arduinna-jade
replied to your post
“y...you eat mealworms. ?”
Why can’t we just eat lentils and beans
ok so this is actually an EXTREMELY good question and I hope you don’t mind me rambling on for a bit! Why not rely on plant protein entirely? Like, animal agriculture as we know it is terrible, right? It’s shit for the environment, it’s shit for the animals, and it wastes so much water and land and puts so many horrible things into the groundwater (do not google “hog lagoon,” please for your own sake do not do that).
The problem comes from the fact that modern plant-based agriculture ALSO SUCKS! It sucks for the environment, it sucks for the plants (monoculture is death), and it really sucks for the laborers. The fact that big companies can go after small farmers and essentially sue them into suicide is atrocious and one of the greatest failings of late-stage capitalism. But this has been going on a lot longer than we think. Unethical agriculture (both plant and animal) is a historical truth as well; early mass production methods were actually a driving impetus behind chattel slavery in the USA.
So, thinking about that, how do we make food more ethical for humans and for the world around us? Lots of people smarter than me think about this (if this is something you’re interested in, Sarah Taber has this fantastic podcast, Farm to Taber, that’s totally worth listening to), but generally speaking, it’s a dangerous trap to think that a vegan diet or vegetarian diet is ethical based only on environmental impact.
There’s lots of other ethical reasons some people prefer veganism, but if you’re looking at environmental or labor impact, the whole factory system is super, super bad. One thing that I really like about insect farming, however, is that it... can’t... really be done factory style. Compared to other types of farming, it causes very minimal harm to the people in the industry, largely because it actually requires very little human labor. There’s no carcinogenic pesticides, and no backbreaking livestock labor. It doesn’t require migrant work like say, tomatoes in California. It doesn’t provide as many jobs, but it’s a super cheap source of protein that you can raise even if you don’t have space for a garden.
It’s not for everyone, though. I’m not saying we should all just eat bugs! There isn’t one ideal human diet, and it’s a dangerous trap to think there is. Honestly one of the hardest things about existing, at least for me, is knowing that there is no ethical consumption under late stage capitalism. Everything has downsides. So when you make food choices, you have to balance your ideas of what causes the least harm, what you can afford, what you like, and what your body needs. These are not always easy decisions!
So. Why can’t we just eat lentils and beans? Some of us certainly can. But even if we all switched to a plant based diet, that wouldn’t fix our environmental problems. We need to fix the idea of an industrialized diet in general, and I think incorporating insect protein into my diet and talking about why I do it and just getting the idea out there is a possible way forwards.
We’re in a major environmental decline. At some point in the near future, we are going to have a global food crisis. Climate change and rising grain prices have already been linked to political unrest; bread prices fueled the Arab spring back in 2011. If our collective governments can’t get their shit together (they won’t) and corporations don’t stop murdering the planet for profit (they also won’t), it’s extremely likely that climate change is going to make farming both plants and animals even more difficult, and rising food prices are going to affect a lot of people in really strong negative ways.
But, you know what’s really good at surviving heat waves, doesn’t need a lot of water, produces fertilizer that doesn’t need to be packed into an anaerobic lagoon that can overflow and poison people, and is packed with protein and vital nutrients?
Eat up, kittens. They’re slimy, but satisfying.
