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Scientific research suggests it might be a good idea to add python to your diet
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- Title
- You Should Seriously Think About Eating More Python, Scientists Say
- Authors
- David Nield
- Published
- Mar 15 2024
- Word count
- 471 words
This article seems a bit disingenuous to me. Yes, pythons have a high food-to-meat-produced conversion ratio compared to other livestock animals, but isn't that because pythons eat meat rather than plants?
Possibly there could be a situation where pythons could effectively recycle meat waste products from other animals into more meat, but there are so many hurdles involved, in addition to health questions of whether it'd be safe for humans to eat the meat of an animal fed entirely by meat unfit for human consumption, with the moral considerations looming on top of it all.
Also, they acknowledge they didn't factor in how snake meat actually tastes, so it may all be moot. Any Tilderinos tried it?
Edit: Missed MimicSquid's comment, which covers the inefficiency inherent to feeding an animal meat to make meat.
Totally. I have a hard time imagining that the authors would make this proposal seriously. "Let's add another deleterious step to this already inefficient process."
On the other hand, maybe we can kick start a population of pythons on beef/salmon. But then feed half those pythons to more pythons and sustain the population in this way. We solve protein with a literal ouroboros.
To answer one of your questions, I have eaten snake meat. King snake iirc. We used to have a cherokee restaurant. They had all kinds of interesting foods.
I found the snake very appealing. Like frog legs, but the gamy element was more earthy. It was in a stew, which is a good way to prepare snake due to meat/bone structure.
First, no. No no no.
Second:
So is this saying we could feed a salmon 15 lbs, get 10 lbs of meat but perhaps 13 lbs of total salmon including byproducts (just making up a number), then feed that 13 lb salmon to the danger devil noodle and get 10.2 lbs of meat back?
Let's standardize the numbers a bit to make it easier. If you fed a salmon 10 pounds of food, you'd get 10/1.5= 6.66 pounds of meat. if you fed a python 10 pounds of food, you'd get 10/1.2=8.33 pounds of meat. The challenge from my perspective is that pythons are carnivores, so you'd be having to raise some other meat animal to feed them. Perhaps it would mean that there would be extensive rodent or insect farming on herbivorous diets to feed the pythons, but at that point if people must have meat, why aren't they eating the rats or insects which didn't require fattening up on meat? A calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie, especially not when it comes to animal husbandry.
And thus, once again we ask the question how we could make the consumption of meat to be more ecologically friendly.
But the answer yet again is simply to just eat more beans.
Want to eat more beans? Head over to Rancho Gordo!
I emailed Adam Ragusea about Rancho Gordo a few weeks ago and last week he put out a video featuring them. He never responded to me but I choose to believe I got him on the Rancho Gordo hype train.
cries in European
The most ecologically friendly meat eating is by hunting invasive species. Go down to the Everglades, python is back on the menu!
This is the key issue that every article about environmentally friendly meat production completely misses. The issues with meat production are all directly caused by or indirectly influenced by culture.
I think everyone knows how many environmental issues that beef production causes, but at the same time beef is still one of the most popular forms of meat, and it’s popularity has been skyrocketing for years. And our cultures are completely unwilling to simply swap out ingredients no matter how good the substitution is. Beef stew without beef is not beef stew.
With that in mind you would be much better off telling everyone to go vegan because you will get far more benefits from that, both personally and collectively. But as countless people can tell you, it’s not going to happen. To get the kind of change on this scale would likely require government intervention, and good luck getting enough support to get that started.
I think a lot of us who are online a lot know about how bad beef is for the environment, but I do not think that anywhere near everyone in society knows that. Like I would suspect significantly less than half. And I suspect that any attempts to educate people would be dismissed as being Woke™ attacks on our farmers. Similar to how natural gas companies got everyone all worked up about gas stoves even though cooking with gas is like 1% of natural gas usage.
If you mean “know” as in it’s something they have on their mind, sure. But I think that the percentage of people who have not heard anything about it is extremely low. Weather or not they have dismissed or embraced the idea is another question entirely.
New people are coming online every day, and they don't know anything to start with. "Today's 10,000", right? Any given bit of information is going to be new to a lot of people, and restatement of the same concept in different ways can engage different people. You don't necessarily have to be saying something new to change a person's thinking for the better.
That's fair. I never meant "everyone" as literally everyone, but perhaps it's lower than I figured.
To be more charitable, I have seen a number of people publicly state they have largely cut out beef from their diets because of the environmental issues, but I've always chocked that to being part of the woke leftosphere.
I think that casually hits upon a point that feels so very true to me: Replacing conventional meat is always going to be a culture shift. You remark upon how doing that culture shift alone, because that culture shift needs scale to become easier. What I also find interesting is that it's still a (personal, in this case) culture shift, regardless of whether I go vegan or go insect meat. I can't just make a insect steak. I can buy a insect-based burger, but I can also buy a soy-based burger. Either way, I have to cut out parts of my repertoire (steak) and adapt others (burgers) because there's just no steak without beef. And replacing that repertoire takes lots of different kinds of effort, which is why (collectively) this culture shift takes forever. So from that perspective, all these newfangled types of meat, be it insect, python or whatever, don't add any options that I don't already have - culturally, less steak, moar beans requires less adjustment than 'less steak, more python', because beans are already part of my repertoire and have less of an icky aspect.
Can you make python steak? I honestly don't know
That was my first thought, but the question I was trying to ask was basically "can we produce a certain amount of edible meat in one animal and get even more meat from a python by feeding it that meat AND the rest of the animal?" So are we essentially doing animal alchemy because pythons have a higher ratio of meat in their body and can digest otherwise indigestible parts of other animals?
The paper defines the metric for the numbers they're quoting there as:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54874-4/tables/4
At the end of the "Results" section, the paper gives what's probably a more intuitive measure:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54874-4#Sec9
I think no one has mentioned that this is an animal that can survive periods of severe drought and famine by going dormant and can as you mentioned digest parts of a carcass that we won't eat.
I have not personally eaten snake but I have eaten alligator.
An important aspect! Every now and then, I read news here in Norway that we've overproduced one type of meat, and have to throw away tons of it. What if instead of throwing it away, we feed it to the pythons? Then months or years after, when there's a lack of meat; butcher some pythons.
What's it like?
Alligator was something I ate at a place in Florida.
It tasted like chicken
I think alligator grilled rather than fried has a slightly fishier taste than chicken does. But same with frog and I cannot remember if I've had turtle but my partner has and concurs.
Slightly different than chicken with a reptile tang would be how I'd describe it if pressed, because I'm not a food critic 😅
The ratio of bone to meat is pretty good isn't it?. And raising them ?. Tastes like chicken ?
I have heard that snake tastes like chicken.