From the grass-fed steer I get from my neighbour each year, I get: delicious beef to eat, obviously, but also organ meat for some hard-to-obtain nutrition, bones to make delicious stock, plus tallow for cooking and soapmaking. The only reason I don't use the hide is because I haven't started processing my own leather yet (it's on the list). Crickets offer NONE of these ancillary benefits, and require resource-intensive processing to make them minimally palatable.
This is an important point that absolutely nobody ever brings up. The amount of goods you can make out of a single cow is ridiculous. Here's a favorite infographic of mine from the 40s:
Obviously some of this stuff is outdated, but most of it isn't. Almost every good here is still regularly made from cows, because why not? We slaughter over 30 million cows a year in the US alone, which means the byproducts are crazy cheap.
Too many people believe that we strip the meat off a cow and throw the rest in the garbage. Almost nobody truly understands even the most basic aspects of the world around them any more, because it's all done behind the scenes where our innocent eyes don't have to see it. And that's where you get stupid shit like comparing how much water it takes to make a steak vs. a cricket burger. It's like comparing how much wood it takes to build a house vs. a bird feeder. It's a ridiculous oversimplification.
The water shit always pisses me off. They act like the water used to raise a cow is gone forever, instead of just passing through the animal and returning to the water cycle. Farms have been on the same land for decades, or longer, and they aren't running out of water. A large dairy farm probably ships 10,000,000 liters of milk a year, yet the wells don't run dry. Water is not a consumed resource.
I've been hearing that argument my entire life. When I was a kid, the big thing was not "wasting water" by showering too long, flushing the toilet unless you need to, etc. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that the water is gone forever once it goes down a drain. It bred entire generations of people who had no fucking idea how water works until they became adults and realized that your shower drain doesn't jettison into space. And sadly, millions of people never
do come to that realization unless they're explicitly prompted, because pepole dum.
(Disclaimer: I
do try not to use more water than necessary because I recognize that a lot of energy goes into making sewer water back into potable water. But I also don't appreciate being lied to, even if the intentions are ostensibly noble.)
If they wanted to make a real argument, they could argue about
sequestering water. The average cow is about 800 pounds of water by weight, which means each cow is holding 95 gallons of water. There are 94,000,000 cows in the US at any given time, which means about nine billion gallons of water is being stored in cows. That's a lot of water. However, it's also .0003% of the amount of water in Lake Superior alone, so it's actually
not a lot of water, assuming you don't live in an area famous for its dryness. Desert-dwellers seem to be under the impression that water is a precious resource worldwide even though all it takes to acquire infinite amounts of it is to not settle in a retarded location.
theconversation.com
www.bloomberg.com
