"Parasitic developmental forms were detected in 244 (81.33%) out of 300 (100%) examined insect farms. In 206 (68.67%) of the cases, the identified parasites were pathogenic for insects only; in 106 (35.33%) cases, parasites were potentially parasitic for animals; and in 91 (30.33%) cases, parasites were potentially pathogenic for humans. " Sounds horrific. How does this compare to other food sources?
Other food species, in their wild forms, don't rely quite as hard on a fast generation cycle to solve parasites. If individuals of your species can lay eggs and die before the exponential curve of some infection reaches the steep parts, that's good enough, problem solved. It's the same reason as why short-lived programs require neither free nor GC and why we prefer to not bother with types in one-shot scripts.
I think the brakes should be slammed until that is answered. Unless we want another pandemic. Given the rate of mutation and transmission in bugs with natural gestation and migration, the probability of catastrophic outcomes is exponential without a similar dataset in other human food sources.
exponential has come into popular usage to mean “really high”, i.e. not exponential. I frequently see it used to refer to single values that aren’t even in a time series, or in comparison to one single previous value (“exponentially higher”) when that is, of course, a mathematical impossibility.
It’s similar to how unconscious is now commonly used to mean subconscious (i.e. not unconscious) and literally is commonly used to mean not literally.
It troubles me that our specific words are getting watered down by pop usage, like sharp tools being blunted. This is different than my usual prescriptivist screeching.
> It troubles me that our specific words are getting watered down by pop usage
This is not a new phenomenon; I think we've been able to cope in the past by either clarifying precision by context or adopting new words with the precision we need until they get watered down as well.
> literally is commonly used to mean not literally
I realize at least one dictionary disagrees with me, but I think that's a mistaken analysis of the phenomena. Literally is quite frequently used as an intensifier even when the utterance is meant figuratively, but if it were left out the utterance would not be intended or interpreted as more literal.
I think what is happening is that "literally" is being used as hyperbole, much like any other bit of English can be. It doesn't mean "not literally" in the same way that when someone says "you left me waiting for days" we don't say "days sometimes means minutes" and fret about how anyone will ever measure time again; we rather say that people sometimes exaggerate. None of this, of course, should prevent you from objecting to this use of "literally" on stylistic grounds, or from objecting to individual confusing utterances of any sort.
Right, basically from the very beginning, which IMO supports my position that it's an ordinary use of the same meaning of the word rather than a change in the meaning of the word.
I suspect that is the case here. Though I had hoped that there would be some interesting mathematical model that Shaburn had in mind, because they mentioned something about rates:
> Given the rate of mutation and transmission in bugs with natural gestation and migration, the probability of catastrophic outcomes is exponential without a similar dataset in other human food sources.
The new, certainly exponential variable, is the viral media growth in popularity of eating bugs. Viral(exponential) adoption of consuming bugs will increase the risk of (apparently already great) transmission of deadly diseases as an increasing rate.
This very conversation stands as of evidence of exponential adoption of disease transmission from bug consumption due to online media growth on the subject.
Sorry, could you point me to any exponential increase in the popularity of eating insects?
I don't really see how this conversation is proving anything of the sort. (If it did, could we please talk about eating a healthy balanced diet, too? I'd like to see an exponential increase in adoption of that, just from talking about it.)
The combination of factors makes the chances of a catestrophic outcome increasingly higher as the volume of inputs increases, thus, exhibiting exponential increase in risk until finality.
In practice: in order for exponential growth (or any growth) to happen, things must have been smaller in the past.
Do you want to argue that the risks were so much in the past?
Eating insects is probably about as dangerous as it was ten years ago or twenty years ago. Not all that much has changed, or has it?
If more people are eating insects than before that might increase risks. Are you suggesting that the growth in number of people who are eating insects has been or will be exponential?
Or are you suggesting that risks are growing (exponentially!) from other factors?
So the counter argument you postulated(seemingly to undermine the validity of my argument with a tangential non-sequitur of math term application purism) fails on a principle basis upon further examination, yet we are persisting the thread with definitively unprovable practical application arguments that result from an (assumed) lack of objective related research and the reality that we are discussing forecasting probabilities using reason.
At this point I have to wonder, do you have any vested interest in the insect as food industry? I see you have accumulated many points over a decade and YC is running a few horses in this race.
And we are discussing public health and possible pandemic initiators predicated on nascent scientific research here, no? Dismissal through obfuscation and fallacious intellectual undermining leveraging local social clout?
Mass production and consumption of insects is a recipe for disaster based on this research. The increased rate of mutation between insects and mammals is key driver for concern. Fruit flies are studied for genetic research due to observable rate of change and mutation is one of the key ingredients in catastrophic diseases.
'Asien' didn't misuse any math terms. I don't know why they're being downvoted.
'Shaburn' made some claims that sounded like they want to be math, but didn't make any sense as math. Hence my confusion.
I recognise that people use terms colloquially, like 'exponential', but given all the (pseudo?) sophisticated, math-y language in the comment
> Given the rate of mutation and transmission in bugs with natural gestation and migration, the probability of catastrophic outcomes is exponential without a similar dataset in other human food sources.
I had hoped that Shaburn actually had a more concrete model in mind that they could explain.
1. Number of people eating bug(driven by mimesis pushed through a media narrative and thus typically viral(often exponential).
2. Number of variety of bugs being eaten(regionality and entrepreneurialism((often referred to as Cambrian explosions in perfectly competitive markets, thus exhibiting exponential growth functions)).
3. Number of geographies bugs for consumption being grown in.
4. Number of production methods and processes.
5. New combinations of genetics of peoples and insects/infectious organisms being consumed. Think Montezuma's revenge or lactose intolerance in certain regions of the world except possibly contagious and deadly
Multiply all that by orders of magnitude faster gestation cycle and thus the chance for mutation, aside from technology developed to support existing food chain, Number of mutations per lifecycle, increasing the chances of deadly DNA combination by 12x, so order of magnitude.
Average lifespan of... A. Bacteria: 12 hours B. Insect: 12 months C. Mammal: 12 years (shortest being the primary disease harbinger, the rat).
> At least 2 billion people globally eat insects in over 113 entomophageous countries though this habit is regarded negatively or as revolting by others [4–6]. More than 1900 species are consumed by local populations globally but insect consumption (entomophagy) shows an unequal distribution.
There's roughly 8 billion people on the globe. Between 2 billion to 8 billion, there's not much room left for exponential growth.
Extremely probable as well as extremely dangerous outcome. Analogous to the risk of ruin in finance, not simply an undesirable out probability.
Should we not believe the research above to contain 1/3 insects tested carried pathogenic parasites? Does this not strike you as extreme. Potentially an order or orders of magnitude more dangerous?
The act in isolation. Yes. But When a society eating societies of bugs both increase you get exponential increases in probability of transmission of terminal diseases. This is literally High School biology in the US.
If you eat any sort of processed agricultural produce (wheat, rice, juice, tomato paste etc), you're already eating lots of bugs that got processed along the way.
I was surprised to learn that it is not primarily raw eggs that make cookie dough potentially dangerous, but the flour. The raw wheat that sits in grain towers, that birds sit on top of and pests snack off of, doesn't go through a lot of processing before getting bagged or so I read.
This makes sense to me. When you actually look at farming practises. Trying to maximise the productive load in a space. As usual perfect breeding ground for anything.
Now, how do natural habitats compare? And in those do these parasites affect the reproductive success?
Who are the “we” you are referring to? “Western civilization”?
I lived and worked in Zambia for a while, and there — and possibly in many other countries in Africa — it was common to eat ants, grasshoppers, and caterpillars when they were in season. I never had the chance to taste the caterpillars — and it would probably have been a challenge for me — but the fried grasshoppers and ants were delicious.
Insects also kill more humans there through disease than almost anything right?
Where is any data or scientific research on the volumes or substance of this over anecdotes?
Absolutely, I'm convinced people will keep on eating insects as wealth increases.
It's not out of constrain that people have them in their diet, but it's part of their culinary culture.
Of course, as people get wealthier, new habits form, they are able to afford previously unattainable food, and surely they're will a shift in the diet, but eating insects will not be eliminated.
Humans have been eating insects for a long time. In south africa they eat ants, china they eat scorpio, thailand they eat crickets...
The ants and the scorpio are quite tasty IMO.
On the other hand, I know of places where their casual vegetables are dangerous because their hold traces of animals feces with pathogens but you couldn't tell when buying them.
And finally, I remember eating the best eggs ever from my mother old neighbourg for years. One day friends from the city come, and eating them, get sick. So there is a strong habit component.
The study on insects is interesting but more informations is needed to draw conclusions.
> Humans have been eating insects for a long time. In south africa they eat ants, china they eat scorpio, thailand they eat crickets...
I'm in South Africa. I've never heard of the ants thing, but it is most definitely NOT NORMAL over here to eat those things; rich people may do it as a delicacy, like they would eat caviar, but it never was normal to eat insects over here.
> This might be the main reason why the consumption of insects is largely practiced in rural areas where high levels of unemployment and people with no formal education are found. In addition, people who are unemployed consume edible insects more because they have to do so to meet nutritional requirement needs.
Well, that actually explains why I have not seen or even heard of people eating insects in the 40-odd years that I've lived here: I'm not usually talking to unemployed people in rural areas who face famine without insects.
Unemployed rural people are still in the minority, and that still makes it 'not-normal'. The poor people and unemployed people I see in non-rural South Africa still don't eat insects.
Normal for who ? There are 11 official languages in SA, the population is very diverse, and indigenous people have different habits than city dwellers.
Trivial quantities at the scale of the global population today, not at the scale of local indigenous people for millenia.
If we want to know if insect consumption can be adopted, just looking at industrialized insect farms production given to city folks is going to give us a partial understanding of what's possible.
We need to know things like:
- are those parasites massively more presents in farms than in nature (it's the case for fishes) ?
- what's the probability of the parasites to infects the average consummer ? (We eat parasites all the time)
- if this probaility is high, can a population adapt over time so that this probability goes down ?
> We haven't been eating insects except in times of famine. We have not yet developed methods of dealing with it.
Literally a "What do you mean 'we' Tonto?" statement.
Here in one of the oldest continuously settled by the original arrivals outside of Africa parts of the world (Australia), foods such as the Witchetty grub and the Honey ant are nutrituous high food value, much sought after delicacies and not some kind of "only in a famine" fallback.
