One guy told me that we receives 30 grams of silk worms at the beginning of the season from the collective farm, then these worms eat and grow and spin until they produce 100 kg of silk. The collective farm then takes the silk and "pays" the folks who raised them 30 kg of rice. Think about the economics of that for a minute.The practice even affects the landscape. The worms only eat mulberry leaves, so there are millions of these trees all over the rural parts of the country. And they all look pretty sad from the excessive pruning, as the villagers have to cut the new branches off every year to feed the worms (every few hours).
7 comments:
I'm trying to understand this..is this inside the house???
okay, i don't even want to know how deep that pile of worms was. I think I saw a radiator peeking out on the left. how big are those worms? is that just a room in their house? and the poor trees. Your are right, hard to describe and equally hard to understand. craziness!
jen
Yeah ladies, how about giving up your living room for 60# of rice??? There is probably a pretty huge pile of worm pooh under there too. Makes me wonder why I complain of a little dust!
To clarify - yes this is inside the house... these are sensitive little guys and the conditions need to be controlled as much as possible. It starts in one room when they first receive the wormlets, then as the worms grow it spreads sometimes to every room in the house.
It is funny to read your amazement at this... I tell people here that people in America have no idea where their silk come from and they are just as amazed.
yeah. Ew. Ew, ew, ew. Good think I don't wear much silk, 'cause after seeing this ... ew. lol.
In response to Carol's comment about worm poo ... isn't the silk the poo? Kind of like spiders and their webs? So if we wear a silk shirt, we're actually parading in worm dung - right? Aaron, you're our new worm expert. Got any more clarification?
Hmmm... learn something new everday, huh? This is the high-light of my day...! ;)
Wow I didn't know this would be such a hot topic. Tanya, to answer your question: No. The silk is not the poo (and I'm not too sure about your commentary on spiders, either :)). The worms make millions of tiny poos that look like black sand. They only live for a couple of months and poo as they grow. They only spin the silk for the last week or so. The silk they produce was meant to be their cocoon, but as soon as they finish spinning and crawl inside for a much deserved rest, the silk harvesters boil the cocoons (worms and all) to extract the silk thread, a fact which, believe it or not, some animal rights people oppose, in spite of the fact that after more than 2000 years of dependence on humans, silk worms would become extinct if we stopped caring for (or rather exploiting) them.
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