Conspiracy theorists are trying to influence European election campaigns with disinformation and lies. Much of the fabrication comes from Moscow, but plenty is homegrown.
If media campaigns in more than a dozen European countries were to be believed, the European Union (EU) intends to force citizens to eat insects instead of meat.
The claim has touched nerves, especially in Italy, where variations of it have been revived and splashed across billboards during European elections to pit Brussels against mama’s special sauce.
But consumers of this claim are being fed pure nonsense, an example of countless fabrications launched or adopted by candidates seeking political gain at the cost of the truth.
The fake insect-food narrative, which first surfaced last year in a number of EU countries, has proven so popular with malign actors both within and outside the bloc that they’ve brought it back for the European election cycle to try to discredit pro-EU candidates.
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But no one should be surprised that malignant actors want to impact Europe’s election cycle, with 720 seats up for grabs for the next five-year term in the European Parliament and many national elections taking place simultaneously as part of a record year for elections worldwide.
The EDMO reports a record-high amount of disinformation ahead of the vote about universally controversial issues like migration, agricultural policy and climate change, including even the resurrection of fake stories from years past, such as COVID-19 conspiracies.
Funny, this is actually the second thread in the past couple of days where eating insects has come up for unrelated reasons. I’ll repeat what I said in the other thread on a few points:
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Insects can be farmed sustainably, they are high in protein and many other nutrients, and there’s really nothing wrong with their tastes unless you don’t like the same flavors in other foods.
The length people will go to, to not eat a goddamned legume.
Or… stick with me here… we could be eating both. Because insects both taste good and don’t taste like plants.
People are squeamish about eating insects but are okay with all the killing of cows, pigs, chickens and more, which is a very much nastier business.
Easier for them to ignore the suffering they cause than ignore that their food is different from what they’re used to.
I’m vegan, so you won’t be seeing me after bug flour. But I would much prefer that It replaced the meat industry.
There are plenty of amino-acids in plants, there’s no need for wasting resources on insects.
In reality, the subsidies meant for these invertebrate animal farms will be lead to more feed for the vertebrate animal farms, in the shape of “concentrated protein feed”.
You can feed insects on garbage. No resources will be wasted. You also don’t need to use pesticides or herbicides on insects.
I get that you don’t like the idea of eating insects, but that’s another issue. Farming them is sustainable and eating them is healthy.
Could consumption of insects, cultured meat or imitation meat reduce global agricultural land use? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912417300056
Your first link talked about the problem being variability in how they are farmed, not that they are farmed.
Your second link says:
Did you even read it?
I didn’t go further than that if you’re not going to check your own links.
Yes, I read it. Plants are still the superior option. I was being generous for your middle ground position.
If you knew anything about animal farming, you’d know that “garbage” can mean a lot of things. This hope of waste feeding gets trickier with invertebrates who don’t regulate their own body temperature. I’m saying that you’re being excessively optimistic about it.
You were being “generous” by contradicting your own point.
That’s also known as being wrong.
I expect you to understand that some topics are more ambiguous, which means that there are more contradictory bits of information which are tied to different setups in context.
As the practice of raising these invertebrate animals is not happening at a large scale, the data for it is also weak and based on immature research. The ambiguity with decline over time, if there’s more research into this and it actually happens at a large scale.
In terms of food traditions, eating land insects is usually a luxury, which reflects the scarcity: https://www.finedininglovers.com/article/insect-delicacies-around-world The simple notion that “insect protein is cheap” is misleading.
I expect you to understand that you contradicted your own point with your own link that you clearly didn’t read.
And now you are linking to some food blog about what insects people eat rather than anything scientific as if it means something.
Ma Laeng Tod (Thai street food- fried insects,) is delicious. The grub were like spicy-savory gummy bears.
As some one who’s perhaps too adventurous for their own good (I’ll eat almost anything, once.)… I find this whole idea that it’s going to be forced patently ludicrous. Even if there was a push towards it.
Italians, or at least Sardinians, already eat bugs. As expected, they make it into something delicious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casu_martzu
maggots in… cheese…
Eh. not the most disgusting method of fermentation I’ve heard about.
Never eat those maggots live, unlike mites they actually can fuck you up from the inside. Which isn’t the reason it’s outlawed though, that’s because Sardinians have no sanitary source for the maggots.