this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
90 points (97.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
634 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Stuff like mealworms or soldierfly larvae can be grown easily, using almost anything. Don’t know how big of a problem diseases can get though.
Worms are less of an efficient food source than, for example, beans. The sci-fi trope of eating insects is silly. Deus Ex had it right - soy food is the future. (And the present!)
Depends on what you have on hand. Many insects have an almost 90% conversion rate of food to insect biomass and if you have a lot of plant matter or other biological material available that humans can’t consume they are great.
The trope is usually depicted as farming them en-mass for consumption, and that’s much less efficient than just growing soy beans.
Sure, in a survival situation, it might make sense to eat insects. But on a large scale, it doesn’t really.
Farming soy beans also produces waste and stuff still spoils. Turning that into consumable biomass efficiently via insects or other crustaceans is still a viable option. Especially since their droppings make great fertiliser. Including that in a food production cycle is not the worst idea.
Disease is a risk for every living thing.
Yes, but how big the danger of disease is compared to other alternatives.