this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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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.