[Wasagdu] Healthy dog treats
Becky Frankeberger
b.butterfly at comcast.net
Fri Nov 27 23:43:10 UTC 2015
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
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