'Disgust factor' must be overcome if planet-friendly insect food to become mainstream

The "disgust factor" must be overcome if insect-based foods are to become mainstream, according to a study.

Insects can be high in protein and making them more acceptable could help cut the high greenhouse gas emissions that come from farming cattle.

There are also potential benefits for cutting obesity and researchers say the idea of farming insects is gaining more attention.

Hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America are estimated to already eat insects to some degree.

There are hopes Western attitudes could shift over time, perhaps in a similar way that food such as sushi has become mainstream.

"Insects are a potentially rich source of protein and micro-nutrients and could help provide a solution to the double burden of obesity and undernutrition," said study lead Dr Lauren McGale, from Edge Hill University in Lancashire.

"Some insect proteins, such as ground crickets or freeze-dried mealworms, are cheaper and easier to farm, often lower in fat and have a lower environmental impact than traditional livestock."

However, most people are still very reluctant due to preconceptions over taste and appearance.

But the study also found they were significantly more likely to give insects a go if they are ground into a powder.

"This has been done successfully with rice products fortified with cricket or locust flours in other parts of the world," said co-author Dr Maxine Sharps from De Montfort University.

Only 13% of the 603 people questioned in the UK study said they would be willing to regularly eat insect food.

Some 47% said they wouldn't eat it regularly, and 40% were unsure.

More than 82% of people expected insect food to be crunchy, 64.6% salty, and 62.4% bitter.

Only 24% said they expected to like the flavour, with just 14.1% believing insect food would look appetising.

Younger people also appeared more squeamish - and each year younger was associated with a 2% increase in saying "no" to the idea.

"The disgust factor is one of most important challenges to be overcome," said Dr Sharps.

"After all, there may be eventually no choice with climate change and projected global population growth."

The study's findings are being presented at this week's European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Venice.

Sky News
Archive [May 14 2024]

 

[Marvin]

I made a mee-mee.

Seriously though, nutraloaf is designed to be revolting but nutritionally complete. It's used as punishment for prisoners. It's arguable whether this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

The powers that be want to impose bug burgers on people. They're trying to market it to us, but really, it's clear they mean it as a consensual, self-imposed punishment.

"your ancestors had too much fun with natural resources like oil, so you must punish yourself"

 

[Comandante Marcos]

Bugs are seen as revolting as food for the simple reason that bugs are disease vectors. Mosquitoes carry malaria and dengue, cockroaches carry all sorts of icky stuff, flies and maggots destroy meat and make it inedible. Bug farming would eventually run into the same problems as any other industrial scale food production. The problem is that there are too many people for Earth's rapidly dwindling resources. The exponentially increasing number of humans means the forced quadrupling down on industrialized food production which is by its nature bad for the environment. If tehgorillionaires would simply get people to shuffle off to the ovens en masse they would be ahead-they get rid of the hated proles and get wagyu all to themselves. Hitler got the Jews to meekly board cattle cars to their deaths, so there's no real reason Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates can't do it.

 

[Android raptor]

If insects are so great why did we develop the disgust of them and why has it endured?

Because there aren't as many bugs worth eating the farther you get from the equator

Bugs are seen as revolting as food for the simple reason that bugs are disease vectors.

Wait til you hear what you can get if you don't cook pork or beef properly.

Insects have more or less the same food safety guidelines as shellfish.

A reminder that the derided ‘disgust factor’ is an inbuiltbprotective mechanism called the behavioural immune system. This kicks in when we see something potentially disease causing to us, like a maggot infected wound, or rotten meat.

Mine kicks in when I see a baby or think about pregnancy.

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

Unpopular position time. I don't think there's an elite humiliation conspiracy here, I think we're just seeing a new fad protein cycle designed to fleece a bunch of would-be entrepreneurs while a bunch of people making supplies for it get rich.

These fads are fundamentally caused by shovel-sellers announcing a gold rush.

I realize I'm about to say things that will make Kiwis realize how old I am, but.

In the late 1980s, you'd see articles all over Reader's Digest and Prevention and all these other old person magazines about ostrich meat.

To hear them tell it, Ostrich meat was delicious, as good as beef but with a fat content even lower than white meat turkey, and the ostriches practically raised themselves. The eggs were a fun novelty, too. Farmers who had been unable to make good profits on cattle or pork, perhaps because of living in areas where heat and disease outbreaks were common, could use ostriches instead, since they sold for more per pound, and yielded ostrich feathers and eggs to supplement the income they produced.

Around the same time, to the northerners, they hawked bison. Bison was delicious, as good as beef but with a fat content even lower than white meat turkey, and the bison practically raise themselves. Farmers who lived in areas where the cattle froze to death (Minnesota, Nebraska, Dakotas) could raise bison with no fear of the same happening, since they're natively cold-hardy.

In both cases, the articles claimed that in ten or twenty years, we'd probably all eat a lot of these new wonder-meats, maybe as much or more as we eat beef or pork.

Obviously that didn't happen, and bison and ostrich remain specialty game meats that few producers think are worth their many hassles. There are still feral ostriches found from time to time in the Florida panhandle who were released by farmers who found they could not turn a profit on the beasts.

Both bison and ostrich were new wonder-meats because they were low fat, and the 1980s was the peak of low-fat-mania.

Today, we don't have a cultural obsession with reducing dietary fat, but we do have a cultural obsession about climate change and carbon footprint.

So the sellers of the new wonder-meat needed something with a very low carbon footprint.

They also needed something else: some new suckers. Farms don't change hands so often. After a few wonder-meats came and went, most farmers who were suggestible and could be led to farm a meme product had gotten burned once or more already. There's also fewer small-time farmers than ever, so this was becoming a tiny sliver of a market.

Bugs have a low carbon footprint, but more than that, you could at least theoretically make bug protein in urban areas and under nearly any conditions. This means you now could potentially get suckers with no access to farmland to buy your expensive insect culturing setups, using warehouse space or whatever else they can get hold of. People who had no way to purchase a farm can now get in on the agricultural wonder-meat of the future for a low, low investment.

I've seen enough of these cycles come and go to know what I'm seeing now. Almost every one of these articles ends up being some thinly disguised advertisement for some of the supplies you'd need to start your own business selling bug meat.

 

[winterfag]

Only 13% of the 603 people questioned in the UK study said they would be willing to regularly eat insect food.

This is 78 people in such a small sample size, but it's bongland so I can't be too surprised

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I'll let Jahy do the honors.

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

Mine kicks in when I see a baby or think about pregnancy.

 

[Anasûrimbor Kellhus]

and this is where the probably would love to add chips in the brain as a technology to do. Not to fix brain injuries or restore lost sight or lost limbs, but to turn off the part of your brain that makes the prospect of eating shit and bugs evoke disgust in you

as famed comedian sam hyde said, its like they're playing a video game to be as evil as possible.

 

[Android raptor]

as famed comedian sam hyde said, its like they're playing a video game to be as evil as possible.

Wait til you hear about the shit the big meat monopolies do

 

[Merton J. Dingle]

Unpopular position time. I don't think there's an elite humiliation conspiracy here, I think we're just seeing a new fad protein cycle designed to fleece a bunch of would-be entrepreneurs while a bunch of people making supplies for it get rich.

These fads are fundamentally caused by shovel-sellers announcing a gold rush.

Think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Stuff like this is always a matter of endlessly moving the goalpost in search of the next grift. Alpacas seem to be one of the most recent iterations of this grift, even if they are raised more for wool than meat.

 

[Escaped Abortion]

Why should the plebs have access to food items that might taste good and are not detrimental to their health?

This is not about "saving the planet". This is about the "elites" growing tired of pretending and they want to enslave and humiliate everyone else. They and their NGO-friends, the journalists and all politicians should be pushed through meatgrinders, turned into fine paste and fed to the dogs.

A bit unfair to the dogs, really, but otherwise whole heartedly agree.

Bugs are actually environmentally wasteful in their production, since it only yields a shitty source of protein no one wants. If they really wanted something environmentally sound and palatable, you would stick with chicken. Their byproducts are also useful in farming and other things. They essentially go further pound for pound when you consider all of the uses for the animal bits than bugs would, and it's something people like to eat.

Cows aren't even that bad, since they basically are just filling the niche of the large herbivores that we put on the endangered list. Millions of bison have been farting for hundreds of thousands of years in that time before people they fantasize about.

Getting us to eat bugs is about the control and conditioning the peasantry to suffer.

 

[Whiskey]

Have to address the elephant in the room that they taste like baked shit first. There is a reason why no one bats and eye at crab,lobster ,and shrimp when they are essentially insects.

I don't get the weird retarded idea that this would be widely accepted beyond it's some fat rich faggots kink to watch people eat bugs

 

[Daily Affirmation]

You know it's a humiliation ritual because you never hear these people say a word about algae farming. Spirulina powder is 60 percent protein and doesn't taste like roach shit,

 

[Sithis]

Cannibalism is a disgusting concept to me, but not more disgusting than eating bugs. If these fuckers really do go through with their plans to force people to either buy lab grown meat or eat bugs, yes, I will be willing to join the cannibal raider gangs that arise to feast on the people responsible.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

A reminder that the derided ‘disgust factor’ is an inbuiltbprotective mechanism called the behavioural immune system. This kicks in when we see something potentially disease causing to us, like a maggot infected wound, or rotten meat. It’s a response to make us stay away from things that can harm us. Oddly, conservatives have a much stronger response and progressives have a much weaker one, and the response is also initiated by stimuli like two men kissing.
I have often wondered if the real political divide is people with a healthy behavioural immune system vs the slaaneshi cultists without

Kiwi Farms, where a female scientist compares people who eat bugs to Slaaneshi Cultists.

 

[Drain Todger]

Out of sheer curiosity, I tried the bugs so you all don’t have to. I tried dried crickets, dried grasshoppers, and even a dried scorpion.

Crickets and grasshoppers have kind of an earthy, herbal taste with a faint hint of shellfish, almost prawn or shrimp-like, but with an unappealing mustiness like a wild mushroom in an old gym sock. They are mostly very bland.

Scorpions taste like nothing at all. They have no flavor (except for the legs, which are faintly lobster-like) and crunch into pieces that are practically self-sharpening and try to cut the fuck out of your gums. They are as hard as rocks.

My opinion was that they were neither particularly good nor offensively bad. The bugs are mediocre. At least, when dried. I have no opinions on fresh bugs, having never tried them. None of them were filling. None of them had any nutritional value whatsoever. In fact, eating them felt like a bout of pica. My father tried them as well, and he had an allergic reaction to them due to his shellfish allergy. In fact, lots of people in the West are allergic to chitin. The cunts pushing for us to eat bugs know this, and they want us to suffer.

Entomophagy is common in a lot of places. In Cambodia and Thailand, people fucking stir-fry locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets and shit and eat them.

You know why they do this? Because they’re FUCKING POOR. If they had a choice, they would be having beef, pork, and poultry like us, but they can’t because they’re poor.

If anyone tells you that you should be eating bugs, it’s because they want you to be poor.

I will NOT eat the bugs. Fucking pedoelites are something else trying to make us eat this shit, and you can bet they will continue dining on wagyu steaks and lobster and caviar while finger-wagging at us how WE'RE the ones destroying the world. Not even medieval tyrants were this brazen.

This. The Davos cunts pushing for this shit will not be eating the bugs alongside us. This shit is like a revival of medieval sumptuary laws. They want to make sure the serfs know their place. Well, we didn’t go through an Industrial Revolution and create an empowered, enlightened middle class for nothing, only for a bunch of demented aristos to try and drag us back to pre-industrial living and turn the planet into their own private adventure park. These motherfuckers have some surprises coming if they think they can get away with it.

 

[More AWS-8Q Than You]

Kiwi Farms, where a female scientist compares people who eat bugs to Slaaneshi Cultists.

That's why we like @Otterly around here. This bug thing though, I rarely even eat sea bugs, just not my thing, I can't imagine actual bugs being much better. I eat more than my bodyweight in proper meat every year and I have no intention of stopping.

 

[Wasabi Wahhābī]

We should force all the fatty fat fatties to eat bugs to solve their food addiction

 

[Involuntary Celebrity]

Because there aren't as many bugs worth eating the farther you get from the equator

if we breed spiders the size of cows maybe people will be more comfortable with it

 

[Drain Todger]

if we breed spiders the size of cows maybe people will be more comfortable with it

If we breed spiders the size of cows, I can think of other uses for them, like riding them into battle like mighty steeds and using them to cocoon globalists.