I HAVE QUESTIONS
For an assignment prompt we were asked to read the following article about the nutritional and ecological value and ethical superiority of entomophagy: Eating insects: good for you, good for the environment. As with so many of our readings, I disagreed with much of it. As none of the links in the piece worked I ended up sitting down and fleshing out all the notes I took while reading and then looked into my own assumptions.
The author noted six points supporting the benefits of eating insects, offered in bold below. Under each is my response.
1) Efficient feed conversion:
“Predatory fish are expensive to raise in aquaculture because they need to be fed fish.”
Not all farmed fish are carnivores. And farmed predator fish, such as salmon, are typically fed pelleted food – with much of the fishmeal and fish oils therein composed of the leftover material produced by the fishing and seafood industries; however, the amount of fish protein being fed to predator fish has dropped significantly, from 70% to 25%, over the last forty years (National Ocean and Atmospheric Association, 2018). And pelleted food isn’t bad. My cat, also a strict carnivore, eats a healthy diet of pelleted food with a specific pH, which is the only reason he’s still alive...
“Herbivores are more efficient, but it still takes 10 kilograms of food to produce 1 kilogram of cow, only half of which can actually be eaten. By contrast, 10 kilograms of feed will produce up to 9 kilograms of insects, of which over 95% can be eaten.”
The claim that it takes 10kgs to produce 1kg of beef is entirely unfounded. The typical number quoted is 7kg, which also appears dubious. Yes, it’s possible to raise a cow on this volume of grains, say, as is done in some US-style feed lots but this is not the norm, common globally, was not done historically, nor is it a possible future for beef production. High priced, healthy, delicious beef that’s treated humanely is grazed on grass and/or the leftovers of food production (cellulose humans can’t consume – converting indigestible roughage into human-accessible nutrition) with little other inputs. When you look at the production ratio of grass-fed beef the rate is not 10:1 or 7:1 or even 3:1 but closer to 2:1 or 1.5:1 (Fairlie, 2010; Monbiot, 2010). For a great perspective on the future of sustainable and humane beef production check out the documentary Steak (R)evolution, which tours France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Belgium, UK, USA, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Japan uncovering best practices old and new. Or for all the gritty details on all sides of this argument see Simon Ferlie’s Meat. About this book, George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian:
This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong [about promoting veganism on environmental grounds]. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case. (Monbiot, 2010)
Moreover, cow, horse, pig, sheep and goat husbandry are absolutely essential to the vegetable production we’ve had and all want and will need going forward. Michael Ableman (expert farmer, urban agriculture crusader, food activist, and co-founder of Sole Food Street Farms, the Center For Urban Agriculture, Cultivate Canada, the Center For Arts, Ecology, and Agriculture, and co-founder of Agrarian Elders) explained, during his 2019 Bateman Lecture, that without large and regular inputs of animal waste no one is growing any vegetables, for anyone other than their immediate family and just for one season, unless they use huge amounts of synthetic fertilizers – those petroleum industry by-products. Where will all this shit come from if not via the sustainable raising of relatively large numbers of ruminants?
And I couldn’t find any evidence for the statement that “only half [of cow production] can actually be eaten.” Assuming this is true, the other 50% is certainly used to feed the other carnivores we keep, such as cats and dogs, and what can’t be is sold to other industries. Everything from soap to gelatin to insulin, from ointments and creams to baseball gloves, footballs and, of course, shoes, belts, and other clothing items. None of this will be replaced by a global cricket industry.
2) Food inputs from waste:
“If we have to catch fish to feed our aquaculture fish we are still dependent on wild caught protein.”
This is not how it works. (See above.)
“If we grow grain to feed our cattle, we still have to use land and fertiliser and water.”
This is generally not how farming works. We mostly haven’t and don’t (and needn’t) feed cows (or pigs or chickens) grains. No farmer sells grains at a fraction of the cost to feed lots if that same product can be sold as human food at 200x the price. (Also, see above.)
“But if we choose to raise insects we can feed them our waste products.”
This is how we typically, historically, and in the future will raise cows (and goats and fish and turkeys and everything else). "Waste" is just money being thrown away. The system is more efficient than that. (See above.)
“Think about it, flies grow on manure. Other insects could grow on agricultural waste products high in cellulose. This transcends efficiency. Growing insects for food could actually clean up the mess made by growing other food.”
There is no such mess or waste made by growing food or raising animals that isn’t already used as a food stock in another part of agriculture web. This is how agriculture works. This is how we feed people. (And, again, "waste" is just a business throwing away money. There is no incentive to not make money when there's a profitable alternative...) We wouldn’t have made it this far without efficient waste-to-food agriculture practices – which has never stopped, even in the era of Big Ag (Ableman, 2019).
3) Less greenhouse gases:
“Cattle produce so many greenhouse gases that a kilogram of beef has an impact similar to driving 250 kilometres in a car.”
I don’t know what this means. And I don’t think the author does. Comparing one kilogram (two steaks?) from a four-year-old thousand pound cow to, what, three hours of driving (?) makes no sense to me whatsoever. (Comparing steaks to kilometres driven is far sillier than comparing apples to oranges...) Further, the GHG produced by a cow comes with all sorts of other outputs, products, and benefits that insects producing zero GHG don’t and can’t – from enhancing grasslands to producing absolutely critical fertilizer for agriculture to, for a personal example, the raw materials for jewelry production providing a livelihood for women escaping human trafficking and, well, thousands of more examples…
“Getting our protein from insects would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
There would be many other impacts aside from reducing GHG emissions if we were to get all or even most of our protein from insects. None are discussed never mind accounted for here. For example, would we still raise animals for their manure, milk, eggs, leather? If not, it appears to me an obscene vision. (How will we grow carrots and beets, not as fun treats but in volumes to survive on, in this fantasy world?) And if we’re still going to raise animals for these and other products but not eat their flesh, well, this feels to me considerably more obscene, wasteful and unethical.
4) Water savings:
“…the production of animal protein requires 100 times more water than protein from grain. This includes the water used to grow the grain to feed the animal, also known as ‘virtual water’. By this method of calculation … 1kg of beef requires between 22,000 and 43,000 litres of water.”
The reliable sources I come up with when I search “how much water for 1kg of beef” are the international non-profit Water Footprint Network, found at waterfootprint.org, the UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and professor Arjen Hoekstra, who works in Water Management in the Faculty of Engineering Technology at University of Twente in the Netherlands. These three sources agree on the number 15,000 litres everything accounted: that's more than 25% lower than the low end of the scale offered by the author of this article (Hoekstra, 2012, 2013; How Much Water?, 2013; Water Footprint Network, 2019).
5) Animal welfare:
“All of our concerns about live animal exports and battery farm hens are based on the need to reduce animal suffering. High density of livestock is necessary for commercial food production but is undesirable from an animal welfare point of view. Insects, on the other hand, are naturally gregarious. Many of them prefer to live in high densities and killing them humanely is possible and easy. No more nightmare film clips from abattoirs.”
I’m not so sure about any of this. I think we all want to limit suffering in the world; but it seems there has been relatively little research done on the ethics of raising, preparing, or eating insects. The little there is suggests we don’t do it ethically. There is a whole Wikipedia page on the welfare of farmed insects. In it is described how research was done by the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums and their Terrestrial Invertebrate Working Group which found the most common form of insect euthanasia was freezing; and, relatedly, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) has determined freezing or boiling of invertebrates to be inhumane (Underwood, Anthony, Cartner, Corey, Grandin, Greenacre, & Miller 2013). This wiki page also gives a list of other organizations which neglect the AVMA guidelines along with an example of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, saying the opposite of the AVMA and recommending freezing as a humane method to kill insects (Welfare of Farmed Insects, 2019). To add to this are the myriad questions I and many others have about how, exactly, killing thousands or millions of animals (crickets, say) is a desirable alternative to killing one (a chicken or cow) – given all the unknowns and very significant assumptions present. The Jains, for one example, don’t hear any of your arguments about complexity or cognition or consciousness or sentience. And it may, very well, turn out that if we ramp up insect production future generations will believe we exploded global suffering for no better reason than the belief that cows are cuter than cockroaches. (#TrudeauBrownFace)
6) Reduced risk of disease:
“Think about the infections that move from animals to people and have frightened all of us: swine flu, bird flu, mad cow disease. These infections are called zoonotics, and they spread because we are similar enough to our livestock to be able to catch their diseases. Insects have a much lower risk of passing disease on to us.”
There are many insect-borne illnesses (bubonic plague, Lyme disease, yellow fever, malaria, etc.) And having never had widespread, commercial level insect production it seems almost absurd to infer that these animals will somehow not cause us grief when most animals have. (#SwineFlu #VapingDeaths)
But all of the above ignores that food is often eaten for sensorial and cultural reasons and not merely to access the 12g of protein locked away. I promise there’s a difference between tuna sashimi and cockroach powder.
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REFERENCES
Ableman, M. (2019, August 7). Royal Roads University Bateman Lecture
Fairlie, S. (2010). Meat: A benign extravagance. Chelsea green publishing.
Grindrod, C. (2016). How Much Grain Does It Take To Produce A KG Of Meat? Retrieved September 15, 2019, from https://www.rootsofnature.co.uk/grain-beef
How Much Water? (2013). Retrieved September 15, 2019, from http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-much-water-food-production-waste
Hoekstra, A. (2012). The hidden water resource use behind meat and dairy. Animal Frontiers, 2(2), 3–8. https://doi.org/10.2527/af.2012-0038
Hoekstra, A. (2013). The water footprint of modern consumer society. London, UK: Routledge.
Monbiot, G. (2010). I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat (but farm it right) | George Monbiot. The Guardian. Retrieved September 15, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/meat-production-veganism-deforestation
National Ocean and Atmospheric Association (2018). Feeds for Aquaculture | NOAA Fisheries. Retrieved September 15, 2019, from https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/feeds-aquaculture
Underwood, W., Anthony, R., Cartner, S., Corey, D., Grandin, T., Greenacre, C. B., & Miller, D. (2013). AVMA guidelines for the euthanasia of animals: 2013 edition. Schaumburg, IL: American Veterinary Medical Association.
Water Footprint Network. (2019). Retrieved from https://waterfootprint.org/en/
Welfare of Farmed Insects. (2019). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 15, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Welfare_of_farmed_insects
