There's an rule in the EU that says you can't feed the insects pork and then let those insects go on to be fed to pigs (same for beef and chicken). This is intended to prevent the transmission of diseases like Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (like "mad cow disease"). As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe. Arnold van Huis and his team at Wageningen University are putting quite some energy researching the safety and lobbying the EU to change the rules based on the findings. At one of the talks those folks they said it's basically a black box of trying to get what kind of science the regulators will consider acceptable.
As you might guess, making sure the food waste you feed the insects doesn't have _any_ animal proteins in it is quite logistically challenging and so afaik nobody is doing that at a large scale.
I did quite a bit of research into the history of insects in the food system, especially in the Netherlands. While I was rooting for Ynsect and other big players to figure something good out I believe that it's a problem much better suited to a smaller scale (perhaps on the city level). Basically, have the food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects and then let those insects be turned into whatever (pet food, fish food, trendy protein bars).
> But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many > Westerners feel about bugs.
I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.
And even for some of those who do eat insects, they are specific insects, form specific places, prepared in traditional ways.
Not a powder of insects
> I think this is a weird wording. I dont think you need to limit the ick factor to "Westerners" There are an awful lot of people out there who would feel the "ick" factor.
Of course, this has nothing to do with “Westerners.” No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder. The fact that the company was allowed to operate and to receive massive funding is the real issue here.
Well, chickens tend to live off insects when you let them roam.
I don't really see how insect powder would be worse than the flour they get now. You don't even need to turn the bugs into a powder.
To be fair, chickens can see and discriminate between insects before putting them in their mouths. Powdered insects preclude that.
Likewise, cows would never eat a carcass cow, but as hamburger mixed with a lot of grass...
> To be fair, chickens can see (insects)
Yes, they do that
> and discriminate between insects
Yeah, they do not do that.
They also eat mice, which I guess came as quite a surprise to the cat that was stalking the mouse, although not half as much as to the mouse.
Chickens eat anything they can. Sometimes including eggs and chicks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_poultry
Indeed we already feed them insects and we don't powder them. You can purchase bags of dried meal worms at the feed store. The carcasses are fully intact.
For the longest time industrial and domestic livestock raising used to involve feed that included literally anything the animal would it. Free range birds today regularly eat worms and insects. Pigs were used as a sort of waste disposal system for anything they could digest, leading to a lot of health issues. Still nobody really cared beyond “I’ll cook it until it doesn’t kill me”, not the producers, not the consumers.
> No one in their right mind would want farm animals to be fed insect powder.
Why?
There aren't really any farm animals that eat insects. Mostly they eat tough grasses and plants, the kind of things that we can't eat.
I am pretty sure most people don't care how their steak made it's on their table.
I think most people do care if it weren't very difficult, even illegal, to find out.
Thats was Jamie Oliver, right?
I really don't concede the point. Kids see food they aren't accustomed to eating blended together and fed to them by people they trust (Oliver is a celebrity in the UK).
What they aren't seeing is the chicken eggs they're eating was laid by a hen that was shat on by the chicken above it while sitting on a bed made of the cadaver of the chicken that held the pen before it.
Steak is the meat that people pay the most attention to in this regard! People will pay hundreds of dollars for a few ounces of steak solely based on how the cow was raised and fed.
For steak, I disagree with the article about stigma of eating bugs. Feeding cows bugs will save money, no doubt, and that might help cost on the low end of the beef market. Steak is a different thing though. A "bug-raised, bug-finished" steak would have to be incredible to overcome the stigma.
Comparing high end, connoisseur based food like wagyu to the plastic wrapped supermarket meat most folks buy day to day isn't a good comparison. Both things exist; there isn't only one way people think (or don't think) about their food in this way.
Similarly with whisky - some folks care deeply some of the time about a particular whisky made by a particular distillery in a particular way in a particular place. This is fun and interesting and there is a lot to appreciate there. That doesn't mean there isnt a massive market for "well" whisky or the flavored ones where they mix up all the lower quality whisky they can get their hands on in bulk then add cinnamon or peanut butter syrup to it until people drink it again.
In the same way people generally don't LIKE the conditions of food animals it doesn't prevent their purchase, especially if it reduces cost or increases availability.
There are probably a fair share of people that care. But I said "most" and stand by it. Maybe you are american? Around here we don't ask how the cattle was fed, maybe in high end restaurants and markets, but that is obviously a minority.
>The fact that Ÿnsect failed doesn’t mean the entire insect farming sector is doomed. Competitor Innovafeed is reportedly holding up better, in part because it started with a smaller production site and is ramping up incrementally.
>For Prof. Haslam, Ÿnsect exemplifies a broader European problem. “Ÿnsect is a case study in Europe’s scaling gap. We fund moonshots. We underfund factories. We celebrate pilots. We abandon industrialization. See Northvolt [a struggling Swedish battery maker], Volocopter [a German air taxi startup], and Lilium [a failed German flying taxi company],” he said.
For the moment ynsect was launched in France it was obvious that it was doomed to fail. Like often here, the only real goal was to suck public funding.
Normally, you would start a small business/factory and scale with your business. Especially growing insect doesn't require a "mega factory".
But here, from the onset, they started from scratch and announced a mega investment to build a giant factory. Obviously getting hundreds of millions or even a billion, most from public funding as we could guess.
Where can I learn more about that ?
It was in French and a long time ago, but basically it was in the style of the following article:
https://www.fishfarmingexpert.com/france-mealworm-molitors/n...
Like the huge megalomaniac project that, to french people, is the typical example of too huge to make sense step for a startup, that is expected to be a sink of funds.
Otherwise, there is a good article in english if you want straight to the point article about the history and concret reasons of failure in the following link:
https://www.onei-insectes.org/en/ynsect-difficultes-economiq...
I think in the case of flying taxi's is just that it is a moronic idea tho.
Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan) and applications (e.g. mountain rescue).
Ain’t no way you want flying taxis in Manhattan. If two collide or one fails, you could kill dozens of people.
Maaaaybe instead of the tunnels and bridges, to increase throughput during rush hours, but even then we’re trying to have fewer vehicles in Manhattan, not more.
Also, I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through an intersection during the winter. You would be hit with a wall of cross-cutting wind tunneling down 50 blocks that no airborne device is going to handle well. Absolute nightmare.
Helicopter. Already exists.
Presumably, if you're going to bother with flying vehicles, it's to free up space on the ground below.
To fill with other uses, say pedestrians.
Taxi falls, pedestrians get crushed bellow, but now the vehicular speed isn't 20-30 mph tops, but the terminal velocity of the vehicle.
mv^2 is mean.
Much worse, obviously.
I’m not an expert by any means, but one of the major impediments I would imagine to flying taxis carrying people is safety; there’s a _lot_ that has to be done before people board an airplane in terms of checks, paperwork, planning, etc.
The dream of “order a flying taxi on your phone and it takes you wherever you want in five minutes” isn’t really compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot level in the US). That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to say “we want to remove the safety controls from this so we can make money with it” and have people buy it.
aviation occupies a great deal of my attention, and there is a logic to everything that is done, based on actual provable, repeatable results. anything involved in high volume passenger aviation has to pass reliability tests that will dry your eyes out just reading through the synopsis, nothing is making it to the PR stage. I splain little bit, pick some fancy country full of rich people flying around, tell them that the US has just ripped the lid off airspace restrictions (again¹), and is now letting some kind of ubber drone thing loose , and quite litteraly instantly there will be calls for all flights going to the US to turn around as all insurance policys for commercial flights to the US will be null and void.
¹one of the few times the US has been forced to back down admit fault, and agree to changes. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/17/united...
i don't think mountain rescue is asking for a better vehicle. traditional helicopters work.
flying taxi startups, drone companies, jetpack companies, and all the other fantastical flying startyps keep trying to say they have applications in mountain rescue, but i'm pretty sure that's providing a lot more benefit to the flying taxi startup's pitch deck than it is to any mountain rescue operation.
Traditional helicopters also have the effective lift-weight ratios to tackle the density*altitude of mountain rescue that these "air-taxis" have _zero_ hope to achieve with the the vastly lower power-weight of electrical drive-trains and their lift-inefficient multi-rotor designs.
China calls it the low-altitude economy, and besides human transportation there is a lot that can be done. Personally, I believe that propeller-driven devices are too dangerous and noisy, but there might be innovations coming out of China that Europe can't
Birds.
They make no sense at all.
You can't fly within 500 feet of any person, vehicle, or structure.
At 500 feet, literally any failure of the aircraft means you die about seven seconds later.
What attribute should they have to make them more suited than helicopters? Silence ? Energy efficiency ? No landing pad ?
Yes, I too want my space alien anti-gravity flying saucer. Those eggheads need to hurry it up.
> Flying taxis make a lot of sense for very specific areas (e.g. Manhattan)
The things people will do to not build bike paths.
Weather in New York is perfectly fine for biking. If you can walk outside you can bike. Both means of transportation are equally resilient to bad weather. What you need is protected bike lanes, so you can bike relaxed and holding an umbrella if necessary, as millions of people do every day in Netherlands and other European countries.
...ChatGPT? Such an odd take, to point at weather being variable.
This is a coastal city at a fairly run-of-the-mill latitude, people build functional bike networks in much worse.
> any kind of outdoor rescue
You know we have these things called "helicopters", right?
Because the need is fulfilled adequately. They are not solving anything new or revolutionising anything old, these are dumb ideas for dumb people to throw money at hoping it sticks.
At least with respect to aviation, we don't have any non-combustion power-trains that can remotely come close to the power-to-weight ratios of turbine engines.
The earliest cars were replacing the animal muscle power of carriages--a trivially easy feat given that the most primitive steam and combustion engines easily 10x both the raw power, power-to-weight, and power-density of a team of horses.
Agree. It doesn’t have the futuristic vibe but an urban gondola type system is probably what would be best. Especially in a city where there may already be a network of structures to leverage (eg. The buildings/rooftops and elevators). It would require massive coordination or eminent domain type laws to force but end result could be pretty awesome
What is moronic about the idea?
It's hard to pick just one reason, but off the top of my head:
* Any failure tends to turn flying things into unguided missiles
* Noise is extremely hard to control -- I did an FAA helicopter discovery lesson, and oof
* Cities tend to have difficult to manage wind currents and hit-or-miss visibility. I was in a skyscraper across from one hit by a helicopter trying and failing to land in 2019 -- there's reasons for city no-fly zones
* Limited landing sites makes them highly situational in the first place, unless you want your streets to be helipads, which you don't
These are all fairly intrinsic and not mitigable. I can think of more issues more in the sticks, but you get the idea.
> Electric taxis will be welcomed once they are certified and economical.
Do you believe helicopters are noisy because they're not electric ? Your electric taxi will do the same thing: they need propellers. Propellers that can carry up to 1 ton are fucking loud.
Electric taxis will never be welcomed because they are a dumb idea.
The wind in NYC is no joke. In brooklyn yesterday there were gusts so strong that car alarms were going off. In some apartment buildings, the handicap-accessible automatic doors simply cannot open into the wind.
Imagine being in a flying car. Nope nope nope!
There’s just a lot more space when you can move in three dimensions, so I don’t think the congestion limitations of non-flying cars are likely to be replicated. IIUC (I’m no expert) that’s one of the most attractive features of flying VTOL vehicles.
Founders can be chasing a dream and in doing so mesmerize investors. Or they capitalize on that same dream being the investor's. Even if it's not viable, it can still be really fun company to work for and/or earn money at. Even if there is a small lane for that sort of flying machine, the sheer number of companies purportedly working on something like that is suspect. Given the huge costs for development and certification, and the small number of vehicles that will really get deployed (certainly for the first so many years), there must be many that are never going to make their money back. I worked for a drone-adjacent company and now my LinkedIn is swamped with these startups.
If a startup were able to truly solve the first two issues alone, they would not be burning those world-changing engineering solutions on flying taxis.
I don't know if a silent, fail-safe, and efficient method of flight is physically impossible or not, but I do know this is low on the list of applications it would be first seen in.
EDIT: I'm looking at the air taxi companies this thread started with, and no, they have not solved any of the relevant problems.
Theranos was famously founded on pitches about blood testing from finger pricks that literally any phlebotomist and many people with a modest life science background could've told you were physically and statistically impossible on their face. You should be considerably less credulous toward startup grifters.
Because noise?
about Innovafeed, their core business is creating animal feed like Ÿnsect, however with two key differences:
- the bugs feed on crop waste instead of the animal waste of the target animals [1]
- they are also investing in vertical farming alongside the core business
still not profitable as of writing the linked article, however.
It’s moronic to have the government pick winners. Only private investors with actual skin in the game will pick those with true potential. This error happens again and again and again
See SpaceX, Oracle etc for more government funded winners
No monorail on the list?
How about funding some housing for the people? Why is it that every city had new huge neighbourhoods built en-masse until the 1990s, and then suddenly stopped (with a few tiny exceptions)?
But hey, flying taxis, right?
Startups failed, now here's bob with the weather.
Similar like grass fed beef and dairy is a sign of quality and "naturality". I look forward to the day when insect fed chicken becomes a sign of quality. Because insects are part of a natural diet for chickens.
> Because insects are part of a natural diet for chickens.
It's actually a welfare issue for chickens. They have feathers, and they molt. Just like hair, feathers need methionine. Methionine is very hard to get solely from plant sources. If they don't get enough methionine they eat each other's feathers, not just the discarded feathers (which left on their own they do normally).
If the insects are fed "naturally", though!
If the insects are fed naturally, it would probably be more cost effective to feed the chickens whatever you are feeding the insects. The only reason to introduce the insects would be if you were using something the chicken cannot eat, like wood.
Living organisms don't metabolise and transform matter in the same way.
A chicken eating an insect who ate a plant could produce higher quality feed and thus chicken than if the chicken ate the plant directly.
Same with humans. It's much more efficient to feed humans directly than animals for human consumption.
Reminds me there are startups looking at vat grown protein using hydrogen and CO2 to feed nitrogen fixing bacteria.
An interesting thing is solar farms are maybe 30-50 times more efficient than corn. So the above isn't insane on the face of it.
"Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. "
if you raise that much money and go under, its usually just fraud.
The french government has been heavily subsidizing private R&D (up to 50% of the cost, including engineer salaries). It was relatively easy to create a moonshot project worth a few millions, and have the taxpayer pay for half of it. Then you just need to find a sucker to pay for the other half, and collect the money (getting an actual result is optional).
How do I know? My company is a minority partner in one such project (wind energy, we would provide instrumentation). It's infuriating, the head company has been trying to make one of the big energy providers pay for half the R&D, with no success, and the project will be closed. Lots of taxpayer money wasted for no result, and we won't make sales.
Because of these abuses, the french government is changing the financing rules. They will only finance small proof of concepts first, then a pilot project, and only then industrialisation issues (instead of financing all in one go).
IMO it doesn't make any sense for a startup company like this to get $600 million in funding before making a profit. It seems obvious that it could be proved out for a lot less before scaling up.
I wonder if they would have succeeded if they didn't try to go so big so fast.
Another thing would have been if they had worked with Black Soldier Flies and focused on sourcing feedstock for them and scaling in a cheaper manner -- cheap/modular bins that leverage their tendency to "self harvest" -- the BSF larvae will climb up a ramp when ready and drop right into a collection bucket.
Automating the care and feeding of those pods in a cost-conscious manner and then being able to package that facility at scale at the feedstock source, e.g., parking shipping containers at a dairy farm where they're happy to consume the livestock waste. Then collect and bring back to a central processing facility.
This is like Juicero. It doesn't need a startup, investors or "tech". They already do this all over the world, and not just for animal feed...
It's not that it's not a good idea, it's already there. It's that it's not a VC idea.
And it seems the market prooved my point
Why do you think it’s not a VC idea? VC is necessary to scale up to large volume. It’s easy for me to believe that insect protein can be a good business at high volume but not low. At volume you can get economies of scale and efficiency and get your cost basis down, making things profitable that wouldn’t be profitable at lower volume. Makes sense on fundamentals without a lot of details. Sounds like they were just too ambitious and chased after a very large market with very thin margins. (Animal feed.) instead of a smaller market with thicker margins (pet food)
The fact that they were simultaneously pursuing animal, pet, and human product lines is just poor management. Exactly the kind of poor management that VC can encourage, mind you. Because VC pumps in tons of money and wants to see big plans.
For the same reason corn farming isn't.
They already do this, at scale, feeding people, all over the world. There is no "unlock" to invent some tech that makes it magically more efficient, cheaper, or otherwise more adoptable.
The only difference between them and their existing, already on the market competition is they don't owe investors 10x returns.
Good point there isn’t some magic unlock. Although maybe they were hoping to find one.
But a key difference with corn is that corn has been farmed for thousands of years. We know without a doubt there aren’t any low hanging fruit to make it more efficient. I think it’s a reasonable bet that insect farming might have some easy wins simply because (almost) nobody has tried it at scale before.
Pet food might be more lucrative. Or fish food.
But it is not a goldmine. Dogs, cats etc have better teeth and like to eat a lot of meat, that humans generally does not eat: rabbit ears, tendons, throats, noses, etc.
Insect food is not that cheap. A lot of pet stores give out free treat samples. My dog normally loves all treats, but refuses to eat the the insect treats (before I realize they are made from insects).
I am sure there are companies making a good living making insect pet food. But it is probably not that obvious a choice.
Good. We do not need to bring even more animal suffering into this world. Especially when we have much better alternatives available to us.
Meanwhile the "other" French insect farming startup seems to be doing fine (Innovafeed)
They should stick to snails.
Given that EU tech salaries are a lot more tame, it would be interesting to see how 600m were even used. Hopefully there’s some good R&D there and not some French alps retreats and Porches for founders
They had 600 million employees!?
Yes. All of Europe was working for them, and we're now entirely jobless. The industries, governments, all refocused on insects, and now it's gone. We don't know what to do. Send help.
> how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million
I'm letting my mind wander and thinking what a French insect wrangler looks like. I'm kind of imagining a mix between French style, a cowboy hat, and lab gear.
Or maybe a guy with a large incredibly smelly cheese who is trailed by a huge cloud of flies.
I find it remarkable, and depressing, that so many people just cannot handle the idea of insect protein. You get similar resistance to water reclamation from sewage and nuclear power. How are we supposed to change the world when we always hamstrung by all the mercurial and irrational whining?
The monster in Paris should not fear getting meat packed anymore!
“Make something people want” was supposed to be the motto.
No Flea Soup for You!
> Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation
Yum, liquidised insects
Ynsect-crushing reality - nobody really wants to eat bugs
“Human food was never the focus”
I eagerly purchase insect/grub kibble for my dog - both fly and cricket based. Also a lot of vegetarian kibble, I am a vegetarian myself.
But still your dog doesn't really want to eat the bugs, it's just there's no bowl of steak next to it
Have you met dogs?
How mighty wolves have fallen...
How can you know that? Dogs were domesticated on being fed scraps to start with and came from wolves which are also natural scavengers and eat all sorts of nasty (to us) things. Ive seen many dogs happily gobble up insects, even stink bugs. Dogs don't even know what their food is made out of 95% of the time these days so im not sure anybody can claim they simply don't like eating insect food without some kind of study to back it up.
I was being a little facetious. Yes they probably "like" processed insect food designed for them, but for the average dog, I'm still betting on the steak.
Wolves scavenge opportunistically, but they are first apex predators. Their primary food drive is to hunt in packs for large game and gorge. Dogs are not so far removed.
Why not? Have you tried? I have, must've been almost 30 years ago now, at Wageningen University. They taste quite well, if well prepared (they were). Insect burgers are also nice. I liked Damhert's insect burger [1]. People just think too much it looks like [2]
[1] https://www.jumbo.com/producten/damhert-nutrition-insecta-gr...
[2] https://www.theburningplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/0...
Yet most people over a certain age probably have without realising. Haribo, Tropicana, lots of fruit juices, sweets and dairy products used Cochineal.
People do however both keep pets and eat animals that eat insects, which is what the company was aiming for.
I would happily eat cricket protein if it were more scalably environmentally sustainable. I’m fine with milk, but cows aren’t helping our greenhouse sitchu.
Not to mention the issues with pea protein and lead content.
What are the problems with pea protein and lead?
A recent investigation by Consumer Reports found that plant-based protein powders, particularly those made with pea protein, contain significantly higher levels of lead compared to animal-based alternatives, with over two-thirds of tested products exceeding safe daily lead intake levels.
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And here are some of the reasons why:
1. high risk of severe allergic reactions and cross-reactivity
2. contamination with pathogens, toxins, and heavy metals
3. digestive and nutritional drawbacks, including anti-nutrients (no pun intended) and imbalances
4. and last but not least, the good old precautionary principle: limited research on long-term human health impacts and emerging hazards
if you still want to eat zee bugz, consider yourself warned !
I don't understand why everyone involved didn't immediately realize especially the first two of those whys. Eating bugs at scale is such a surefire way to get everyone allergic to random stuffs.
And it's not like it was never tried. There are tribes and cultures that do it at tiny scales, which means humans used to do it and quit at some point in the past. It's removing not an insignificant Chesterton's Fence.
This is one of the posts on HN where I first read the dead comments. And they did not disappoint.
You will eat ze bugs
Until the vegans make it mandatory through legislation, nobody is going to eat bugs.
1. Most vegans don’t intentionally eats bugs.
2. Ynsect main target was… non-human animal food.
Why would vegans eat bugs or force others to eat bugs, though?
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Because the natural order of things is wild shih tzus hunting down cows?
Wolves did hunt aurochs, and apparently, shih tzus are one of the closest related dogs to wild wolves: https://www.dogingtonpost.com/8-dog-breeds-closest-to-wolves...
Why would that be? Killing and having them eat chicken and lamb is morally superior how?
Ask my dog, he knows
if u saw what goes into commercial animal feed u might feel different about trying to figure out better ways to do it...
Not the heckin doggos :((
…because most dogs just will eat bugs on their own, no outside influence necessary? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
I am baffled as to why cat food is labelled up as having "The great all-natural taste of beef and lamb that your cat loves!" because if my cat could naturally eat beef then that would be fucking terrifying, a 4kg cat that can eat a 600kg cow.
They should say "The great all-natural taste of mice and wasps that your cat loves!" based on observed behaviour.
Cats love tuna. Why? Basically got a lot of the amino acids that taste good to them, just coincidence.
you eat beef and you're only 73kg and eating a 600kg cow! Baffling!
Thanks to tools, I'm a far more capable hunter than my cat. It's trivial for a human of any size to kill a slow moving cow. It's very hard to imagine any scenario where a domestic cat would be capable of hurting a cow, let alone kill and eat it.
Actually I'm well north of 100kg, and being a tool-using ape that's about 1/6th the weight of and considerably taller than the animal I want to eat it's a fairly easy task.
If I was 1/150th the weight of a cow with my eyeline roughly level with the top of the animal's foot, armed with teeth about 12mm long and sharp claws about 5mm long, I suspect it would be considerably more difficult.
Humans have been hunting prey many times larger than themselves for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years (maybe even millions).
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> bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.
How on earth did French taxpayers get roped into funding a moonshot startup whose entire goal was to make pet food out of insects..
Good question.
There seems to be strong lobbying for insects as human food, in particular from companies that would be happy feed us with their own shit as long as it's cheap and they could get away with it
The green-left seems to enjoy that idea. Exactly why is hard to tell - especially on HN, but let's say I don't think it's rational.
So I guess, successful lobbying?
The why is not that hard to understand - insects provide a lot of proteins compared to how much food they consume over their lifetime.
But yes, the obvious place to start is to use it for feeding chickens and not humans. Why chickens? Because insects are part of their natural diet when they are free. There is just a bunch of infrastructure problems that need to be solved for that to work as insects have pretty different problems to solve compared to other parts of the food production chain.
None of which requires startups, science or factories.
If you put cows on a field for a day, wait three days for insects to infest their shit, then put chickens on the field, the chickens scratch through the cow shit and eat the bugs. The cow shit gets nicely spread out and fertilises the soil more quickly.
The problem with this system is that it doesn't allow rich people to screw mega bucks out of the government for doing no work at all.
> The green-left
You don't need left there, there is no green right
No, but there is a non-green left. And the greens do get most of their policy influence by associating with the rest of the left, since there are very few green parties that govern directly, or at least alone. So it's fair to say that such initiatives are successful because a subset of the broader left, the green-left, likes the idea.
Figures are all over the place, but the figures around public funding are around 50 millions (Euros) total, including EU, national and local.
They were clearly surfing on pure hype: green, local...
You should look at the percentage of fish that comes from aquaculture and where the food that they are fed comes from.
French taxpayers need to revolt, and soon. Their situation is extremely bad
Nobody protests like the French!
Because pet food is a large contributor to greenhouse gas emissions?
In Europe ist mostly crony capitalism.
Well connected people using government funds to finance their businesses.
Like in the US then?
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Good riddance. Like the beyond meat implosion that was foreseeable from the far, it is another elitist dystopian dream getting smashed by the harsh reality of people's natural instincts.
These initiative's will be back though. Likely armed with their lessons learned, like making the government compulse us into eating it. Sugar coat it by telling us it's only once per week, or how affordable it is since we increased the prices of proper food through red tape and taxes.
That's very good news. I hope all companies of this kind meet the same fate.
Rest assured though that they will be back.
And as always their blood of life against the public's natural disgust will be lobbying, powered by being rooted in elitist thinking.
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Animals served us well when human's life expectancy was 30yo
Centenarians i know are all on a plant based diet
Insects? why bother
There has never been a period where most humans would die at ~30.
While life expectancy at birth was ~30 for the whole history of humanity up until the mid 20th century, this doesn't in any way mean that average people died in their 30s. Instead, life expectancy was highly bi-modal: most people died as children (most before age 1, but still a large number before age ~15), and most of those that didn't die as children lived into their mid to late 50s.
I'd imagine they would be possibly able to self-regulate easier compared to plants
Oh my god eat some beans. Eat some tofu, eat some black-eyed peas, eat some green peas, eat some lentils, eat some northern beans, eat some lima beans, eat some chickpeas
What does that have to do with animal feed?
I think the point is about nutrient intake rather than animal feed.
No.
no thanks
'Ÿnsect focused on producing insect protein for animal feed and pet food'
Surely nothing could go wrong feeding herbivorous animals a diet of insect protein...
Especially when you could have just fed them the grain directly:
…factory-scale insect production typically ends up relying on cereal by-products that are already usable as animal feed — meaning insect protein just adds an expensive extra step. For animal feed, the math simply wasn’t working.
They fooled investors with the sustainability angle. What a huge waste of money on a terrible idea cloaked in lies about sustainability.
It seems like their pet food business (where they were competing with input-intensive meat products) could genuinely have been sustainable, if they hadn't taken so much time to figure out that competing on livestock feed is hopeless.
This sounds like "draff", or distillery mash, where you get a huge lorryload of spent grain from brewing for very little money, which is still pretty damn nutritious for cows and sheep.
Better than letting it sit and rot, emitting massive amounts of methane in the process.
plant protein is vastly inferior to animal protein. they don't feed livestock fishmeal for the hell of it.
The quote you make doesn't mention herbivores.
Cat food contains insect protein, and cats are carnivores. They even catch and eat insects themselves.
In contrast, cats are being fed grains which they wouldn't naturally eat.
Moreover, insects are a cheap source of animal protein.
Not all agricultural animals are herbivores. Pigs and chickens are both omnivores. Also insects are probably good feed for some species of farmed fish.
Cows and horses are opportunistic omnivores.
From the article looks like fish feed.
We have food waste -> black soldier fly larva -> chicken and fish feed companies, a financially sustainable ecosystem of companies globally.
They are currently fed fish protein. I fail to see a difference.
I mean most pets are carnivores or omnivores, it sounds to me like they just scaled up before they had really found product-market fit
You'd have thought it wouldn't be the proteins in the input, but the prions in the output they would care about. They're remarkably resilient, it's not unreasonable to be cautious.
Agreed, this is one area where care should be taken. The effects of CJD are absolutely horrendous, and it’s easy to imagine that this might be a way to transmit it.
Or at least focus on not having neural tissue in the input. That wouldn't rely come from consumer waste, would it?
plenty if brsins for sale at the supermarket.
but, more important- prions are general. not specific to brain tissue.
Mais bien sûr ! Consider visiting France some day, it's not just the restaurants, supermarkets carry genuinely interesting ingredients. https://www.intermarche.com/produit/cervelle-de-porc/2889214...
its not in most supermarkets you'd see in NYC or LA. But several places in Indiana had them a few years back.
> As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe.
We banned all kinds of such "forced cannibalism" after BSE, yes. And for good reason, I think - not just is it highly unethical IMHO, but because even a minuscule risk of a repeat of the BSE crisis of the late 90s/early 00s just isn't worth it. The destruction that BSE brought upon the European agriculture industry, the public outrage - I doubt non-Europeans could even understand the impact it had.
I was born in the UK during BSE, and as a result I can’t give blood in Europe. People forget it but the scars are still there.
Might want to revisit the regulations of the country you're living in. Ireland [1] and, apparently recently, also Germany [2] at least have largely taken back the ban. If you're fluent in German, you can read the factual basis on which the RKI made its decision here [3].
[1] https://www.giveblood.ie/can-i-give-blood/keeping-blood-safe...
[2] https://www.blutspendedienst-west.de/magazin/blutspende/mehr...
[3] https://www.rki.de/DE/Themen/Infektionskrankheiten/Blut-und-...
Amazing, looks like the ban was lifted where I live in NL in May 2025! Thanks for the heads up, I had missed this, despite being fairly certain I had checked relatively recently.
https://www.sanquin.nl/system/files/2025-05/sq_beleidsregel-...
Just to clarify, pig -> insect -> pig wouldn't constitute cannibalism. But it's still a rather unusual (ie low frequency) food chain in nature so there's no reasonable assurance that it will be safe. Given how resilient prions can be and just how crazy some of the observed transmission pathways have been the current EU regulations seem quite sensible to me. (As a layman. To be clear I'm no expert on prion diseases.)
Not direct cannibalism. It is cannibalism once removed though.
Soylent Green is people!
Our city just had a compost program. Throwing away compostable material into the provided bin was free. They put it into the city managed compost yards and then every weekend you could go down there and pick up bags of the finished product to use at home in your garden.
It's also the case that many states already have a "garbage feeding" program that allows food waste to be diverted into feed for commercial animal lots. The food has to meet certain criteria and be fully cooked and ready for human consumption before being discarded.
Cooking does not destroy prions to any significant extent. They’re even resistant to autoclaving. It’s one of the big reasons that prion diseases are so pernicious. The garbage feeding you describe could absolutely spread prion diseases for the same reason that use of animal byproducts in feeds spread BSE in Europe.
Wouldn't the worse problem be that humans are consuming it first? These aren't "animal byproducts" it's food meant to be served to humans in restaurants who ended up discarding it.
In any case, it truly is part of several state laws, including where I grew up, in Minnesota. You wouldn't believe what they feed pigs back there. All kinds of expired foods, pastries, candies, and other convenience store fare. That's what the law is meant to cover, including, "discarded or unused restaurant food."
Humans consuming it would be bad, but the animal cannibalism is what allows the prion diseases to proliferate in the first place. There never would have been a BSE outbreak in the first place if it weren’t for that.
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Given that the incubation can be in the decades caution is well deserved.
Im not allowed to donate blood in N. America because I once lived in the EU for a few years.
Why?
Because feeding cows cows wasn't proved unsafe and therefore allowed in the food chain. Then people started dying. Oopsie.
But it's OK. It better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
That restriction on blood donation due to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was lifted in 2022. You should go donate blood.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
At the time we didn't know prion disease could be transferred between species. There's no evidence that scrapie (sheep prion disease) or CWD (deer and moose prion disease) can be transmitted to other species. BSE is seemingly a unique prion disease that can affect other mammals.
Though, BSE was massively overhyped by the same epidemiologists who got COVID wrong. They said it could be a huge disaster that killed millions and in the end only fewer than two hundred people died of cjv over a period of decades. Although that's bad it's very far from being a good justification for banning everything pre-emptively.
Better safe than sorry.
Is pig > insect > cow (and reverse) any safer or have same concerns?
Yes, it is safer. Basically what we discovered in the 90s is that cannibalism (an animal eating others of its species) has a relatively high chance of leading to protein mis-folding in that animal, producing prions. Those prions can then cause additional mis-folding producing more prions, this time in a very direct way that is unrelated to who consumes the meat.
So pig > pig or cow > cow is known to produce prions. I believe it's also somewhat proven that, say, pig > cow > pig does not produce prions in the same way. However, insect digestion is very different from vertebrate digestion, so it's not necessarily safe to assume that pig > cow > pig being safe means that pig > insect > pig would also be safe. However, it does prove that pig > insect > cow > pig would still be safe - the insects don't add a risk in themselves, we're just not certain that they eliminate the risk the same way vertebrate digestive systems do.
While cannibalism is related to transmission in some cases I don't understand it to have anything to do with prion formation in and of itself. See scrapie for example. While highly contagious the underlying cause of scrapie is typically (afaiu) genetic and transmissible through the environment over fairly long periods of time.
Which is to say that things are likely even a bit worse than you seem to be making out.
Let's not forget human > human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
Yeah and to be honest the research on it is still at the start. Maybe with the advances in protein folding computational research we'll be able to understand this better
Because that's the biological equivalent of that catastrophic bug that only happens in very weird and very specific conditions
Are you referring to alphafold etc?
My understanding is they don't actually simulate or calculate (meta)stable states of proteins, but rather extrapolate on known folds of experimentally confirmed proteins (basically peeking at what types of folds are found in similar sequences in other proteins. then known as homologous proteins).
How proteins get folded, unfolded, refolded etc depends on the exact cellular or vacuolar environment.
AlphaFold isn't trained on the environment, it only sees the known mappings from genetic sequence to protein structure. It is patently unaware of any environmental aid or frustration in correctly folding a protein.
An incorrectly folded protein structure (putative prion structure) and its correctly folded structure share the same genetic sequence. AlphaFold is effectively blind, it was just trained on correctly folded proteins with known structure.
Unless future versions of alphafold use ML to speed up actual QM or molecular modelling calculations
I don't see how alphafold can help enumerate all potential misfolds of all proteins generated or preserved in an animal of species A and consumed in an animal of species B, and calculate all possible ways a misfolded protein from A may act as a prion in B.
Its only safer because of dilution - insects are less likely to have proteins that a prion can induce to misfolding.
But unless it is demonstrated that insect digestive systems have some magical enzyme that can do what autoclaves can't, that is break down prions, then it cannot be assumed safe.
As far as I understand, it is indeed safer, because different animals tend to be sensitive to different illnesses.
I had heard about that rule. But thought I had heard it had been overruled in the last 5-10 years. Maybe only for fishing feeding cycles?
Scrapie (a sheep and goat prion) contaminates soil where sheep graze (and shit) and can persist for years in the soil.
> food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects
a. how does that solve the transmission problem?
b. amazing work by EU bureaucrats to regulate businesses that dont exist yet
c. they can export the feed to fish farms or china or whatever. the question is do the economics work. US soy bean is just incredibly productive (and subsidized)