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Fast Coexist reports on the Edible Insect Desktop Hive, a kitchen gadget designed to raise mealworms (beetle larva), a food that has the protein content of beef without the environmental footprint. The hive can grow between 200 and 500 grams of mealworms a week, enough to replace traditional meat in four or five dishes.
The hive comes with a starter kit of "microlivestock," and controls the climate inside so the bugs have the right amount of fresh air and the right temperature to thrive. If you push a button, the mealworms pop out in a harvest drawer that chills them. You're supposed to pop them in the freezer, then fry them up or mix them into soup, smoothies, or bug-filled burgers. "Insects give us the opportunity to grow on small spaces, with few resources," says designer Katharina Unger, founder of Livin Farms, the company making the new home farming gadget. "A pig cannot easily be raised on your balcony, insects can. With their benefits, insects are one part of the solution to make currently inefficient industrial-scale production of meat obsolete."
Of course, that assumes people will be willing to eat them. Unger thinks bugs just need a little rebranding to succeed, and points out that other foods have overcome bad reputations in the past. "Even the potato, that is now a staple food, was once considered ugly and was given to pigs," says Unger adding that sushi, raw fish, and tofu were once considered obscure products. "Food is about perception and cultural associations. Within only a short time and the right measures, it can be rebranded. . . . Growing insects in our hive at home is our first measure to make insects a healthy and sustainable food for everyone."
(Score: 2) by dmbasso on Friday November 20 2015, @05:43PM
Two days ago I manually cleaned whole shrimps, for the first (and probably last) time in my life. While I was doing it I couldn't stop thinking how similar that would be for insects. It is just a matter of how it is prepared and presented. If it is convenient (cleaning shrimp is not, at least with my n00b skillz) and the end result doesn't look like living animals (I find those roasted whole pigs highly disturbing... don't you think they look like babies?), then it is ok.
Cultivating spirulina is in my "someday in the future" todo list. Is it difficult? What's the problem?
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
(Score: 3, Funny) by Valkor on Friday November 20 2015, @06:39PM
I dunno what problem cmn32480 is having with it, I can't keep a fish tank WITHOUT growing the stuff like crazy. Just put it in some partial sunlight (or full sunlight if you're crazy) and in a week it'll be everywhere.
Of course I'm not 100% sure this is the same algae, I don't have the tools or skills to find out.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Friday November 20 2015, @07:33PM
The problem I'm having with what? I am so VERY confused!
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 20 2015, @08:48PM
I doubt the stuff growing in your fish tank is spirulina. IIUC, spirulina is a variety of marine (i.e. salt water) algae. Certainly every time (rarely) I've tried to eat it it was unedibly high in salt.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday November 20 2015, @07:12PM
I think one of the key things here is scale too. A shrimp is really close to the bottom on my scale. You manually cleaned and processed those shrimp by removing the head, legs, shell, tail, and finally devaining (poo removal). That just isn't doable with insects and so they lie below my "it is food" scale. One small caveat is that i am mostly expressing preferences here. You can obviously eat insects and even live on them. Just like you could probably eat other people and live on them too. To each their own : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday November 20 2015, @09:16PM
I've gotten the kit from AlgaeLab [algaelab.org] a couple times and simply can't get the starter bottle to scale up. All the nutrients at the proper concentration, a PH tester to make sure the alkalinity is in the right range. I tried big translucent plastic containers, with an aquarium pump bubbling air through the mixture, but they all go yellow and die. I tried an automatic stirrer powered by an arduino and solar panels, same result.
The second time around I sprung for a full on glass aquarium with water heater to keep it at the optimal 80F, but that died even faster.
I thought maybe the lumens in the tanks were too high, or too low, and experimented with different placements and screens to control it, because everything seemed to instantly die in full sunlight. I thought I wasn't filtering the water enough (to remove any residual chlorine), so I double-filtered everything the second time around.
No luck. After two fresh restarts I have one last plastic container that seems to have become stable, but I can't seem to scale it up.
It's quite disappointing. Dunno, maybe I'll have to find a way to go somewhere and learn by workshop or something, or maybe I'll pack it in and build an aquaponic setup instead. There at least seem to be more online resources for the latter than the former.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by jdccdevel on Friday November 20 2015, @11:36PM
Maybe there is some residual waste product from the alge's metabolism that's poisoning it, because it can't dissipate fast enough? (volume vs surface area?)
Could be that large amounts of alge dying (and decaying) at the end of it's life cycle is poisoning the stuff that's stil alive.
Just a thought, it seems like you've thought of everything else.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 21 2015, @12:40PM
Yeah, I dunno. If it was a normal fish tank you'd run a filter to get the waste products out, but in this case that'd get rid of the algae you want to grow. You look at pictures of commercial algae ponds and they're open-air. You'd think that a controlled environment like an enclosed tank would be easier.
It has given me something of a complex. I can handle the regular kind of farming/gardening with weeds, insects, moles, mercurial weather, fungus, but this I can't master. If I can't handle hydroponics they're never gonna let me live on Mars...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by jdccdevel on Saturday November 21 2015, @06:41PM
Not really, the closed environment has to maintain a perfect balance. In an open environment, waste products have somewhere to dissipate to. In a closed environment, they accumulate, and eventually kill.
It might be worthwhile to monitor the CO2 and O2 levels in the atmosphere around your algae tank if you can, since it sounds like you're using a enclosed tank. I suspect your algae is suffocating.
I guess that depends, how good are you at growing potatoes? ;-)
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Friday November 20 2015, @10:13PM
Randall has similar feelings about lobster:
https://xkcd.com/1268/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday November 20 2015, @10:56PM
Randall is a fag bitch and none of the women he's kneading his dick over have any respect for him.
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Saturday November 21 2015, @04:50AM
Shrimp are bugs.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.