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).
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.
> 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)
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.
> 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.
>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.
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
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.
It's certainly not crazy to imagine that you could cut the costs of a helicopter-like aircraft that was purpose-made for relatively short, relatively low-speed, relatively light load duties.
The energy cost during operations is very relevant, too, which is why you see things like tilt rotor designs with wings/bodies to generate lift.
When Airbus was doing the math on these a few years ago, the pilot cost was also one of the main concerns, so it was "autonomous or bust", and they ended up investing a lot on the autonomous side (not just the aircraft but also urban traffic management, etc).
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.
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
Lower noise, lower operating cost, lower purchase price, easier to pilot, more reliable (fewer parts), safer (redundancy), no emissions, faster time to air, configurable to requirements, etc.
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.
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.
Unfortunately Manhattan doesn't seem like a great place for bikes. The weather is just too variable. Some daredevils will be out in any weather but for most people it's just not feasible about half of the days of the year.
Not that helicopters make any more sense. The city needs some car bans, and yes, bicycles are part of replacing that. But only mass transit will be able to move enough people when there's a foot of slush on the ground.
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.
There are about 80,000 non-essential helicopter flights in Manhattan annually -[0]. That means a) there is a lot of demand, and b) it’s been pretty safe, with accidents being very rare.
Many people are against helicopters on the grounds of noise, safety and pollution. Electric taxis will be welcomed once they are certified and economical. They only need to do better than helicopters.
One more reason is that it cannot actually solve the traffic problem that it claims to solve. It might be able to solve it for rich people when they are the only ones that can afford to travel by air, but if the cost ever comes down low enough for the masses to afford it, I don’t see any reason that congestion wouldn’t be as bad or worse than it is now. And to me it’s not a good investment to improve things just for rich people.
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.
You're bandwidth-limited on a sparse serialized landing site map no matter what, and you need far higher distance margins that will eat up basically all of the dimensional advantages.
If ground vehicles side-swipe, it's just an insurance claim. If flying vehicles sideswipe, it's a Problem(tm).
I honestly think the most attractive features of VTOL vehicles are that they are from sci fi, and you can look up and see a bunch of empty space and wish you were there while sitting in traffic.
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.
I am (usually) not willing to assume that the founders of highly technical startups would not consider something that I as an outsider would in the first 5 minutes of engaging with the topic.
That makes me skeptical of all of these (minus the wind currents in cities, that might have taken a little longer).
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.
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.
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.
The reason why you (and everyone else) knows about Theranos is that it was unique, which serves as a bad signifier if you want to judge what is likely to happen with the next startup. Being in prison and losing billions of dollars is just not something most people get excited about.
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
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)?
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
We had a dog who would pull watermelon rinds out of the compost pile to eat. We gave her nice bones, but it's not enough. Nothing is enough. All is food and food is all.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Not all agricultural animals are herbivores. Pigs and chickens are both omnivores. Also insects are probably good feed for some species of farmed fish.
Yum, liquidised insects
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).
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)
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
That's where the problem is.
When Airbus was doing the math on these a few years ago, the pilot cost was also one of the main concerns, so it was "autonomous or bust", and they ended up investing a lot on the autonomous side (not just the aircraft but also urban traffic management, 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.
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...
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.
You know we have these things called "helicopters", right?
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.
Are we — as a species — really going to spend until eternity grovelling around on the ground?
If not, then we need personal aircraft.
Other than wait to be on the ground again?
The things people will do to not build bike paths.
Not that helicopters make any more sense. The city needs some car bans, and yes, bicycles are part of replacing that. But only mass transit will be able to move enough people when there's a foot of slush on the ground.
This is a coastal city at a fairly run-of-the-mill latitude, people build functional bike networks in much worse.
There needs to be an entire wholesale change in both infrastructure and culture to make bike-commuting workable in most extant cities.
Relatively speaking, the infrastructure is the easy part.
I think we'll get to the heat death of the universe before bike-commuting in Houston, Texas would ever be "a thing".
* 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.
Many people are against helicopters on the grounds of noise, safety and pollution. Electric taxis will be welcomed once they are certified and economical. They only need to do better than helicopters.
[0] - https://stopthechopnynj.org/frequently-asked-questions/
If ground vehicles side-swipe, it's just an insurance claim. If flying vehicles sideswipe, it's a Problem(tm).
Imagine being in a flying car. Nope nope nope!
That makes me skeptical of all of these (minus the wind currents in cities, that might have taken a little longer).
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.
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?
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.
if you raise that much money and go under, its usually just fraud.
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).
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
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.
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.
How on earth did French taxpayers get roped into funding a moonshot startup whose entire goal was to make pet food out of insects..
They were clearly surfing on pure hype: green, local...
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?
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.
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.
You don't need left there, there is no green right
Well connected people using government funds to finance their businesses.
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.
[1] https://www.jumbo.com/producten/damhert-nutrition-insecta-gr...
[2] https://www.theburningplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/0...
Not to mention the issues with pea protein and lead content.
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 !
They should say "The great all-natural taste of mice and wasps that your cat loves!" based on observed behaviour.
Centenarians i know are all on a plant based diet
Insects? why bother
Surely nothing could go wrong feeding herbivorous animals a diet of insect protein...
…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.
Better than letting it sit and rot, emitting massive amounts of methane in the process.
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.