these kind of posts make it to the top page of HackerNews. Perhaps there is a bigger audience for this than you would think?
  - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    There's occasionally a weird undercurrent on this site which flirts with alt-right conspiracy theories. Partly because Hacker News attracts the kind of person who wants to show off how intelligent he* is, and those people easily fall prey to this kind of nonsense. (I try to remind myself that I'm not immune to many of the same thought traps, though I'm unlikely to ever go alt right. As I age, I move ever more leftwards.) * Usually.
peterisza 3y ago
Eating bugs is not some radical new thing that noone has ever tried. Just go to a market in Southeast Asia and you will see.
- lusus_naturae 3y ago
  Or even some countries in Africa, served like pupu platters and delicious. Whatever, each their own.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
> First, people keep trying to say you should eat insects to save the environment / help animals / be vegan. This seems a fundamental misunderstanding of Veganism, where I believe even Honey is considered non-vegan by the relevant authorities: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan/honey-industry https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan/honey-ind...

Several years ago, I lived very close to the University and there were several Desi stores nearby. So I would shop in them and try out my Indian cookbook all the time, it was great. They had the best fragrant spices and the really good yogurt drinks. Once I purchased a big sack of basmati rice. When I opened it at home, all the larvae came worming their way out. I mean there was a lot of bugs in this rice. And I knew this store tended to keep stuff on their shelves years beyond the expiration dates. So I took the sack of rice back to the store. The kind proprietor told me it was a nothingburger and the bugs wouldn't hurt me. I said ugh. He said just to pick the bugs out. I said there's a lot of bugs. He insisted this is normal and no big deal. I think I finally managed to make the return. And I really didn't feel like shopping there again. Growing up, my dad would say hilarious things, like "mmm, more protein" and lick his lips when he saw a bug on our food. Or, he would see a non-venomous spider in the house and say "he won't eat much." But I managed to develop a rather neurotic fear of pests. I adored beneficial insects when I was a child; I memorized all their Latin scentific names, and I purchased ladybugs and mantids at the nursery and I released them all into the garden. I would build ant farms, fascinated with their tunneling and behaviors. I used to catch butterflies just because they were beautiful. But show me a cockroach or a bedbug in my home, and I will go into a hissy fit. I don't feel like that's abnormal.

luminen 3y ago
I looked too closely into a bag of frozen spinach I had been using for smoothies and discovered it was about 10% small green caterpillars... I threw it out and never bought it again. Morally, could I tell you why, like the author of this post tries to do? Absolutely not. I eat birds and mammals. I had a decade-long stint of vegetarianism and often thought about my moral responsibility as a conscious creature towards the other creatures on this Earth. But tossing the insects wasn't even a choice, and in retrospect, I don't think I could convince myself to eat them (even if the macros are good.) I wonder how much of this aversion is learned/cultural, and if future generations will laugh at how squeamish we are today.
- Shaanie 3y ago
  It's probably mostly learned behavior; many westerners have the same reaction to eating things like chicken heart or fish eyes, which other cultures eat without hesitation. That being said, usually insects being in your food is probably a bad sign (e.g. maggots in rotting meat), so there could be some innate skepticism perhaps?
  - ImAnAmateur 3y ago
    Don't forget that it was unexpected and not identified as a specific species.
- bigger_inside 3y ago
  which also brings back the old insight that harvesting greens kills a lot more animals than producing steak does. Though I guess with symbiotic species living inside organisms, that may become debatable? In any case, there is no food consumption without death involved. Though ultimately, that's not even the point. The larger point is that individual consumer choice does not actually shift the food industry structure, which, again, is neatly exemplified by this entire debate that kicked off these threads: humans don't -choose- bugs. This is a system change. Though of course the change involves better mass production capability and higher rates of profit on the industry side, not "care for nature". Industry doesn't care for anything but profit.
  - pantojax45 3y ago
    > harvesting greens kills a lot more animals than producing steak does How is this possible? Cows must feed and they eat plants (inefficiently too)
  - worstestes 3y ago
    I find this a bit dubious, particularly that a large part of the agricultural industry is dedicated to _feed_ for livestock.
    - 3y ago

illirik 3y ago

This is a solved problem - don't consume animal products. Doing so causes cancer in the consumer [1], untold suffering for the human producers, who are often children [2], and the deaths of billions of animals per year in the US alone. [3] [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(15)00444-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-28/slaughterhouse-scandal-sends-blackstone-firm-s-debt-tumbling-44#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-28/slaughter... [3] https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...

ralfd 3y ago
Regarding your link from 2015 this was about red meat, not all animal products, and further had to be rolled back in recent years: 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/sep/30/research-red-meat-poses-no-health-risk https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/sep/30/research-red-me... 2022: https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-associated-consumption-unprocessed-red-meat-burden-proof-study https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-a...
lockhouse 3y ago
If we weren’t meant to eat animals then why are they made of meat? Seriously though, it’s your choice how you live your life, but there’s no escaping that humans are omnivores and should eat both plants and animals for proper nutrition. The problem is that a lot of human diets go to heavy on the animals. I know that you can replace animal protein in your diet with several plant based supplements, but that is far from ideal or natural.
- zvmaz 3y ago
  > Seriously though, it’s your choice how you live your life, but there’s no escaping that humans are omnivores and should eat both plants and animals for proper nutrition There are millions of vegetarians and vegans around the world.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

ajuc 3y ago

> What if there's a 99% chance they're an android? Still seems like you should avoid the torture-murder, for the 1% chance they're human. 99.9999999% chance? At this point I think it becomes less pressing, but it's still a little bad to hurt them. This is a nice lie we tell ourselves, but it's obvious if you look into what we actually do, that we value small things like convenience and money over a small chance of killing someone. See cars for the easiest example, but there's many more. Conveniently your chances of dying in a car accident are around 1% each year: https://www.rosenfeldinjurylawyers.com/news/what-are-your-chances-of-dying-in-a-car-crash/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20National%20Safety,103%20for%20any%20given%20year https://www.rosenfeldinjurylawyers.com/news/what-are-your-ch....

carrolldunham 3y ago
>your chances of dying in a car accident are around 1% each year That's very obviously wrong since that would mean the road toll for my city of 400k would be 4000/year and it's actually 12/year
f5ve 3y ago
> 1% each year I think you mean 1% each life
- ajuc 3y ago
  > According to the National Safety Council (NSC), your chances of dying in a car crash are about one in 103 for any given year. It does seem impossibly high now that I did math.
  - carrolldunham 3y ago
    Look at the crapsite you copied this text from - it's spam garbage. Please be more discerning when you see 'facts' given online.
- JackMorgan 3y ago
  Divide the number of fatalities (36,096) by the population (331,000,000) and multiply by 100: (36,096 / 331,000,000) * 100 ≈ 0.0109% It's easy to mixed up with the percentage conversion. Still it's really high all things considered.

helpfulmandrill 3y ago

I ate some. They were fine.

its-summertime 3y ago

The trolley problem but its 1 chicken vs 3000 worms. > And don't bugs have [...] passions? Like what? Eating more dirt?? > In general, animal neuron number scales up slower than animal weight. A brown bear and a house cat have similar neuron counts? Additionally, assuming neurons are meshed, the ability gained from an additional neuron would be exponential, no? Worms come in at like, what, 10,000 - 100,000 for their entire nervous system, compared to 221,000,000 for a fowl, not only is that 20,000x - 2,000x linearly, going with the assumption that each new neuron is probably more significant than the last, it would be more than worlds apart in ability to think. > most factory-farmed insects are being raised as animal food and not for humans. And therefore if you eat the chicken, you also must be aware of the moral cost of the fact that the insects were killed for the chicken, which was then killed for you. So, morally, just eat the bugs, don't do a double conversion, that's inefficient.

JackMorgan 3y ago

> "First, people keep trying to say you should eat insects to save the environment / help animals / be vegan. I don't want to do this. That makes it very convenient that it also seems to be potentially morally wrong." Oh, please. This post reads like a very smart person going to great lengths to justify why they don't want to try eating a new thing. Like, no one is making you my dude. You don't need to flex a Shakespeare quote to justify not wanting to eat something. I don't eat shellfish because they look gross, no one needs to read an essay about it. That's my one beef (hehe) with the rational crowd, and I love 'em to death, but dude you don't need a dive into philosophy to justify why you like pizza better than milkshakes. Let life have some whimsy in it. Also, this is the third time this week I've heard people fretting about being "forced" to eat bugs. It is a common alt-right conspiracy theory that "the left" is going to force everyone to eat bugs. So there are endless memes about how they should courageously eat even more meat to "own the libs". At this point I genuinely wonder if this isn't just an extremely effective marketing campaign by the meat industry to turn meat consumption into a form of protest, right when meat is getting almost unbelievably expensive. My dudes, it ain't "the libs" jacking up the prices of meat and bringing in record profits. So when I see someone fretting about eating bugs I have a hard time taking it too seriously. If you don't want to, then don't. From a financial utility, whey protein is expensive, and not everyone can consume it. The veg alternatives taste like chalk, so I know quite a few athletes who are quite interested in high protein insect flour. If you could spend half the price for a better tasting shake...

omniscient_oce 3y ago
I don't really understand why these kind of posts make it to the top page of HackerNews. Perhaps there is a bigger audience for this than you would think?
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  There's occasionally a weird undercurrent on this site which flirts with alt-right conspiracy theories. Partly because Hacker News attracts the kind of person who wants to show off how intelligent he* is, and those people easily fall prey to this kind of nonsense. (I try to remind myself that I'm not immune to many of the same thought traps, though I'm unlikely to ever go alt right. As I age, I move ever more leftwards.) * Usually.

peterisza 3y ago

Eating bugs is not some radical new thing that noone has ever tried. Just go to a market in Southeast Asia and you will see.

lusus_naturae 3y ago
Or even some countries in Africa, served like pupu platters and delicious. Whatever, each their own.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

> First, people keep trying to say you should eat insects to save the environment / help animals / be vegan. This seems a fundamental misunderstanding of Veganism, where I believe even Honey is considered non-vegan by the relevant authorities: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan/honey-industry https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan/honey-ind...