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Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

journals.plos.org

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Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#182
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what happened to those countries that eat bugs nevertheless? They're going against their instinct? Or maybe it just is cultural, but in your culture it doesn't seem that way.

With the right conditioning, people can be made to accept all manner of madness.

The rejection of things can be "madness" too.

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?

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

who is the "elite intellectual class"? does it include everyone on this forum?

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#184

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 an…

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.

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#185

Quoted post unavailable.

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.

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#186

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 an…

> 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.

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#188

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 an…

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy_in_humans#Rejectio...

Re: Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)

#189

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 an…

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..

The world comes at you fast, lol.

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