Who exactly is "they"? The... Big Bug industry?

Insects are being promoted as a way to hit UN’s sustainable development goals [1]

There’s also an industry emerging, with big pushes from organizations like WEF, to normalize eating bugs [2]. Investors are getting in on this trend too [3]

1. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4450/12/6/557

2. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...

3. https://fortune.com/2022/05/24/war-ukraine-big-ag-insect-fee...

Is there actually anything wrong with normalizing eating bugs? Like, get meat if you want but don't be a baby about insects?

Yea insects typically have a high amount of allergens to humans. It's why bioreactors for things like insulin, igb, etc avoid insects cells if they can.

You want to go as low as possible for a medicine, but how common are allergies to the kind of breeds that make reasonable food?

For comparison, it would be silly to say we shouldn't normalize eating peanuts because of the allergy risk.

Are you kidding? Insect cells used in bioreactors would be an order of magnitude safer than possible insect food ( medical grade is much much higher standard than food grade), and people still avoid it as much as possible . That should tell you "food grade" insects have enormous risk associated with them.

Well if I look at peanuts again, an order of magnitude safer would still be something to avoid very strongly in bioreactors.

At this point I'll keep an eye out but insects are such a broad and mostly unexplored category that I'm not convinced there's an unavoidable and crippling allergen risk.

in what world will people eat bugs instead of beef, do bugs taste anywhere as good as beef? all the push from the supply side doesn't fix the demand problem.

Honestly they are really delicious and satiate in a similar way to meat. Try some grasshoppers next chance you get.

ill try anything !

"Eat the Bugs" has become a far-right/anti-woke catchphrase. This video is typical:

https://youtu.be/8_8LTUmHWP0

Lol what did I just watch?

From a quick search it appears eating of bugs specifically refers to the WEF push:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/good-grub-why-we-migh...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...

don’t know about the catch phrase or how it’s “anti-woke” but interesting

"Eat the bugs", "Woke", "Socialist" can all be used in a positive way it's just that they are also often used by the US right wing in a negative way. You'll understand that when Alex Jones is calling a democrat "woke" he is using it in implying being woke is a bad thing. "Eat the bugs" is similar and is more common in the anti globalist conspiracist circles.

Lobbyists exist for everything.

India has had many many vegetarians for a long long time.

We don't need to eat bugs. We can just eat less meat, like our ancestors did.

Historically, people at a lot of meat.

> The researchers studied ten other comparable food lists from southern England and discovered a remarkably similar pattern: a modest amount of bread, a huge amount of meat, a decent but not excessive quantity of ale, and no mention of vegetables (although some probably were served).

https://www.medievalists.net/2022/04/who-was-eating-meat-in-...

Simply put, you have an animal who eats a bunch of veggies. It’s gathering the calories for you. Then when you kill it, you harvest those calories. There are other means of collecting calories (farming grains, milk & honey, etc) but for most of human history (even now) meat was necessary as it contained the calories to survive.

Literally the next paragraph says:

“The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggests that they were provisions for occasional grand feasts, and not general food supplies sustaining royal households on a daily basis,” says Lambert. “These were not blueprints for everyday elite diets as historians have assumed.”

“I’ve been to plenty of barbecues where friends have cooked ludicrous amounts of meat so we shouldn’t be too surprised. The guests probably ate the best bits and then leftovers might have been stewed up for later.”

Leggett adds,: “I’ve found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis. If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we’re just not finding that. The isotopic evidence suggests that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than we’ve been led to believe. We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in.”

The researchers believe that even royals would have eaten a cereal-based diet and that these occasional feasts would have been a treat for them too.

Agreed, and a great alternative is chicken. Delicious, very versatile to cook with and an ecological foot print that is 4 times smaller compared to beef.

Except that 99% of chicken is factory farmed living a dreadful non-moving existence in boiler rooms.

Though being veg in India usually means still eating dairy products.

Cattle are pretty energy inefficient though, that's a fact. And people would prob be healthier with less meat overall.

You should stop reading right wing conspiracy twitter.