[ExI] will raise bugs for food

[Gregory Jones]

--- On Thu, 8/5/10, Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:
 
>...Have you ever seen a Regal Moth [1] up close? 
 
I have not, but I want to.  
 
The critical part of raising bugs for food actually isn't their size.  Regardless of what we use, we need to process them and extract the useful parts.  I never had in mind frying and devouring the bugs in any way similar to the way we eat shrimp.
 
The critical part is what they eat, and how well we can control that.  For instance, there are two great domesticated plants for maximum efficiency in converting sunlight to calories: corn and potatoes.  In both cases, there is plenty of biomass left over after the food parts have been removed.  Some of the remaining biomass can be converted to silage, but if we could engineer a bug that can go devour everything above ground on a potato plant leaving the roots for easy robotic harvest, we have really invented something useful.  Or perhaps we can create a bug that devours the remains of the corn plant after the ears have been removed, then crawls into the vat and gets reduced to protein, fat and oils, which are used directly to fuel machines or as livestock feed, or possibly novelty food additives.
 
spike
 
 
 
 

 
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