Get Ready for Hot Dogs Made with Insect Parts Thanks to Liberals Worried About Overpopulation
I’m unusually interested in quotes of indeterminate provenance. Perhaps my favorite is the adage, “Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal.”
There’s a certain irony to the fact that nobody can determine who originally coined this locution and who was just being very mature and stealing it, but T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling seem to have the best claim to the sentiment.
Another favorite of mine involves is generally constructed similarly to this: “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” Otto von Bismark is actually the first man to have uttered that thought, but the basic premise holds true: Stuff you don’t want to see is involved in both processes.
All I have to say is: Otto von Bismark ain’t seen nothing yet. I mean, nor will he, since he died in 1898, but he might be glad when he sees just what’s going to be in this next generation of sausages — at least, if one Australian academic has anything to do with it.
“Meat Science Professor Dr. Louwrens Hoffman said conventional livestock industries would not be able to meet worldwide demand for meat, and alternatives were needed to replace or complement traditional protein sources,” Geek.com reported.
So, Hoffman’s answer? “[M]aggots, locusts and other alternative proteins.”
“An overpopulated world is going to struggle to find enough protein unless people are willing to open their minds, and stomachs, to a much broader notion of food,” Hoffman told Australia’s What’s New in Food.
“Would you eat a commercial sausage made from maggots? What about other insect larvae and even whole insects like locusts? The biggest potential for sustainable protein production lies with insects and new plant sources.”
However, Hoffman understands, not incorrectly, that consumers in the West aren’t really big on eating whole insects.
“In other words, insect protein needs to be incorporated into existing food products as an ingredient,” Hoffman said. “For example, one of my students has created a very tasty insect ice cream.”
Oh, so that’s why Ferris Bueller passed out at 31 Flavors that one night: pesticide bioaccumulation!
In addition to feeding you maggots, Hoffman would also like to feed your chicken maggots, too, by incorporating black soldier fly larvae into chicken feed.
“Poultry is a massive industry worldwide and the industry is under pressure to find alternative proteins that are more sustainable, ethical and green than the grain crops currently being used,” Hoffman said.
Well, I’ll say this much: Hoffman is more famous now than he was 15 minutes ago. Otherwise, this is the exact same nonsense we’ve been hearing since Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” roughly a half-century ago.
Ehrlich, for those of you who are too young to remember the soi-disant Cassandra of the environmentalist movement, predicted that food production wouldn’t rise at a clip commensurate with population growth, a disaster which would be exacerbated by environmental changes. The result would be mass famine which would kill hundreds of millions of people a year.
This didn’t happen, of course, but it didn’t stop Ehrlich from appearing on Johnny Carson about as often as Michael Avenatti appeared on CNN before he got arrested. Food producers and farmers got more creative and were able to feed more people using less resources. We have less famine now than we did when Paul Ehrlich was preaching about the eschatology of scarcity.
As for the modern insect-eating movement, I understand that hundreds of millions of people around the world eat insects as part of their diet.
However, none of what Hoffman is saying is going to avert a food crisis. It’s unlikely to help the environment to any great extent. And, perhaps most importantly, none of his environmental fatalism is at all new.
Heck, just six months ago, we were being told that eating mealworms with our pasta was another great way to save the environment. I understand adoption of new habits may be a slow process, but somehow I don’t see any movement in that direction happening anytime soon.
I will say this for Louwrens Hoffman, though: Given the history and the rhetoric of the environmentalist movement, he’s nothing if not an extraordinarily mature artist.
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