Jess Eats a Scorpion
Todd’s chocolate treats are quite popular at the office. He has eaten a lot of ants, and offered the fine suggestion that insects rank pretty low on the vegetarian karmic hierarchy of edible life forms. He regards sentience on a continuum. Low-neuron count organisms operating off reflexes might garner less respect than organisms capable of thought, or organisms with a centralized brain capable of feeling pain. The idea haunts me as I think of the obvious inevitability of synthetic meat…
And it begged a thought experiment for vegetarians: consider the sea squirt. It is a fine animal, but when it becomes sessile, it digests its own brain. Does it then become a vegetarian delight for purists?
And Todd sent me this study: Energy-efficient food production to reduce global warming and ecodegradation: The use of edible insects
“The authors highlight the relatively stronger sustainability of animal protein production by way of insect farming because, pound to pound, the production of insect protein takes much less land and energy than the more widely consumed forms of animal protein. It is estimated that over a thousand insect species are already a part of human diet and the nutrition offered by several of the species matches or surpasses that which is contained in traditional non-vegetarian foods. The paper also deals with the relevance of entomophagy as a potentially more ecologically compatible and sustainable source of animal protein than the red and the white meat on which most of the world presently depends. In the emerging global pattern based on an expanding share of renewable energy sources, entomophagy fits in as a renewable source of food energy for the future.”
— Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 15 (9): 4357–4360. December 2011
Photo sequence: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/8495508295/#comment72157632826637444
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