Insects…nutritional values of some…
- Thread starter kinyonga
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nightanole
Chameleon Enthusiast
Insects show higher feed conversion efficiency (i.e. a measure of the animal's efficiency in converting feed mass into body mass) in comparison with mammalian livestock. Van Huis et al. [11] even stated the feed conversion of house cricket (A. domestica) to be twice that of chickens, 4 times higher than in pigs and more than 12 times higher than in cattle.
This is what gets me(along with the the utterly absurd price of insect "meat"). Van is implying it should be a minimum 12 times cheaper to buy cricket meat vs cow meat. Or at least twice as cheap as chicken. And if you do the math van is also implying that chicken should be 6 times cheaper than cow.
Unfortunately this is not the case. Go ahead and buy a pound of meal worms and a pound of the worst cut of cow. You will find the meal worms cost several times more.
You would think that you could have a bug bin and scraps go in and cheap meat comes out, kinda lika BSFL setup. I mean peoples raise chickens for meat. Guess what, they dont eat grass, you have to buy the chicken food. So you would think you could setup a mealworm tub and pop in the same feed, and get twice the meat/calories out vs chickens.
I have not done a deep dive, but i wonder if it is word play. "conversion efficiency" could be like furnace efficiency. Old furnace is 80% efficiency and new one is 90%. So they can say the conversion is twice as efficient (half the waste) . But in reality you are not getting twice as much heat per pound of propane, you are only getting 12%. So one pound of grass only gets you 1/2 pound of cow, but you feed it to crickets and you get .9 pounds of cricket. aka 12 times less waste.
This is what gets me(along with the the utterly absurd price of insect "meat"). Van is implying it should be a minimum 12 times cheaper to buy cricket meat vs cow meat. Or at least twice as cheap as chicken. And if you do the math van is also implying that chicken should be 6 times cheaper than cow.
Unfortunately this is not the case. Go ahead and buy a pound of meal worms and a pound of the worst cut of cow. You will find the meal worms cost several times more.
You would think that you could have a bug bin and scraps go in and cheap meat comes out, kinda lika BSFL setup. I mean peoples raise chickens for meat. Guess what, they dont eat grass, you have to buy the chicken food. So you would think you could setup a mealworm tub and pop in the same feed, and get twice the meat/calories out vs chickens.
I have not done a deep dive, but i wonder if it is word play. "conversion efficiency" could be like furnace efficiency. Old furnace is 80% efficiency and new one is 90%. So they can say the conversion is twice as efficient (half the waste) . But in reality you are not getting twice as much heat per pound of propane, you are only getting 12%. So one pound of grass only gets you 1/2 pound of cow, but you feed it to crickets and you get .9 pounds of cricket. aka 12 times less waste.
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