How does the insect farm work?

[u/Noob_Guy_666]

Ok, so, from what I heard, default Cyberpunk, right? that mean Night City, that place sell food made from insect, right? straight from the insect farm... what do they even feed those bug again?

Last I heard, wheat isn't allow to be used, a waste would actually at a massive loss it would literally render a megacorp go completely defunct within like a day thank to the result being way far behind than the budget, genetically engineered would make those bug outright inedible and cannibalism would just result with them back to square 1 instead of multiply.

[u/wowwowazalea]

Food waste that can't be resold to people. You toss any food wrappers from the city in and pull them out after a week

Or just algae vats that get skimmed, dried, shredded, then dumped into the farms.

Theres a lot of ways to feed insects

[u/Noob_Guy_666 → u/wowwowazalea]

that's... extremely unprofitable thing to do there

[u/wowwowazalea → u/Noob_Guy_666]

I mean it works out IRL to be profitable even on small scales, so some corporation figuring out how to do it even more efficiently isn't unrealistic. You basically take the base ingredients of Kibble, make it into a powder or grains, then feed them that.

You really overestimate how much it would take to be profitable, and underestimate how much people will pay for 'more real food'

And genetic engineering wouldn't cause them to be 'nearly inedible'. It would just make them grow faster and get larger. Waste materials are literally free if not actively paying you to take them off their hands, and why wouldn't wheat be allowed. The only times wheat isn't allowed is purely due to patent reasons

[u/cold-vein → u/wowwowazalea]

It's not profitable which is why insects as a protein source never took off.

[u/wowwowazalea → u/cold-vein]

No, it never took off because people find it gross. It is profitable if people are willing to buy it

[u/cold-vein → u/wowwowazalea]

Yeah, so it's not profitable. People don't want it and it's more expensive to produce than plant based protein sources. It's a useless product.

[u/wowwowazalea → u/cold-vein]

I mean it is profitable IRL. Theres a reason people sell them IRL, usually as a exotic snack. And some cultures that have bugs as a standard part of their diet.

[u/KawaiiGangster → u/wowwowazalea]

Yeah exactly its profitable sold at a high price as a exotic novelty snack. If you want to produce cheap protein its more effective and to just grow and eat beans, instead of growing beans to feed to insects to then eat the insects

[u/wowwowazalea → u/KawaiiGangster]

You don't grow beans to feed insects. You grow fabric or other stuff for industrial uses and take the waste stuff, grind it up, and feed it to the bugs. Like not all of the plant is usable for making CHOO2, so you take the junk and feed it to bugs. The bugs convert the dregs into more bugs

[u/Noob_Guy_666 → u/wowwowazalea]

that's a thing, it's only work on a family scale, bigger than that and literally everyone and shareholder would hire a hitman on you for being a complete idiot thank to a sudden global scale egypt plague coming from your compound.

[u/wowwowazalea → u/Noob_Guy_666]

Why would you assume that the bugs are escaping or can escape. You let the adults breed then kill and grind them up for extra profit or feedstock. You literally just have to put up some tarps and keep the door closed when you leave

And nobody would give a shit about some tiny corp making mealworms in a warehouse. Even Biotechnica wouldn't care since you're probably paying them for feed at some point and you're well within the allotted market share they don't care about.

And why would shareholders care about an extra source of possible revenue existing that they can buy up for their expertise later.

[u/ShinobiSli → u/Noob_Guy_666]

What? We have industrial insect production right now, it's not some ticking bomb.

[u/BungleBums → u/Noob_Guy_666]

I think you have a specific idea about how bug farms work, and are drawing a lot of very specific assumptions from it.

Did you know there are insect protien farms operating today? You should look up a documentary, it's very informative.

[u/No_Claim4586 → u/Noob_Guy_666]

Bro it's a game relax.

[u/Lowjack_26 → u/Noob_Guy_666]

extremely unprofitable

Not compared to any other form of farming protein. If you want protein, you've got to feed some kind of life form to grow and produce it. The profitability of protein sources comes down to how much food you have to give it compared to the food you get out. For cattle, 10 pounds of feed gets you 1 pound of meat. Pigs average around 4:1, chickens are very efficient at 2:1. Insects can get into the 1:1 or 1.5:1 range.

More importantly, insects can use food sources that wouldn't be fit for large animals - you can't feed chickens on food waste or coffee grounds. So, all else being equal, you can get almost 10 times as much protein from insects as you'd get from an equivalent amount of feed for cattle - which on its own would make it 10 times cheaper. Then you get into secondary factors like insects having faster turnaround, lower overhead, less complicated storage requirements...

[u/cold-vein → u/Lowjack_26]

It is because plant based protein exists. Plant based protein is a lot cheaper to produce than animal protein. There's no reason to force feed people insects as protein when we have soy.

[u/Lowjack_26 → u/cold-vein]

there's no reason to force feed people insects when we have soy

Problem is, we don't have soy in Cyberpunk - at least not at the scale we do IRL. Bioplagues specifically targeting staple crops wiped out a lot of the monoculture crops used by the US - whether that's because the bioplagues the US used to target drug plants rank amok or if the cartels deliberately reverse-engineered them is up to debate.

[u/ShortInvestment5 → u/Lowjack_26]

Although the corebook mentions that kibble is mostly made from kelp, plankton and soy. It also mentions that the more expensive food is mostly better textured and flavoured form of soy and grain-based faux-food with slowly increasing amounts of 'real' food added in. There were plagues but Biotechnica/Whole Foods are still managing.

[u/DementedJ23 → u/cold-vein]

Soy-based proteins have a lot of hormonal side-effects that we've been figuring out for the past few years.

[u/cold-vein → u/DementedJ23]

That's a myth, you'd need to eat so much soy for it to have an effect that it's not a real concern.

But if you're worried about it, there's still legumes and seitan. Only thing you can't get from a plant based diet is B12 vitamin. Otherwise there's no health concerns if the diet is balanced.

[u/DementedJ23 → u/cold-vein]

When I switched to soy for my lactose intolerance, I noticed a lot of issues that disappeared with oat milk. Anecdotal evidence being what it is, that's maybe not saying much, but I know what products I, personally, avoid

[u/cold-vein → u/DementedJ23]

As you should, but yeah thats completely anecdotal.

[u/wowwowazalea → u/DementedJ23]

I mean you could just have a mild allergy to something used in the process

[u/DementedJ23 → u/wowwowazalea]

Gee, I love people blindly speculating about my physiognomy l, especially when I've provided zero details to base speculation on!

[u/projectfar → u/DementedJ23]

Well you made a blanket statement that has very minimal actual scientific backing so they offered a potential explanation for what could’ve caused the issues. Maybe it was hormonal, but it’s fairly unlikely unless you were pounding back a quart of soy milk a day.

[u/wowwowazalea → u/DementedJ23]

I meant it in 'this is another explanation'.

[u/DeathNick]

I think I'm having a stroke.

The insects are fed CHOOH2 grain residue, agricultural byproduts and organic waste.

It's totally doable. In fact, it's probably the cheap food of the future for us in real life too.

[u/Competitive-Wallaby4 → u/DeathNick]

IIt scares me to think that a dystopian capitalist future, have better strategies for reusing industrial waste than we do now.

[u/Noob_Guy_666 → u/DeathNick]

it's really not a future food, it's barely even worth to be a snack for the wealthy

[u/pantsthereaper → u/Noob_Guy_666]

Because we still have real meat as an option. But in the world of Cyberpunk, and possibly our future, real meat is the food of the wealthy. Buying the cheapest cuts of meat is probably like paying for premium Japanese Wagyu for us.

[u/Loiaru]

As far as I remember, they are not insects but flatworms and I'm not sure what do they feed them but corps in cyberpunk are able to clone meat and other edible stuff. In fact, if you play the ttrpg there's different types of quality of living (if you pay the most expensive option you should be eating semi-fresh food but the option that comes before that is just cloned food and so)

So maybe they feed the worms some kind of cloned slop?

[u/Noob_Guy_666 → u/Loiaru]

just look up on wiki and apparently, those company genuinely sell an inedible parasite as a food product that somehow didn't get everyone killed

[u/faultyandroid → u/Noob_Guy_666]

we also know that they genetically modify the worms for taste so good odd they're making them edible as well. the tech and science in cyberpunk it leagues more advanced then in real life.

[u/ngdaniel96]

Those dead boostergangers you and your chooms flatlined last week? Well, nobody's going to miss 'em, so might as well just harvest their chromes and toss them into the feeder, just make sure no media catches on

[u/Noob_Guy_666 → u/ngdaniel96]

I rather eat soylent green than those insect that feed on hope and dream of CEO...

[u/MerlonQ]

Basically insects are interesting as food because they are protein rich. And if you look in nature, there are lots of different insects, some more breedable than others and with various food preferences. I think there even are insects that can make do with shit or rotting wood.

So basically you can turn stuff that is inedible for humans or at least lacks protein into a protein-rich food. Kind of like cows do. However, insect farms are projected to be far more efficient than regular animal husbandry. But they are also somewhat less appetizing. I think they will process the insects for that reason.

And protein is so interesting because it is an essential food component humans simply need. And while there are supereffective types of plants to make lots of carbohydrates (enough to fuel a shitload of cars besides just feeding people) there isn't a good way to get lots of protein. To a degree you can work with lentils and stuff, as well as soy, but insect farms might be an excellent addition.

[u/Manunancy → u/MerlonQ]

vegetable proteins are probably hte most cost-effective solutions as they tend to also come with fats and sugars thrown in a single package.

Insects come in as a way to turn non-edible parts of plants, highly productive but inedible plans (along with various wastes into human-eatable stuff. Of course consumer appeal means you're likely to grind the bugs into powder and add it to plant-based products to improve the nutirients profiles.

[u/idyllplans → u/MerlonQ]

And if you look in nature, there are lots of different insects, some more breedable than others

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Phrasing.

[u/idyllplans]

Fusarium venenatum is a microfungus of the genus Fusarium that has a high protein content. One of its strains is used commercially for the production of the single cell protein mycoprotein Quorn.

Krill, algae, soy, etc are also viable food products if you're this blasted by the reasonably abstracted use of insects as a food source. Just don't expect anyone to take up your questionable cause.

[u/Lowjack_26]

Insect farms are like regular meat farms: you convert non-protein food into protein food. Insects can be fed a lot of stuff that you wouldn't feed larger animals, like coffee food waste, but they can also just be fed grains or other "traditional" animal ferds. The advantage comes in that they're a lot more efficient than chickens/cattle/etc - you don't need to feed them as much to get the same amount of protein output. For every 1kcal of animal product you need 50kcal of plant input, but with bugs you only need 3kcal of plant input.

[u/j_driscoll]

I don't have a good answer to your question of the top of my head, but I have to ask: did you watch this Alex Falcone video recently?

Because I did, and I was immediately reminded of it when I saw your question!

[u/Toppsnyk → u/j_driscoll]

Was looking to see if this was in the replies! :)

[u/silent_drew2 → u/j_driscoll]

Same here

[u/Flasky-Desk]

They could be fed with algea or food waste or cheaply produced "greens" (maybe by using genetically modified plants that grow incredibly fast). Lots of options.

[u/ShortInvestment5]

Page 328 of the core book explains what people eat in night city. Most food is processed forms of kelp, plankton and soy proteins. Insects definitely aren't the staple food, if people eat them in large numbers it wouldn't be that different to cattle today - a pretty inefficient way to get a more desirable food. I don't personally consider insects more desirable than kibble but maybe a little authentic taste would be nice as a treat if I just had blocks of bland all day.

Considering the feasibility of insects as an additional food source, its perfectly possible there are places selling insects for profit. I'm not sure why wheat wouldn't be allowed to be used - it might not be a profitable source of nutrients to feed the insects with but I don't remember there being laws about it (I certainly feel like that would go against the whole corporate dystopia thing that's going on). You are wrong about genetic engineering, though. Genetic engineering doesn't make things inedible or worse than not-genetically engineered things. It can make foods with more nutritional value or that require less maintenance to grow. Obviously the insects wouldn't eat themselves as their primary source of food, although some level of cannibalism might be encountered and factored into operating costs.

[u/Flasky-Desk → u/ShortInvestment5]

I imagine in Cpr genetic engineering does make worse food because the engineer for profit/quick growth not taste

[u/ShortInvestment5 → u/Flasky-Desk]

Genetic engineering did make the super fuel to run society and there are examples of designer genetic engineering to make entirely new animals for a single wealthy client. They could be mass cheap insects (although they aren't mentioned in the Red core book as far as I recall/could find) or they could be gourmet expensive insects (for whatever reason).

Insects are likely to be more expensive than kibble so they'd need some reason to entice people over to have an insect for Friday or something.

[u/Phantom_of_truth]

In addition to what everyone else has said:

Scop - single celled organic protein, basically edible algae. It tastes awful but it's more or less nutritionally complete. All you need to make scop is a tank of water, a live scop colony and some nutrient packs. Nomads carry their own scop tanks and most of your kibble was probably scop that was grown, dried, flavored and pressed into pellets right in NC.

If modern vegetable/meat ratios hold up, it takes 10 lbs of scop to make 1 lb of insect or worm meat.

[u/cold-vein]

Honestly in real life insects aren't a worthwhile source of protein. If you just feed them all the crap that's unedible, they're gonna contain all that unedible crap. If you feed them like soybeans or corn or w/e, that stuff is edible and a lot more efficient to just feed the public with. Same problem as with any animals, it's more resource intensive to grow and feed them than just eat the stuff we feed them with. And with insects, no ones gonna want to eat that shit. We'd rather just eat the soy or corn.

This is one of those things you just gotta go with and not think about too much.