The importance of this subject is underestimated and applies as well quite independently of whether humans eat the insects directly or not. Consider the cuban tree frog for example, which has long since initiated its campaign in Florida to host and spread throughout the food chain the rat lungworm nematode. Rat lungworm (angiostrongylus) holds its own in the burgeoning presence of hideous and hostile parasites. It is highly infectious to many species and no picky eater, as it favors the entire body of the host, the brain and all. Burmese pythons are another up and coming host in Florida, and while they might prefer a provincial life in the everglades, many other species will meander north and onward. There are other nasties from nematodes to cestodes and more, gaining new ground. Baylisascaris procyonis is another terrible nematode found almost anywhere in the US, mostly in racoons, but in other species (humans included) with more varying and less frequency and it's often incurable. A study showed that, if I remember correctly, 40 out of 250 wildlife rehabilitation personnel had been exposed, but symptoms varied by exposure load. Both rat lungworm and baylis ascaris are resistant to environmental elements that normally break things down, with baylis even surviving UV light, formaldehyde and extreme cold. Rat lungworm can be deposited on surfaces (eg vegetables), and snails are common vectors. Lungworm is very difficult to remove by washing while baylis is so adhesive that wildlife control authorities advise disposing of rather than washing shovels or tools exposed to racoon latrines. The list goes merrily along with other nasties, but it would require time to refresh my memory and accurately describe more.
The importance of this subject is underestimated and applies as well quite independently of whether humans eat the insects directly or not.
Consider the cuban tree frog for example, which has long since initiated its campaign in Florida to host and spread throughout the food chain the rat lungworm nematode. Rat lungworm (angiostrongylus) holds its own in the burgeoning presence of hideous and hostile parasites. It is highly infectious to many species and no picky eater, as it favors the entire body of the host, the brain and all.
Burmese pythons are another up and coming host in Florida, and while they might prefer a provincial life in the everglades, many other species will meander north and onward.
There are other nasties from nematodes to cestodes and more, gaining new ground. Baylisascaris procyonis is another terrible nematode found almost anywhere in the US, mostly in racoons, but in other species (humans included) with more varying and less frequency and it's often incurable.
A study showed that, if I remember correctly, 40 out of 250 wildlife rehabilitation personnel had been exposed, but symptoms varied by exposure load. Both rat lungworm and baylis ascaris are resistant to environmental elements that normally break things down, with baylis even surviving UV light, formaldehyde and extreme cold. Rat lungworm can be deposited on surfaces (eg vegetables), and snails are common vectors.
Lungworm is very difficult to remove by washing while baylis is so adhesive that wildlife control authorities advise disposing of rather than washing shovels or tools exposed to racoon latrines. The list goes merrily along with other nasties, but it would require time to refresh my memory and accurately describe more.
Hmm. That would come with the more frightening risk of HN community scrutiny, a sort of indelible scabies of the retrospective consciousness. What the hell..
If you're 5, or any age with a palate for insects, especially centipedes [1], cook them first or consider sugar free gummy worms until mom can prepare them properly.
More seriously, it depends largely on behavior, ie personal hygiene, industrial standards, awareness, etc. Some factors are potentially impossible to control, such as invasive species or other environmental factors.
There are older reports similar to [1] where children initiated the infection (of lungworm and other deleterious parasites) by consuming insects, and in some cases spread them to adults. There are many cases of vegetables infecting people too, eg lungworm in Hawaii [2]. Also many other species in man..most other countries.
In one study I read, a large and eclectic sample of vegetables and fruits from scattered European countries showed a high prevalence of infectious parasites in a significant percentage of the batch. Similar studies showed similar and worse elsewhere. One particularly interesting study found a vegetable farm which was frequently down wind of a kennel housing a large number of x (I've forgotten the animal type). The crop was riddled with wind-disseminated infectious parasites -- I forget the type, but it was nasty and somewhat impervious to the elements.
Invasive species, interference with wildlife, development, animal agriculture proximal to veg ag, climate and much more is involved. For anyone who realizes it as a formidable danger, I think the risk is smaller. For most, it's probably not large, but growing and, I personally believe, an insidious factor behind some misdiagnosed conditions.
Parasites are everywhere, with most posing minimal risk. Pinworms, for example, infect a surprising portion of the mighty and developed US population, which is why you can find pinworm medicine on the shelves of any pharmacy. They often go unnoticed, but in some, cause severe itching and further complications if untreated over many years. Children are common carriers and the eggs can be spread on/via dust particles that enter the nose, and by the very fingers that scratch the itch. Thankfully, a single dose of parantel pamoate and a thorough housecleaning usually eradicates the problem.
If you do vist Florida, which has been ill-advised by my HN editor[3], watch what you eat raw. Raw panther would be a great way to get trichinosis, with +20% of them carrying it. Wild hogs too, which is often where the panthers get it. Whether in Florida or Florence, raw foods pose risk, which sucks because they can also be the healthiest.
Indoor/outdoor pets are a difficult situation too. There are more and less serious threats here. I remember finding my best friend with little grains of rice crawling all over his arse. They are a form of tapeworm where fleas are the vector. Oddly, I could have eaten one if I so chose and have remained unaffected. However, if I'd eaten an infected flea, I'd be infected. The progottids of that particular species generally need to be ingested while inside the flea for it to settle in a new host.
Edit: If the cat had laid in or passed over infected raccoon droppings, things could be much worse (think baylisascaris p). The mentioned tapeworms were easily eradicated with a single dose. Nothing works well on the former.
Most American health professionals will dismiss the risk of parasites as trivial, if that is any consolation. But if you prefer to pursue your concern, there is much to read and learn, from entertaining videos of people examining live worms in their restaurant sushi or wriggling through the salmon at Costco, to hard scientific studies and case reports of human and animal infections of many varieties everywhere in the world.
If I've failed to ELI5 or convoluted the subject, it's because it's a huge subject and I'm a mnemonically challenged dilettante with one finger to communicate with today. My advice is to not panic, don't develop complexes, and instead, be aware and learn and apply what you learn practically. And to be extra safe, avoid Florida -- it's getting crowded anyway.
Thanks so much for the excellent comments. You seem familiar with the topic, so a question:
How do you convince a doctor to actually check for parasites?
Two years ago I was bitten by many, many triatomines in a subtropical environment and have recently been seeing symptoms similar to chagas disease, but no doctor I've spoken to is interested in testing for it. I understand it's not an everyday concern, buy the resistance to even try surprises me.
>How do you convince a doctor to actually check for parasites?
Scopolamine and a cattle prod? Actually, if you travelled internationally, it shouldn't take more than a polite request.
I sincerely hope your fears are in vain. I know very little of chagas disease, but it seems early treatment is the most effective treatment. If you have it, you've wasted precious time.
Hindsight would have you plowing through such resistance and demanding the desired tests as you deserve. Perhaps you were too timid. This is slightly odd, with international travel being about the only thing that would have most American doctors considering parasites.
But it's two years after the fact. If I were in such a position, I would resolve to allay my fears and wrest a sure conclusion from the medical bureaucracy. I would take notes of all my symptoms, a chronology of progression, and also adequately inform and prepare myself to hold a compelling dialog with the doctor. Screw their interest. You are the patient and they have responsibilities beyond hurling pills at rote and familiar illnesses. If you test positive, then you may have lawsuit material. If you don't, it may be time to explore other causes or solutions to what ails you, and crucially, you'll have peace of mind about that specific fear. So if you are truly concerned, go demand a test.
I've been researching triatomines and am learning a bit, most of which is not pleasant. I now realize I've seen and even photographed some species. They are in the US, certainly Florida, Texas and many other states. According to an edu source, it's estimated that only 1% of infections in the US are diagnosed or otherwise accounted for.
There's definitely ample credible evidence that the risk is significant and your concerns valid.
I thank you for reminding me of this insect and the protozoa it carries. Credible sources claim it too will be posing problems, increasingly. Current policy, unfortunately, isn't considering it yet. The rising presence of the problem coupled with the tendency for initially asymptomatic infections but often inevitable demise of the host should be taken seriously.
From my reading, a child would be fortunate to only suffer stunted growth. One reason for higher/longer survival rates in adults is the greater volume of the skull tolerating more pressure from the worms and reaction they cause. In children, the inner-cranial pressure is more deadly.
I've never encountered any references to rednecks and baylis, but I've met some that, in hindsight, might clarify and reinforce your note.
You will see a noticeable uptick in engagement with your comments on this website if you add newlines for emphasis, clarity, and readability. You don't necessarily need to put them between every sentence. There is a bit of finesse involved.
That being said, the comment is so excellent and information dense that it largely escapes this potential pitfall.
No offence, but I would rather suggest improving your reading skills. Books don't have newlines or spacing, mostly: do you have issues reading a novel as well? That would be a major problem. But I bet you don't have any issues reading books, because this demand of spacing is a lot stronger among US readers and I bet is mostly cultural rather than a real issue.
Books have paragraphs, which are newlines and indentations, specifically to help people read in the face of what would otherwise be a wall of text.
Being able to read large chunks of text with minimal or no formatting is useful, but so is knowing how to format the text you produce so it's easier for people to consume. We should all strive to be capable of both.
Most books paragraphs are larger than an HN comment without spacing. Since the ability to read books is crucial, it is better to exercise the skill of reading text without spacing than asking commenters to add them.
Books have an incentive to minimize whitespace, as it costs money (paper). Computer screens don't have this limitation so the cost: benefit calculation is different.
What I mean is that book length content has paragraphs longer than single not spaced comments. Thus it is very odd that readers have issues with one but not with the other. Moreover making it too simple to parse comments and social network posts, creates users that struggle to read more complex content: as a society we don't want that.
In this case it's like if there were centuries of already written code with huge value, all written without comments. You don't want to limit the ability of programmers to read it. However things are very different in their dynamics: reading text without well separated paragraphs is mostly a matter of habit: a simple skill to achieve, so discouraging this ability has very little return. Lack of comments make reading code a lot harder in certain cases, especially since many informations in the comments are non local.
Also I'm not against proper formatting of posts. Just if it's not separated in paragraphs readers should so the small effort of doing it mentally, instead of complaining. Similarly I'm not against code comments (but strongly in favour).
Btw I replied for the sake of argumenting but the two things are not comparable. Just so this test: splitting text written by others in paragraphs is a very easy task you can do just reading the text one time. Commiting code you don't yet understand is impossible: many informations you should write are not implicitly in the code. It's the contrary actually: most good comments are about things that are not evident.
Redis is an excellent codebase and an extremely useful piece of software. I am a very grateful user.
I'm just mystified by the idea that functions, modules, and paragraphs are not only useful, but expected, while newlines in HN comments are not.
The best answer I can come up with is that internet etiquette and formatting is constantly evolving. If that's the case, I don't see the issue with suggesting a formatting that might be more effective or accessible.
I see your point. However, books have a few advantages that allow reading them with less issues:
1) higher resolution (printed letters are better seen by the eye than the average letter on a screen)
2) narrower lines (easier to spot the next line)
3) at least a bit more spacing between lines
Finally, when the topic is not fiction, but stuff that requires a lot of attention to digest, perhaps paragraphs and newlines can improve the reading experience.
p.s. you probably meant offense with an "s" (I used to do the same typo, and we're both Italians)
I just picked a book at random: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. First thing that popped into my head. Scanning through the first chapter (thanks to Project Gutenberg) I easily found a paragraph that looks larger than the discussed comment, starting with "Lord save me, thinks I". Indeed has 520 words, which is almost twice the comment's 277. I'm with Antirez here: dumb Americans who can't read and all that.
Though anyone reading using a wide browser window on a desktop will be facing long lines; don't blame the big paragraph for poor readability due to line length.
> I just picked a book at random: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.
I think that's a poor example - Moby Dick isn't exactly praised for ease of casual reading (and internet comments should definitely fall in the category of casual reading. Relative ease is a choice, and the parent comment was just suggesting that the other comment would find wider reach if it were easier to parse)
> I'm with Antirez here: dumb Americans who can't read and all that
I seem to have no trouble finding big paragraphs. Opening one from "Fall of the House of Usher" by E. A. Poe. 389 words.
DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Cultural issues are as real as any other issues...
Isn't it much easier to make an easy neutral change to your writing that will be positive for some readers than to assert their culture should learn to read better?
Following your reasoning we should all do efforts to translate all the documentation of all the software available in many languages, a major amount of work, instead of asking developers to learn English. And learning English is a major undertake compared to read comments without spacing.
Larger animals can be inspected individually to find pathogens or diseases.
Insects are so small that it's practically impossible to inspect each individual organism. You can do sampling of the batch, but the odds of missing bad ones are still high.
Same with the fruits and vegetables, some are easy to inspect, others are almost impossible, or impossible to clean. There are kosher (insect-free) versions of lettuce and some berries which are much more expensive than non-kosher ones.
Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system. Religious dietary laws and cultural taboos are probably partly developed from disgust, and partly from trial-and-error.
> Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system.
This is the most important bit.
Too many "rationalists" who otherwise preach evolution all the time forget to notice that our sense of disgust is also evolved just like everything about us for the purpose of survival and reproduction and is not just some annoying irrational quirk that gets in the way of doing the right thing.
I thought the generally accepted science was that humans can learn disgust reactions socially, so that they are more adaptable on a non-evolutionary timescale.
> The disgust system is a psychological mechanism for producing pathogen avoidant behaviour [10–12]. In previous work, we have stressed the universality of disgust, showing that there is much that is similar about disgust responses between animals and humans, between humans and over historical time [11,13]. However, there is also much that differs between individuals and between social groups. In this paper, we look at disgust and disease avoidance behaviour in human individuals and in human social groups as an adaptive system. Natural selection has produced a solution to the problem of hard-to-detect parasites by designing a system that is sensitive to local information about infection risk. This system responds to parasite pressure not just over evolutionary time, but over lifetimes, using what cues it can. This may be information about an individual's current state, its history of sickness and exposure to disgusting experiences, or what it has learnt from the local culture and from the hygiene practices of others.
There's a strong cultural component when it comes to disgust. People in many parts of the world eat insects regularly as a part of their standard diets. In the US, most people don't think of honey or lobster (aquatic arthropod) or carmine (red food coloring) as "insect food" but these items most definitely fit in that category and are commonly consumed.
In the past, people in the west found yogurt, sushi, and lobsters absolutely disgusting. Now many will happily eat those foods, and even consider them delicacies.
Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.
> Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.
Curious if you've got a source for that, because I've lived with 3 infants and every one of them was delighted by the squishiness of poop and needed to be taught that disgust response.
The greyness of your comment possibly indicates it has been deemed bigoted. It's relevant regardless. The subject of human parasitology certainly shows geographic and cultural distributions. One example is a strange case of neurocysticercosis, perhaps the most common cause of epilepsy and result of taenia solium or pork tapeworm. The case I recall involved a Jewish family, all infected and symptomatic. Doctors had difficulty discovering the source due to both assumed rarity of the disease and the preclusion of pork in a kosher diet. The eureka was the servant, who did not practice a kosher diet. Because this worm can lay 80k eggs per day, all of which are small and sticky, they tend to accumulate under fingernails, presumably as a result of grooming and outlier of hygiene. There are numerous parasites that are either or both geographically and culturally concentrated. In the US, neurocysticercosis is most common in California. According to sources not my own, this is due to the larger population of individuals who come from areas where swine handling is more common, along with certain mitigation practices or lack thereof. The French have a higher rate of toxoplasmosis, possibly due to, eg steak tartare. There are many examples.
> Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.
Others are learned by experience. I used to like peppermint a lot, until one day in uni I poisoned myself by drinking half a bottle of peppermint schnapps. Ever since then, for many years, the smell of peppermint makes me dry heave and physically gag uncontrollably. I cannot tolerate peppermint at all, something in my brain 'learned' that peppermint is a poison and won't tolerate it.
It literally says that what we evolved was a system that can learn that something is bad via society like eating dogs and horses vs eating pigs and cows. The pig eaters and the dog eaters aren't overriding anything, because they didn't learn it in the first place.
It invalidates it because you're saying disgust is evolutionary. The response is saying it's largely cultural, thus something that triggers disgust is not going against some "evolutionary truth" but is rather just another learned behavior.
If it's purely cultural and has no connection to reality then it should have "evolevd out" of us. But it hasn't. Being influenced by culture is part of how the system works. The reason you learn disgust is you can't afford to learn by trial and error so you outsource to society.
Now if you think you're a smart ass and decide to "override" the cultural "indoctrination" that makes you find insects disgusting, what do you think is the likelihood that you are the one who is right?
In all likelihood you will find out after some time that you made a huge irreversible mistake.
Social transmission is an evolved trait that is beneficial, and transmitted disgust that prevents disease spread is absolutely one reason it might be beneficial.
I didn't eat scrambled eggs for ten years or so after once choking on a forkful when I was around seven years old because I found them absolutely disgusting.
It's still not economical to test e.g. every single pig for roundworms, especially since they do not create clinical symptoms in these hosts and a direct test is rather expensive. But they can pose a significant risk to humans who eat undercooked pork and in the past about 5 percent of Americans were estimated to be infected at any given time. This has only gone down thanks to modern production standards that eliminate or drastically reduce exposure to wild animals that may transmit the disease. Compared to farm animals it's actually pretty easy to contain insects in an environment where they can't get infected with foreign pathogens, since people don't really care about freely roaming larvae.
I've read a medical research paper about the resurgence of some nasty parasitic disease in Israel with the breakdown by religious community[1]. Turns what? The stricter the dietary laws for the community were - the less infections occurred.
And we're talking about sheep here, which is similar in size to pig. There are might be a confounding variables here though, i.e. some communities are mostly urban, others are more rural ones. Or maybe sheep meat is less popular among less infected. Or maybe the animals were smuggled from the "West Bank" which is endemic, and veterinary control services are not strict there if existing at all.
--
[1] they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone.
> they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone.
Eh? Given the location, I'd assume Jewish (Orthodox), Muslim, Jewish (Non-Orthodox), Christian, in descending order of dietary rule strictness. Not sure how that would offend anyone; the applicable dietary rules are hardly a secret.
So keep in mind the world eats basically European cuisine. It is for this reason that in Paris yes food is great but nothing is exotic because eg Duck á la Orange is known everywhere (and it was particularly exported in the 20th century, and particularly with the Green Revolution). And it's made to suit Europeans, so it seems like the restrictions are lax but actually European Christian diets are baked into the sanitary codes. So like shellfish. Wilbur Wright died of shellfish, and many others, he was the son of a bishop. The thing is Christianity and especially European Christians dominate the culture around food in the West, have tons of cultural export. So they're the default, so it looks like they don't care. But oh man do they care. When they travel they get special bottled water, say.
And it's the most typical thing to have dietary restrictions, for a long time I avoided fish for mercury while eating crazy doses of fish oil, a brain damage recovery diet, Christians accommodated that. It just never came up as a religious doctrine, it's fine. The Christian usually has idk type 1 diabetes, that's restrictions, or is an athlete, that's restrictions, or is a woman seeking to lose weight that's like 80% of women right there, that's restrictions. Bodybuilders are much more restrictive than Orthodox Jews.
Orthodox Jews seem very restrictive, and yes they totally are, but while it is partly because they make basically no concessions, and are part of a powerful ethnic group in America, meaning they have power everywhere, like newspaper editors, practically if not literally all producers, a good share of politicians, bankers, what else...well they also have been a fractionally small highly persecuted (on-and-off) minority for thousands of years.
In agreement, let me cite the exception that proves the rule: Charterhouse monks. Eat no meat absolutely ever. I think do eat fish, so fish on Fridays is a Christian thing.
> possibly to a human giving their best GPT-3 impression.
Also commonly accused of mental illness, you gotta look at both sides of the story.
I guess the reason people are like "no no no no!" is first, truth, second, not being afraid of being accused of bigotry--don't want to be bigoted, but also not willing to err on the side of not being accusable. Just being straight. Then, further you have the act of going through mental illness and coming out of it with a clean bill of health--unheard of. Afterward, hamming it up. I could if desired be totally neurotypical, without medication (I did hear one case of this), n I identified everything that was hosing me. F atoms especially.
But I love my poor beleaguered soul, it's been through so much, why change it?
They don't, but they sympathize. And I did spend every second I could in America, absolutely every single second I could. The Non-Orthodox generally buffer the Orthodox strictures. Like demanding all lemonades they carry have the U in a circle symbol, kosher.
And no problem with that, I am unique in my ability to prove my pro-Semitism. I like Orthodox intolerance of, essentially, being poisoned. They take the heat for a lot of society's pure food and drugs.
That's not racial immunity, it's probably an alcohol-induced "immunity" or resistance.
Visigoths probably drunk much more alcohol than Jews, which is a good disinfectant. In the old times it was even part of the soldier rations in some armies.
Some Visigoths converted to Islam and migrated to Morocco, but even after their conversion they still had a reputation of heavy drinkers.
For 10 years I was a pescetarian, until one time I tasted a beef carpaccio, and it was both edible and tasty (before that I wasn't even thinking about meat as a food). So I started eating raw meat dishes like steak tartar, but I always drunk a shot of something strong for safety, until one day I understood that it's unnecessary.
This sounds pretty absurd and I can't find anything on Google about native Spaniards having any kind of special immunity to "bad pork", specifically pork tapeworm or any of the other common pig parasites. So if you've got some links I'd love to read more.
Not bulletproof but it comes with the cultural norms around cooking pork. In combination the cultural norms and the immunity mean pork isn't forbidden like it was by Moses in the Bible. That was the equivalent of a public service announcement for the early Jews, there was nowhere to say "don't eat this it'll kill you" than in one of the books of Moses. That message couldn't be separate from the Bible, everything was conveyed in the Bible.
But like a Spaniard eating nearly raw pork doesn't die. Extrapolate for bad pork, he'll spit it out if it's bad.
.
And since when does your one-cent Google search trump my traveling to Spain in person?
I had thought that pork that was handled carelessly was just more prone to foodborne disease, and that happened to be the case at that time--not something genetic like lactose intolerance. It's pretty recent that Americans are even now okay with rare pork, and that's because improvements in preparation reduced the risk. For that matter, there's nothing all-that-magical about chicken that it can't be eaten raw in theory, it's just that salmonella is very very common.
could you elaborate the last sentence of this comment?
I'm afraid I don't see the connection between innate immunity and service anouncements or writing things down, but its probably me being thick even though I'd like to understand.
Like eating pork that wasn't cooked very well, no problem. Or bad quality pork, perhaps.
In America it's irrelevant, the bacon is pre-cooked to high standards and comes from good sources. Partly because secular Jews eat that pork having no cultural norms around it, just driven by it being forbidden. They're vulnerable.
It's genetic, just like a certain tribe of Pacific Islander developed a partial immunity to prions, because they sometimes ate human central nervous system. It's genetic.
Insects and crustaceans (shrimps, lobsters, etc.) are closely related; I always joke that shrimps are just under water bugs. Lots of people that are disgusted by one, enjoy eating the other. Disgust is mostly cultural and learned. Obviously, some of our gag reflexes are about detecting things that are bad. Like rotting meat or things that have gone off.
But then we ferment and rot lots of things intentionally and the products related to that are loved in some parts of the world and found disgusting in other parts of the world because they trigger the same reflexes as food that has gone off. E.g. a lot of Chinese people might not enjoy french cheeses and likewise the french might not appreciate some the fermented soybeans and eggs that are popular in China. And they eat snails, which with a lot of garlic and butter are actually not horrible but also not something everyone enjoys.
Anyway, if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that. Cleaning that is a percentage game. Likewise with organic produce you buy at the market. Small mites, spiders, etc. The occasional bigger bugs you might wash away. But a lot of smaller ones end up in your food. It's fine. We've evolved to be omnivores. Most of that meats with the acid in your stomach and gets broken down. Some of the parasites are a bit more nasty and actually can become an issue. Guess how those end up in your stomach. You eat/drink them.
Probably intensive farming of fish, ducks, chickens, or bugs does not result in the healthiest animals. Unhealthy animals get sick. Eating sick animals is risky. There are some signs that covid happened like that and there have been other examples of diseases spreading from animals to people via farmed animals traded in poultry markets or wherever.
> Insects and crustaceans (shrimps, lobsters, etc.) are closely related ...
One important difference: salt-water animals (including crustaceans) harbor parasites which are less compatible with humans, for them humans are dead-end, they can't close the complex reproduction cycle. Land insects and fresh-water crustaceans (e.g. crayfish) are much more dangerous for humans. Lobster sashimi is much safer than eating a raw crayfish from a river or lake. The latter can cause a serious lungs disease.
> if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that.
> One important difference: salt-water animals (including crustaceans) harbor parasites which are less compatible with humans, for them humans are dead-end, they can't close the complex reproduction cycle. Land insects and fresh-water crustaceans (e.g. crayfish) are much more dangerous for humans.
Nice point. The flip side is that with land based insects the parasites can close the cycle with humans/mammals and hence insect consumption can be more risky.
(Parent comment)
> if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that.
Eating food with the occasional insect that has gotten through (e.g in a vegetable or salad) will not be as risky as eating large amounts of insect mass. The probability of then getting a parasite or disease then will be much higher. Its just mathematics.
This is exactly why I don't eat shell fish. I have always thought they look like underwater bugs and the thought of eating them is revolting. I am fine with others eating whatever they want, and my wife eats them but its just not for me.
I think bivalves are usually considered shellfish and they just look like muscle. Except for oysters, which look like snot or something and I'm unsurprised when people don't want to eat that.
I recently learned that Rambam[1] advised against eating fruits, even though they're perfectly kosher. Turns out he noticed he noticed that people can get sick from fruits, but back in the day they weren't aware about harmful bacteria and the fact that you need to wash them.
I was told to always split the apple into two halves, and check that there is no non-kosher meat inside;) Have no idea whether that's an actual kashrut requirement, or it was a joke.
Salmonid species (salmon, trout, char, et al) carry nematode parasites that can infect humans. Before salmonid sushi can be eaten, at least in the US, it is required to be frozen, killing the nematodes. Large trout species like rainbow trout are sometimes served as sushi -- I imagine species size and susceptibility to freezing damage factor in too.
Other freshwater fish like sturgeon are also served as sushi.
Religious laws like kosher and halal laws didn't develop from disgust. They engrained disgust to steer people away from contracting trichinosis. That was an exceedingly practical way of putting out a public health message prior to the advent of mass literacy.
When my Jewish grandparents came from Ukraine to the US in the 1930s they'd never even considered or been presented with the possibility of eating pork... so famously, my grandma who didn't speak English went into a butcher shop in Baltimore bought a bunch of bacon without understanding it was pig, and fed a piece of it raw to my father, who was a baby... and the butcher apparently shouted at her not to feed that raw to a kid. Which baffled her.
Equally baffling to me, I had a beer at the Munich Hofbrauhaus and watched a kid eat a pile of pork tartare.. which looked delicious.. but when I asked, he seemed shocked. He told me there's no trichinae in Europe now, and it's normal to eat raw pork in Germany..
Similarly like only after living 7 years in Israel I discovered that "white meat" is an euphemism for pork.
Also the reality is much more complex. We tend to project our current understanding into the past. The reality of keeping Kashrut back then wasn't as we understand it today.
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The lifestyle of Eastern European Jews from the beginning of the 20th century until World War II - between keeping the mitzvot and secularization [Hebrew]
“ When my Jewish grandparents came from Ukraine to the US in the 1930s they'd never even considered or been presented with the possibility of eating pork”
I don’t understand how that could occur, since a great deal of pork is produced in Ukraine, both now and historically.
This might explain how wild deer develop prion diseases. My understanding is that they aren't eating the nervous tissues of other animals but perhaps an insect, parasite, or other lifeform is providing the infection.
Deer getting CWD from the soil wouldn't be unprecedented. Sheep get anthrax that way. Animals that keep their head down eating stuff off the ground are particularly susceptible to soil-borne infections.
"Prions bind to plants and bound-PrPSc efficiently sustain prion replication
Roots and leaves were washed thoroughly and analyzed for the presence of PrPSc by serial PMCA (Morales et al., 2012). The results show that even highly diluted PrPSc can bind to roots and leaves and sustain PrPC conversion (Fig. 1A). [...] However, both roots and leaves capture PrPSc efficiently, even at very small concentrations, equivalent to those present in biological fluids, such as blood and urine (Chen et al., 2010).
Animals can be infected by oral ingestion of prion-contaminated plants
After exposure, plants were extensively washed 5 times with water and animals fed with dried material orally. [...] All animals that ingested prion contaminated leaves and roots developed typical prion disease. Although the incubation times were significantly longer in animals ingesting prions attached to leaves and roots as compared with those fed directly with the brain material, the differences were not as high as one could have expected (Fig. 2A)."
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Something developed sporadic prion disease (in humans its called "Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease": https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29887134/ ), died from it, plants grew on the fertilized land and were eaten by deer, the cycle repeats.
CWD-infected deer shred prions in urine, feces, probably saliva too (the aforementioned paper mentions that this is enough for plant-mediated infection), a trait shared with scrapie-infected sheep, hamsters and, i assume, BSE-infected cows.
"Oral exposure to prion-tainted blood, urine, saliva and feces have been suggested as modes of transmission for CWD and scrapie among herbivores susceptible to these diseases. Both CWD and scrapie infection is thought likely to enter the body through gut-associated lymphoid tissues, in Peyer's patches in the alimentary tract. Moreover, the presence of the infectious isoform of the prion protein, designated PrPSc, in Peyer's patches suggests alimentary shedding of CWD and scrapie prions into feces. [...]
When noninfected Syrian hamsters were cohabitated with Syrian hamsters orally infected with Sc237 prions, we observed 80–100% infection rates within 14 days after oral challenge."
Also, birds can spread prions in their litter:
Crows don't digest prions, may transport them to other locations
"Crows fed on prion-infected brains from mice can transmit these infectious agents in their feces and may play a role in the geographic spread of diseases caused by prions, such as chronic wasting disease or scrapie."
Perhaps because insects are more evolutionally distant from humans, than mammals for example. That doesn't mean that it's true, but this could be why someone migh assume that it's true.
Luckily, even most mammalian prions have some troubles jumping between mammal species.
For example, sheep scrapie can be transmitted to primates in laboratory, but to date considered non-transmissible to humans in nature (fortunately, as it is insidious and regulations on sheep and goats slaughter are laxer than on bovine):
Transmission of scrapie prions to primate after an extended silent incubation period
"However, one cynomolgus macaque exhibited obvious neurological signs more than 9 years (110 months) after intracerebral exposure to a high dose of a sheep classical scrapie isolate (25 mg of brain)."
BSE prions are much more infectious, not only for humans and ruminants, but for other species too, for example, cats and hamsters.
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Personally, I don't expect fish or insects to be sources of infection, only potential (if relatively unlikely) transmitters.
That said, apparently nearly everything can be transmitter for prions:
* Fish have prion proteins too (currently, no fish prion diseases are known):
"To date, the occurrence of TSEs in lower vertebrates like fish and birds has received only limited attention, despite the fact that these animals possess bona fide PrPs."
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* Birds can transmit prions in their poop, spreading them at great distances (keep it in mind when clearing bird feces):
Crows don't digest prions, may transport them to other locations
"Crows fed on prion-infected brains from mice can transmit these infectious agents in their feces and may play a role in the geographic spread of diseases caused by prions, such as chronic wasting disease or scrapie."
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* Insects and parasites can be prion infection vectors:
Could ectoparasites act as vectors for prion diseases?
"Fly larvae and mites were exposed to brain-infected material and were readily able to transmit scrapie to hamsters. New lines of evidence have confirmed that adult flies are also able to express prion proteins."
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* Plants are acting as prion vectors:
Grass plants bind, retain, uptake and transport infectious prions
"Prions bind to plants and bound-PrPSc efficiently sustain prion replication [...] These results indicate that leaves and roots can efficiently bind PrPSc, which remains able to catalyze PrPC to PrPSc conversion, leading to prion replication. [...] After exposure, plants were extensively washed 5 times with water and animals fed with dried material orally. [...] All animals that ingested prion contaminated leaves and roots developed typical prion disease. Although the incubation times were significantly longer in animals ingesting prions attached to leaves and roots as compared with those fed directly with the brain material, the differences were not as high as one could have expected (Fig. 2A)."
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* Excrements can transmit prions, thus coprophagous animals, insects included, can too:
"Oral exposure to prion-tainted blood, urine, saliva and feces have been suggested as modes of transmission for CWD and scrapie among herbivores susceptible to these diseases. Both CWD and scrapie infection is thought likely to enter the body through gut-associated lymphoid tissues, in Peyer's patches in the alimentary tract. Moreover, the presence of the infectious isoform of the prion protein, designated PrPSc, in Peyer's patches suggests alimentary shedding of CWD and scrapie prions into feces. [...]
When noninfected Syrian hamsters were cohabitated with Syrian hamsters orally infected with Sc237 prions, we observed 80–100% infection rates within 14 days after oral challenge."
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* Even dust can transmit prions:
Circulation of prions within dust on a scrapie affected farm
"Using protein misfolding cyclic amplification we demonstrate that scrapie PrP(Sc) can be detected within circulating dusts that are present on a farm that is naturally contaminated with sheep scrapie."
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* Even ashes from not sufficiently hot cremation can transmit prions:
Infectivity studies of both ash and air emissions from simulated incineration of scrapie-contaminated tissues
"We investigated the effectiveness of 15 min exposures to 600 and 1000 degrees C in continuous flow normal and starved-air incineration-like conditions to inactivate samples [...] yielded a total of two transmissions among 21 inoculated animals from the ash of a single specimen burned in normal air at 600 degrees C."
I wonder, how bad is prion contamination of the Ganges river in India?
Can't cooking solve this problem? Rare meat is problematic for this reason. Also my understanding is that some traditions in Judaism and Islam even for allow insect consumption.
Yes, there are 4 types of locust that are edible according to Kashrut, but my understanding that it's mostly for the environmental reasons - because migrating locusts causing so much damage to agriculture - the Rabbis permitted to eat them (similarly as some vegans are saying that oysters can be eaten since they're sustainable and clean the oceans).
Lately I heard another explanation by Prof. Yigal Bin-Nun[1], that when so called "Judaism" became an organized religion it simply assimilated the previously existing dietary norms and taboos. And the pork wasn't eaten in the entire area even before the first mention of the Israelites. The exception being the Philistines who brought a European pig and wild boar to Canaan. Recently there was a DNA research paper which confirmed that the wild boars in Israel are of European origins, not local ones.
So according to this theory it might be that locusts "whitelisted" by "Judaism" when the Himyarite kingdom was converted, probably because locusts were already consumed before the conversion. Of course it's only my speculation.
EDIT: yet another theory is that pork was prohibited b/c swine shares some similarity with human anatomy and thus both species can share common diseases. So it was prohibited to eat in order to prevent epidemics/pandemics. There is some mentions of this in Jewish sources, but it mostly sounds like an afterthought.
>> similarly as some vegans are saying that oysters can be eaten since they're sustainable and clean the oceans
Never heard that argument, but it seems like a misunderstanding. Peter Singer made the point that oysters have no nervous system and are therefore as plant-like as animals can come and probably non-sentient. The fact that oysters clean the oceans would also be a pretty strange argument. That's why there are so chock full of contaminants and pathogens in most places and many countries have special allowances to make them street legal when virtually any other food with the same toxin contents would be banned.
Beans and legumes are some of the healthiest foods you can eat, being high in both fiber and a range of beneficial phytonutrients. There is no high-quality evidence that lectins in properly prepared beans cause any health problems.
I once heard (not sure if it's true) that the Islamic rule for not eating pork was mostly a practical one, because at the time the rule was formulated it was easier to get sick from eating pork relative to other meats.
I thought most mass manufactured foodstuffs are irradiated in the West (but I somehow assumed X-ray tubes were used since they could be switched on and off, although a source may be cheaper...)
as I thought pair production is irrelevant in food irradiation
the tolerable limits in particle energies and doses are very high for truly tiny increases in induced radioactivity. its really marginal as long as the very conservative limits are respected.
Sounds good to me. From a medical standpoint, I'm aware that irradiated food is perfectly safe. It's the political utility of saying "no residual radioactivity" that I was focused on. But I guess positrons probably aren't much different from electrons in causing that.
I’ve wondered about this for a few years so this is extremely gratifying to read. I’ll have to go in deeper later to really understand the implications of each parasite, but my main takeaway is that my intuition here was way off. I expected insects to pose far fewer risks from parasites to humans.
I wouldn’t have taken a chance based on that assumption, and cooking bugs seems like it would eliminate most of these pathogens, but still. I figured it would be safer.
I’d need to read a lot more to draw some kind of comparison between insects and animal agriculture (both seem to carry plenty of baggage), but it’s great to see research like this so it’s possible to begin doing so.
>my intuition here was way off. I expected insects to pose far fewer risks from parasites to humans.
Weird, my intuition was the exact opposite. The thought of eating bugs triggers a disgust reaction, similar to the thought of eating crap. Humans developed those reactions over hundreds of generations for a reason.
Anything to do with eating any meat can be dangerous.
We don't know why religions banned certain meat. Anthropologists etc give us post facto rationalisations, and, to my mind, even the holy books might be retrospective excuses.
There are two main reasons why religious books of law ban certain behaviors:
- to encode social and higienic rules as understood at the time
- to signal heressy, prohibiting a common practice carried out by heretics (double points if it is a practice central to those heretical beliefs).
For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled.
> For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled
Is pork any more prone to spoilage, or spoilage-related health risks, than other meats?
My understanding is that the health risks from pork relate mainly to the transmission of disease and parasites in undercooked pork, not spoilage.
Re:spoilage Even if there's nothing specific to pork, the size of the animal may present that challenge. it's harder to time the slaughter and butchery if a larger animal. If you've been raising an animal for a year, you're going to want to eat all the meat. So you need to save it for celebrations, or barter, or eat meat that's been sitting around. Pigs are pretty big, assuming all domesticated animals have increased in size roughly equally.
But the kosher prohibition isn't "don't eat meat slaughtered a week ago", which would be easy, it's about cloven hooves.
The other hypothesis I've seen put out there is that viruses tend to have an easy time jumping from (living) pigs to humans. We think of the flu as relatively minor now but without clean water it would be a big deal.
Thanks for the advice. I try to have it enabled in all edit tools and browsers, but some will not allow it in two languages at the same time, and setting it in mobile to a language other than the main OS language is not trivial. And I haven't found how to enable spell check on Firefox mobile.
We have lots of written history that validates his generalization and zero reason to believe that peoples who's records did not survive would have done those same things for different reasons.
This simply isn’t true. From a health as well as safety standpoint, chicken correlates with worth health outcomes and definitely leads to more illnesses.
We are not talking about quantity, we are talking about severity. Plus, you can't use modern data for this because modern stock raising methods mitigate a lot of the dangers from pork.
The parasites from undercooked pork can be very dangerous.
Why wouldn’t we use modern data? We’re not living in the past.
Are you talking about trichinosis? I can see that being more problematic than salmonella in historical contexts, but again, it’s highly treatable today and rarely fatal if it isn’t treated.
Am I missing some other kind of infection?
Edit: Now I see it, you were referring to the past in the parent comment. I’ve confused this thread for another - sorry about that!
I'm intrigued that you can recognize fried or minced pork by smell and distinguish it from beef or poultry by smell alone.
I know a lot of people have an aversion to mutton as it can have a very gamey aroma to it, but I wasn't aware people perceive pork as similarly intense.
They smell very distinct to me as well. Just as they taste much different, they smell different in similar ways to me.
I think turkey, duck, and chicken are distinct while cooking as well. I’d have a hard time distinguishing gamey meats, though. I couldn’t tell you if it’s venison or moose, for example.
There will always be some cultures that are different from the norm. 100% uniformity in human culture is very rare.
But look across the globe: I would posit that a large percentage of humans have a taboo against insect consumption.
If there are any counter examples that you can state from the world one must analyze how numerically large that community is within that country and the world.
In other words, don't count the number of cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption, count the population of the cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption.
I don't think taboos are in anyway useful in determining health implications. For example, are dogs or horses in any way materially worse than cows or sheep for people to eat? Why are the French happy to eat frogs and snails?
I'm reasonably certain the idea of certain food being taboo is almost completely due to cultural norms.
Dogs and horses are not ruminants, therefore they are more likely to carry parasites that are harmful to humans. Cows and sheep are both ruminants. So yes, there is a difference beyond cultural preferences. Or I should say, cultural preferences are not just arbitrary.
Human societies have developed over the years with trial and error. Taboos against a food can have a positive correlation with negative health outcomes when consuming that food.
So just because there is a taboo against a food group does not mean that it will definitely be bad for you. There is just a positive probability that it could be.
Taboos can also arise out of fashion and economics, irrational beliefs and moral considerations of a particular culture.
So when we see a Taboo, it is often good to analyze: could this taboo have arisen due to health issues (here pork is a good example because of the danger of tapeworm infection) ? Or could the Taboo have arisen out of cultural reasons e.g dogs/horses are beloved in many cultures so a taboo may have evolved that we shouldn't kill them.
> I'm reasonably certain the idea of certain food being taboo is almost completely due to cultural norms.
TL;DR: Sometimes it due to cultural norms and sometimes its due to negative health outcomes that get noticed due to trial and error over generations.
We know that plenty of "natural" phobias are actually cultural, i.e. learned behavior. Toddlers and even infants pick up on social cues and develop fear and disgust responses by mimicking the behavior of adults and older children.
"Conditioning" is an unnecessarily spooky framing for what is quintessentially "culture".
My toddler's first reaction to ground pepper was to cry out in pain, exclaim "hot!" and never want to go near it again. Would you call it "conditioning" if my child later in life develops a taste for peppery dishes?
Some aversions are cultural, others aren't. Which are which?
The fact that bug eating remains niche around the world, generally only seen in regions with a recent history of food insecurity, suggests that the conditioned madness is eating bugs, not aversion to bugs.
I don't believe we have any such instinct, we only have cultural norms.
I can't imagine any ethical experiment which would adequately separate the two factors. It's difficult to raise a child without influence of their surrounding culture.
Predators in the wild tend to eat the vital organs of their prey first, yet for a great many people eating organ meats is gross.
Its instinctual, not cultural. I'm going to guess you're referring to hunter-gatherer societies that frequently have to overcome famine and eat bugs out of desperation.
We have a somewhat similar reaction to eating brains for instance, yet that’s probably one of the safer part or the animals we eat.
I think a lot of the reactions we built over hundreds of generations need to be revised in the world we are in today, and in light of what we know now. One of the interesting one is our reaction to body sizes, and how we still have an instinctive reaction to tall people, when it makes no sense in most of the societies we live in.
Prion transmitted diseases similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease seem to be not that rare in nature. You need to cook the brains extremely well and long to be on the safe side.
Thankfully BSE (Mad Cow Disease) was not as transmissible as feared.
Prions are proteins and need to be denatured to be rendered harmless. Cooking is generally not enough to achieve this. See WHO guidelines for prion sterilization as mentioned in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization.
I’ll pick the salad over the steak any day, though.
Above all I’d love to see better technology and attention for food safety, though. It’s stunning to see how many people suffer from food born illness today — something I’d thought was far more under control up until my mid 30s. It’s better under many circumstances and I’m not going to pretend it’s anything like it has been in the past. However, we could do much, much better than we do now and it would literally save lives.
The pesticides are designed to kill insects, but research shows pesticides and their residual byproducts do accumulate in animals that eat the plants treated with pesticides.
Animals also accumulate things like heavy metals and the drugs they are given.
Plants can be washed of pesticides fairly well and they accumulate these chemicals at much lower rates, but meat can’t be washed of what has accumulated in it.
Overall the health outcomes of consuming plants appear to be better than those of consuming meat.
> Meat and poultry, a combination of four animal food categories, Beef, Game, Pork, and Poultry, accounted for fewer illnesses, but for 29% of deaths.
Poultry accounted for the most deaths (19%); many of those were caused by Listeria and Salmonella infections.
This rate is partly due to three large Listeria outbreaks linked to sliced processed deli turkey meat; the last such large outbreak occurred in 2002.
Produce, on the other hand, accounted for 27% of deaths. However, it's important to distinguish here that produce accounts for 27% of all deaths, but animal products accounts for all of the rest. That's 73% of all food borne illness coming from animal products.
You are far more likely to die from food borne illness caused by animal products; especially agricultural animals.
Right, I didn’t realize you meant steak and steak only. I was inferring meat in general. In that case I agree. It isn’t clear what the numbers are for beef but the fatalities are certainly lower.
Mercury etc accumulates to the end of the foodchain, sure, but I vaguely remember a study that made the news in Sweden a few years back about limiting your intake of pesticides.
If I remember correctly it was far better to eat organic vegetables/fruit and “normal” meat, than the other way around, and only marginally worse than all organic. The explanation being mammals have kidneys and a liver that we no longer eat (most of us at least).
From this one could guess insects could be worse than steak.
Sorry I don’t have a reference right now, or know if this research was heavily skewed somehow by the meat industry. I would be happy to hear more from someone knowledgeable on the subject.
This is actually a serious issue that’s ruining food supplies (particularly in the oceans). Farmed catfish in the USA has been noted for high levels of dioxins. US chicken often contained crazy levels of arsenic until agricultural practices changed to avoid that. Broth made from bones often contains more lead than the daily allowable intake (something like 475% more in the case of broth made with chicken bones, skin, and cartilage present, but still far too much when using just the meat).
We are exposing ourselves to dangerous substances every day due to bioaccumulation in animal foods.
It's one theory among many. The flip side is that autoimmune diseases are often triggered by pathogens (MS from EBV, diabetes from HEV, and more). Air travel and urbanization help pathogens spread. My understanding is that it's not yet clear which are beneficial and which are harmful, but there's ongoing research.
Maybe both are true, they might be triggered because of lack of exposure over a lifetime and then sudden exposure gets an uncontrolled response. But yeah, I have no idea. The parasite therapy for crohns is interesting.
If you as a human have been exposed to an extremely "clean" environment, your immune system will not have had the opportunity to get trained and strong. So you might get a severe infection at the first opportunity.
However, the other extreme can be very bad. I wouldn't recommend living in a lush tropical forest without any protection from novel viruses and bacteria spread from all kinds of insects and other vectors. Your body may not be able to take that kind of bio-warfare against it.
So, the million dollar question is: How much should we train our immune system by exposing ourselves to the natural environment and how much should we protect it?
Different people will put themselves on different sides of this spectrum.
The "middle" ground is of of course the best, some self-exposure to natural environment and some self-protection. But it is difficult to quantify this "middle" ground and that is why we have many of these arguments.
You can’t cook away many risks associated with meats, though. There are many problems such as red meat being a probable carcinogen, bio accumulation of fat-soluble chemicals that are harmful to humans, and inflammatory responses which make it hard to justify eating it.
Steak when cooked carries far fewer pathogens than a salad which is not cooked. I do wonder about the comparison between cooked vegetables and cooked meat however.
Steak comes from a sterile place: the inner body of an animal. I don't know of any parasites burrowing their way out of the guts upon temperature changes when cows are killed unlike fish which are loaded with parasites. Thus it's pretty safe to eat steak raw from a pathogen perspective unless handling was botched.
> stunning to see how many people suffer from food born illness today
The way I see people handle food, I'm not surprised at all. People leave lunch meat out of the fridge for sometimes hours, cut the fungus off things and eat the rest (which is ok sometimes, but often isn't), rinse chicken breast in the sink, use the same tools and cutting boards to handle uncooked and cooked food... And I can keep going.
So many people have no clue how food should be handled, or willfully ignore what they do know.
I completely agree. I worked as a cook when I was younger and so I had a considerable amount of formal and informal training in safe food handling. None of differed from what I learned in my families kitchen, and our never really had food poisoning with the notable exception of my father who ate a bad lobster after being repeatedly warned it had sat out too long (trunk of the car in summer, long story, stubborn man who could not admit he was wrong, and he was so sick he had to go to the hospital).
I think a lot of the time when people say they have "food poisoning" what they really have is digestive distress from eating poorly handled food. There's an incredible lack of awareness around safe food handling (which is really very simple) and most of it stems from laziness or inattention. Even if you only have one cutting board, cut the chicken last, and clean the cutting board correctly, etc. Don't leave a knife on the counter and use it over and over. Wash it with the rest of the dishes. If it was used to cut meat, don't use it again until it is properly sanitized. Don't leave leftovers sitting on the stove or counter for hours, esp. things prone to going off. And so on.
My girlfriend never washed her fruits and veggies. I had to put the kibosh on that, however I am probably not 100% safe with my meat handling strategies, often just rinsing tools before using them on the next substance, justifying it to myself that as long as I cook everything that "meat germs" could have touched before eating, it should be safe, but like, that ain't perfect I'm sure. I also am willing to cook and eat food much older than most people.
Isn’t it also the case that a lot of these contaminations in produce (like leafy greens) are caused by animal manure being used to fertilize the produce?
Without manure being used the risk is diminished by orders of magnitude.
Maybe so, but how does that explain how E. coli outbreaks on lettuce? From what I understand the waste from animal farms run off into waterways that feed the vegetable farms.
It doesn't seem to rank the causes it lists, but googling it suggests widespread contamination caused by fecal matter runoff from animal ag finding its way into irrigation water.
Here in Canada we have pretty heavy application of manure, primarily in spring and fall. It's part of how we replenish soils at small and large scales.
I suspect we rarely grow greens immediately after applications, but to say only backyard operations use animal manure isn't true.
From that link it looks like about half of illnesses are from animal products and half is from produce. Deaths from animal products is higher.
The data is also from 2008. Things have likely changed since US households and food prep has been heavily focused on cleanliness around animal products but nowhere near as much focus is on produce. The 'pre-washed' pre-packaged produce is especially risky.
> cooking bugs seems like it would eliminate most of these pathogens
I prefer everything I eat to be properly cooked. I even usually avoid raw vegetables. I can't imagine eating a raw bug on purpose unless it was for a lot of money and I could chase it with a shot of hard liquor afterward.
If insects were such a valuable and risk free source of nutrition wouldn't we see a lot more human cultures eating them?
They've been around forever, but somehow we share a mostly common disgust for eating bugs. Is it farfetched to assume that perhaps that disgust allowed us to survive.
They're not a practical food source. They're hard to farm, they taste bad, they're subject to predators, etc. There are lots of cultures that eat a few insects but I've never seen a single one that gets >33% of their daily protein from insects. The human gut produces chitinase but I don't know how it would react to tens of grams of chitin per day.
There Is a more interesting way to utilize insects as food… By cultivating them and turning them into chicken eggs.
We are experimenting With various forms of maggot farms and meal worm farms which are then fed to our flock of chickens, which turn those food and energy inputs into eggs.
That's simply not true. The UN FAO estimates that 2B people worldwide consume terrestrial insects regularly in their diets. Add in aquatic insects like shrimp or lobster and that number increases drastically.
2B people intentionally consume terrestrial insects.
99+% of humans incidentally consume terrestrial insects. Food processing is imperfect and insect contaminants are common.
"But the FDA allows up to 225 insect fragments per 225 grams of macaroni (yes, that's one piece of bug per gram) and 4.5 rodent hairs per 225 grams. Per 100 grams, the FDA allows either 10 fly eggs, five fly eggs and one maggot, or two maggots in most tomato products."
A lot of animals do eat insects however, so it is not that they are dangerous a priori. Our evolutionary ancestors, small mammals/primates, most likely did eat insects. We somehow evolved them out of our diet. Strange actually, since they are quite abundant.
It's not surprising... I mean look at them. There is an evolutionary reason why insects look disgusting to us. Same reason why feces look disgusting - We're not supposed to eat that.
Insects being disgusting could also be a learned response, kids are pretty willing to pick up and touch things they haven't seen before including insects.
However they look to their parents when doing it, or about to do it and are generally quite good at picking up on even subtle facial clues. Since kids can easily be 1 or 2-shot learners about stuff like this it's very difficult to separate innate from learned.
They're spooky because they move erratically and their bodies are so different from ours that we can't intuit where they are looking or what they are about to do.
Disgust is largely a learned response, i.e. cultural. Many people find crutaceans disgusting to look at. Rodents are also extremely polarizing. Personally I find dogs mildly disgusting because they often drool, roll in dirt and residue of urine and fecal matter can cling to their coat since they don't clean themselves like cats do. On the other hand some people find cats disgusting exactly because they clean their butts with the same tongues they use to clean their coat and maybe you.
The reason most people find insects digusting isn't the insects themselves but that insects are a signal of decay. Spoiled and rotting food attracts flies and other insects, so food with insects on it is unappealing. Countries that don't have a tradition of dairy consumption often find cheese disgusting because it is practically rotten milk.
Faeces look disgusting as you learned that it was disgusting from your parents when you were young. Its unrelated to your own evolution but is instead a memetic idea passed on from one generation to the next
I don't think it can all be reduced down to memetics because there are things which I find disgusting which my parents don't find disgusting. Like oysters for example. Though I think obviously some people are more influenced by memetics than others.
"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.
As an owner of a reptile this study has another angle for me. The insects tested are all classic reptile food and aside from some creatures being illegal to import or breed the production and selling of edible insects for animals seems pretty unregulated. Every producer claims their bugs are all parasite free so seeing ~80% actually do have parasites is alarming.
Yeah, I always said that for me, a south American for which the Churrascos/Assados (barbecue) is part of my cultural identity, I prefer to become a vegan than eat insects. Pass the lentils, shall you?
Possibly like any other food source, then? Boils down to how they're grown, handled, prepared.
Arguably, the wet markets in Wuhan wouldn't have been such a disease nightmare if the cages of live animals weren't kept one atop the other, dripping feces and other fluids between species and breaking the inter-species barrier.
Big fan of Black Soldier Fly farming and there are efforts with grasshoppers. Not sure the featured article (TFA) issue extends beyond the few people working in production (increasingly automated [1]) because the output is a dry meal flour.
This, Seaweeds, and directed precise fermentation are a big part of the 10B+ people solution.
Any ideas about how to achieve that? An n-child policy? Forced sterilization? Property size limits? Maybe you'll just be kind and suggest punitive taxes.
"U.S. Population Growth and Family Planning: A Review of the Literature" is still the best collection of potential methods, as far as I know despite it's age.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? It doesn't matter how bad another comment is—you're still breaking the rules.
You've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly, and we ban such accounts. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Don’t eat the bugs. You have an innate disgust reaction to bugs and to the idea of eating them. It evolved over millions of years. Heed nature’s warning. They only eat bugs in places where it was historically necessary due to extreme famine. These activists trying to get you to eat bugs don’t have your best interests at heart. Eat meat. It is one of the great liberties man enjoys.
I don't think disgust is "innate". A typical English person finds squid disgusting, but is happy to eat various kinds of cheese, including ones like Stilton with mould on them. Someone in Japan, on the other hand ...
Also, everyone has heard at least one story of a young child eating an earthworm they found in the garden. It seems to be only after seeing the reaction of older children and adults that they learn to find that disgusting.
Oh it is and what til you hear about couple more fears we didn't have to learn through experience:
> Examples of innate fear include fears that are triggered by
predators, pain, heights, rapidly approaching objects, and ancestral threats such as snakes and spiders. Animals and humans detect and respond more rapidly to threatening stimuli than to nonthreatening stimuli in the natural world.
Some adaptations are so worthwhile they get wired into our biology!
Sure it is. Did someone have to teach you not to eat shit? Or green meat that smells like death? Certain smells and physical appearances trigger reactions in our bodies that tell us "stay away." That there might be certain groups of people that act in contrary ways is an exception, and doesn't disprove anything.
What's with the sudden uptick in people talking about eating bugs and eating meat (and liberties, billionaires, elites?)?
Those two things aren't the only two options, and no one is forcing anyone to do anything, which makes me think this is some attempt by the meat industry to paint all the people who are telling you to eat less meat (like your doctor) as authoritarian lunatics out to undermine civilization.
They’re likely alluding to articles posted on The World Economic Forum’s website. WEF is a group of wealthy, influential individuals whose goals include building what they believe is a more sustainable global economy (and society). Some of their more infamous articles have become memes (“You’ll own nothing and be happy”, “You will eat the bugs”).
The kookier versions of anti-WEF arguments veer into conspiracy theory territory, but there’s something to be said about out-of-touch wealthy individuals attempting to wield their influence to reduce e.g. developing nations use of cheap-but-nonrenewable energy sources, or reduce their consumption of more efficient sources of protein.
> Own nothing, be happy. You may have heard the phrase. It started life as a screenshot, culled from the internet by an anonymous antisemitic account on the image board 4chan. “Own nothing, be happy – The Jew World Order 2030,″ said the post, which went viral among extremists.
Well, that's reassuring.
Meanwhile, the actual content on the WEF site is monumentally boring:
> Greater action on food loss to ensure more food is preserved for human consumption
> According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, globally 13.8% of food is lost from harvest to retail. And, of course, mitigating food loss also brings cost savings and economic benefits, while reporting can help assess the efforts to minimise food loss.
The author later clarified they were predicting a possible future, “for better or for worse”. They didn’t outright deny they supported that specific idea, though, nor does it directly contradict WEF’s stated goals (although it’s on a much shorter timeline).
So the secret conspiracy is clean energy, self-driving taxis, protected environment, and more leisure time due to increased automation?
And when intentionally publishing the plan for this secret conspiracy, on their website, cunningly disguised as a fictional take on the near future, they accidentally left in bits where they worried about digital surveillance which luckly the anti-semites on 4Chan noticed, and saved us from this dark future?
> Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
>So the secret conspiracy is clean energy, self-driving taxis, protected environment, and more leisure time due to increased automation?
I agree. It's completely idiotic. Clearly, all those billionaire, industrialists and politicians have our best interests in mind. They simply want a better future for all. They would probably be more inclusive in their decision-making, but it's just that an average person out there is too dumb to make any important decisions.
Nice of you to cherry pick the "good" stuff from the article. The things people take issue with are being forced to rent everything from some unknown overlords who now are the only ones allowed to own anything. You're also required to share your personal accommodations with others. Apparently money is not allowed either since no one actually pays rent but they do work so it's some version of "from each according to their ability, to each according to his needs"
> we don't pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.
It also posits that anyone who does not submit to this regime is simply left to rot in the countryside. Implying that they live the equivalent of 19th century life probably with no electricity, running water, or medicine. Sorry, you don't get any technology if you don't want to be a serf.
> My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
Living in this society also apparently means that everything you do or think is recorded and that it can be used against you, presumably by the people in power should your behavior ever displease them.
> I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
And apparently a whole lot of people died on the way to this utopia.
> We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.
No wonder a lot of people reacted poorly to this but I think that was the point. They wanted to do a limited hangout to gauge public reaction to some version of their envisioned future. That allows them to manage the blowback by saying it was just a silly article after which they delete it and then paint all of its detractors as racists and right wing nutjobs which is SOP at this point.
The issue which really started the discussion on this was not the article, which I suspect relatively few read, but the Tweet/Video that the World Economic Forum published. You can find an archive of it here: https://archive.org/details/world-economic-forum-presents-th....
It was universally poorly received, which led to them removing the video/Tweet, and it's now being censored on platforms like YouTube. Their predictions, as stated in the video, to happen by 2030, include:
- You'll own nothing.
- You'll rent everything.
- You'll eat less meat.
- "Western values will have been tested to the breaking point."
The WEF, if you are not aware, is not just some random crazy think-tank. It's a collective that, as a whole, is arguably the single most influential group in existence. Their backing companies [1] include Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla, WalMart, the banks, and the vast majority of massive companies you can think of. Their individual members/delegates [2] include chief executives, heads of state, and so on. The sort of group that doesn't just make predictions, but makes predictions happen.
That such a group thought society at large would respond positively to that video is simply odd. That they hold the views expressed in that video are something much worse than odd. These people, are at a minimum, unimaginably far out of touch with a society that they overtly aim to puppeteer.
The URL is quite odd in that it ends with a period which it seems that Hacker News is parsing, more normally, as a period instead of a part of the URL. In the following URL, manually add a period at the end:
It's difficult to estimate the exact wealth of the WEF and their delegates/companies, but it's going to be a very large share, and likely the wide majority, of all wealth on this planet. The group that owns everything, stating you will own nothing and instead just rent [from them] is something few will regard in a positive way.
When the exact people actively working to change the world in pursuit of these predictions make them, they are no longer predictions but goals.
It’s not a secret agenda. The elite intellectual class is coalescing around the idea that meat consumption is bad for the planet and needs to be phased out by dramatically raising the cost of meat.
> needs to be phased out by dramatically raising the cost of meat.
They of course will continue to eat meat, continue to own rural property, continue to drive cars and travel for leisure on jets. Their solution to all problems is to maintain their privilege while forcing the underclasses make all the sacrifices.
I thought this was just speculative until I was recently in a Hilton that had the changing video displays in the lobby and elevators. The displays were promoting their 'sustainable' pasta with crickets dish in the restaurant.
Calling people idiots (as OP did) is unnecessary, but do we really need whataboutism?
The point here is that insects are proposed as a new, high volume source of proteins, as a way to reduce meat consumption.
Humans have fairly good understanding of parastites, bacteria etc related to meat. And have established routines for raising animals and preparing meat to minimize the problems.
As far as I know, humans have not the same level of knowledge, nor processes related to mass production and consumption of insects.
The paper shows that there are substantial parasitical risks with eating insects. Something, at least as far as I am aware, is not generally known or talked about. Importantly things like applying heat (cooking), which generally works to reduce problems with meat, according to the artible, seems NOT to be effective against parasites in insects.
> seems NOT to be effective against parasites in insects.
I don't see this in the article. They explain in a paragraph that cooking and/or freezing are effective, and that simple drying was "considered promising". With a little drop of caution.
> However, there is a need of thorough evaluation of insect processing methods, including temperatures and time of cooking / freezing to prevent possible parasitic infections
> Calling people idiots (as OP did) is unnecessary, but do we really need whataboutism?
Let's say I propose cars as an alternative to motorcycles, and you respond by citing the enormous numbers of deaths from car accidents. Am I doing a whataboutism if I mention that motorcycles have accidents too?
edit: "whataboutism" is an anticommunist propaganda term meant to defend segregation, but to the extent that it has a meaning, that meaning is: When I mention thing A that you do, it's a distraction when you mention totally unrelated thing B that I do. It's not when I criticize you over doing thing A, and you mention that I also do thing A.
Your edit contains a really nice concise definition of what is and what isn't whataboutism. Sadly I find that it's often deployed as a defense like "you can't accuse me of X, I accused you of X first!" and it's tiresome
This isn't whataboutism at all. The topic at hand is parasitic diseases coming from eating insects. Someone is saying this is a reason not to eat any insects and to stick to meat. Hence my comment about meat, in fact it is not only relevant but is one of the reasons two of the major religions to shun certain types of meat.
Only the human species is able to surviva in all climate zones. Cultural evolution allows us to utilize everything around us, including certain insects.
You are making a sweeping statement by saying, "eating [all] the bugs" is dangerous and _contrary to our nature_. Also, you should be careful with the word "idiot".
> Modern society needs to go beyond animal instinct.
Yes, especially when it's a certain minority of "modern" society that determines those needs for the society as a whole. I can assure you billionaires won't be eating bugs.
> Just decades ago people in the West had the same reaction to lobster,
Aversion to lobster was an American phenomenon, lobsters have been considered a delicacy in coastal communities around Europe since the Roman era, possibly earlier than that. In the American north-east, people were initially averse to eating lobster because they were originally from inland parts of Europe and didn't know much about seafood. But they did figure it out as they developed their own coastal palates.
We've all been living alongside bugs this whole time. If they were good to eat, they'd be popular by now.
Actually yes, free commercial transactions between individuals should be a human right.
But don't worry about it, they will also make life hard or impossible for small livestock owners. So you won't be able to raise your own or buy from your neighbour.
In order to raise meat you also need land, tractors, and fertilizer which also seem to be targets of the Davos attendees.
> Too many people take the current consumption society for granted. It is not a human right.
It isn't a privilege granted by our rulers either, in fact it's the very thing that everyone is working to maintain so why shouldn't we enjoy the fruit of our labor?
>Conducted parasitological examination suggests that edible insects may be the most important parasite vector for domestic insectivorous animals
Bummer. I was aquainted with some folks in insect farming who tried to get novel food regulations moving years ago that for whatever reason gave up and fell back to insect based flours/protein powders and animal feed. Some of them had pretty interesting proposals integrating insect farming with recycling urban bio waste that then gets turned into animal feed which looked good on paper but I always wondered if that was recipe for disease. That said, crickets taste pretty good fried, but for some reason I don't like the idea of the meat I eat being fed on crickets.
> > edible insects may be the most important parasite vector for domestic insectivorous animals
> Bummer.
You quote this as a bummer, but even if we change the 'may be' to 'definately is' I don't see how this is unexpected?
'Domestic animals' avoid a lot of parasite vectors that wild animals face, and if you have a pet reptile that eats insects, then there's not that many other places for it to get parasites from.
I was thinking of raising insects for my cat to hunt in the apartment, and had the idea that maybe an indoor farm could become parasite-free after a generation or two of treatment with ivermectin.
I searched the article (didn't read) for the words "ivermectin" and "treatment". Nothing specific, but it did have this to say:
> The high prevalence of selected developmental forms of parasites in the evaluated insect farms could be attributed to low hygiene standards and the absence of preventive treatments.
I kind of assumed that bugs raised for reptiles, etc. would be treated, but maybe not.
They probably contain toxins that can't be cooked away either. Ask yourself why humans refrained from eating them unless near starvation and death for the recorded history of humanity.
I'm going to say you probably haven't traveled much to be drawing such conclusions. Eating bugs is a big tourist shtick in Mexico for example. And you can go to markets with heaps of them on display.
The last hunter gatherers in Africa have lived that way for as far as we can tell for thousands of years. Part of their diet is raw bee larvae. There's a photo of a man eating it accompanying this news story about a study in Science.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/24/5456315...
> Ask yourself why humans refrained from eating them
Plenty of humans don't eat plenty of meats and sea animals either. Traditions don't necessarily contain good wisdom.
I think seeing a bug feast on feces and then having it sneak up on your food stashes might trigger an obvious reaction (similar to pigs and the reason why some don't eat them)
Correct. All of our food contains parasites, pathogens, and deadly chemicals, even those we eat the most like pork, salmon and cassava. The difference is that we learned how to deal with those risks. Literally water can be fatal sometimes, this issue is not specific to bugs.
The study at hand specifically mentions that further research is required in order to reach the same level of safety for bugs as well.
I don’t think there’s an exact correlation between safety and “what we eat,” which is rather more a consequence of availability and customs. Lots of countries don’t eat horse meat or snakes. Neither one is particularly unsafe.
Compared with cows or sheep pigs eat what humans can eat, so growing pigs means wasting a lot of food that could be fed to people. Many historians argue that this was the primary reason why pork was banned in Islam and Judaism, not because pigs were considered unclean.
I've always heard it was because they'll happily eat human corpses (and other carrion). Especially back in the day, livestock were rarely penned, but rather let loose to forage. So pigs would be seen at battlefields eating corpses.
They didn't. Many insects are even literally kosher. It's just that farming them didn't make much sense until recently.
Plants and mushrooms, having far more different biology from us than insects, are probably a worse concern when it comes to toxins that can't be cooked away. And yet humans managed to cultivate food with plenty of those, like cassava.
If by many you mean just locusts. When a bunch of bugs eat all you food and the only thing left to eat is those bugs, then I think locusts being kosher has more to do with survival than actually being kosher.
At least several types of locusts as I recall. It's been widely speculated that the dietary restrictions were really about parasites and other food safety concerns, but what's also famous is that they were quite legalistic about it. So if it was only permissible as desperation food, they would have said so... at length.
Either way, Jews and other middle eastern groups with picky dietary rules, do have a long tradition for eating it in non-desperate times too.
It's icky for us not used to it, but there's no reason to think parasites is a bigger issue with insects than with animals far more similar to us, which we do eat.
Remember this article is about pet food insects, often fed to pets raw (if not alive), and it notes some extremely unsanitary practices in pet shops that farm them, such as feeding them on the excrement of the type of creature they're fed to. It's not particularly relevant for insects considered for human consumption.
Over the years I've seen several female friends try to stay vegan. One managed a decade before she couldn't put up with the anemia any more. The others quit sooner, because of weight loss, malnutrition, and other issues.
It seems humans were evolved to scavenge animals as well as eating plants. It's not just protein, it's iron and fats, and a few other things.
Maybe it was challenging before, but honestly, getting enough iron and protein in a vegan diet today is pretty trivial. There are plant based alternatives to more or less everything these days.
I'm vegetarian,, and only for 3 or 4 years, but honestly there's nothing really missing at all for me.
On every HN thread about meat there are people claiming they know dozens of people that nearly died because they stopped eating meat, completely neglecting that there are entire cultures that eat pretty much no meat[0]. Or the fact that there are numerous studies about how we eat too much meat and how it affects our health[1]. Sorry, I just don't believe it. Or my experience is just vastly different, because nobody I know that went vegan had side-effects as described by these comments. It's like you said, getting your nutrients on a vegan diet is trivial nowadays, especially if you live in a developed country. The only explanation I have is that people are scared to lose their burgers.
Vegan and vegetarian are pretty different. I don't have a problem staying healthy (and enjoying a dinner or two out every week) without meat, but I think it would be extremely hard for me to do that and keep vegan. As I'm allergic to nuts a decent chunk of common substitutes are off limits.
Is it still possible? Sure, but giving up dairy/eggs would be a much bigger sacrifice to me than giving up meat, and it goes beyond just enjoying the foods - the effort required to maintain a balanced diet would have additional time and social costs that vegetarianism doesn't for me.
I think a much more fruitful avenue for persuasion (and this applies to vegetarianism too) is to encourage people to try cutting back on the products, perhaps start with one day a week meat-free. Different people may find it easier or harder based on a number of life circumstances, but the easier they find it, the more they may cut back.
Vegan for ~15 years here. It's important to be thoughtful about nutrition when going that route (I do various supplements 2-3x day). Common pitfalls for people are B vitamins, zinc, and iron (as your friend found out the hard way, perhaps), and there are vegan gummies with these specific vitamins/minerals in them.
I'm the only one in my family that will take a pill. Everyone else will only do gummies. I'm with you, but I'm the minority in my small sample. I'd be looking to maximize absorption/bioavailability vs. flavor.
We evolved to hunt animals. The evidence being our capacity for long distance running, our bipedal stature freeing up our forelimbs for grabbing / killing with tools, our intelligence, our dentition. We shouldn't be ashamed of this fact any more than you should be ashamed that your dog or cat is a carnivore. At least we have the choice to not be cruel to the animal as we eat it, we can kill it humanely rather than disemboweling it and eating it guts first while it's still screaming in pain.
We also evolved to store calories as fat. But, turns out that if you do that excessively, it's not that much of a benefit anymore.
When was the last time you ran a long distance to kill a deer? For the majority of people, it's mainly about long distance driving to the supermarket to pick up a cut of meat. The cognitive dissonance is pretty real here. There is no screaming to be heard at the supermarket checkout. If there were, I don't think we would be having this discussion.
> ... we can kill it humanely ...
That's some wishful thinking if I've ever seen it. I encourage you to actually look at how most animals are kept and slaughtered. Then again, after the "life" most of those animals have been living, death, in whatever form, is a relief.
> That's some wishful thinking if I've ever seen it.
I said we can kill them humanely and there are slaughterhouses that enforce good practices. I didn't say all animals are killed humanely and I didn't say we should favor the worst of the factory farming practices. They often produce substandard meat anyways. I don't think meat should be as cheap as possible but I also don't think it should be made so expensive that no one can afford it. So, yes there should be more regulation around how animals are raised and slaughtered in order to prevent cruelty and that will likely increase prices of meat and I'm ok with that. We should also do more to make sure that small producers aren't forced out of business by large factory farming interests since that's what's driving this race to the bottom and degradation of conditions.
> turns out that if you do that excessively
That's plainly a strawman argument. I didn't say we should be 100% carnivorous or eat excessive quantities of meat or spend 100% of our time hunting. It's also an argument against being 100% vegetarian by the way so you might want to be careful tossing it around.
> There is no screaming to be heard at the supermarket checkout
If your goal is to kill the animal humanely then there shouldn't be any screaming in the slaughterhouse either. As I said above, there are certainly many slaughterhouses where the animals are mistreated but I don't support this and think it should be regulated against.
The obvious answer is because they are tasty and people are used to it and it is ingrained in the very culture (cooking, traditional holiday meals etc) of pretty much every country I know of. Those are some of the strongest forces working in unison. Seems very unlikely hamankind will ever move off animal based diets.
middle-class american urban yuppies who've given up on McD a few months ago and now insist the rest of us should follow suit? not the enemy, just their useful idiots.
global elites with their private jets, yachts, islands and castles preaching to us unwashed masses to tighten our belts and lower our expectations as they bring about the end to our peace and prosperity? yes, absolutely, they are my enemy - and yours, if you can see past your nose and realize these people don't give a flying fuck about the environment, social justice and all the other bullshit.
> global elites with their private jets, yachts, islands and castles
People were harping against meat long before the elites opened their mouths about it. For all you know, the elites' suggestion to eat insects is a ploy to get people like you to do the exact opposite. Maybe YOU'RE the useful idiot.
1. Number of people eating bug(driven by mimesis pushed through a media narative and thus typically viral(aka Exponential by default).
2. Number of variety of bugs being eaten(regionality and entrepreneurialism((often referred to as Cambrian explosions in perfectly competitive markets)) .
3. Number of geographies bugs for consumption being grown in((any including Antarctica and space with a new profit motive...look at the impact of disease due to invasive species)).
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).
It is my understanding that the reason to eat bugs is the increased protein density. In a vegan diet, getting a sufficient number of calories is quite easy, but getting enough complete protein while not over-filling on calories is tougher.
It is. But protein is also a weird battleground as it's in just about everything you eat.
Just as a plant-only eater would want to ensure they are getting certain nutrients like B12 and vitamin D, meat-only eaters have their own share of things to worry about: vitamin C, calcium, boron, potassium, magnesium, etc. Yet if you follow carnivore influencers, you'd think beef has the nutritional breakdown of a multivitamin.
The real take-away should be to track the nutrients in the things you eat and then see if there's something you can add to fill the gaps.
What's the solution to the "an antenna/leg is stuck in my teeth" problem that I experienced when I ate crickets? The actual bug part was inoffensive, lightly dusted with salt, and had a satisfying crunch, but the legs and antenna stick to your mouth like a hair and make it hard to eat.
As others have stated, 2 billion people eat insects, surely not all of them eat legged insects, but I wonder how the ones that do deal with it. Do they just suffer through it? It's not exactly going to stop you if you're hungry
Yeah, I have noticed that with a lot of HN threads that resolve around eating meat. It gets to a level of tinfoil-hat that I'm absolutely not used to on this website, but maybe I've simply not been here long enough. The other day someone unironically said they feel there is "a war on protein" going on, because apparently it's more likely to have an "elite intellectual class" in the background, scheming to deprive us from nutrients, rather than the fact that raising and killing billions of animals each year could simply have adverse side-effects for our planet.
I have no explanation for this, and it makes me a bit sad to be honest. It really seems like a whole bunch of people here simply do not want their worldview challenged when it comes to eating animals, and will continue to do so no matter what.
With the recent uptick in doomsday-news regarding our climate and all the effects we can feel *right now*, it's also possible that I'm overly sensitive. But it's really depressing to see the community that I've been very impressed with regarding their discussions take such a weird, head-in-the-sand stance on this.
The most interesting part - at least for me - is how unapologetic such conspiracies can be expressed in these "no more meat" threads, whereas other conspiracies in other threads are heavily downvoted and countered through comments. I slowly tend to believe that at least a vocal minority of the Bay Area tech bros are really creeping out on the idea that they might be loosing their beloved meat.
Just for disclosure: I eat meat myself, I love it and I want to continue to do so. But I also see the need to reduce meat consumption generally and personally, for health and ecological reasons. But billionaires wanting to forbid meat consumption to follow some new world order? Please stop the shit-chat. At least here in Germany meat production is still heavily subsidized [0].
That's really well put, and I think is exactly what strikes me as off about these threads as opposed to what I'm used to on HN. It really seems like these conspiracy theories are way more indulged here than they would in any other thread.
I'm with you, also from Germany and very rarely eat meat (my rule of thumb is that if it's already dead and in front of me, I'm not going to save anyone by throwing it away -- think BBQs and the likes. Or when I visit my grandparents). Also, I'm firm in the camp that everyone can make their own choices, and don't shame anybody for eating meat. I just don't think it's viable going forward and I've made the choice a few years back to limit myself, because to me it seems only logical. Also like you said, it simply shouldn't be subsidized as it is. If someone wants to eat meat badly enough that they're willing to pay large prices -- great. If not, there are numerous protein sources out there that take less toll on the environment.
> if it's already dead and in front of me, I'm not going to save anyone by throwing it away
That's a sane and reflected reasoning that many of us could take as an example from time to time.
I myself have heavily reduced meat consumption, too, though probably not as much as you have. The best thing to do as a starter IMHO is to reduce the "unnecessary" things: Cold cuts can easily replaced by other - vegetarian - alternatives, skillet dishes mostly work with mushrooms only too, and diced ham is pretty much nothing more than glorified salt (of course this is hyperbolic, but you get the idea). By doing without this "hidden" meat you can drastically reduce your consumption without having to forgo the places where meat is the best: steaks, rips, pickled knuckle (!) and so on.
I've combined this principle with buying the remaining meat at a local eco butcher (which reduces your consumption even further due to prices) and am morally calmed, at least for now.
> Also like you said, it simply shouldn't be subsidized as it is. If someone wants to eat meat badly enough that they're willing to pay large prices -- great. If not, there are numerous protein sources out there that take less toll on the environment.
The only problem I see with this is that then meat becomes the food of the rich, which is unfair. I don't say that meat shouldn't be more expensive or that I have a better solution, it's just a thing to keep in mind, IMHO.
> The only problem I see with this is that then meat becomes the food of the rich, which is unfair.
Truffles have become the food of the rich. Too bad because I like truffles, unfairness is a moot point. I have no "right" to truffles. You should be much more concerned that decent housing or access to housing are becoming privileges than any particular food product.
> apparently it's more likely to have an "elite intellectual class" in the background, scheming to deprive us from nutrients, rather than the fact that raising and killing billions of animals each year could simply have adverse side-effects for our planet.
I'm not saying some people don't take it too far but there is some justification here. Many people disagree with the assertion that current farming and herding practices are bad for the planet. The interpretation of "bad for the planet" is key here since those that disagree see this from the standpoint of the environment serving to support human life rather than protecting the environment for its own sake. Taking that view means there are very strong tradeoffs that need to be considered such as how reducing meat consumption or reducing fertilizer use will affect human health and happiness. Many people weigh those against each other and find that the benefit outweighs the harm and so argue that we should look elsewhere to compensate for those effects.
The conspiracy talk has its roots in seeing that only one side is being pushed hard in the media. This results in some pretty obvious media manipulation with some of the most glaring recent examples being under-reporting of the Dutch farmer protests, smearing of the Canadian trucker protest, and mis-reporting of the Sri Lanka crisis focusing on "economic mismanagement" rather than pointing out the precise policies that led to the implosion of their agriculture industry. As a Canadian, I saw with my own eyes the difference between reality and what reporters were saying about the trucker protest. That was a slap in the face and changed my opinion of our media from being perhaps a bit biased towards the current party in power to perceiving them as utter sycophants willing to blatantly lie to an entire country to serve their own purposes.
Those three events aren't unrelated either, they all have roots in policy being propagated around the world to attempt to drastically cut the amount of petrochemicals being used but those policies are cutting at the very foundations of our civilization when they are applied to food production and transportation of goods. You've heard the phrase "don't fuck with the money" when applied to business since it's a sure way to destroy the company, well this is the equivalent with civilizations "don't fuck with the food supply" if you do then the world won't be burning by 2050 it'll be on fire in 6 months while everyone tears each other to shreds over the last bag of grain.
HN has always been tolerant of this kind of fringe, it comes with the territory of its (right) libertarian bent. The fringe just didn't have as much political potential until a few years ago and has been emboldened to be more open about its views. They've also had years to test out ways to be open about their beliefs while hiding behind a guise of "civility" or "curiosity" and spreading blatant lies only to discard them and move on to the next talking point when caught.
HN is incapable of fixing this "problem" because doing so would go against its supposed neutrality and impartiality while the people in question are usually lucid enough not to resort to outright slurs or insults that would allow them to be banned for a breach of civility.
As a German I have heard many stories about the nice neighbor or uncle who just happened to actively go on to do war crimes despite otherwise being such a nice person. Civility is not a basis for productive debate, it's a shield for reprehensible views you wouldn't dare to spell out in polite company.
> They've also had years to test out ways to be open about their beliefs while hiding behind a guise of "civility" or "curiosity" and spreading blatant lies only to discard them and move on to the next talking point when caught.
I'm not sure what you think this has to do with "conspiracy thinking". I'm not saying this is an organized effort. While particularly rowdy online communities do organize via places like 4chan (and its various even less palatable siblings) and KiwiFarms, the shift on HN can much more easily be described by looking at how fringe politics generally spread in online spaces. Innuendo Studios' video series "The Alt-Right Playbook"[0] is worth a watch if you are new to this concept.
Heck, Jordan B Peterson wildly holds celebrity status at this point and for the longest time his interview strategy consisted of making general statements implying political positions and then accusing the interviewer of putting words in his mouth when those positions were challenged. Literally "just asking questions" and "stating facts" (which even with proper context were not always actually true, e.g. the entire lobster thing was based on the assumption that lobsters and humans react the same way to the same biochemical reactions).
Right-wing fringe groups have been talking about various flavors of "red pilling" since before "alt-right" even became a thing. Even before "GamerGate" (which shifted a lot of young male gamers towards extremely far right views) you'd hear the concept in the "Manosphere" (i.e. MGTOWs, PUAs, MRAs and so on) to refer to "the truth about gender roles" (sexual market value, female promiscuity, but also "true facts" like male suicide rates but always presented as part of a misogynist narrative yearning for some imagined patriarchic past based on 1950s advertisements). The idea has since been refined to the point that "red pilling" has moved from simple "truth bombing" (i.e. plainly citing factoids supposedly supporting the narrative) to "just asking questions" (see above) and "it's just a joke" (hence the phrase particularly popular among online antisemitic white ethnonationalists: "when the joke really lands", i.e. when you no longer see it as an edgy joke but as the truth).
Your use of the term is an interesting reversal of the accusation of "conspiracy thinking" by the way. The term is usually used to describe "anti-establishment" accusations of "powerful elites" (Rothschilds, WHO, George Soros, Bill Gates, whatever) conspiring to control the world. Even the actual Nazis spread conspiracy theories about "international bankers" (or simply "the Jews" when civility was not required) being "in control" and blaming the economic collapse and the loss of WW1 on them.
What I'm claiming is far more mundane:
1. Far-right extremists and right-wing fringe people exist.
2. At least some of them are online and hang around in the same spaces as normal people do.
3. At least some of them understand that if they just open their mouths and plainly state their views they'll be banned from those spaces.
4. At least some of those still want to either state or advertise their politics in those spaces in ways that won't get them immediately banned.
5. At least some of those succeed in doing that.
Of course this requires acknowledging that ideologies exist and people can hold genuine political views rather than simply looking out for their own financial gain. And historically liberals (and libertarians) have a track record of not being able to comprehend this or to believe "bad politics" (i.e. ideological opposition) is just a matter of not having access to enough information (e.g. "white supremacists only hate brown people because they don't understand how immigrants benefit the economy").
This post by the way is a perfect example of why these tactics work:
1. You replied with a single short sentence that probably took you no time.
2. You broadly dismissed everything I said without pointing out any specific claim as wrong or giving any actual argument I could respond to, making it hard to falsify without "rambling".
3. You didn't directly attack me or what I said (e.g. "That's conspiracy thinking!") but instead merely implied a statement by asking a rhetorical question, thus appearing more civil without changing what you actually wanted to say.
That was such an interesting post, thank you for that. I'm sure I've felt it but I don't think I could have put it in words like you did. Landing on those last three points of yours really hit the spot for me.
There's a lot I could have taken issue with in the comment I replied to starting with your conflation of libertarians with Trump supporters. You also haven't been paying attention considering libertarianism really had its heyday under the Bush and Obama administrations and has flagged quite a bit since then. You're positing that there is some subculture of these supposed evil libertarians that have been biding their time here on HN and elsewhere, practicing their menacing writing skills to further their vile plots. You say that anyone who takes this type of rhetorical approach is doing so in order to conceal their true desire to engage in hate speech, honestly this is just twisted you're painting your opponents as monsters instead of admitting that someone might disagree with you and it seems you'd prefer to simply ban anyone who disagrees as such. Talk about authoritarian ambitions. To top it all off, you Godwin the conversation by comparing this imaginary foe to Nazis. To me, all of that seems very in line with conspiratorial or paranoid thinking. No wonder I didn't want to put the energy into a long winded rebuke like this one.
> your conflation of libertarians with Trump supporters
I'm not saying all these people are libertarians. I'm saying libertarians are ill-equipped and/or unwilling to subdue the far-right because they value civility over content (or "order over justice" if you want to bring MLK into this).
That said, some supposed libertarians were (and in some cases still are) exceptionally friendly towards Trump but I'd argue that has more to do with being opportunistic right-wingers than specifically being right-wing libertarians. Ironically prior to 2016 there was a wave of people with clearly right-wing conservative (and in some cases even clearly tradcon) views adopting the label of "classical liberals" but I wouldn't call them libertarians either.
> You're positing that there is some subculture of these supposed evil libertarians that have been biding their time here on HN and elsewhere, practicing their menacing writing skills to further their vile plots. You say that anyone who takes this type of rhetorical approach is doing so in order to conceal their true desire to engage in hate speech
The problem with intent is that there is no functional difference between someone using far-right talking points because they're edgy or because they are a true believer but by enabling them by giving them a platform, you're enabling the true believers even when the ones you initially refuse to subdue are just being edgy. This is a well understood phenomenon (meme-fied as the Paradox of Tolerance).
I've literally seen comments on HN openly espousing antisemitism, sexism and "race realism" (aka scientific racism). I've seen HN users do this repeatedly without having their accounts killed even if their posts were downvoted or flagged. More often than not any replies calling them out for it were downvoted at least as much if not more than the comments themselves.
Meanwhile any comment acknowledging racism, sexism or other "social justice" issues will get immense pushback in the form of replies and downvotes compared to a casual mention of well established far-right talking points like the Bell Curve (race and IQ) or evopsych bullshit.
> libertarianism really had its heyday under the Bush and Obama administrations and has flagged quite a bit since then.
I'm not talking about the US government, I'm talking about the US startup VC culture (and to some degree even so-called "Hacker culture" in general) HN originates in and still inherits.
> Talk about authoritarian ambitions.
That's not what authoritarianism means. HN is already authoritarian. Dang can shadow or slow ban anyone he pleases with little oversight. Being a property of YCombinator, theoretically Paul G could interve and ban you personally with zero repercussions. HN users can up and down vote or flag and vouch posts but the HN mods and owners can completely ignore that and boost or kill posts if they want without accountability.
It's not that I'm asking for "more authoritarianism", I'm saying that authoritarianism should be applied differently than it is.
> honestly this is just twisted you're painting your opponents as monsters instead of admitting that someone might disagree with you and it seems you'd prefer to simply ban anyone who disagrees as such.
If your disagreement consists of denying the humanity of other people by espousing pseudoscience like "Jews are naturally more intelligent but can't be trusted" or "Black people are naturally less intelligent but physically stronger and thus more prone to violent crime" or "women can't do science, maths or programming because they're naturally more adapted for child rearing", that's not simply a disagreement, that's a declaration of war and should be treated as such. See Tolerance Paradox as above.
> To top it all off, you Godwin the conversation by comparing this imaginary foe to Nazis.
No, I'm not comparing anyone to Nazis. I only call nazis nazis. There are white supremacists, incels, casual racists and antisemites on HN too but I'm not calling them nazis. When I call someone a nazi I'm specifically talking about someone who wants to establish a white ethnostate and believes in a Jewish conspiracy to "weaken the white race" through immigration (often in the form of a Great Replacement or White Genocide narrative). These people also exist on HN but they are harder to identify for what they are because that kind of talk is much less socially acceptable.
What I did say was that the Nazis believed in a literal conspiracy theory. The only person accusing anyone of believing in conspiracy theories here is you, so if you really want to insist on this being a case of Godwin's law you'd have to argue that I was accusing you of comparing me to Nazis, which still doesn't really match any definition of Godwin's law I've ever seen.
I didn't say you were comparing me to the Nazis though. I said it's interesting that you accuse me of believing in a conspiracy theory because I'm literally talking about the presence of people who believe in conspiracy theories. It's also weird that you double down on this accusation considering I literally explained I don't believe there is a coordinated campaign of undermining HN nor that the moderators are intentionally supporting these people.
So I guess my question really is: who do you think my "imaginary" foe is? And what is your opinion on the Paradox of Tolerance given that you seem to be arguing for a "marketplace of ideas" (often framed as "sunlight is the best disinfectant") approach to "bad ideas".
EDIT: To be redundantly clear, I'm not saying there is a far-right subculture in HN. HN doesn't really lend itself to building subcultures within it directly and allegedly there are protections in place to make brigading an inefficient strategy so coordinating outside HN is also off the table. What I'm saying is, as I've already said explicitly, there are people who hold these views and some of these people use HN. In aggregate, the more of these people feel comfortable expressing their views on HN, the more their views become part of HN's culture, the less people on the opposite end feel comfortable expressing themselves on HN and the fewer of those people will remain. I'm also saying this cycle has already been going on for a while and if you think it hasn't that may be because it hasn't affected you (yet).
It's wild to me to see such an anti-insect eating tirade on HN. Just observe the comments here: almost every highly upvoted comment is anti-insect, and the comments that express any positive sentiment towards eating insect is flooded with angry responses. Bizarre.
Don't you want to "follow the science"? Science says insects are a major vector for parasitic disease in humans. So should we ignore the science now because other science?
It's bizarre to realize that most people don't want to eat bugs? How many people do you see eating bugs on an average day for this to be a shock to you?
My modest goal these days is to set myself and my descendants up so that none of us ever has to eat bugs. I don't care what it costs. Life isn't worth living if you can't happily chomp a steak, suck down a martini and light a cigarette at the table. It's not to piss people off. It's for enjoyment. Fuck people who can't enjoy life and want to make everything a disgusting misery for other people. If eating cockroaches is what someone believes it takes to save the environment, then let them be a crazy saint. The world will recover after humans wipe ourselves out, if we do, but it's not really worth living if you spend all your time hating yourself for existing and desiring what comes naturally, is it? I'm just dead tired of the neo-religious bullshit around the idea that what I eat or drink is some kind of sin. This is the reason to get rich. Let everyone around scream and faint into their bowl of mealworms. fuck'em all.
There is a lot of puritanicalishism in current western culture. I miss the 1990's when people were excited for the future and the upward course of human history.
How is eating bugs to satisfy the scalability and reporducibility goals of a software developer who spends hundreds of billions lobbying governments to change what i eat because it meets both his pseudo moral and investment portfolio agendas "the upward course of human history."?
> want to make everything a disgusting misery for other people
Wait, who's doing this? All I've seen is advocation for eating insects, not people trying to make others do the same. The comments in this thread would make one think there's a government mandate to eat some ration of insects daily and to criminalize meat consumption. What did I miss?
