Hacker News Reader

Comment by terhechte | Hacker News Reader

I'd try it right away. I dig the idea and I wouldn't mind at all moving away from having to eat cattle.

But what I didn't from the article get was, how is eating insects considered in line with the vegatarian mindset? Insects are living things, too, no?

View on HN

Well, I guess it depends on what particular mindset. I do not eat meat, because I think that most animals that are commonly eaten are sentient, and I believe intentionally killing sentient animals is wrong.

The question of course is, what animals are sentient. I don't know. But I find it plausible that, say worms, are not really sentient. And from that perspective it's pretty ok to eat worms. Since I do not know where to draw the line, I play safe and avoid meat, but others would choose differently.

Some of my friends are also vegetarians, not because they think killing animals is wrong, but because they believe animal farming has a negative impact on the environment. If insect farming does not have the same impact, it could be a reason for them to consider eating insects.

I don't want to attack you or anything, just want to point out that no living thing wants to die. There is evidence that even plants have some form of sensation [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/science/15food.html?_r=2

Of course living things don't want to die. But if you decide that all living things including plants deserve to not be eaten or harvested, your menu becomes incredibly short.

I mean, you are not left with absolutely nothing to eat, but all you've got that I can think of is dairy, fruit and nuts. You could technically eat grains, but harvesting enough grain without killing the plant is difficult.

> I wouldn't mind at all moving away from having to eat cattle.

Who's forcing you to eat cattle?

It's a matter of ease and usability. Go to any normal restaurant and the set of non-meat (read, tofu) is rather limited (read, none). Of course, I cook myself and I'm selective that I don't eat too much meat. But that's additional work. It would be great if non meat would be a more common part of the food industry. To make it easier to find / eat it. (Even the salad offerings are terrible, most of the time. The Mediterranean areas are pretty good at that, though).

"Go to any normal restaurant and the set of non-meat (read, tofu) is rather limited (read, none)"

We must be in dramatically different parts of the world... I never really considered the east coast particularly good for that particular kind of variety either.. ..but I have no problem eating vegetarian most of the time.

Here (Netherlands) it's also not that bad, there's often a few sections on the menu: meat, fish, vegetarian. If you're lucky, they're of similar size. Supermarkets have a reasonable selection of meat substitutes, though I prefer to use cheese, mushrooms or nuts (and meat ;))

It does vary even more, now that you mention it: I remember San Jose in Costa Rica having many different vegan (not vegetarian) option.

I've had locusts. They're pretty good, especially panfried, but unfortunately people seem to be having trouble importing them into the US:

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/san_fran...

I don't think they can ever completely replace beef or pork, but the article was pretty dead on when they described them as something crunchy that could be added to fried rice or whatever.

Depends on the definition of the term vegetarian. You can go with the "no meat, but fish and bugs allowed" definiton?

I wonder why do we, as humans, consider eating bugs strange, and why haven't they evolved as a regular part of the modern human diet? Is it only for historical reasons, social, or is it something physical or biological?

"Humans" doesn't consider eating bugs strange, just us westerners do. The only reason for it is cultural.

Eating bugs is very common around most of the world actually:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy

Yeah, I didn’t get that bit. But then I don’t get why some vegetarians eat fish either.

Well, plants are living things too ;)

There are a couple of reasons why some vegetarions (pescetarians) eat fish and not other meat. The main one is health, since it is really difficult to get a healthy and varied diet, with enough protein and fat, through eating just plants. A lot of people also don't believe that fish suffers as much as other animals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com