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Danish insect farm sets sights on feeding Europe's livestock – Enorm intends to produce more than 10,000 tonnes of insect meal and oil a year
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- Title
- Danish insect farm sets sights on feeding Europe's livestock
- Published
- Jul 17 2024
- Word count
- 583 words
Snowpiercer when?
Jokes aside, I appreciate any efforts and attempts to normalize entomophagy. Wild that shrimp are literal water bugs, yet so much more palatable to the majority of the population than something like crickets
It is very odd isn't it! I'm somewhat creeped out by the simple and common garden potato bugs, and yet I would totally eat a giant isopod. (Especially on ramen)
I think there's something magical about the size of prawns and crawfish, where, once they become nearly bite sized, about the size of larger berries, the brain switches away from the "ew!" reflex towards the "oh food!"
I love that the article you linked on the giant isopod is very specifically one warning consumers from eating giant isopods :)
I've never thought about size coming into play... I grew up eating beondegi (silkworm pupa) and still eat it regularly today. I don't know any other Korean American my age who isn't disgusted by these, lol. I think it was a combination of eating them as a child as well as The Lion King's bug eating scenes that helped me firmly categorize these as food first.
Well, I mean I probably don't want to eat anything pulled from certain waters anyhow (0v0)
So maybe giant isopods that were farm raised or fishes out of clean waters, tested and cleaned properly of bitter squishy bits. I would absolutely eat them.
With regards to beondegi, I don't understand why I'm reacting weirdly. I will gladly eat cordicepts that still look obviously buggy, and these guys are more like bean pods or something in appearance......is it the intermediary nature?
I also have tried and failed to eat balut and noresore, even though I have absolutely no problems eating duck/fish eggs or full grown ducks/eels, and I love noodles + Japanese food in general. I have also never knowingly consumed veal.
The question is: would I be more okay with eating a full grown adult silk moth? They do look white and fluffy and cute, probably pretty decent deep fried. :/
In Florida there are "palmetto bugs" (cockroaches) that are way bigger than most of the shrimp that we eat in Sweden. Even if they turned out to be the healthiest, most sustainable food source on the planet, and was also the only antidote to a deadly poison that I had just ingested, I still think I would seriously struggle to eat a cockroach.
There's ways to "dress up" food though isn't there? Okay so steamed fresh might be a bit much, agree with you on that front.
Even if you were dying? I'm curious about what would make things okay for folks very resistant to certain ingredients, so the following might gross you out, in which case please do ignore. Only if you're up for a bit of thought experiment on how to save your life if you needed this antidote, or to prevent starvation. I'm curious to see where along the line might people change their minds
Suggestions follow for methods used to deal with less palatable ingredients. Writing style somewhat sanitized and not intended for shock.
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Maybe the least offensive.....dried and then ground into powder? Like how they make red food colouring. Assuming it's not bitter of course. What if it turns out to be somewhat sweet and can be added to regular white bread for extra protein?
If the questionable lifeforms have died, and then used by say, algae or fungi or bacteria, and then it is the algae fungi bacteria that's harvested and served up? Kind of like how no one would eat cow or chicken manure but crops grown using it are fine.
Or only as aromatics: they go into a hot wok along with chives, garlic, ginger for about half a minute, and then it's all tossed away before the rest of the dish is cooked.
Or dried and then used as a teabagged up broth ingredient and then strained/thrown out before serving? My mom used to make a lot of Cantonese clear broths and there were some ingredients I stayed away from because it still looked a certain way. Strained out, it was fine.
How's the thought of say, meatball or sauce? Imagine lobster: shelled, then pureed so nothing of the carapace or even the texture remains. Just as a fat and protein additive. Or to improve texture of something like chicken nuggets or fish cakes.
Used in nutritionally complete meal bars or meal powders/shakes?
Edit: anyone else want to chime in on which options would nudge you to a "yes"?
If I can easily pretend it's not there for the entire eating process, then it's fine. There's almost certainly some portion of cockroach ground up in most processed foods, but I still eat those, because it's extremely easy to pretend that they aren't in there. I got the one clean batch, go me! I can't taste or see or smell them and I don't have to think about them. If there was a bag of chips with a picture of a cockroach on the bag and the chips were called "Roach Bites" and the chips inside were indistinguishable from my favorite flavor of Doritos, I could not eat them.
I've actually thought about this a lot. I currently don't eat meat and rarely eat fish or shrimp, so adding bugs to my diet wouldn't be improving much, but if I was going to do that I would need to be lied to. I don't think it's okay for companies to lie about what they're putting in our food, and I don't want to open that door, but I wish that I could opt in to just me being lied to about just this. Tell me it's flour or something.
That last point of yours is extremely interesting and may be important for our futures: maybe we could sell a class of products that may or may not have bugs in them. Big Shrugs: big in flavour, maybe on the bugs. Tagline: who knows, maybe this is one of the bug free bags!
And maybe differentiated product lines: red orange green, with different probability of bug content and priced accordingly.
Would you eat Green Bags if there's a good chance they're bug free? but also small chance they had bugs
Also you specifically mentioned roaches. Are other insects okay?
Fun to think about. However, the FDA requirements of nutritional labels would prevent this I think.
Aww that's no fun :/ once again big government here to ensure our food has no
bugsfun in them. (All jokes aside yes thank you modern food safety standards)Some insects are not a big deal, some others I'm still pretty uncomfortable with, but nothing is nearly as bad as cockroaches.
I don't think the probability system would work because it would inherently remind me of the bugs. Unless it was one of the least upsetting bugs. We had monarch caterpillars on our parsley plants when I was a kid, and they always smelled like pure parsley. I feel like I'd take a 50/50 shot at something being flavored with parsley or caterpillars, if there was some benefit to it being caterpillars.
I don’t see a reason for it. Humans have a disgust reaction to bugs for a reason; they symbolize disease. There is no reason why people need to eat bugs. A spoonful of tiny critters has a very different taste and texture from the animals that people are used to eating.
I never understood shrimp and other shellfish. They are absolutely bugs. They always creeped me out. There is certainly a reason why shrimp is usually served shelled, stripped from the creepy looking legs and antennas.
I do think this is fine for feeding to livestock because they can be fed with agricultural waste, though I do question the article’s comparison to importing soy. Surely farmers don’t need to use soy, do they? Perhaps this is a regulatory problem, where it’s cheaper to import than to use local crops.
I have already done my own aquaponics project and multiple vermicomposting systems, including one large enough to significantly supplement my chickens' feed. I was also a hobbyist beekeeper and mushroom farmer for about a decade. All alongside more "traditional" gardening and homesteading efforts.
All of these seem to be at least "insect-farming adjacent" (I'd argue that beekeeping is 100% insect farming ... just one that we have already internalized, culturally).
So, now I'm thinking about trying other forms.... I was going to ask what the options look like for hobbyist-scale insect farming, but halfway thru this post, I did some searching, and there's definitely resources out there already.
I'm reading thru this right now.
You're very far ahead of me on this but it is something am interested in getting into.
I was thinking primarily of two things: raising bugs to feed my chickens, and using meal worms to eat some of my plastics
Love the naming of the company, very punny; could both be read as "a worm" and "huge".
Enorm, as in "enormous? :) e norm enorm as o-nom-nom-nom?