Katharina Unger and Julia Kaisinger, 25 and 28, have developed a device to breed in the comfort of your own home the protein-rich grubs of the meal beetle, to then eat.
“With this current design you can make 200-500 grams (seven to 18 ounces) of mealworms every week,” Unger told AFP at a recent tasting and fundraising event in Vienna.
“You freeze them and then you make them like any other type of meat. You can cook them, roast them, make them into burger patties and mix them into sauce for pasta,” she said.
Into the top of the sleek, white “desktop hive” go pupae which then hatch into adults. In the next section, the “love shack”, the insects mate and their eggs fall into the next layer.
Helped by a controlled microclimate, the eggs hatch into larvae which gradually grow and descend to a drawer at the bottom where, around three centimetres (an inch) long and plump, they are “harvested”.
“Our team eats them almost every day,” Unger said, showing off some of her creations — Greek salads topped by toasted grubs, quinoa-and-mealworm meatballs and even chocolate (and worm) cake.
Deep down, the r-strategists don’t know that they are designed to exploit a resource glut. They don’t fully understand how resource restriction will be bad for them. Yet they know instinctually that resource restriction is a very bad thing, to be avoided at all cost.
Take a K-strategist, and he will rave about a restaurant that serves wasteful portions of steak and potatoes. We don’t care if we run out of food, because if we did, that is what we were made for. It would be better for our psychology and our population as a whole if we ran out. Deep down, we are cool with that idea. However, find a restaurant serving lots of vegan meals in very small servings, or weird meals like tofu and bean sprouts with fried grubs that is ecologically conscious, and you will find a clientele that is made up of r-strategists who support political liberalism.
I’m convinced this is an instinct dating back to when resources grew short in the past. As K-strategists began to fight over the few remaining antelope, the r-strategists hid in corners eating grubs, rabbit fecal pellets, and grass, and telling each other how delicious it all was. I suppose the meals were amygdala assuaging when they thought about all the vicious fighting that would find them if they tried to eat more normal fare.
Amusingly, in monkey studies, when the amygdala was undamaged, the monkeys would carefully pick the delicious currants out of their mixed food, and steer clear of the other foods. If they suffered amygdala damage however, they would mindlessly eat everything in the bowl, without regard to what it was. Those little kicks of disgust and aversive stimulus which we suffer from at the thought of eating grubs, just don’t pop up in the amygdala-deficient. The damage in the experiments was an artificial way of simulating nature’s mechanism of adaptation.
Amygdala and Apocalypse – like apple pie and vanilla ice cream.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
Aside from the obvious disgust reflex that is lacking here, do you think fasting is more of an r- or a K- trait? On the one hand K’s should be adapted to shortage… on the other hand, r’s might find tolerating long bouts of hunger advantageous. It’s confusing when the same behavior seems to support both, so maybe it is unrelated. Yet, I usually only hear about hipster liberals doing all-vegetable “cleanses” and weird alternative diets.
“We [K-strategists] don’t care if we run out of food.” This is inconsistent with the practices of “preppers” and “survivalists,” who display traits of K-strategists: low time preference, high investment parenting, facility with weapons, in-group loyalty, etc. Or are preppers “grizzly bears,” as you described right-libertarians in a previous article, instead of either “wolves” or “rabbits?”
In tropical climates, people eat a lot of insects. In temperate climates, we eat warm-blooded animals. Raising insects for food requires too much energy to keep their living quarters warm.
If you don’t have much chance of winning a fight, learn to eat something that others don’t see as food. Imagine a horde of Vikings landing on an isolated homestead in Iceland. The owner and his family are nowhere to be found. The raiders open the barn door, the odor of hundreds of rotting shark carcasses washes over them, and they run gagging back to their ship.
Those days are long gone, but Icelanders still eat “hakarl”.
Interesting article. Very good point about the disgust reflex though I will say if you can get over that, insects do make an excellent food source. Many cultures eat them. Also virtually every culture has a number of foodstuffs that disgust everyone else. Highly K selected Europeans ate entrails with relish which is something most us throw away.
As a K selected person , while I can tolerate privation and have had the real deal , I don’t like it and a lot of it like you might find during a collapse can be have bad long term consequences for health.
And with huge populations and fragile foods, extreme privation or bad harvests or strife can effect even well prepared K strategists .
As such while I’m not getting a grub grower anytime soon, grubs, sprouts and spuds would be a way to keep going to farms and ecology can be rebooted.
Bugs, they are not just for R’s
Hey Anonymous Conservatives,
I thought might enjoy this since we are on the topic of diets with r/K.
This is on Vegetarian diet which I think would have to be an r selection due to the fact that it is not about health but about their self-rightist belief. I have meet many Vegetarians who will try and convince you that eating meat is wrong. Worst are the Vegans.
“A new study from the Medical University of Graz in Austria finds that vegetarians are more physically active, drink less alcohol and smoke less tobacco than those who consume meat in their diets. Vegetarians also have a higher socioeconomic status and a lower body mass index. But the vegetarian diet — characterized by a low consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol that includes increased intake of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain products — carries elevated risks of cancer, allergies and mental health disorders.”
http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2014/08/15/a-vegetarian-diet-will-make-you-sick-and-crazy/
Very interesting. I would predict the mental health thing since anyone who won’t eat meat is crazy. But allergies and cancers? You have to wonder if that isn’t city life doing that.
Hey Anonymous, I don’t think it is just the city life and not the diet. I used to be a Vegan myself for a month and a half and before that I would eat no red meat. I gave up drinking alcohol around the same time, and I exercise quite often both during and after that time. I went from a on a mostly low carb white meat diet to a raw Vegan High Carb diet.
It had huge affect on my body and my mind. The first week I felt great and lose weight (76kg to 74kg).
Near the end I was 68kgs with little muscle (my arms went from big since I do weight to thin) and a fat developing around my belly, I become more depress then usually, my iron level were a lot lower (too low that the blood bank which I usually give blood to would not take). I also started to get head aches and my energy level were going crazy (up and down in the same hour). I was taking B12 (about three a day) iron, zinc and fish oil tablets, (which I never needed to before). Also I was hungry all the time.
When my I went back to eating meat my body slowly change back to what it was before the diet. My energy levels went back to normal (iron levels went back to normal) and it went even better after I gave up wheat. My muscles came back and most important my headaches went. I felt better about myself and I was more cleared headed.
I think the reason you find that Vegans are so angry and get mad at you for not giving up meat is in part because they are actually suffering (lack of B12 due to the fact that the only source you can get is from meat, the hungry pains, the headaches and the lack of energy) and they are doing it for a causes that they feel is higher themselves. It is a religious called for the people who do not have a religion. It is like the modern day version of the flagellants monks in medieval Europe.
Though I did meet vegans and vegetarians who wanted to get government to force farmers and companies to stop producing meat. These people I stay away from but I can see after reading your book it may of been a way of spreading the r types to spread their craziness since I found the diet makes people more crazier (crazy if they are not already).
I keep reading that traditional western cultures did eat things that we would find gross today, like organ meats. But I keep reading about how organ meats like liver are far richer in nutrients than muscle meats. If I could find a way to overcome my disgust for liver I’d like to incorporate it into my diet. I don’t give a fuck about the environment, I just want the best diet possible.
@Mike: I grew up eating that stuff and still do eat it when I can. It tastes delicious and in most traditional recipes you wouldnt know that its tongue or liver unless someone told you. Just be mindful of your sodium intake, a lot of recipes call for more salt than is healthy. The recipes are holdovers from an era lacking refridgeration. Leftovers had to keep.
You can get some excellent ‘grass-fed-cow’ livers in pill form.
The lack of a healthy disgust response is something I too have noticed in the r-selected. Whilst visiting my girlfriend we came back from a date to find her kitchen crawling with roaches. She and I were so disgusted we could hardly move fast enough to do something about it. Her two sHillary supporting roommates acted like it was the most normal thing in the world. They did purchase some neurotoxin and applied it to the kitchen, but complete ignored my suggestion to apply borax powder around the walls and cabinets. Borax powder is much cheaper, kills immediately roach population can’t be selected for immunity, and safe for humans and the pet cat. Completely blew it off as a silly suggestion (how can it be better if its cheap?). These people don’t make sense until you it sinks in; they’re just brain damaged.