Would you eat bugs? How about a dog?

It’s less likely that insects are able to suffer?

I’m pretty sure the meat/animal dichotomy in English has its roots on the Norman invasion of England where the French-speaking nobles maintained the porc-boeuf-veau vocabulary for the meat on their tables while the native peasants continued to call the animals in their care by the old Anglo-Saxon names.

Personally, I think the reason for not eating cats, dogs or horses is that they are among the few species of animals that can “read” human emotions. Most other animals will just assume that human beings are dangerous predators. Your dog, on the other hand, trusts you — and can possibly read you well enough to tell if you’re lying. You can’t eat another dog in case your own dog might see your guilt.

[On the other hand, there’s an old joke about cats to the effect that if they were larger than you, you’ld be their lunch. And we seem quite happy with sharing a house with a miniaturized tiger]

I became a vegetarian 40 yrs ago, based on not wanting others to do what I didn’t want to do – kill animals. I’ve since adjusted my diet to include occasional fish (which I would kill) and my lifestyle to participate in small scale animal farming including slaughter. I still call myself a vegetarian and am happy to defend my choice. No needed to consider eating bugs/no bugs, eyes/no eyes, or tongues/no tongues.
It’s a luxury to be able to chose but maybe we all need to reconsider sometimes.

ET: Why would you kill a fish if you wouldn’t kill a rabbit? Also, you are not a vegetarian by any definition but your own; you restrict your diet to vegetables and fish, a widespread habit for which there is no formal name although “pescitarian” is often used. And if you would kill a fish, would you kill a prawn or an oyster? If not, why not? What privileges a prawn over a salmon? But if you would kill a prawn and eat it, why not a beetle, since DNA analysis shows that insects are nested within crustacea?

“I don’t know much about animals, but why would this be the case?”

Because you have to have a fairly complex nervous system in order to suffer, and insects don’t have sufficient complexity. Lots of animals have nociceptors, i.e. nerves that respond to tissue damage of various sorts. But not all animals have brains, much less complex brains. Not all animals can experience suffering, which requires some higher level of sentience.

“And is it the suffering of animals that holds back people from eating animals…?”

For lots of people: yes. It is the suffering. As you go on to point out, it’s really not clear what “innocence” could mean in the case of animals. (“I don’t eat innocent cows, but once that heifer ate my prize petunias, I ate her with relish!”)

But there are almost as many motivations for vegetarianism as there are vegetarians. In my own case, suffering is a significant consideration. But if we could genetically modify cows so that they were born brain-dead, and otherwise developed normally, this would not reconcile me to eating their flesh. There are other issues in play (in my own motivations) about how we relate to the natural world, and also about which human traits we want to foster or discourage.

There really are lots and lots of positions to take, and lots of ways to take consistent ones.

The head of one stalk of wheat can contain 30,000 mites (arachnids). People eat “bugs” all the time without knowing it.

Order life by cognitive complexity – how similar they are to humans; how easily we can form relationships to them.

Top category includes dogs and pigs. Next is cats and dolphins. Etc. Bugs will be far down, though above plants & fungi.

Then, apply the ethical argument between two categories. Appeal to the behavioural beauty of the higher categories; their human similarities; the breadth of meaning in human relationships with them. That’s my vegetarian justification for eating bugs.

That’s also why I come to a different conclusion from Susan. I think eating pork is wrong, as pigs are as sociable and amicable as dogs. Likewise for octopus vs. fish.

I am a vegetarian; though I do eat fish, eggs and dairy products. I became one for a combination of reasons – economic circumstances, a strong environmentalist streak, and disgust at the weak communal response to the Rubashkin scandal..

I also keep Kosher so that would rule out bugs and most non-conventional animals as food. The Torah makes a strange exception in that it allows locusts to be eaten. I understand they were common among Yemeni Jews and others from the Arabian peninsula. I think there are people in Israel trying to popularize the dish.

When I did eat meat I used to enjoy beef tongue. I liked it as a cold-cut and my late mother and my sister-in-law both had excellent recipes for it. I read Emile Zola’s “Germinal” for a history class as an undergraduate and recall a description of a feast in the book which included both squirrel and rabbit.

I’ve eaten grasshoppers (tiny ones, so they didn’t look so obviously like bugs) in Mexico. They were delicious. I’m also fond of beef tongue, which a friend of mine calls “the only food that tastes you back”.

Here’s a classic article by Edmund Leach, “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse” (1964), that speaks to some of these issues:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/82724053/Edmund-Leach-1964-Anthroplogical-Aspects-of-language-animal-categories-and-verbal-abuse

Note that it has been rather severely critiqued, John Halverson, “Animal Categories and Terms of Abuse” (1976):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2800435?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Soylent Green anyone?
It’s quite delicious!
Also, once upon a time there was a horse meat shop in Seattle’s Pike Street Market.

Ask my understanding is that eating dogs and cats is becoming considerably rarer in Asia as it develops and they move from working animals to pets.

On the question of “It’s less likely that insects are able to suffer?”, David Foster Wallace wrote a brilliant essay on what he basically called “sea insects” and our ability or inability to adequately gauge their suffering: .

One of the requirements of an entomology class taught by the late Prof. John Edwards (University of Washington) was to eat three different kinds of insects. John was from New Zealand and had studied at Cambridge with V. B. Wigglesworth (I had to get in the name). I recall bee larva, grasshoppers but can’t recall the third. This was in the 70s. Don’t know if John was able to maintain this requirement in later years.

I think there is a practical distinction based upon the animal size. Modern humans don’t normally eat entire cows, hoofs and large intestines and all. But for something as small as an insect, its impractical to separate out the organs you want to eat, from those that are ground up and fed to the hogs. Although if you eat sausage and hamburger, or worse chicken nuggets, you are probably consuming organs you wouldn’t find appealing. So we don’t get to be selective about parts anymore if we go to small scale animals.

There are experiments whose goal is to grow “meat” in a cell culture, rather than as part of a large animal. So in the future we may be able to have our carnivorous diet, and never kill any non plant that contains a nerve cell.

Of course we all accidentally eat bugs from time to time. We occasionally breathe one eat whilst out jogging. And I’m sure vegetarian meals occasionally serve the occasional small bug that was clinging onto that lettuce leaf. So at least in a purist sense, its impossible to be one.

@Eszter Hargittai 24

” And then you would explain that for some specific books you make an exception for xyz reason.”

This is the sort of “cathecorical” thinking that I find strange.
Suppose that I don’t want to kill animals to eat, so I don’t eat cow. But I eat cheese, in whose production in reality a lot of cows are killed. Why am I so “incosistent”?
Because I live in Italy, where I can find many vegetarian meals in traditional restaurants (like pizza margherita), but no vegan full meal, so mantaining a vegan diet would be an hassle. So I do this kind of math:

Being vegetarian: +3 ethical points
Being vegan: + 4 ethical points (non-cumulative)
Not being able to eat outdoor: -5 annoyance points.

Vegetarian total value: 3+0=3 (win)
Vegan total value: 4-5=-1 (lose)

so I am vegetarian but not vegan. Note that there is no “cathegory shift” here, just plain old laziness.

I think that this kind of “evaluation of results” is the way we usually make choices, but my particular choice (when I say that I don’t kill cows but still kill them for cheese) for some reason is taken as “inconsistent” by some.

Omega Centauri 05.21.17 at 3:34 pm @ 33 —
In that case, people could enjoy cannibalism as well — eat human flesh without having to kill a person, which might otherwise be an objection I suppose. If this seems disgusting or horrifying, one might want to meditate on the source of the horror. There isn’t a whole lot of difference between a human being and a dog or a pig with regard to the structure of the nervous system or the interests of the animal in going on living.

If there is an analytical ethics postulate that it’s wrong to take life, and you object to bugs, by what principle not also yeasts and bacteria?

… There’s a relation to the question about abortion, and I propose that the resolution in both cases is we may limit our concern to the status of time-binders, collectors of experience. Bugs seem to have no individual consciousness in this sense, being fancy windup gadgets, although apparently capable of social consciousness. Generalized mammals, like newborn babies, experience and learn. But the postulate assumes an overweening individualism that I personally would disown … we’re all just part of the flow here.

My maternal grandparents had a farm so raising animals to eat was nothing particularly appalling to me growing up. My father, who grew up poor, hunted jackrabbits for the family dinner when he was a child and we raised rabbits to eat them (rabbit is quite good, leaner than chicken, and expensive to buy). He taught me how to kill a rabbit and I’ve done it.

The vegan stuff seemed a bit like a bourgeois preoccupation to me initially, but it is a reasonable response to corporatized farming.

Limiting your consumption to fish may be good for you personally but it’s not good for the oceans and fish farming as practiced in many places is not healthy or pretty.

As to eating insects – I’ve watched others do so on TV and it looks like they fry up pretty well. I wouldn’t eat them unless driven to do so, however.

@5:Well, if you die and your body isn’t discovered immediately, any dog or cat you have will start to eat you (“She was a winner/Who became a doggie’s dinner/…..Poor Marie”). My cat has all the kibble he wants and shows very little interest in making a serious effort to hunt anything. I wonder if unlimited kibble would have the same effect on a leopard. Not tempted to try the experiment, although I don’t think a leopard could eat much more than my cat.

I would never eat a dog or horse short of a Donner Party situation. We as a species owe them too much, including our very survival. They have provided us with transportation, companionship, love, and loyalty, even in the face of horrible maltreatment. Bless them all, every one, even Grandpa’s grumpy old buckskin, an inveterate nipper.

(I feel the same way about cats, but it’s purely personal.)

Quoting from machine-translated text:

It should now be known: Around eight billion people can not eat steak, schnitzel and fish sticks regularly. If the consumption remains as high as it is at present, it is difficult to provide all people with animal protein.

It feels like I am I missing an implied argument for the importance of specifically animal protein. Why expend such effort to overcome aversion to eating insects when there are already plant based sources of protein that are widely available and have no such aversion to overcome? (Maybe it’s just the grown-up version of your parents telling you that you have to at least try a bit before you decide you don’t like it.)

Are there many people out there who can’t bear to go meatless but are indifferent as to whether they’re eating cows or grasshoppers? I can’t imagine that eating insects that eat plants is any more resource-efficient than just eating plants… unless it’s a situation like with grass pastured beef, that some land can’t support cultivated crops that humans eat directly yet it can feed edible animals.

SusanC would seem not to be a cat-person. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Contrary evidence as to whether your pet cat would eat you if it could:

Pet cats (most of them) get along fine with babies and puppies. John Cole of Balloon Juice had two dogs and cat when he fostered two young puppies. The cat was the only one who played with the puppies, letting them use it as a tackling dummy without rancor. It was big enough to eat them.

There is a famous case of a farm cat adopting some ducklings.

Lions raised from cubs and then released in to the wild have much later recognized their associated humans and been quite affectionate with them. (See YouTube for examples.)

Of course cat and dog personalities vary, as humans’ do. Except the ones like Trump tend to get disposed of early.

As for eating habits, an article I read in “Scientific American” years ago said that by 2050 there would be so many humans that there would only be one bowl of rice per day to feed them – assuming by then we had killed all other animals which would otherwise compete with us for grain (such as cows), or for the land to raise the grain on. (Yes it took into account the slowing of population growth in developed countries.) Of course this scenario assumes we won’t kill off our excess population through wars or starvation. (It is the rosy scenario.)

I don’t eat bugs and never will because I find them revolting (and I’m convinced that this is not strictly cultural; Homo Sapiens are mostly just not insectivorous by choice) while I find dozen vegetarian sources of protein delicious. I wouldn’t eat a dog because 1) one does not do that in my culture 2) I share with them (as with all social mammals) a sense of empathy and caring, so the thought of killing them makes me sad (and 3) I’m convinced I wouldn’t like their meat, seeing as the meat of carnivorous mammals usually has a very distinctive taste). When I was a teenager, I was tutoring my best friend, whose widowed mother was a horse butcher, and each time I came, she would cook meat for me. Her personal circumstances were quite difficult, so I felt it would be unpleasant if not insulting on my part to refuse to eat her meals. So in all likelihood I ate horse many times though I would never do it of my own volition.

I can imagine many ethical reasons (as well as emotional ones, if you accept that emotions have a role to play in ethics) to eat bugs and not eat mammals and birds. For instance, insects are unable to experience pain in a way even remotely comparable to the way we do. They also do not care for their young in the same way as mammals and birds do, so have developed a completely different range of pro-social behaviors, making (at least some) ethical judgments about them harder to make soundly.

It seems to me that what you eat and how you eat it, and more generally how you relate to other living organisms, is inextricably linked with core anthropological and cultural properties, and as such are not human behaviors very amenable to rational explanations or consistent intellectual examinations (to give just an example, you destroy entire ecosystems every time you shower, usually using chemical weapons). In view of this, I find oldster’s recommendation (let’s not treat people’s food choices as a game of “spot the inconsistency!”) very wise.

I’m sure it’s species, or at least kingdom, centric; insects don’t have recognizable faces, hence she feels no compassion for them.

Did we have to defend her position or offend? ;-)

painedumonde @49: I’m sure it’s species, or at least kingdom, centric; insects don’t have recognizable faces, hence she feels no compassion for them.

I don’t know of any organized movement to draw the ethical bright line as between protostomes and deuterostomes, but this notion has both cladistic and aesthetic virtues. She who would eat an octopus, grasshopper or lobster, but not a sea urchin, tuna or gorilla, can reasonably say that she is observing a consistent “till they have faces” standard, by eating nothing that eats with a mouth homologous to her own. The protostome gut runs in the other direction, so if you recognized an insect face it would have to be from behind.

@45: Cats can also be highly protective. A local news item from awhile back featured a family cat who unhesitatingly charged a dog that had trespassed on the property and was mauling a toddler. The cat ran him off.

Ezster it was my goal as a vegan to show an alternative way of living that was practical, feasible and realistic. Discovering that it is literally impossible on that diet to get basic nutrients or to eat enough protein to maintain physical fitness meant that as a radical human choice it was off the table. So now the animals are back on the table.

Slightly tangential: there is an awesome ABC podcast series for kids called Short & Curly, on ethical questions. They had a great episode on “Should you eat your pet?” Other favourites were “should pugs exist?” and “Is Dumbledore as great as he seems?”. Highly recommended.

I think suggestions that insects become a major source of protein generally imagine roasted insects ground up and used as meal. They require relatively little biomass to sustain them prior to being eaten and reproduce very quickly. As to why they should be preferred to non-animal sources, I think the idea is rather that they will supplement them. Crickets eaten whole are a little too crunchy with legs poking about for my tastes but the flavor is fine–they are popular as a street snack in Thailand. I have eaten a whole lightly toasted witchetty grub which was quite good, having little in the way of offending legs, and the grubs are good in a creamy soup. Bugs are eaten in lots of cultures and certainly with relish by hunter-gatherers (and by extension, one imagines, early humans); for this reason I think the disgust factor is to a large degree cultural. I super-don’t want to eat scorpions, though! They are served at Chinese banquets sometimes. I would have to be VERY worried about offending my hosts to eat them. I think they are an example of Cantonese people proverbially eating anything that moves with its back to the sky, which is to say, everything.

I was invited to a special meal here in Taiwan that included fried grasshopper (delicious) and fried wasps (nutty, but leggy). A teenage girl showed up late, and was disgusted by the strange food- luckily there was some normal stuff as well- duck tongue and fish cheeks and eyeballs.

I don’t see how you can argue that it’s inherent to humans to be repulsed by bugs when people have been eating it in all sorts of places for quite some time.

In a thread on the ethics of eating meat and bugs, I think it is good to unpack this statement.

First, there is a presumption that human beings won’t do something that is inherently (i.e biologically) repulsive to them. But, among humans, cultural and social circumstances trump such biological distastes anytime. You can think of a million examples but let us start with torture: with a scanner, you can actually see the neurological process that induces the revulsion we have at seeing someone being tortured, and yet “people have been torturing people in all sorts of places for quite some time” is arguably even more true that the variant about eating insects.

Regarding the precise question at hand, the reason we have a distaste towards bugs is actually quite simple. First, we are omnivorous animals and as such picky about our food (contrary to what pop-biology would perhaps suggest, it is of course omnivorous animals which have an evolutionary advantage at being picky, so they generally are, just compare how rats and chimps feed compare to, say, hawks and if you don’t have that at hand, compare a dog or a cat to a baby interacting with their respective range of admissible food). Second, our guts (which have evolved a lot compared to even our closest cousins) don’t digest insect cuticles very well (this is why insofar as there are large scale insect consumption in the world, it is usually in the heavily fried and seasoned variety, or of larvae with a favorable ratio of protein to cuticle). (More speculatively, many insects are human parasites so repulsion to them might have been selected through evolution.) Precisely for the same reason of inherent distaste well-grounded on biological properties of our digestive system, very few human beings regularly eat raw meat by choice (though of course many have done so and will do so under suitable cultural and social circumstances).

All that being written, I trust it was already clear in my first post that if I don’t believe my own lack of taste for insects is strictly (i.e 100%) of cultural, anthropological or psychological origin, I of course agree with e.g Belle @61 that is overwhelmingly so (hard to quantify these things, but maybe 99%).

Interest declaration (I’m an omnivore in an otherwise Vegan family).

I find the ethical arguments re eating meat problematic. Firstly, in order to eat vegetables in the first place we have to do damage to wild animals (otherwise called pests). This is not obviously worse that allowing animals to live that otherwise wouldn’t. Of course it damages humans to treat these animals unnecessarily cruelly and the extra resources required by meat production extend the damage to the natural world caused by humans. All animal life involves competition and predation, protecting a wolf will cause damage to many individual sheep or deer or whatever. Absolutist views of the ethics involved all seem wrong to me.

@DavidtheK: during the feast in Germinal, they eat rabbit (still very commonly eaten in France), not squirrel (not eaten in France, although it used to be one of those last-resort foods for extremely poor people).

The French also do still eat horse sometimes, although horsemeat consumption is slowly disappearing (it is, actually, very tasty), but, contrary to Italy, that’s not an ancient tradition. Eating horsemeat had been forbidden by the Christian church in the early Middle Ages, as a way to combat pagan traditions. Although people would still eat horse when starving (hence the “soldiers eating their horses” as signalling military disaster), that interdiction was only lifted in France in 1866. Eating horse became widespread during the Paris commune. The sudden oversupply of horses that were needed less and less by peasants, aristocrats and soldiers alike, turned horses into a relatively cheap and abundant supply of meat from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th. Horsemeat was particularly “popular” after WWII, but as soon as economic conditions changed, its popularity waned. Given how useful and expensive horses were in an agrarian / aristocratic society, it is logical that they would not be routinely eaten before that.

Raw meat (tartare) is an extremely popular delicacy (on top of the fact that the French also like their meat cooked rare, apart from pork, which is too dangerous to eat undercooked). I have heard that for a restaurant to have tartare on the menu was a way of signalling quality, because meat can only be offered raw if its quality and freshness are guaranteed, just like eggs.

As far as I can tell, most food preferences regarding meat result from regional mixes of a) community building by drawing culinary boundaries, b) economic calculus (non-dietary usefulness of the animal + energy expanded in feeding it vs calories produced by its consumption), c) status signalling. In regions with plentiful access to protein from large domesticated animals, not eating bugs (which, in Europe eg, are quite small and not overabundant) would logically and easily fulfill all three options (like eating rats – potentially dangerous, very few calories per piece, and accessible to even the poorest starving people, so very low status).

As far as I can tell, few vegetarians and vegans believe that their behavior really makes a difference. The point is rather not to be responsible for that suffering. That always has seemed to me a slightly self-centered concept of the universe.

(Something that is often overlooked is that farm animals as species get something in return from this business, namely, no need to hunt for food, and almost guaranteed survival of the species as long as humans eat meat. This is a dark universe quite fundamentally not about us.)

If the point is to feed an ever growing population, I don’t think bugs are the obvious solution. Bacteria and yeasts can be more easily coerced into cheap mass production of valuable proteins. Still, I wager that it would be quite difficult to beat the ability of chicken, pigs, and cattle to do that.

Z@67 –
Given that many peoples around the world routinely eat insects and, from what I hear from people who have tried them (not uncommon among us cultural anthropologists), that they actually taste good, this is clearly a purely cultural (i.e., learned) behavior/reaction.

Procopius @ 62
My Scottish colleague’s Grandmother’s Haggis:
Take lungs, kidneys,liver, thymus, heart,etc.from sheep and chop.
Cook oats in mutton broth made from bones.
Mix with the offal.
Thicken with blood.
Stuff stomach with this and tie off ends like a big sausage.
Poach in more mutton broth.
Flame with Scotch.
Slice and serve with more Scotch. (lots!)

reason,

Heh, well, I grant you #1. But as long as we haven’t hit the limit, we have some wiggle room, I guess…

Some advantages of chicken, pigs, and cattle have over almost anything else when considering industrial scale production:

* Reasonably cheap to feed. Pigs are great for recycling many organic wastes.
* Cheap and easy to handle, because they live on land, like we do.
* Large. Can be practically looked at at an individual level if need arises (it’s not practical to keep fish or worms in stalls, and good luck figuring out what’s wrong with a sick grass hopper).
* Those meats have a high acceptance among the population
* …as well as a well understood health impact (nobody knows what happens if you completely substitute the established meats by insects in a human diet at scale).

I don’t say it is impossible to beat the ability of chicken, pigs and cattle to produce valuable proteins en masse. Just that it will not be easy at all.

Had deep-fried bugs a few times in China; they are quite a good snack food while drinking. Also ate various species of lugworm and jellyfish while in Southern China; some were good, others not so much.

Remember,too, that 1/2 of the corn and soy grown is fed to animals.

“They require relatively little biomass to sustain them prior to being eaten and reproduce very quickly.” (Belle Waring)

This seems to me the insects’ principal advantage as a source of protein. It sounds gross, but certain types of flies feeding on manure, offal, or leftovers can produce larvae with a high content of easily extractable, edible protein. One obvious use would be as chicken feed, a more sustainable option than fish flour or treated soybeans. It might also be possible, in theory at least, to do away with the chicken (pig, cattle) stage altogether and use the larvae-sourced protein for human consumption.

To the categorical absolutists (“You can’t be vegetarian if …”), my father recently introduced me recently to the biological/bacteriological terms “facultative” and “obligate” — having recently started to experiment with veganism, I describe myself as a facultative vegan if someone really pries on the subject, because I’m a vegan when the option is available. The obligate vegan is the one who cannot survive in a non-vegan environment. These terms are more usually applied to such things as anaerobic bacteria.

It might also be worth thinking of the ecological notion of mean trophic level: how high on the food chain one eats. Our mean trophic level re: fish has dropped over the decades as we’ve fished out all of the top-level predators and are now eating things much lower on the food chain than would have been of interest in the past. Of course, trophic level doesn’t account for the social status accorded @Adam Roberts’ (not *the* Adam Roberts??) excellent example of swan.

Personally, as a self-styled (i.e. non-, according to some here) vegetarian of some twenty years, the only animal “meat” I’ve consciously consumed in that time has been invertebrate. This is substantially connected to the ethical arguments of resource efficiency, antibiotic use, and, yes, a non-absolutist approach to animal rights. I don’t accord as much value to a fly as to a gorilla. Things like Alexander in Global Food Security make it clear that cultured meat and insects are both strong candidates for better land use efficiency, though I suspect that both, as they industrialise, will incur heavy antibiotic use and become ethically unsupportable according to some of my personal values.

When we have a discrete vocabulary (omnivore, pescetarian, vegetarian, vegan) to describe points that are arguably on multiple somewhat-continuous spectra, getting overly fussy about word meanings may prevent you from actually communicating with people.

Conrad Hughes@87:

Things like Alexander in Global Food Security make it clear that cultured meat and insects are both strong candidates for better land use efficiency, though I suspect that both, as they industrialise, will incur heavy antibiotic use and become ethically unsupportable according to some of my personal values.

Actually, what I’ve read of cultured meat suggests that it requires a sufficiently sterile environment for growth that antibiotics should not be necessary. I’ve seen this touted as something in its favor in recent articles disusing advances in the industry.

The faculative/obligate distinction is a useful one.

Orange Watch@89: completely agree, there is that interesting possibility; here in Scotland while the Environmental Protection Agency is utterly failing to prevent pollution from marine sea lice (aka salmon) farms it appears that some farmers are successfully creating land-based farms which, due to their pure created environment, don’t have to deal with lice and the associated “treatments” at all. This’ll be interesting: one of the major threads in the organic movement has been that treating the soil as a sterile environment where all inputs can be human-managed is a catastrophic misreading of the complex mechanisms by which the most nutritionally valuable foodstuffs can be produced. Such pristine fish farming smacks of the same, and given that there’s some evidence that the organics were at least slightly right about plants I wonder whether that’ll be amplified or muted with fish. Exciting times.

Eszter Hargattai@90: ha yes, well perhaps my phrasing was a little poncey, but maybe I can rephrase to something along the lines of “please don’t let your first response to someone be that their self-identification is wrong”…?

And then there is the Frat which offered road kill as the initiation feed.
Ivy, no less.
BTW, working my way through, I was a tree surgeon’s helper.
Trimming grossly overgrown ivy on an unnamed library, we disturbed a thriving colony.
Owls, snakes and many rodents living in this forest.
Had to be removed.
Ivy is destructive to masonry.
Ivy is better gone, both usages.

Frying and eating crickets and grasshoppers used to be a favorite childhood occupation in the American Midwest during the 19th century.

Mario, in Canada if you believe the children are in danger you are legally obligated to report the situation.

Mario @ 96: relax. 375 million vegans/vegetarians might beg to differ re: meat/fish-free diets being incomplete. We’ve got more than 2,500 years of evidence on that.

This also ties in with mythologies of meat and masculinity. If those weren’t so pernicious they’d be funny in context of all the stories about moobs and meat (which, to be clear, I don’t necessarily endorse or believe: unsure of the solidity of evidence for same).

I have read that the animals we normally eat live on stuff we can’t eat like grass while cats and dogs are carnivores so economically it makes no sense to raise them for their meat.

My theory on the relatively common (if not universal) taboo on eating cats and dogs: unlike pretty much all other domesticated animals (to my knowledge), cats and dogs weren’t domesticated due to a decision to do so by humans; the domestication process was unplanned and mutual (humans and wolves working together while hunting the same prey; cats moving in and making themselves useful as pest control where grain storage attracted many rodents). Our relationship with them, at a species level, is considerably less one-sided.

For that reason, the taboo is (on my theory) a cousin of sorts of the anti-cannibalism taboo. One reason we might not want to eat other humans is because we’re the same species, which wouldn’t apply, but another might be because it’s easy to imagine them as members of our community, which would or could extend to dogs and cats. Perhaps the taboo is missing/weaker where the link to our shared history is weaker?

(Regarding bugs, I’ve eaten them a handful of times and it never would have occurred to be squeamish about it. Same with Cow Tongue.)

Conrad Hughes @99: We’ve got more than 2,500 years of evidence on that.

Actually, no. There are no known examples of premodern human cultures that survive without cobalamin (organic cobalt, aka vitamin B12) produced by exogenous gut bacteria, either in food derived from ruminant tissues (meat, milk) or in human feces. No known eukaryote fixes cobalt, no known fermentation process outside of mammalian colons has been shown to make cobalt bioavailable to humans, and our own colons are too far downstream for us to absorb our own B12 (though the sacred Ganges is rich with other people’s).

Mario @96 was specifically concerned about children raised vegan in first-world conditions, where none of these historically proven sources are reliable. Millions of vegans may beg to differ, but biochemical fact need not hear their plea.

Food taboos, and what is and isn’t considered commonplace food, are endlessly fascinating topics. For me, it was a surprise to learn that some people consider eating rabbit or cow / calf tongue as in any way adventurous (for reasons other than explicit religious rules, which of course can fall any which way), or steak tartare for reasons other than iffy hygiene. Raw fish was new, and its degree of yuckiness much discussed among my childhood peer group. Eating horse in France and Italy or frog legs was new but not adventurous, as was various wild meats once I moved to the North (moose, caribou, wild duck/grouse/ptarmigan, beaver). Muktuk was a step up (I like it in itself, but the seal oil it’s usually served with is a bit too much of an acquired taste for me; it’s unsurprising that some young urban people eat it with (supermarket) wasabi), and akutaq (“ice cream” made from vegetable fat, wild blueberries, sugar and cooked fish) is excellent.

But that these patterns are contingent on culture doesn’t make them non-existent or inoperable.

Over my lifetime, mainstream awareness of how complex the ethical choices around food are has increased. It’s clearly naive to think that a vegetarian or vegan diet is a shortcut to a clean ethical slate, or even in every case the most ethical option. I’ve progressively much reduced my consumption of beef, but since I moved to the US, frankly, just looking at the sheer size of commercial chicken breasts makes me wonder what’s going on. And we cannot all be specialists in every agricultural production chain (nor should we be). It’s an incentive for seeking out sources outside the big-chain grocery store. The ethical situation regarding horse meat in the US appears to be extremely convoluted, with a whole raft of unintended consequences. Fisheries can be sustainable, but we’d need to be scrupulously honest about monitoring, causes, and consequences.

For some of the slightly or definitely taboo meats — horse, dog, cat — there’s clearly a lack of ethical oversight of animal welfare, and that’s what puts me off even before considering whether my relationship to the species would allow for the option to consider them as food.

Mario @96
“Re. acres of pasture for beef: that shows that beef is expensive, not that it is inefficient. ”

This is little odd. What IS efficiency if not price (since price is a reflection of opportunity cost)? (Maybe you are trying to say that nutrient value of beef is so high that it counteracts the high price. Seriously?) And in the limit (especially when we are talking about high quality land) one man’s expensive feed is potentially another mans famine.

With regard to fish, this is also tricky ethically.

We (meaning in this case mankind) are without question putting our land resources under enormous pressure in order to feed the world population in a style to which they are accustomed (or becoming accustomed to). That we should use the resources of 2/3 of the earth’s surface unused, seems to be unconscionable (it must increase the pressure on the land resources, and animal/plant life dependent on those resources). On the other hand, there is the way we go about harvesting those resources! But those are surely, two quite separate questions.

In find in general, the whole ethical field filled with such dichotomies. It seems it is not so much whether animals are killed or allowed to live that matters here, but how they are killed and why. I’m not sure that the animals themselves though, care about such distinctions (which is interesting isn’t it).

Joshua Burton @105–

Thanks for sending me to the Wiki page on B12, which confirms all you say.

So what gives with historical vegetarians and vegans? Do you have any hypotheses on where they were getting their cobalamin from?

I mean–population-wide deficiency is a possibility, I guess. Or a lot of consumption of human excrement? Or vegans secretly noshing on cows when no one is looking? Any theories?

Mario@115:

So… cultured beef is or is not “good enough”? If they get the flavor and texture “right” (and they’re close – possibly already there – on both counts), is it still a soulless abomination that doesn’t “nurture the soul”?

In any case, it would be better to label this objection as finding alternatives distasteful, because efficiency WRT food normally doesn’t refer to the amount of class markers and social status a given food provides – it refers to nutritional value obtained in relation to resources consumed in production. It’s perfectly acceptable to find small feed animals to be undesirable as food, but that doesn’t make them inefficient, nor does (or can) everyone enjoy such a distinct luxury of protein pickiness in perpetuity.

Re. vegans and vitamin B12 … you could always take B12 tablets, but my first thought was that that celebrated British delicacy, marmite, is a source of B12 and probably vegan. And indeed (I just looked it up) the National Health Service’s advice page for vegans mentions marmite specifically.

People from other countries may however consider marmite to be “not food” ;-)

oldster @114: Any theories?

Well, trace cobalt is indispensible; it’s a slow deficiency disease (years, in adults) because once supplied you conserve it well, but zero B12 will literally kill you eventually. All the B vitamin deficiencies, which are mutually related by historical contingency of discovery and similarity of some symptoms rather than by structural chemistry, are pretty horrible: irreversible neurological damage impacting mood, memory and motor function come before the frank symptoms. I don’t want to die of any deficiency disease, but I’d far rather survive acute scurvy or rickets than pellagra and friends.

The obvious guess is probably the correct one: human fecal ingestion, which is a good tradeoff if life is cheap enough that you’re willing to lose several percent of your children to V. cholerae, S. dysenteriae, and good old E. coli. The Indian subcontinent is singular in a lot of ways involving excrement, as well as with regard to widespread vegan practice. Field defecation is rare in Africa and Indonesia, for instance, but almost universal and protected by strong cultural norms in village India. (A privy that must be manually cleaned every couple of years is a capital expense well within reach of subsistence farmers everywhere; a brick privy that will last for generations, because you could never visit a temple again if you serviced it, costs a couple of years’ wages, so there are very few of them on the subcontinent.) I already alluded to river immersion, as well.

I remember reading the suggestion that people in India (and perhaps elsewhere) eating vegan diets are probably obtaining their vitamin B12 requirement from incidentally consumed insect fragments (legs, wings, and so on) which could only be eliminated from vegetable foods by a thorough washing; and I see that bks at comment 15 above has stated that the head of one stalk of what contains 30,000 mites, which presumably act as just such a source of B12.