31–40 of 495 posts
It's good that we don't have to eat the bugs. Pods are still on the menu though.
Eating the bugs never really made sense when they are less efficient and more expensive than plants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. The article at…
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?
It's good that we don't have to eat the bugs. Pods are still on the menu though.
Eating the bugs never really made sense when they are less efficient and more expensive than plants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. The article at…
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?
Having eating crickets in Mexico in the past, now I'm concerned.
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.
Where do you get your information from? Have you seen that wetmarket? It looked pretty clean to me. Wetmarkets are diverse.
I don’t get why it’s so hard for people to just stop eating animals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...] the probability of catastrophic outcomes is exponential [...] What does that even mean? Do you want to say that the probability is high?
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…
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.
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 pat…
Salads can literally kill you via the listeria they bring.