The chief executive of Tesco has urged ministers to change “outdated” laws to allow insects grown on food waste to be fed to fish, pigs and chicken.
Writing in The Telegraph, Ken Murphy argued that by removing “regulatory barriers”, insect protein could be used as an alternative feed to animals and strengthen the UK’s food security as the war in Ukraine hammers supply chains.
Why not just feed the food to the pigs?
Yes, I know, foot and mouth. But isn’t this just a lovely example of how one bureaucratic decision and mistake then cascades through the system? Government then having to do ever more work to deal with its own consequences?
And once they’ve achieved this, the very next thing is to say ‘Why feed the insects to pigs, fish and chicken? We can cut out the middleman if only you proles will just EAT THE DAMN BUGS!’
I have a sister-in-law with a smallholding who raises a couple of pigs and some lambs each year. The regulations on what she can feed the pigs are nit-pickingly ridiculous. She can feed her pigs the outer leaves she trims off cabbages or other brassicas, but only if they’re cut off in the utility room or outside, not if they’re removed in the kitchen, because there might be meat there. They also can’t be stored in the kitchen, nor in any container that might have even seen some meat. She can feed surplus eggs from the chickens to the pigs, but not if the eggs have ever been in the kitchen, even for a moment as she passes through without putting them down.
As you might imagine the spirit of the law is frequently invoked.
Let us take for a moment the case of an omnivore such as the chicken. A free range meat bird will be eating bugs and worms that have in turn been eating rotting vegetation and the remains of various bits of wildlife that has fallen off the perch so to speak. I see little difference in feeding chickens bugs or insect pupae that have been grown on food waste and having chickens feed themselves from the same stuff that is lying around in a field.
Many chicken owners breed their own mealworms fed on various bits of vegetable scraps and then feed those mealworms to the poultry.
A lot of people don’t seem to realise that chickens will eat just about anything that is good for them and will if pushed eat other chickens. Poultry cannibalism is a problem where you have hybrid chickens that grow so fast that they are in danger of keeling over due to heart attacks. When this happens its not uncommon to have the other chickens decide that their dead coop mate represents a tasty snack and additional protein.
Whilst there are good reasons not to feed discarded meat to chickens because of the risk of transferring diseases across species I believe tht there is less risk in feeding poultry worms that have grown on food waste.
Arthur, those rules sounds faintly……. Kosher to me……..
These idea of using food waste for animals has been done for decades by Sugarich (and I am sure others) He also mentions using low energy fertiliser which I saw trialled near Kings Lynn in the 90s as they took sewage waste treated it and used it as fertiliser on the farm.
The guys at Defra/MAFF obviously neve read their Whiffle.
Off topic, but related.
“Like other RNA viruses, the FMD virus continually evolves and mutates, thus one of the difficulties in vaccinating against it is the huge variation between, and even within, serotypes. No cross-protection has been seen between serotypes (a vaccine for one serotype will not protect against any others) and in addition, two strains within a given serotype may have nucleotide sequences that differ by as much as 30% for a given gene. This means FMD vaccines must be highly specific to the strain involved. Vaccination only provides temporary immunity that lasts from months to years.”
Which is precisely why the so-called CoVid vaccines don’t work, CANNOT work – and Humans are far more mobile than livestock.
Third/fourth dose merely stimulate immune response to the original viron which cannot be effective against mutated versions – as the data is showing – and worse they are actually promoting evolution of new variants because vaccinated subjects are selecting for these variants against which the ju-ju medicine isn’t effective.
We now have tens of millions of people acting as incubators for new variants of CoV 2. If a virulent strain comes along it will be ‘wipe out’, not least because the vaccinated immune systems will be preoccupied with producing the wrong immune agents rather than coping with the new pathogen.
The unvaccinated (me) will have a much better chance of fighting a new variant.
The point being: it was well understood that vaccinating against RNA virus is ineffective, can at best only give temporary protection against a specific strain, and can encourage evolution of new strains so the virus can never be eradicated nor disease prevented nor transmission stopped.
But then they were following The Science, not science.
John B, ditto Mareks Disease Virus: “However, the leaky vaccine changes this evolutionary pressure and permits the evolution of highly virulent strains.[13] The vaccine’s inability to prevent infection and transmission allows the spread of highly virulent strains among vaccinated chickens. The fitness of the more virulent strains is increased by the vaccine”.
If only the experts had know this sort of thing before they started
‘recommending’mandating the use of leaky ‘vaccines’ for Covid 19………Oh, wait a minute….they didDidn’t the ban on using food waste begin as part of measures to prevent/combat BSE?
@Addolff: I suspect Kosher laws would be less insane. I think it’s Welsh government regulations, if they’re separate from English ones.
Arthur. A lot of the Kosher laws stem from food safety concerns among the ancient Israelites. Pork, shellfish and meat with blood in it all tend to spoil quickly in hot geographical environments and it’s a bit risky to eat carnivorous animals and birds. Some Kashrut laws such as the prohibition against mixing meat and milk items together are more cultural and were designed by the Israelites to separate the Israelites from the Babylonians who enjoyed such foods as a kid goat boiled in its mother’s milk. Forbidding people from eating such stuff stopped the Jews from drifting off and joining the Babylonians but today it merely stops me eating a cheesburger.
Some Kosher rules regarding meat such as checking the lungs for imperfections or checking to see if in poultry the part of the intestine that originally in the chick was joined to the yolk of the egg is not infected look to me as they also could have had their roots in food safety.
Other rules such as not eating the fat surrounding the kidneys are purely religious in origin as this is the fat that was reserved for the Priests in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem.
Yet more rules that apply for specific occasions such as Passover where leaven is forbidden are in place so tht nobody can make an inadvertant mistake and eat the wrong grain and the Ashkenazi prohibition on peas at Passover came from a time when peas were sometimes stored in sacks that used to contain grains.
Kashrut can be complicated but it a darned sight more easier to get your head round than some of the edicts from DEFRA and similar entities. DEFRA rules is why I make sure I don’t have so many chickens that I need to register with DEFRA as a registered chicken keeper. I know DEFRA is a administrative nightmare so I want to keep DEFRA as far away from me as I want to keep other stuff I dislike such as beetroot.
Why not just feed the food to the pigs? Or as it was known in my yoof pig swill
Worried about disease – boil it first.
Asiaseen. Yes heat treatment kills almost everything apart from prions in brain tissue but as the more dangerous tissues such as brain and spinal cord are prohibited from human and animal feed in places like the USA and other similar nations then the prohibition on food waste looks a little over the top.
“A lot of the Kosher laws stem from food safety concerns among the ancient Israelites. Pork … tend[s] to spoil quickly in hot geographical environments”: this is a popular rationalisation but is almost certainly balls.
(i) The archaeology shows a long period when pigs were kept in the hill country of Palestine. Then suddenly it stopped. That’s far more likely to be a cultural change than some sudden evolution in pigs that makes pork dangerous.
(ii) Pigs flourish, and pork is eaten, in Spain, including those parts which have climate near-identical to the hill country of Palestine.
A far superior explanation is Spinoza’s. The priests of the new Hebrew religious cult wanted to keep their people separate from their fellow Canaanites who hadn’t joined the new cult. Taboos on intermarriage are a good way to achieve this. So are food taboos, not least because they stop Hebrews from going to the religious feasts of their neighbours.
Combine some taboos with some foundation myths and you’re in business.
One of the known problems with pork is tapeworm infestation which can lead to some very nasty diseases in humans, hence the insistence on adequate cooking of pig meat. Given that pig herds tended to be “free range” and therefore more liable to infection especially in warmer climes, this may well have a bearing on the prohibition of pig products in both kosher and halal cultures.
Yummy yumm yum more flies and worms to eat. Yummy I love to eat insects for my lizard people. Save some flies and insects for me to eat. Yummy Yuum yum.
Vote Tory to help the oil companies hurt the ordinary people.
Remember whebn I described the British working class as criminals, drunk and hopeless.
Remember when I allowed my magazine to publish a poem that called for the Scottish people to be exterminated,
Vote for me Boris Johnson the lizard King.
Yum Yum give me more flies to eat.
“this may well have a bearing on the prohibition of pig products in both kosher and halal cultures”: as I’ve just explained this is almost certainly balls. But only the kosher needs any explanation anyway because halal is a copy of kosher. Islam presumably started as an idiosyncratic type of Judaism and/or Jewish Christianity so of course it contains large chunks of their beliefs and habits.
We’ve allegedly left EU. Abolish all these stupid nit-picking regulations
Let the animals eat whatever they want, same as wild animals do – Freedom
@John B
+1 and one reason I rejected the poison jabs