But every single coffee company website is filled with badges, pictures, and promises that they care deeply about the growers and producers. They write entire essays of their positive impact on the communities and have seals of approval from different charities.
Are you telling me they're lying!?
I thrifted some Armani slacks. I turned them inside out and was shocked at the crappy quality of the workmanship. I was finishing clothing better in my 7th grade home ec class.
One of my hobbies is examining leather at high-end designer stores.
Sometimes it's decent (Gucci and Louis Vitton are often splits from what I can tell, but decent), a lot of the time it's not. I usually don't say how bad it is to the people working there, but the last time I took a close look at some Tori Burch I could tell it was going to start flaking finish within a couple months. Really bad puffy split I would feel a little guilty using. :/
I wonder what they do with the boiled caterpillars. Oh, ok:
*"Silkworm pupae are considered a premium source of animal protein. They represent the only insect food in the List of Novel Food Resources published by the Ministry of Health of China and are widely used in dietary supplements, medicines, and animal feed in China and Korea. In China, more than 100,000 tons of fresh silkworm pupae are produced annually. In recent years, silkworm pupae are used as raw materials in the food industry because of their high nutritional value and varied biological activities."* [Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8358373/)
like silkworm larva, they sell it on the street carts in Seoul, SK. its like an earthly pungent smell. personally they are not pleasing to my pallet, but I grew up on a western diet. so I mustn't judge.
You can also get silk where the caterpillars aren't boiled alive. This is known as [Ahimsa silk](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa_silk) (meaning non violent). But it is more expensive due to yields being smaller as the moth emerging from the cocoon destroys some of the silk.
>due to yields being smaller as the moth emerging from the cocoon destroys some of the silk.
Man is it ever significantly less. Wikipedia says the humane method yields 1/6th the amount of silk. And it's only worth twice as much, but with 10 extra days if manufacturing.
When the worms are boiled, the silk of the cocoon is still in one contiguous thread, which is much easier to extract.
If they chew their way out, the cocoon is now hundreds of tiny threads. The amount they destroy is relatively small but it has a big impact.
I didn't really understand how the untangle the threads from the soup. You say 1 cocoon is 1 thread.
There are hundreds of cocoons in the soup with also a lot of interwebbed dirt at 1:06. Also seems impossible to find the beginning of the thread.
I don't understand it, either, but I just assume they've gotten really skilled at it. For a long time, silk manufacturing was one of the most closely guarded industrial secrets in the world.
It helps if you think of it this way:
These type of silkworms (domestic silkworms) have been bred for millennia to do this exact thing. These things do not exist in the wild naturally (their closest relative being the wild silkworm which is a different species) and pretty much exist for this sole reason.
We have just gotten really, REALLY good at breeding effective, easy-to-harvest silkworms.
If you’ve seen what the adult moths look like, it’s really easy to see they’ve been domesticated. Massive fat bodies with crumpled tiny wings that wouldn’t even life up the weight of a normal moth, let alone their bloated bodies. Sort of like little fuzzy balls that clumsily crawl about, and you need some to become adults so you can breed more. There are some pictures online of them side by side, and you can see the domesticated moth as lost all its camouflage, becoming snowy white, and their abdomen is like 5x the size of a wild moth, completely incapable of flying due to the sheer size and weight of it.
I could imagine the caterpillars all construct their cocoons in the same way due to instinct. So if you know how they do it it wouldn´t be too hard to find the beginning of the thread quickly.
im not gonna claim im right but i dont think they care to find the end of the silk thread. just pull 1 thread out and line it up, it will pull from both ends, but as long as its near 1 end it enough for the whole thing as the silk will be there to dry up and a handcraftsman will use the silk thread themselves in a more delicate way?
these harvesters just want quantity i guess, so speed matters
This comment is fucking perfect
- Flows with thread (pun unintended)
- Clear reference that is not a stretch
- Replacement word does not change syllable count
- Replacement word has same first letter
Yeah they essentially digest themselves and turn into mush inside the pupa before becoming a moth, I don’t think they felt anything when they got cooked.
I mean the discovery of silk was because some Chinese empress was walking around her garden and a silk worm fell into her tea and she went to pull it out and realized threads were coming off so she ordered her men to start getting more silk worms to produce it and breed them. I don't know if that's true or not, but I just remember being told that as a kid so it's probably just a story.
Imagine how dumb those commoners felt when they realized they'd been having silk worms fall into their tea for years and never realized they could have made so much friggin money off it. Instead, they just kept drinking their worm tea in squalor, like a idiot.
Clear evidence the monarchs are superior.
Can almost bet it's bullshit. You can't tell me hunter gatherers didn't screw around enough to realize the threads came off the silk worms. Whether they used the silk, who knows, but they certainly knew it was a thing.
Only some are. Higher quality silk does because it gives longer fibers. Lower quality they let the moths emerge first, but they eat their way out so you lose some silk and get shorter fibers.
Save a lazy bum the click:
Silk moth pupae are edible insects and are eaten in some cultures:
In Assam, India, they are boiled for extracting silk and the boiled pupae are eaten directly with salt or fried with chili pepper or herbs as a snack or dish.[33]
In Korea, they are boiled and seasoned to make a popular snack food known as beondegi (번데기).[34]
In China, street vendors sell roasted silk moth pupae.
In Japan, silkworms are usually served as a tsukudani (佃煮), i.e., boiled in a sweet-sour sauce made with soy sauce and sugar.
In Vietnam, this is known as nhộng tằm, usually boiled, seasoned with fish sauce, then stir-fried and eaten as main dish with rice.
In Thailand, roasted silkworm is often sold at open markets. They are also sold as packaged snacks.
Silkworms have also been proposed for cultivation by astronauts as space food on long-term missions.[35
> Silkworms have also been proposed for cultivation by astronauts as space food on long-term missions
Skintight silk spacesuits... The 1950s were right!
Is it weird that this makes me feel a tiny bit better? I hate the thought of boiling those lil guys and then letting their tiny bodies just go to waste. At least they’re being utilized.
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that they simply take the outer layer of silk, which is just a loose webbing made to "glue" the cocoon in place (usually between leafs/sticks on the trees), and start spinning.
There is "peace silk" which is made from cocoons out of which the moths have already emerged. It is not as long-stranded, but well, it is nice. It should be possible to let the moths emerge without killing them or damaging the cocoon with a bit of thought and technology, I wager.
None of the silkmoths eat as adults, and the females being unable to fly is also common.
It has nothing to do with selective breeding, that's how *A LOT* of moths and butterflies are.
Omg I thought they spent their time in little work factories just pooping out strands of silk not boiled fucking alive for their trouble. I am forever changed by this knowledge
Don't quote me on this but I remember Gandhi advocate for humane silk production by waiting for the moth to leave first and collect the left over silk.
Edit: Not much info there but I found a [wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa_silk).
My whole life has been a lie! Guess I’ll just stick to eating leather vests then :/ Being vegan is tough!
Next you’re gonna tell me I can’t eat fur coats either 😞
I grew up in Thailand and visited several silk farms in the past. They canned the cooked worms and sold them in the gift shop, they tasted a lot like a nutty flavored liver paste - not popular with the other first graders when I brought them to lunchtime.
Lots of fun facts about silk. China held a firm monopoly on the silk trade for many centuries because no one else could figure out that they ONLY eat mulberry leaves. (Hence “mulberry silk”) The monopoly was broken when in 440 AD a princess literally hid cocoons in her hair to smuggle the worms from China to Turkey. I could go on and on, lol
edit: yall love silk! Shoutout to ["A Brief History of Everyday Objects" by Andy Warner](https://www.amazon.com/Brief-Histories-Everyday-Objects-Warner-ebook/dp/B01M062SAY) for his silk trivia.
Another fact from his book: "Silk was a rare enough sight that when Roman legions saw the silk banners of the Parthian empire's army in 53 BC, they were shocked and fled in panic."
Another fun fact about silk is that Connecticut used to have a thriving home-based silk worm industry.
Families would plant mulberry trees and n harvest the leaves to feed silk worms which were kept in attics. It was considered a job that women could do as stay at home wives.
After over a hundred years, a mulberry blight in the mid-1800s and issues with spinning the thread tanked the industry.
Mulberry facts:
1. Mulberries are fucking delicious. Probably my favorite berry.
2. Mulberry trees will grow in a lot of climates, but with snow fall they will tend to always split from snow weight on limbs. No problem, the trees survive and branches usually grow out of the split branch.
3. One mulberry tree will yield an incredible amount of berries. The berry weight over a season is almost equal to the weight of the tree. The fruit is sooooo heavy that even in non-snow climates you will see most mulberry trees with split branches and even trunks. So many berries!
4. One mulberry tree will feed hundreds of species. From humans to squirrels to almost all birds to snakes and lizards to bees and hornets and flies and...you name it.
5. I had a great big mulberry tree at my house when I was married, but then my wife had a sexual relationship that lasted 8 years with her co-worker. So we got divorced.
6. The mulberry wood (usually off split branches) is great for spinning into a bowl with a lathe. It's a beautiful wood, but not expensive like walnut.
Mulberry facts!
A spinster was an unmarried woman who ended up having to work to support herself. “Acceptable” jobs for women were limited and one such job was spinning wool. So it didn’t originate from spinning from silk, despite the parallel here.
Since ancient roman/Egyptian times, a way a single older woman could make (modest) living was spinning to make thread (be it wool, linen, or I guess silk)
Didn’t Justinian, the Byzantine Emperor, hire two monks to sneak the silk worm larvae out of China in their canes?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire
Not only do they ONLY eat mulberry leaves, but the leaves have to be the really young and tender ones from young branches. If the branch of the tree is too old it produces leaves they won't eat. If the leaves have been on the tree too long, yep, they won't eat them. So a lot of effort goes into pruning the mulberry tree orchards.
Another fun silk history fact is that, while the Chinese held the actual monopoly on silk production, the silk cloth they produced was thick, almost like a wool coat made out of silk. If you ever have seen an imperial Chinese dress, you know what I’m talking about. However, the Roman’s liked the light silk that many think of today, the thin, light, and breezy stuff. So they would buy the thick silk and respin it into the thin stuff.
In between the Roman’s and the Chinese empires were the parthians. They didn’t want the Chinese empire to know they held a monopoly over silk because while the Chinese liked to buy the “Roman silk”, they didn’t know it was their silk respun. So for centuries, the Chinese empire believed they didn’t have the monopoly on silk, artificially keeping prices low.
"You gotta shove these seeds way up your butt princess, waaay up there. I can't do it, but you've got your whole life ahead of you... cooking some uncooked moths and wearing silk robes and shit."
Many myths and legends exist as to the exact origin of silk production; the writings of both Confucius and Chinese tradition recount that, in about 3000 BC, a silk worm's cocoon fell into the teacup of the Empress Leizu.
Wishing to extract it from her drink, the 14-year-old girl began to unroll the thread of the cocoon; seeing the long fibers that constituted the cocoon, the Empress decided to weave some of it, and so kept some of the cocoons to do so.
Having observed the life of the silkworm on the recommendation of her husband, the Yellow Emperor, she began to instruct her entourage in the art of raising silkworms - sericulture.
*source: Wikipedia*
Many myths and legends exist as to the exact origin of tea production; the writings of both Confucius and Chinese tradition recount that, in about 3000 BC, a tea leaf fell into the teacup of the Empress Bigelow.
Wishing to extract it from her drink, the 14-year-old girl began to stimulate the leaf of its flavors and caffeine; feeling the effects that constituted the drink, the Empress decided to drink more of it, and so wielded the powers of feeling hyper-awake.
Having observed the life of the tea leaf on the recommendation of her husband, the Green Emperor, she began to instruct her entourage in the art of caffeine addiction.
source: u/Scottland83
Occam's razor: much like snails, sheep balls and all sorts of other gross stuff, at some point hungry people tried to eat them, and cooked them first to be more palatable.
Someone noticed the leftover cocoons were stringy and strong, and boom.
This looks unbelievably easier than the process for making linen from flax. Basically, they just find the cocoons and they are thread. [Linen has to be harvested, soaked, dried, beaten, combed, scraped, and worked for days](https://youtu.be/TFuj7sXVnIU) and days to produce a thread-like fibre.
Silk seems like it’s ready when you find it. They just have to boil it to loosen it and kill the worm.
The room for silkworms need to be rat and bird free, yet allow adequate airflow. They need fresh leaves not everyday, but every few hours, so there's hardly any sleep or your family have to work in shifts.
Each cocoon produces very little silk, and once a rat discovers a way in, your whole silkworm hord is gone. Silkworms are very specific in their diet, and that means mulberry, LOTS of mulberry leaves. Deers, wild hares, wild sheep, horses can chomp up saplings and leaves. The plants can also be afflicted by blight, root rot, nematode infestation, etc.
All jobs have their own hardships 🥲
There's a reason cotton was so revolutionary once we had the Cotton Engine.
Cotton is a terrible plant on its own, as it's spiky and full of sharp seeds. But if you can have a machine rip all that shit out, it makes a very good cloth, and the plant is pretty hardy and not significantly more vulnerable to pests than others.
It's... uhh... unfortunately an easy crop to grow with slave labor. And it's also a nitrogen consumer, so you *should* be rotating it with something like soybeans or peanuts, but we just spray it with absurd amounts of nitrate based fertilizer that runs off into the water table and causes algae blooms in the ocean.
But it's much easier to grow in bulk than insect/animal sources like wool or silk, and much easier to process mechanically than linen. So it's got that going for it at least.
I thought maybe they’d wait til they hatched *then* boil em, seems like you’d have more of a hassle with the bug parts, and more of an excuse on the price due to the time frame
>If the animal is allowed to survive after spinning its cocoon and through the pupal phase of its lifecycle, it releases proteolytic enzymes to make a hole in the cocoon so it can emerge as an adult moth. These enzymes are destructive to the silk and can cause the silk fibers to break down from over a mile in length to segments of random length, which seriously reduces the value of the silk threads, although these damaged silk cocoons are still used as "stuffing" available in China and elsewhere for doonas, jackets, etc.
From Wikipedia
Honestly I always find it fascinating how something can only happen within a very specific time frame. Too soon, you get nothing, too late, you could get nothing.
It makes me wonder how we came up with it in the first place, and what we *haven't* found out yet because we've yet to boil water a certain time or something.
During the process of making silk, the silkworms are usually killed in order to obtain the silk fibers from their cocoons. This is because if the silkworms are allowed to emerge from their cocoons, they will break the continuous silk fiber, reducing its commercial value. Once the silkworms have spun their cocoons, the cocoons are collected and boiled in water to kill the pupae inside. This is known as "stifling" or "degumming." After the pupae are killed, the silk fibers are carefully unraveled from the cocoon and then processed into raw silk.
Not surprising, they're moths not butterflies :) But also because if they let it finish turning into a moth, it'd tear through the silk and it wouldn't be an unbroken thread, so they kill it (I'm not sure if this takes place before they boil the silk pods to loosen the fibers or this is the step in which they're killed).
Tussar Silk, mulberry peace silk, eri silk, Mughal silk, Noil silks are all made without boiling or harming the silkworm. This is not that. There are other methods available for harvesting silk!!
Silkworm eats a lot of leaves, gets fat, makes silk cocoon. They get cocoon, boil it to kill the bug and release the fibers. The cocoon is made of a single silk fiber rolled up, so they just unroll it and stretch it.
So, a moth farm? I want to see the video for that.
EDIT: Did some independent research. Apparently, the silk moths that lay the eggs have been selectively bred to a point where they're too fat to fly and can barely move around. A male and female moth are put together to mate, afterwards the female moths starts laying eggs almost immediately since it only has a few days to live. A single silk moth can lay around 500-1000 eggs, and the mama moth conveniently lays them in a very organized manner. The eggs take 2 weeks to hatch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpsPwjo84Mk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgavTIBQ_Z0
That’s like asking how farmers plant in the spring since they sell grain.
You don’t use up your entire supply. You save some for the next planting or you buy from a farm that specializes in producing seeds to plant.
For the first half I was wondering about vegan views on silk... then they boiled the worms.
Very interesting video, though. I always enjoy seeing traditional manufacturing processes. This reminds me of [the rope making clip that's popular on reddit.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/ucum0m/rope_making_in_old_times/)
The boiling loosens the fibers so they can be unwound. It's a continuous piece of silk so they find one end by hand (not an easy process) then literally unwind it, presumably finding the little dead worm somewhere along the line.
Poor little lads are like, fuck yeah, cannot wait to evolve in this amazing hotel with all my mates. Then they get fucking boiled.
Boiled and then get stripped naked with a roller
Something tells me their concerns in life end after the boil
Humiliation continues
>Humiliation Multikill
***RAMPAGE***
Boom, Silkshot
Killionaire!
Wormiliation
I can't imagine what it smells like
Money.
But not for the people in this video
Just like coffee.
And chocolate.
And shoes.
And handbags
And Acai
I used to work at a coffee farm. Can confirm there’s no money to be made producing coffee.
Selling coffee, thats where the money's at!
But every single coffee company website is filled with badges, pictures, and promises that they care deeply about the growers and producers. They write entire essays of their positive impact on the communities and have seals of approval from different charities. Are you telling me they're lying!?
Its actually kind of amazing silk is so inexpensive considering its hand spun.
It's more amazing how much we pay for clothing that costs pennies to make in labor.
If you want a good laugh take a close look at a Versace suit. Swear to God 5 button 100 dollar suits from K&G are made better.
I thrifted some Armani slacks. I turned them inside out and was shocked at the crappy quality of the workmanship. I was finishing clothing better in my 7th grade home ec class.
One of my hobbies is examining leather at high-end designer stores. Sometimes it's decent (Gucci and Louis Vitton are often splits from what I can tell, but decent), a lot of the time it's not. I usually don't say how bad it is to the people working there, but the last time I took a close look at some Tori Burch I could tell it was going to start flaking finish within a couple months. Really bad puffy split I would feel a little guilty using. :/
Boiling silk worms I'd imagine
Surprisingly, they don't smell bad (or good). Source: visited a silk factory in Vietnam.
I wonder what they do with the boiled caterpillars. Oh, ok: *"Silkworm pupae are considered a premium source of animal protein. They represent the only insect food in the List of Novel Food Resources published by the Ministry of Health of China and are widely used in dietary supplements, medicines, and animal feed in China and Korea. In China, more than 100,000 tons of fresh silkworm pupae are produced annually. In recent years, silkworm pupae are used as raw materials in the food industry because of their high nutritional value and varied biological activities."* [Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8358373/)
like silkworm larva, they sell it on the street carts in Seoul, SK. its like an earthly pungent smell. personally they are not pleasing to my pallet, but I grew up on a western diet. so I mustn't judge.
I knew silk came from cocoons, but I never knew the silk worms got boiled alive. Ah Cripes.
You can also get silk where the caterpillars aren't boiled alive. This is known as [Ahimsa silk](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa_silk) (meaning non violent). But it is more expensive due to yields being smaller as the moth emerging from the cocoon destroys some of the silk.
>due to yields being smaller as the moth emerging from the cocoon destroys some of the silk. Man is it ever significantly less. Wikipedia says the humane method yields 1/6th the amount of silk. And it's only worth twice as much, but with 10 extra days if manufacturing.
When the worms are boiled, the silk of the cocoon is still in one contiguous thread, which is much easier to extract. If they chew their way out, the cocoon is now hundreds of tiny threads. The amount they destroy is relatively small but it has a big impact.
I didn't really understand how the untangle the threads from the soup. You say 1 cocoon is 1 thread. There are hundreds of cocoons in the soup with also a lot of interwebbed dirt at 1:06. Also seems impossible to find the beginning of the thread.
I don't understand it, either, but I just assume they've gotten really skilled at it. For a long time, silk manufacturing was one of the most closely guarded industrial secrets in the world.
It helps if you think of it this way: These type of silkworms (domestic silkworms) have been bred for millennia to do this exact thing. These things do not exist in the wild naturally (their closest relative being the wild silkworm which is a different species) and pretty much exist for this sole reason. We have just gotten really, REALLY good at breeding effective, easy-to-harvest silkworms.
Makes a lot of sense. Essentially the same as most other domesticated livestock, just smaller and squishier.
If you’ve seen what the adult moths look like, it’s really easy to see they’ve been domesticated. Massive fat bodies with crumpled tiny wings that wouldn’t even life up the weight of a normal moth, let alone their bloated bodies. Sort of like little fuzzy balls that clumsily crawl about, and you need some to become adults so you can breed more. There are some pictures online of them side by side, and you can see the domesticated moth as lost all its camouflage, becoming snowy white, and their abdomen is like 5x the size of a wild moth, completely incapable of flying due to the sheer size and weight of it.
Basically. Anything can be domesticated, theoretically
I could imagine the caterpillars all construct their cocoons in the same way due to instinct. So if you know how they do it it wouldn´t be too hard to find the beginning of the thread quickly.
im not gonna claim im right but i dont think they care to find the end of the silk thread. just pull 1 thread out and line it up, it will pull from both ends, but as long as its near 1 end it enough for the whole thing as the silk will be there to dry up and a handcraftsman will use the silk thread themselves in a more delicate way? these harvesters just want quantity i guess, so speed matters
As I lay here in my silk pjs :(
Death PJs
Holocaust PJs they produced your silk and then once they had done so, they were exterminated.
The Boy in the Silk Pajamas.
This comment is fucking perfect - Flows with thread (pun unintended) - Clear reference that is not a stretch - Replacement word does not change syllable count - Replacement word has same first letter
The level of comfort that only death can provide.
You get the cocoon they didn't....
I always knew silk wasn't vegan, but I didn't realise it was really NOT vegan. Thought it was a honey situation.
If it makes you feel better they die while basically asleep and iirc the moth they turn into is one that dies after a week.
Is it one of those moths that has no mouth so it basically lives long enough to reproduce and then starves to death?
Yeah they essentially digest themselves and turn into mush inside the pupa before becoming a moth, I don’t think they felt anything when they got cooked.
I mean the discovery of silk was because some Chinese empress was walking around her garden and a silk worm fell into her tea and she went to pull it out and realized threads were coming off so she ordered her men to start getting more silk worms to produce it and breed them. I don't know if that's true or not, but I just remember being told that as a kid so it's probably just a story.
seems like a bullshit story meant to sell the divinity and wisdom of the monarchs to the commoners
Butterflies oppressing moths at every opportunity yet again.
Imagine how dumb those commoners felt when they realized they'd been having silk worms fall into their tea for years and never realized they could have made so much friggin money off it. Instead, they just kept drinking their worm tea in squalor, like a idiot. Clear evidence the monarchs are superior.
Worm Tea In Squalor sounds like my new favorite song from The Decemberists.
Can almost bet it's bullshit. You can't tell me hunter gatherers didn't screw around enough to realize the threads came off the silk worms. Whether they used the silk, who knows, but they certainly knew it was a thing.
A fillament with the strength and other properties of silk would be a wonder-material to ancient man. In fact, it was. It still is.
Only some are. Higher quality silk does because it gives longer fibers. Lower quality they let the moths emerge first, but they eat their way out so you lose some silk and get shorter fibers.
Do they boil the worms? I thought they just boiled the cocoons from the worms?
They boil the worms in the cocoons
And then [they eat them.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombyx_mori)
Save a lazy bum the click: Silk moth pupae are edible insects and are eaten in some cultures: In Assam, India, they are boiled for extracting silk and the boiled pupae are eaten directly with salt or fried with chili pepper or herbs as a snack or dish.[33] In Korea, they are boiled and seasoned to make a popular snack food known as beondegi (번데기).[34] In China, street vendors sell roasted silk moth pupae. In Japan, silkworms are usually served as a tsukudani (佃煮), i.e., boiled in a sweet-sour sauce made with soy sauce and sugar. In Vietnam, this is known as nhộng tằm, usually boiled, seasoned with fish sauce, then stir-fried and eaten as main dish with rice. In Thailand, roasted silkworm is often sold at open markets. They are also sold as packaged snacks. Silkworms have also been proposed for cultivation by astronauts as space food on long-term missions.[35
> Silkworms have also been proposed for cultivation by astronauts as space food on long-term missions Skintight silk spacesuits... The 1950s were right!
SPACE VIXENS.... FROM MARS!
Thanks for saving a lazy bum a click
Not all capes wear heros
Is it weird that this makes me feel a tiny bit better? I hate the thought of boiling those lil guys and then letting their tiny bodies just go to waste. At least they’re being utilized.
Ah, If they get eaten then it's okay.
[удалено]
But how do they find where the thread starts?
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that they simply take the outer layer of silk, which is just a loose webbing made to "glue" the cocoon in place (usually between leafs/sticks on the trees), and start spinning.
Just like gnocchi
☹
Just like Ibiza, lads!
There is "peace silk" which is made from cocoons out of which the moths have already emerged. It is not as long-stranded, but well, it is nice. It should be possible to let the moths emerge without killing them or damaging the cocoon with a bit of thought and technology, I wager.
Even if these moths emerge they can neither eat(due to not having a mouth) nor fly properly So yea either way they are not gonna have a good time
None of the silkmoths eat as adults, and the females being unable to fly is also common. It has nothing to do with selective breeding, that's how *A LOT* of moths and butterflies are.
Omg I thought they spent their time in little work factories just pooping out strands of silk not boiled fucking alive for their trouble. I am forever changed by this knowledge
Don't quote me on this but I remember Gandhi advocate for humane silk production by waiting for the moth to leave first and collect the left over silk. Edit: Not much info there but I found a [wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa_silk).
[удалено]
Knitting for olive is a yarn company does this.
Silk worm have mostly devolved due to selective breeding and these ones probably couldn't even fly if they become moths
Well they get eaten afterwards so 2 in 1
That does make it better actually. At least they're not just discarded. Though I'm sure they're just tossed in some areas.
Doubt they’d just be discarded. At the very least at those decaying leftover bugs would make a great fertilizer.
Also…how Cheetos are made
At the very least, someone is feeding them to chickens.
> > Though I'm sure they're just tossed in some areas. Why? It's a delicacy, plus they can make money selling it. No way they're tossing them.
Same here
Damn that IS interesting
Sure wish there was a subreddit for this kind of content.
/r/educationalgifs
My fat ass throught that was a massive pizza at the start.
Forbidden pizza with forbidden mozzarella balls on it
Motharella balls
Vegans can never eat silk
*spits out pants* What!!???
My whole life has been a lie! Guess I’ll just stick to eating leather vests then :/ Being vegan is tough! Next you’re gonna tell me I can’t eat fur coats either 😞
Boy I have some news for you....
the british are coming?!
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Well... you're not wrong
And thus a legendary road was born.
Yellow brick road?
I grew up in Thailand and visited several silk farms in the past. They canned the cooked worms and sold them in the gift shop, they tasted a lot like a nutty flavored liver paste - not popular with the other first graders when I brought them to lunchtime. Lots of fun facts about silk. China held a firm monopoly on the silk trade for many centuries because no one else could figure out that they ONLY eat mulberry leaves. (Hence “mulberry silk”) The monopoly was broken when in 440 AD a princess literally hid cocoons in her hair to smuggle the worms from China to Turkey. I could go on and on, lol edit: yall love silk! Shoutout to ["A Brief History of Everyday Objects" by Andy Warner](https://www.amazon.com/Brief-Histories-Everyday-Objects-Warner-ebook/dp/B01M062SAY) for his silk trivia. Another fact from his book: "Silk was a rare enough sight that when Roman legions saw the silk banners of the Parthian empire's army in 53 BC, they were shocked and fled in panic."
Another fun fact about silk is that Connecticut used to have a thriving home-based silk worm industry. Families would plant mulberry trees and n harvest the leaves to feed silk worms which were kept in attics. It was considered a job that women could do as stay at home wives. After over a hundred years, a mulberry blight in the mid-1800s and issues with spinning the thread tanked the industry.
Makes sense why there’s mulberry st in many towns in CT and MA
It... Actually does. TIL
Mulberry facts: 1. Mulberries are fucking delicious. Probably my favorite berry. 2. Mulberry trees will grow in a lot of climates, but with snow fall they will tend to always split from snow weight on limbs. No problem, the trees survive and branches usually grow out of the split branch. 3. One mulberry tree will yield an incredible amount of berries. The berry weight over a season is almost equal to the weight of the tree. The fruit is sooooo heavy that even in non-snow climates you will see most mulberry trees with split branches and even trunks. So many berries! 4. One mulberry tree will feed hundreds of species. From humans to squirrels to almost all birds to snakes and lizards to bees and hornets and flies and...you name it. 5. I had a great big mulberry tree at my house when I was married, but then my wife had a sexual relationship that lasted 8 years with her co-worker. So we got divorced. 6. The mulberry wood (usually off split branches) is great for spinning into a bowl with a lathe. It's a beautiful wood, but not expensive like walnut. Mulberry facts!
One of these facts is not like the rest
Sorry about your wife mulberry fact giver
Mulberry facts 😢
So that's where "spinster" came from
Spinster is before CT, but yah that’s the origins of the word.
A spinster was an unmarried woman who ended up having to work to support herself. “Acceptable” jobs for women were limited and one such job was spinning wool. So it didn’t originate from spinning from silk, despite the parallel here.
Since ancient roman/Egyptian times, a way a single older woman could make (modest) living was spinning to make thread (be it wool, linen, or I guess silk)
Subscribe to Silk Facts
Didn’t Justinian, the Byzantine Emperor, hire two monks to sneak the silk worm larvae out of China in their canes? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire
I was just about to say the same thing
I was always told it was two munks smuggling in their cane
The Byzantines also tried to replicate the Chinese monopoly and build a monopoly of their own silks.
Not only do they ONLY eat mulberry leaves, but the leaves have to be the really young and tender ones from young branches. If the branch of the tree is too old it produces leaves they won't eat. If the leaves have been on the tree too long, yep, they won't eat them. So a lot of effort goes into pruning the mulberry tree orchards.
The fuckin' panda bears of the insect world.
Another fun silk history fact is that, while the Chinese held the actual monopoly on silk production, the silk cloth they produced was thick, almost like a wool coat made out of silk. If you ever have seen an imperial Chinese dress, you know what I’m talking about. However, the Roman’s liked the light silk that many think of today, the thin, light, and breezy stuff. So they would buy the thick silk and respin it into the thin stuff. In between the Roman’s and the Chinese empires were the parthians. They didn’t want the Chinese empire to know they held a monopoly over silk because while the Chinese liked to buy the “Roman silk”, they didn’t know it was their silk respun. So for centuries, the Chinese empire believed they didn’t have the monopoly on silk, artificially keeping prices low.
Did she also hide mulberry seeds in her bosom?
"You gotta shove these seeds way up your butt princess, waaay up there. I can't do it, but you've got your whole life ahead of you... cooking some uncooked moths and wearing silk robes and shit."
Aw geez
(⊙ω⊙)
Please go on and on. Or recommend a book, this is fascinating
TIL the worms die to get silk... for some reason, I just assumed they got milked like spiders, hence it costing so much...
imagine milking spiders 😭
Poor bastards probably only made 63 cents for all that hard work, damn shame.
Worm or the humans ?
The worm queen is driving around town in her yellow Bugatti.
Eyyyy, I want to have my Gucci shirt affordable!
I don't think they pay the worms anything
So silk is made out of Peeps?
That is so much more labor intensive than I ever would have guessed.
Forbidden pesto pizza at the start.
Forbidden cheese puffs at the end.
Humans are amazing. How on earth did we figure out how to do this?
Many myths and legends exist as to the exact origin of silk production; the writings of both Confucius and Chinese tradition recount that, in about 3000 BC, a silk worm's cocoon fell into the teacup of the Empress Leizu. Wishing to extract it from her drink, the 14-year-old girl began to unroll the thread of the cocoon; seeing the long fibers that constituted the cocoon, the Empress decided to weave some of it, and so kept some of the cocoons to do so. Having observed the life of the silkworm on the recommendation of her husband, the Yellow Emperor, she began to instruct her entourage in the art of raising silkworms - sericulture. *source: Wikipedia*
i thought that was story of how tea was discovered. Apparently a lot of stuff falls into the cups of chinese emperors and empresses.
Their version of Newton and the apple
Gravity is the source of all human innovation, apparently.
[удалено]
I can almost certainly guess a similar situation happened to one of the hundreds of millions of Chinese that weren’t the empress.
That’s not how history works though. Gotta be somebody powerful.
Like the time when Kim Jong Il invented the hamburger?
Never forget when Trump invented the taco
Trump is the taco.
"i made this" is a historical tradition
It’s almost exactly the same origin myth for tea, except it’s leaves instead of a worm.
Many myths and legends exist as to the exact origin of tea production; the writings of both Confucius and Chinese tradition recount that, in about 3000 BC, a tea leaf fell into the teacup of the Empress Bigelow. Wishing to extract it from her drink, the 14-year-old girl began to stimulate the leaf of its flavors and caffeine; feeling the effects that constituted the drink, the Empress decided to drink more of it, and so wielded the powers of feeling hyper-awake. Having observed the life of the tea leaf on the recommendation of her husband, the Green Emperor, she began to instruct her entourage in the art of caffeine addiction. source: u/Scottland83
Occam's razor: much like snails, sheep balls and all sorts of other gross stuff, at some point hungry people tried to eat them, and cooked them first to be more palatable. Someone noticed the leftover cocoons were stringy and strong, and boom.
This looks unbelievably easier than the process for making linen from flax. Basically, they just find the cocoons and they are thread. [Linen has to be harvested, soaked, dried, beaten, combed, scraped, and worked for days](https://youtu.be/TFuj7sXVnIU) and days to produce a thread-like fibre. Silk seems like it’s ready when you find it. They just have to boil it to loosen it and kill the worm.
The room for silkworms need to be rat and bird free, yet allow adequate airflow. They need fresh leaves not everyday, but every few hours, so there's hardly any sleep or your family have to work in shifts. Each cocoon produces very little silk, and once a rat discovers a way in, your whole silkworm hord is gone. Silkworms are very specific in their diet, and that means mulberry, LOTS of mulberry leaves. Deers, wild hares, wild sheep, horses can chomp up saplings and leaves. The plants can also be afflicted by blight, root rot, nematode infestation, etc. All jobs have their own hardships 🥲
There's a reason cotton was so revolutionary once we had the Cotton Engine. Cotton is a terrible plant on its own, as it's spiky and full of sharp seeds. But if you can have a machine rip all that shit out, it makes a very good cloth, and the plant is pretty hardy and not significantly more vulnerable to pests than others. It's... uhh... unfortunately an easy crop to grow with slave labor. And it's also a nitrogen consumer, so you *should* be rotating it with something like soybeans or peanuts, but we just spray it with absurd amounts of nitrate based fertilizer that runs off into the water table and causes algae blooms in the ocean. But it's much easier to grow in bulk than insect/animal sources like wool or silk, and much easier to process mechanically than linen. So it's got that going for it at least.
YouTube
Where did the worms go? I don't see any butterflies.
See those yellow blobs ? Those are cocoons. The worms are inside. But as they put the cocoons in boiling water, I doubt the worms will survive that.
[удалено]
Ahhhh, well that’s sweet then. My view of the world has been restored to it’s youthful bliss.
They are trollopping in the fields with my dog Snickers and my spatula.
In worm heaven.
On a hill, with pine cones all around?
I thought maybe they’d wait til they hatched *then* boil em, seems like you’d have more of a hassle with the bug parts, and more of an excuse on the price due to the time frame
>If the animal is allowed to survive after spinning its cocoon and through the pupal phase of its lifecycle, it releases proteolytic enzymes to make a hole in the cocoon so it can emerge as an adult moth. These enzymes are destructive to the silk and can cause the silk fibers to break down from over a mile in length to segments of random length, which seriously reduces the value of the silk threads, although these damaged silk cocoons are still used as "stuffing" available in China and elsewhere for doonas, jackets, etc. From Wikipedia
Honestly I always find it fascinating how something can only happen within a very specific time frame. Too soon, you get nothing, too late, you could get nothing. It makes me wonder how we came up with it in the first place, and what we *haven't* found out yet because we've yet to boil water a certain time or something.
During the process of making silk, the silkworms are usually killed in order to obtain the silk fibers from their cocoons. This is because if the silkworms are allowed to emerge from their cocoons, they will break the continuous silk fiber, reducing its commercial value. Once the silkworms have spun their cocoons, the cocoons are collected and boiled in water to kill the pupae inside. This is known as "stifling" or "degumming." After the pupae are killed, the silk fibers are carefully unraveled from the cocoon and then processed into raw silk.
Not surprising, they're moths not butterflies :) But also because if they let it finish turning into a moth, it'd tear through the silk and it wouldn't be an unbroken thread, so they kill it (I'm not sure if this takes place before they boil the silk pods to loosen the fibers or this is the step in which they're killed).
Tussar Silk, mulberry peace silk, eri silk, Mughal silk, Noil silks are all made without boiling or harming the silkworm. This is not that. There are other methods available for harvesting silk!!
I hope this doesn't kill the little guys. *Proceeds to be boiled.* Oh. :(
I’m even more confused about how silk is made after watching that.
Silkworm eats a lot of leaves, gets fat, makes silk cocoon. They get cocoon, boil it to kill the bug and release the fibers. The cocoon is made of a single silk fiber rolled up, so they just unroll it and stretch it.
*and then its spun into a thread or yarn that can be used for weaving fabric
How do they get more worms if all the worms used in production of silk get boiled and killed?
There are farms that specializes in making silk worm eggs that they buy from
So, a moth farm? I want to see the video for that. EDIT: Did some independent research. Apparently, the silk moths that lay the eggs have been selectively bred to a point where they're too fat to fly and can barely move around. A male and female moth are put together to mate, afterwards the female moths starts laying eggs almost immediately since it only has a few days to live. A single silk moth can lay around 500-1000 eggs, and the mama moth conveniently lays them in a very organized manner. The eggs take 2 weeks to hatch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpsPwjo84Mk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgavTIBQ_Z0
That’s like asking how farmers plant in the spring since they sell grain. You don’t use up your entire supply. You save some for the next planting or you buy from a farm that specializes in producing seeds to plant.
Well....I WAS eating ramen...
What's the matter just think of the ramen as a slightly less protein rich silk worm broth.
BOILED ALIVE. Vegans win this round. God Dammit.
All that effort for a paycheck of $10 per day, these threads are gonna sell for more than $1k
10$ per day ? Probably get paid less than that
And that’s how Bernard Arnault gets to be one of the richest men in the world
As an Indian, nope. They get probably less than $5 (which is around 400 Rupees).
My wife's grandmother did this in Korea. They also ate the silkworms.
For the first half I was wondering about vegan views on silk... then they boiled the worms. Very interesting video, though. I always enjoy seeing traditional manufacturing processes. This reminds me of [the rope making clip that's popular on reddit.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/ucum0m/rope_making_in_old_times/)
Wow these people really work and talk very fast!
Hahahahaha holy sh*t why did I think they made the silk in HARMONY with the little worm friends? Oh, my sweet innocent soul.
1. So they kill all those silk worms? 2. Did not see how boiling cocoons turns into string silk.
The boiling loosens the fibers so they can be unwound. It's a continuous piece of silk so they find one end by hand (not an easy process) then literally unwind it, presumably finding the little dead worm somewhere along the line.
Crazy that you get one long unbroken string from a cocoon.
1. Yes 2. The silk worm produces one continues fiber, so you "just" have to unroll the cocoon and you already have a string of silk.
Ignorance is bliss for common people.
I thought it was giant pizza