=food =startups
I've seen
a number of
articles in popular media promoting insects as a key food of the future.
The main supposed advantage is usually greater efficiency. The technical
term is "feed conversion ratio", the ratio of feed to animal mass. I'll use
the acronym FCR for that.
Modern laying hens in commercial operations
have a FCR of ~2.0 for eggs. Modern broiler chickens have a FCR of ~1.6 for
meat. This number has decreased significantly from breeding programs that
produced chickens incapable of much more than eating and growing quickly.
Now, let's consider some insects proposed as food.
Mealworms have
a FCR of ~2.0, which is higher than chickens'. Hmm.
Well, crickets
have a FCR of ~1.5. So, time to overhaul the world's eating habits for that
7% improvement in efficiency over chickens, right? No, crickets are largely
chitin, which is almost indigestible. In terms of food value per feed,
crickets are not particularly efficient.
Why, then, are there so many
articles pushing for eating insects as some sort of environmental
obligation?
Most of those articles were posted because of PR
agencies paid by startups. In 2018 and 2020, the amount of investment in
insect farming startups
increased dramatically.
Why are investors putting hundreds of
millions of dollars a year into insect farming startups? Partly because they
read those articles and current western elites are dumb enough to
believe them. There might also be some rich people who just think it would
be funny to make the plebians eat bugs; I'm not sure.
I think there's
also a signalling component. Some people
proclaim that they
will eat bugs, as a way of signalling their willingness to conform to
changes requested by cultural leaders and the importance of environmental
issues to them. Others
proclaim
that they won't, partly as a way of signalling their distrust of cultural
leaders and their non-membership in that other group, and partly because
they just don't want to eat bugs.
Cultured meat is a related topic.
I don't mean Quorn, which
is based on fungus grown in a vat; I mean actual animal cells, but grown
outside animals.
People keep pushing this, but contamination is a huge problem and the
required inputs are much too expensive;
here's a decent article on that. And what's the benefit - some sort of
marginal advantage over chickens which is currently hypothetical? Modern
broiler chickens are pretty close to being self-contained meat-growing
bioreactors. I can
understand the ethical angle, although chickens are kind of dumb so I feel
that pigs and cows are more of an ethical concern.
Sure, cows require
more corn to get some amount of meat than chickens do, but to me, the whole
point of raising cows is that they can eat grass, and the US system of
raising corn-fed cows is silly.
Instead of needing
sugar and something like
fetal bovine
serum to grow cells, it would be a lot cheaper to use cellulose. And it
would be nice if you had something less sensitive to contamination. If these
criteria were magically met, would the resulting product be really cheap?
Mushrooms meet those criteria. They can grow on straw and sawdust. They're
much more resilient than cell cultures in vats. The "FCR" is quite good too:
some mushrooms give 1/3 the mass of straw or supplemented sawdust -
sometimes higher wet mushroom mass than dry feedstock mass.
And yet,
mushrooms are generally >2x as expensive as chicken meat by mass. I guess my
advice to the people trying to make cultured meat would be to see about
growing mushrooms cheaply first, but that probably doesn't attract as much
venture capital these days.