[nagdu] [Wasagdu] Healthy dog treats

[Debby Phillips]

This doesn't sound appealing to me, but maybe some of you would 
think it was the coolest idea since sliced bread.  (Smile).    
Debby and Nova who says she'd eat it cuz she's a Lab.  Or that 
she'd Lab test it.

 ---- Original Message ------
From: Becky Frankeberger via WASAGDU <wasagdu at nfbnet.org
Subject: [Wasagdu] Healthy dog treats
Date sent: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 15:43:10 -0800

Not Ready To Eat Crickets? Try Feeding Them To Your Dog We can 
all save the
planet by eating bugs instead of meat.  But test it on your dog, 
first.











We should probably all be eating bugs.  Insects have as much

protein-and more vitamins and minerals-than beef or chicken, and

a bug farm takes a fraction of the resources of say, raising

cattle.  Still, despite a quickly growing market, most Americans

may still not quite be willing to swap out steak for ground-up

crickets.  So one new startup is beginning with a less squeamish

consumer: dogs.

  Entobento, a San Diego-based company, makes dog treats with

healthy, human-grade ingredients like peanut butter, eggs, and

honey.  It's designed to be food that dogs want to eat as much as

the standard processed products that the company founders call

"doggy junk food." But the key to their recipe is the insects.







"Our goal is to push entomophagy [eating insects] forward, and

the way we're doing that is by focusing on dogs first," says

Kaison Tanabe, one of the founders of Entobento.

  Tanabe and his five co-founders, who met at a Startup Weekend

competition last year, were inspired by a 2013 U.N.  report that

lays out the long list of benefits of shifting agriculture to

insects.  Producing a pound of beef takes 2,000 times more water

than a pound of crickets, far more land and energy, and emits 100

times more greenhouse gases.  As the global population grows,

replacing some traditional meat with insects could be a way to

provide more sustainable nutrition to the world.

  The extent to which pets adopting a food would ever help

convince humans to eat the same thing isn't exactly clear.  But

Entobento wanted to bring a product to market that had the widest

reach.  "It seemed like a lot of people were willing to consider

the idea, but there's such a large psychological barrier," Tanabe

says.  "We decided to take a look at dogs."







The company wants to work with pet food regulators to start using

cricket flour in dog food, but until they clear that hurdle,

they're focused on treats.  They've spent the last year coming up

with a recipe that dogs like, and they're crowdfunding production

on Kickstarter.

  They're not the only startup with the idea: BugBites, another

startup, recently ran a Kickstarter with a different version of

cricket treats.

  "If there's no competition, that's a bad sign," says Tanabe.

"But if there's some competition, that's a great sign.  We really

like that they're there...one thing that's pretty interesting

about the entomophagy industry is how incredibly collaborative it

is.  The mentality is that any success in the industry is a

success for everybody."





Becky Frankeberger

Butterfly Knitting

-           Ponchos

-           Afghans

-           Shawls

-           Custom Knitting

360-426-8389

becky at butterflyknitting.com