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What's Stopping Us From Eating Insects?
Lasrick writes "Scientific American has a really nice article explaining why insects should be considered a good food source, and how the encroachment of Western attitudes into societies that traditionally eat insects is affecting consumption of this important source of nutrients. Good stuff."
Especially when they're so easy to grow.
It's all in our heads. We choose to eat some animals (like cows) and not others (like cats) because of cultural reasons. Same with insects.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Insects taste like shrimp, crab, or lobster. It's just the cultural bias that keeps people from eating them.
I'll give it a try. I just ask that it be cooked well. Give me some tasty recipes.
Why is this some mystery? The *smart* thing for humanity would be to eat nutrition sticks composed of a solid mash giving us all the nutrients we need for a day. But, we're humans not robots so we don't simply dismiss emotion from our diets.
For those of you who disagree, cicada season will be here shortly. I invite you to test out your theory in your backyard.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Would you like flies with that?
*crickets*
I'll leave the "gock" or however it's spelled, and the tube grubs to the Klingons and ferengis. I'd have to be pretty damned hungry to eat bugs.
What's Stopping Us From Eating Insects?
Windshields.
The insect thing has been brought up multiple times in the western media already. So what are we waiting for? Shouldn't someone already set up an insect farm and make a deal with a supermarket? Personally, I'm cool with the idea.
Yummy, yummy bugs.
I used to get by on the radiation from my CRT, but since LCD monitors I have to get my nutrition from bugs. Unfortunately, the internet is so full of bugs I'm considering going on a diet.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No matter how much I'm trying to train my brain it still thinks that insects and their larval forms are absolutely repulsive. You can't defeat that unless you have grown up eating those things and then it's the norm. In a "survival" scenario we might be able to overcome the repulsion as the hunger sensation might override our other instincts. Anyway, I reckon that, for my remaining life span, pigs, cows, chicken, turkeys, rabbits... etc won't go extinct and neither will we suddenly lose the ability to grow them..
Ugh that risotto with grubs did not help either... yuuuuucckkkkk! Bleah! Ugh!
Well it used to be Western cultures were less squeamish about eating all parts of the animal as well. I think pig's cheek was considered a delicacy in upper Victorian society. Yet these days, processed synthetic foods are accepted more than natural food.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Didn't use to be that way. They got turned into gourmet items in a process that rather reminds me of Discworld's gourmet muddy old boots. In colonial Massachusetts there was a servant strike; one of the concessions made to return peace was a contract stating, among other things, that the servants would not be forced to eat lobster more than three times a week.
and we pay extra to eat them
Crawdads, too! Mudbugs!
I had some of these at Popeye's, like itty bitty lobsters.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Nothing, apart from whimsical craving for tasty food. At least for the civilized countries where pretty much anyone has enough money and supplies to switch to a veg{an,etarian} diet.
In Florida, the insects eat you.
Only if you don't bathe in DEET. Ha!
excuse me, I'm going to molt my skin now.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." - Otto von Bismarck
Look, life is disgusting. There's a reason why "How the sausage is made" refers to anything that should be hidden away.
The only reason people eat sausage and beef and pork and poultry and sushi and other animal innards, etc., is because some trained sociopath has already taken on the burden of turning something repulsive into something delicious.
Package those insects up as cheap, tasty patties for the summer BBQ, ramp up the marketing campaign about gettin' to enjoy a Burger while also savin' the planet AND your money at the same time, and get Burger King to sell the [grass]Hopper in place of the Whopper.
Then, in 50 years, we'll be eatin' insects as though we've always been eatin' insects.
Those different animals altogether, they are arthropods though, sort of in the same way that you and a dog are both mammals.
Are you a dog?
use lots of corn syrup.
You constantly hear about the problems with insects and arachnids. Ticks carry lyme disease. Mosquitoes carry West Nile. Bees sting but honey is delicious. Wasps. Hornets. Plagues of locusts. Poisonous spiders and scorpion venom. Fictitious depictions of flesh-eating scarabs (actually a type of dung beetle).
It's a matter of perception.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Shrimp, lobsters, and crabs are insects in the same way that dogs, wolves, and coyotes are primates.
Ummmm wait for it, wait for it...TASTE!
SA has become a joke of a magazine.
Some bugs taste great. Ever have fried locust? Puts hamburgers to shame.
If it weren't form some weird stigma we could eat like ... uh ... even more pigs!
Where it's their source of protein, some people have no problems with eating big chewy beetles, grubs and worms.
omnivore nom nom nom
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Another paraphrased quote:
"When I eat bugs, it always tastes like they get a last bit of revenge on me by taking a dump in my mouth."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
In colonial Massachusetts there was a servant strike; one of the concessions made to return peace was a contract stating, among other things, that the servants would not be forced to eat lobster more than three times a week.
We find that amusing, but I will bet you that those lobsters were not properly cooked and tasted like shite.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Nuff said.
Yet, people will pay more for a crab with all of its legs than one missing one or two. Go figure.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That us Mexicans are not a Western culture?
Yes, when I receive toursits here, a mandatory stop is at the local butcher store, to see the hanging pig head (from which delicious although extremely fatty food is made). And yes, some even agree to have "chapulines" (grasshoppers) sold in the market nearby.
Yummy :-)
The Royal Ontario Museum a number of years ago did a poster (think normal movie poster from HMV etc) with all the insects on it life size and the tag line "Bug Your Parents take you to the ROM" I got a free copy as being part of a camp run by the Museum. Very very few of the bugs on that poster were even as large as a chicken wing.Then there would be the reducing to shell them. I believe for most of the first world there would be a huge cost to grow them in the winter to meet standards of livestock and keep things cleans and that nothing about controlling the populations from breaking out. Even in the "Banana Belt" of Southern Canada we only get 1 crop a year of most things...I not interested in risking it.
Life is like untied shoe laces; it always tripping you up and getting in your way.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
shrimp etc are the cockroaches of the sea
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/bug-eater-choked-death-article-1.1208649
Which actually is an interesting problem. Bug legs are notoriously small, stiff and designed to stick to things... precisely the opposite of what you want going down your throat. Not insurmountable... as with bones in chickens it's going to come down to preparation (boneless) and making good choices (don't eat chicken bones).
And I don't know how I feel yet about getting wings stuck between my teeth like popcorn kernels.
But, you know... tradeoffs. ;-)
Ever tried lobster without the butter? Can you think of anything that is not yummy when drenched in butter?
Starbucks was nearly crucified for using a natural red coloring in their strawberry fraps.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
So can pork, chicken, eggs etc. if not prepared properly, no-ones saying you eat raw uncooked bugs... and as for allergies... well there are enough food allergies out there already... Just ask anyone with a peanut allergy. I myself am allergic to potatos, corn and chocolate, (so sayeth the allergist, of course potato and corn are RAW potato and corn... cooked is just fine.)
Part of it is in our heads. Also, we eat mammals, not creepy-crawlies, because mammals aren't poisonous. Meat (mammals, birds) is also highly concentrated food.
:)
Insect shells, legs, etc. aren't as good for food, and they are far more likely to be poisonous. Some bugs are poisonous themselves. Others, like flies, hang out in rotting meat which is full of bacteria and toxins. So we evolved to not eat bugs because bugs are likely to make us sick.
Of course, fungus is similar. Mushrooms are an acquired taste, not something that most people enjoy immediately, but with modern practices we can separate the edible fungus from the poisonous. We eat some edible fungus and smoke one of the poisonous ones.
Cats and dogs aren't "all in our heads", we have them for a reason, and that reason isn't food. Evolutionarily speaking, it's better to let your cat keep the rats away than to eat the cat. "Don't eat your friends" is a good idea, not just a cultural convention.
Cochineal. That lovely red colour.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
Many insects carry disease and extremely toxic venom, so it would make sense that humans learned to avoid them. The fact that most people prefer not to have them around their homes and in their food might suggest how prevalent this is. A large subset of the population also has an instinctive fear reaction to their presence, which I'll bet is genetic. Many are also allergic to their bites, feces, and even their discarded shells.
I ate insects during a special event at Insectarium in Montreal. I have to say, people do not eat insect because it simply does not taste good.
There are three problem with insects. First is the exoskeleton. With shrimp and lobster. The shells can be easily removed. Not so with grasshopper. The stir fried grasshopper with heavy sauce can mask its insecty taste, but it still feel like eating little shrimps with shells on.
The second problem is the texture. Of the insects I had, none has the chewy texture people associate with "meat". Beef/pork/chicken, or shrimp/lobster/octopus, or fish, has chewy texture. With insects, it does not. For example, I tried silk worm. No exoskeleton. But when you bite into it, its body burst gooey stuff in your mouth.
Third is the taste. People naturally like cooked meat. Without any seasoning, most cooked meat and seafood taste great on their own. With insects, there's something about their taste that is off-putting to human and require proper seasoning to mask it.
Arthropod != Insect
Lotsa bacon.
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Since people in different places have different views as to what is disgusting different approaches are required. Insects might be turned into pellet like feed for chickens or for fish farms with good results. We do not have to directly ingest a resource.
However since we are over populated we could feed newborns to pythons. The skins could make lovely clothing or shoes and the meat from the pythons could be used to feed hogs or catfish or alligators. Human infants are clearly over abundant. Producing food while reducing population is the only way to go.
And so the economic decline of America continues. Just business as usual. Now we are here discussing eating insects because meat is too expensive.
Yes, we don't insects because of purely cultural taboos. I personally will try anything once. But cultural taboos don't change because we think it they should, they change because they are forced to, either physically (like conquerors forcing natives to adopt their religion) or economically (countries sinking into abject poverty have to start eating insects because they can't afford conventional high quality protein).
That aside, insects are neat in that they convert things like cardboard into high quality protein (ie you can feed cardboard to termites kept in a plastic box). The animals we have used for food in the past have usually either converted inedible biomass like grass or waste food (think pigs) into tasty protein. Insects broaden the potential input sources. Rather than having all that cardboard and presumably paper go to rot in a landfill, why not use it as a feedstock? Even if humans aren't the target, I'd bet it would work well in dog and cat food, or even cattle feed.
At one time, contracts for indentured servants limited the number of times the servant could be required to eat lobster in a week.
Shrimp, Lobsters, and Crabs are Insects
No, they're not. Insects and crabs share the same phylum: arthropods.
For reference we're on the phlum chordata. This includes things such as mammals, all fish (bony, otherwise and even jawless), hagfish (weird craniates which aren't really quite vertebrates), lancelets (kind of small brainless proto-proto-proto-fish) and sea squirts which are sessile bag shaped filter feeding blobs.
Now crustacians is still quite broad but doesn't contain insects. It does however contain woodlice and that really, really gross parasite which eats the fishes tounge and then spends the rest of its life acting as the fishes tounge.
*shudder*
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In LA, you can eat insects at Typhoon in Santa Monica or La Guelaguetza.
I guarantee you will eat some fresh protein during the night.
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I've started eating cricket power bars for hiking. Cricket flour has almost as much protein as beef, much less fat, and tastes great. For the environmentally inclined, consider that ten pounds of grain produces one pound of beef, three pounds of port, or eight pounds of crickets - while consuming virtually no water. Now if only I didn't keep my wife awake all night with the damn chirping...
They get between my teeth all the time. Cow and pig legs don't do that as much.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Plutonium?
Never heard of smoking fungus. We do *eat* some poisonous varieties, though!
Yes, I eat lobster without butter often, I also eat soft shell clams (STEAMERS) without butter (the broth is enough). Honestly, if you don;t like it without slatering it in butter save it for those of us who actually like it. (sorry but water is getting warmer here in the northeast and it is driving the lobsters north)
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Agreed. Vegetarian here as well. I don't eat animals for ethical and environmental reasons, not for health reasons.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Taste?
Seriously. This year has been a non-stop onslaught of "YOU WILL EAT BUGS". It's DeBeers diamonds all over again.
Stop trying to manipulate me you shitbags. I'm eating a goddamned steak wrapped in bacon wrapped in a bigger steak, served between two pork chops. FOADIAF.
for the same reason I dont eat eg. small birds or mice, because I prefer not eating intestines (except liver)
Preachy bastard aren't you? To me, most vegetables taste extremely bitter. I have to coat them in crap, or overcook just to get them down without gagging. That kinda negates a lot of the nutritional value. I still do it because it helps digestion, but I doubt it's a net-win nutrition wise.
How about you eat what you want to eat, and others will eat what they want to eat? Deal?
Also, we eat mammals, not creepy-crawlies, because mammals aren't poisonous.
How does the variety of toxic plants fit into this narrative? I don't see the process of learning what insects to eat as being any different from the process of learning what plants to eat. That other cultures do eat insects I think supports my point.
Mushrooms are an acquired taste, not something that most people enjoy immediately, but with modern practices we can separate the edible fungus from the poisonous.
Why do you say they are an acquired taste compared to anything else we eat? And, like insects and plants, far-less-than-modern practices led humans to separate the poisonous mushrooms from the edible ones.
This is a much better use of insects than eating them directly. Of course, you don't want livestock eating them exclusively, but as a supplement it's probably ok. Most birds eat some insects anyway.
I'd probably eat insects if I could actually buy them.
Only very few specialty stores sell them and they're too expensive for anything but exclusive party snacks.
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Loves those cockroaches and fly's, it seems like fly's really are attracted to Zagnut bars.
Bug eating doesn't have to be direct: http://www.pereanu.com/comic/entomophagy/
And I do too, dont get me wrong. They are good and it makes people fat and thats at least in some part, why your country are mine (Mexico) are on the brink of drowning due to the weight of our colective mass. However, we do eat insects, and they are fucking good. At least if you know how to cook them, and that we do. Three absolutely delicious dishes (that even americans would find good if they didnt know what they are), come to mind:
- Gusanos de Maguey, they are lightly sauteed in corn oil and mild spices, served with avocado, obviously freshly hand-made tortillas, and a set of nice green tomato salsas. This are worms that grow in maguey, which is a cousin of the same plant we make tequila out off.... cool, huh?
- Escamoles, absolutely delicious, id say this is the true caviar of insect dishes in mexico, and its expensive by the way. They are the eggs of a kind of ant and are sauteed in butter with parsely and very finely diced onions, maybe a very little bit of garlic. Also served with corn tortillas and very good salsa.
- Chapulines are a snack. This are a kind of wild crickets (we dont go hunting for them behind your sink, obviously), and they are cooked on the comal, the thingie we use to bake tortillas on the kitchen fire (kind of a round, flat pan). When they are on the fire, we sprinkle salt, lime juice, powdered pepper and just toast them there until they are crunchy, munchy and delicious. A pack of those can last a long time outside of the fridge and are a spectacular snack if your camping and doing outdoor sports and that kind of thing.
Now let me say that part of the eek factor of insects is that one imagines eating them raw. This is not how its done, people, you cook the suckers well, using good ingredients and you will never encounter any kind of eeky texture in your mouth. The texture in the case of the gusanos and the chapulines is much like a vegetable that has been toasted or sauteed, and the aroma is a bit tingy, yeah, but if the bugs are fresh, its combines very nice with the spices.
Finaly, people, if you ever go to Queretaro or a very good mexican restaurant in LA (ive heard of a oaxacan one "La guelaguetza" and anotherone from queretaro), and you dont have escamoles, you are a stupid asshole that deserves to eat out of a bag your whole life. Escamoles are a fucking fois gras (without the gavage).
Enjoy.
NO SIG
Depends on what you're feeding your beef, but a respectable feed conversion from grain is generally around 5:1. Higher conversion ratios are usually found when animals are grazing, owing to the lower nutrient density of forage versus concentrated energy foods like grain.
But insects are remarkably efficient, particularly with regards to water!
I'm pretty curious about that cricket flour now. :)
Aside from them not being insects, they're all big enough for us to remove the exoskeleton and viscera. First thing you learn when eating these things is, "throw away the green gooey thing". You spend a lot of time extracting the tasty white parts, which is part of why eating crab and lobster isn't my cup of tea. The other reason is that I'm possibly sensitive to things in crab and lobster. They sometimes accumulate things that cause allergic reactions. My father broke out big-time once from eating crabs. Small insects may or may not tend to accumulate such toxins. It's a moot point though. I have no desire to eat the skeleton or the insect equivalent of the green gooey thing. Even if you find some really big bug that can be filleted, I just don't want to eat it. That should be reason enough. I suspect there might be a "reverse Streisand effect" too. The elites have been advocating for this every few months recently, so if we were ambivalent about it before, we're even more suspicious now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm sure you'd get tired of lobster daily if you had to crack the shell and dig the meat out yourself each time.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
This is like, the fourth article in as many months on slashdot about why we should use insects as a food source. Are they pushing this as a new diet fad or something?
So can pork, chicken, eggs etc. if not prepared properly, no-ones saying you eat raw uncooked bugs... and as for allergies... well there are enough food allergies out there already... Just ask anyone with a peanut allergy. I myself am allergic to potatos, corn and chocolate, (so sayeth the allergist, of course potato and corn are RAW potato and corn... cooked is just fine.)
I know how to prepare pork, chicken, eggs, etc. I know what a typical 'diseased' animal looks like. thousands of years of domestication has generally given us a good idea for the types of parasites/bacteria we might encounter and how to either kill it or avoid them.
I have no clue how to tell if a grasshopper is carrying a parasite/bacteria. I suppose I could heat the hell out of it, but that's not going to lead to tasty food. Have we identified a sufficient number of potentially lethal bacteria/parasites which exist in native insect populations of areas where insects are not normally consumed by humans?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
You also need a catchy name. Rape Seed Oil doesn't sound as good as Canola Oil. Perhaps Nano-Lobster?
You need a "hero" to be seen using it. New hot actress, athlete or the new "cool" guy. "Steve Jobs 2.0 says Nano-Lobster raised him from the dead, cured his cancer and asshole-ness. Says iPhones will have removable batteries and OS-X will be available on PCs."
Place nail here >+
I hate to break it to you, but as a vegetarian you're probably getting more insect protein in your diet than the omnivores are.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
We will eat insects soon enough in the USA. But it will be mashed to a pulp, processed and reprocessed into "food bars" so that we will not recognize it as eating bugs.
McDonalds will be sure to include a lot of bug in it's "100% pure beef" hamburgers.
With the rising cost of feed, and the rising cost of meat, fast food and processed food will gradually include more and more bug into their mixture that becomes whatever it is we're eating...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
... which is exactly why I don't eat them either. Blech.
Ohhhhh maybe that they're disease-prone, disgusting, universally despised creatures where anyone with a working brain has an aversion to them for genetic/survival reasons since some are dangerous. Also I doubt our digestive system can process the thick-walled cells that make up their shell.
Lobster, crab, shrimp and other crustaceans are much more closely related (evolutionarily) to insects than to fish or other animals that we commonly eat. So in a way, many Americans are already eating insects.
Funny, your mention of risotto made me recall a beetle risotto that I made and ate once.
I'd made the risotto, and then I looked at the rice I made it from (there was some I hadn't used) and there were plenty of little beetles in it.
I decided I was damned if I was going to let my neuroses force me to waste so much effort. So I ate it.
Tasted fine. No ill effects.
It has more to do with the fat content. We were told for some many years that fat is bad that we forget that fat is necissary for the absorption of a lot of nutrients. Lobster, by itself, has almost no fat. Eat it as your primary protein (almost sole protein for those workers if the reports are to be believed) for weeks, months, and years on end and you're end up with all kinds of health issues.
Personally, I think it's disgusting on a whole new level to consume insects. Thing is though, food is very much like religion or your personal sense of style; culture and necessity can influence it to a degree, but ultimately it comes down to personal preference. If some people think this is a great idea... good for them; let them eat bugs. My only request (just like religion or fashion) is not to push it on me. I'll eat what -I- want, they can eat what -they- want.
We're narrow-minded wimps.
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We do use enormous amounts of honey and tons of insects inadvertently gets ground up in grain flour, not to mention the occasional half a worm in an apple...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Where are you getting your vegetables? The reason I ask is that there are a lot of vegetables where the standard stuff in the grocery store is a bit nasty, but fresh from a healthy plant has a sweet flavor. For example, if you eat a fresh green bean, and it's not slightly sweet, that's not a good bean.
I am officially gone from
It's never as simple as "Just grow some bugs and chow down". Most species of insects are hosts to assorted parasites.
For instance, the common grasshopper (yummy when fried) can carry tapeworms.
While we have lots of experience dealing with parasites of domestic mammals, not so much for bugs that live on other bugs.
Process it like a hamburger or a hotdog and there will be a lot less resistance.
When something is truly tasty, it is generally good plain. That doesn't mean you only eat it plain, that seasoning isn't awesome, but that it isn't needed to be good.
I love a good steak with no sauce at all. Raw salmon is great as is (though I do like it with soy sauce better). Chicken is a little bland when cooked with nothing, but no problem and actually needs very little (bit of oil and garlic) to make it quite good. Etc.
Same deal with fruits and veggies. Carrots, tomatoes, apples, peaches, bananas, etc, etc all great just as they are. Peel, if applicable, and eat. There are some other great ways to use and prepare them, but they are all tasty just as they are.
When someone tells you that something is really great, but then it needs to be masked with something pretty strong, well that should give you pause. It probably isn't in fact that tasty, and they are just trying to cover it up. It is rather disingenuous.
Also good for fish-farms (according to Australian research), instead of basically strip-mining whitefish stocks to grind up for protein.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
roaches.
Let's just ignore that in nearly every famine we've had a food surplus, and tell the peasants to eat bugs.
I thought it was well established that in, "Let them eat cake.", the cake is a lie...
> Part of it is in our heads. Also, we eat mammals, not creepy-crawlies, because mammals aren't
> poisonous. Meat (mammals, birds) is also highly concentrated food.
But we DO eat creepy crawlies, if by we you mean `humans`, as the OP stated. The other arguments about poison are pretty weak. It's trivial to only eat the non-poisonous ones, as is done with mushrooms, fish, plants etc. And your last "argument" about cats and dogs is pure nonsense.
Just like some people never learned to eat vegetables or meat or fish. This all without ever trying it.
Let us look at something relatively: Fresh fries. In Belgium and The Netherlands, you eat them with mayonnaise. In the UK with vinegar. Ask either to try the other and you will get an initial look of terror on their face.
And why do they dislike the other so much? Because we have never learned to eat it.
Also eating is social. So if you try to do something too awkward, you will most likely not be asked to host the next dinner. This means the majority will not do that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'd love to eat insects if you stop implying that I have to eat the horrible parts. I also don't want processed "meat" like hot dogs. Find a way to butcher insects properly, and I'll gladly wolf them down.
For example, I can imagine a machine (sort of a robot) that gets the meat out of grasshoppers. First it yanks off the back legs; the rest goes to compost. Second it snips off the leg joints, keeping only the big thigh section. Third it uses a blunt metal probe to push the meat out of the exoskeleton. The result is tasty little bits of meat that can be sold like burger. Probably I'd make tacos with it.
Gag reflex.
> How does the variety of toxic plants fit into this narrative? I don't see the process of learning what insects to eat
> as being any different from the process of learning what plants to eat.
The poisonous parts tend to be the leaves, not the fruit. Humans, and primates generally, don't often graze on random leaves.
We eat the sweet fruit, which is designed to be be eaten. Tomato stems and leaves are poisonous, the fruit is delicious.
The poisonous part is not delicious. Beans are a notable exception to this general rule.
> far-less-than-modern practices [wikipedia.org] led humans to separate the poisonous mushrooms from the edible ones
From your wikipedia link:
The first reliable evidence of mushroom consumption dates to several hundred years BC in China.
The Chinese value mushrooms for MEDICINAL PROPERTIES
If you're familiar with the medicinal properties of 'shrooms, you may recognize the 'medicinal' ones ARE the poisonous ones - they cause hallucinations. Anyway, it's a general rule - we eat a lot more fruit than fungus.
> Why do you say they are an acquired taste compared to anything else we eat?
Our taste buds are:
Salty: meat
sweet: fruit, including "vegetable" fruits like cucumber
sour: fruit
bitter: danger
maybe umami (glutamate, MSG)
Mushrooms are neither sweet, nor salty, nor slightly sour. Those are hallmarks of "food". Fruits and some vegetables are sweet and a bit sour, meat is salty. Things that don't fit the taste profile of either fruits or meats are not pleasant when most people first try them. We can learn to enjoy them, however, and beer is a great example. Give young child mushrooms or bleu cheese and see what happens - they haven't learned the taste, so they only enjoy the naturally attractive flavors.
Umami (glutamate) is debated as to whether it's a basic taste, but it does seem that IN COMBINATION WITH other food flavors, it can enhance those other flavors and make them more delicious. Mushrooms are full of glutamates, they are nature's MSG. Perhaps that's why we eat mushrooms and not other fungus, and why we normally put mushrooms on top of some base food, like meat. Putting mushrooms on a steak is the same compounds as putting MSG on it - it amplifies the steak taste.
Stupid libertardian. The kids can't eat the grasshoppers because of the pesticides. They don't grow enough surplus to purchase meat regularly.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
With an insect, there's no way to remove the shell, extract the meat, and just eat that part.
This is my sole reason for rejecting insects. I think we could build a robot to solve the problem of picking out the meat.
I'm curious where you're from and how old you are that you haven't heard of smoking 'shrooms.
In Texas it's almost as well known as smoking marijuana.
Insects are a good source to refine vitamins and other nutrients.
That doesn't mean we should eat them. What we should do is just eat the raw nutrients once they've been extracted from insects.
I didn't like it at first, but it grew on me.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If there isn't a market for meat, then those animals will never even get a chance to live. They simply won't be needed. It's like you're killing them before conception. Meat eaters at least give the animals life, allowing them to be born and usually even grow up. The animals get the best years of their lives, humanely euthanized before facing the suffering of old age.
Part of it is in our heads. Also, we eat mammals, not creepy-crawlies, because mammals aren't poisonous. Meat (mammals, birds) is also highly concentrated food.
Insect shells, legs, etc. aren't as good for food, and they are far more likely to be poisonous. Some bugs are poisonous themselves. Others, like flies, hang out in rotting meat which is full of bacteria and toxins. So we evolved to not eat bugs because bugs are likely to make us sick.
Of course, fungus is similar. Mushrooms are an acquired taste, not something that most people enjoy immediately, but with modern practices we can separate the edible fungus from the poisonous. We eat some edible fungus and smoke one of the poisonous ones. :)
Cats and dogs aren't "all in our heads", we have them for a reason, and that reason isn't food. Evolutionarily speaking, it's better to let your cat keep the rats away than to eat the cat. "Don't eat your friends" is a good idea, not just a cultural convention.
I was amazed to be taught in college biology that chitin (insect "bone" material) is found in mushrooms.
The reasons I don't want insect on my plate is that per-pound, bugs have more spiky bits and often emit revolting odors. Grubs are less likely to offend, but I prefer my meat to have no identifiable body parts in it and be quite thoroughly dead. That eliminates a lot of non-insect meat as well.
Then again, if I actually had to kill for meat, I'd be vegetarian. Except maybe geese. Nasty ill-tempered little bastards.
Its not so much that cooking negates the nutritional value. Rather, it leeches some of the vitamins and minerals out of the vegetables and into the cooking medium. If you cook the vegetables and don't drain away the water, you'll retain most of the vitamins. And even if you do, you'll still retain the bulk of the nutrients in the plant.
Myself, I prefer to eat my veges pre-processed by a cow. No, not cud. Steak!
What's Stopping Us From Eating Insects?
I'll tell you: beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, pork, fish, milk, cheese, fruits, vegetables, grains, even air. If all of these run out, then I'll consider eating insects. But I have the feeling they'll eat me first.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
...perhaps she'll die?
I think you CAN separate the meat. Look, slashdot just ran a story on a robot that would draw blood. There was also one with a robot folding towels and many with robots driving cars. Machine vision has reached a point where I'm pretty sure you could use it to pick out the meat.
Who could put something as disgusting as an insect into their mouth?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
There it is; the answer all those Biologists have been missing, someone is eating all those bees.
If you get them mixed up, then your treatment of animals is related to your treatment of humans. This applies to both good people and evil people. For example, it you make you join PETA if you don't like killing. You'd see nothing wrong with PETA's idea that killing a rat is like killing a child.
If you can keep humans separate in your mind, as you ought to, then killing animals is no big deal. It can neither horrify nor satisfy an evil urge. It's kind of boring actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Defect_Action_Levels
Well, one big difference is that you're not generally expected to *eat the shell* on shellfish. Most insects are just way to small to peel effectively, and most are not built in a way that make it easy, like shrimp are.
Besides, I have it on good authority that most bugs have a "nuttier" flavor than a "seafood" flavor. Some are said to taste kind of bacony. Some are pretty tart, like ants with their formic acid. Some have fruit flavors, like the water bug. Crickets are supposed to be kind of metallic tasting. Insects and arthropods are a very diverse branch of the tree of life and taste different as larvae and adults. Assuming that all bugs taste similarly is kind of like saying that all mammals taste like beef or all birds/lizards taste like chicken.
Of course, I've never had any myself, so I'm just passing around internet rumors too. I'd very much like to correct that, but I'm too intimidated by the possibility of cooking it "wrong" and giving myself a false bad impression. I've been Googling places that might serve insects in the city I live in, but no successes so far (other than overwrought, negative reviews for places with bad hygiene).
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The poisonous parts tend to be the leaves, not the fruit.
My understanding is that there are plenty of poisonous fruits / berries, many in the same family as human-cultivated varieties that we now eat. But I don't really know the distribution. Also, not all poisonous leaves taste bad or bitter (e.g. hemlock), but I do believe those are the exception to the rule.
Humans, and primates generally, don't often graze on random leaves.
Well, I don't know about gorillas, but humans have plenty of leaves in our diet and they had to have gotten there somehow--lots of trial and error, I'm guessing. Why can't the same be applied toward creepy crawlies? (Again, I'm guessing it did, given the prevalnce of bugs in some cuisines.) So I don't see "there are some poisonous ones" as being a unique feature. Maybe there are more poisonous / unsanitary bugs overall so that made it not worth the effort? Maybe there are more look-alikes that made it harder to catalog (though if you've ever tried to use a mushroom key that factor doesn't seem to have dissuaded us either).
From your wikipedia link: The first reliable evidence of mushroom consumption dates to several hundred years BC in China. The Chinese value mushrooms for MEDICINAL PROPERTIES
Also from the link (the following two sentences in fact): "Ancient Romans and Greeks, particularly the upper classes, used mushrooms for culinary purposes. Food tasters were employed by Roman Emperors to ensure that mushrooms were safe to eat." There's nothing modern about eating mushrooms, we can just learn a lot more about the toxins with modern techniques.
Mushrooms are neither sweet, nor salty, nor slightly sour. Those are hallmarks of "food".
I just don't know why that necessarily means it's an acquired taste. Why is umami, whether in its own right or in combination, not equivalently "naturally attractive" as any other taste sensation? Glutemate is found in meats and veggies too. Conversely, plenty of things may not be perceived as pleasant upon first try; a hypothesis I've read regarding this is that kids have higher sensitivity to different tastes so many common foods for adults are overwhelming and therefore somewhat aversive (e.g., here but that's just a random link I found on this topic). I just don't see where you're basing some of your statements from.
Umami (glutamate) is debated as to whether it's a basic taste
I thought it was pretty accepted at this point that it was a basic taste in its own right. Wikipedia points to several references claiming so at least. Maybe it doesn't elicit a specific perceptual response on its own (I don't know), is that what you mean?
Lastly, non-mushroom fungus we eat includes blue-cheese cultures and cuitlacoche
It was lying on the floor dried out. Next to it was a bunch of small dried out parasite worms that had tried to escape the dead body.
I couldn't help thinking of Marcel Dicke's TED presentation on using insects as a food product.
Then i thought..Noo.
Someone posted this elsewhere, but it seems an appropriate response considering the 'holier-than-thou' tone of your post.
tl;dr summary - you veg{ans, etarians} are just as responsible for fucking up the environment as we omnivores, moreso in some ways. Take your high-and-mighty attitude and blow it out your quinoa-shooter.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The FDA strictly regulates the amount of insect parts in food. In order to eat insects, that limit would have to be raised to 100%. Have you ever tried to get a government administration to change a regulation? So, yeah, it's "big government stopping us from eating bugs!" Maybe next year I'll run on a tea-party "we should be allowed to eat bugs if we want to" campaign!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Guess no one watches Andrew Zimmern's "Bizarre Foods" on the Travel Channel. He eats bugs all the time. I myself got my fill back when I used to ride motorcycles...
Your entire post is nothing but a pile of self-aggrandizing offal:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/vegans-stomach-unpalatable-truth-quinoa
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/protein-full-story/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2157221/Maybe-Prince-Charles-right-British-scientists-reveal-plants-really-talk.html
I don't mind other people making the choice to become herbivores, but when you start shoving it down everyone else's throat, or talk shit because other people don't choose the lifestyle you've chosen, I tend to develop a nasty case of gofuckyourself.
Get off that high horse, putz.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
this is a trial balloon for a society where our leaders continue to eat grass fed beef, and the rest of us survive on grasshoppers. And it'll be marketed to us in such a way that it'll seem like a good idea. Well, to most of us.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Parent may have been clueless to the tongue-in-cheek nature of my post but whoever modded this down was nonetheless a fucking moron; it's well understood that the flesh of nearly-completely-carnivorous creatures (such as felines) is highly toxic and can kill you if you eat it.
Not really. Salmon, tuna, and swordfish are completely carnivorous and are eaten worldwide. Alligators and snakes are eaten in various parts of the US and are carnivorous. Indigenous Arctic peoples ate diets drawn primarily from seals (all carnivorous) and whales (many of which are carnivorous). Squids and octopi are carnivores.
Now, that said, carnivore meat does carry some risks, all in the form of bioaccumulation of toxic materials. (e.g. Mercury and other heavy metals, PCBs, etc.) But "highly toxic" is a bit over-dramatic. You can eat a serving of carnivorous fish once a week and be fine. You can also eat far more than that and survive, but you may run into health risks or, more importantly, pass on unsafe levels that will affect your child's development if you get pregnant. Adults only risk death if those kinds of fish are your primary protein source and/or you get them from an actively polluted area. (See, e.g. Minama disease.)
But the meat *itself* is fine, in absence of human-cause problems.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
My friend from the Newfoundland reported an early childhood memory of a dinner table argument that finished "Well, when we are as rich as the Jones family then we can eat hamburger, but until then quit complaining and finish your lobster!".
She also reported that she always found it strange that in movies and on TV the visible minorities were always the "lower class" characters, whereas her experience was that the visible minorities who had emigrated to "the rock" were almost exclusively professionals (lawyers, doctors, etc) who were upper-middle-class or richer. It was only after moving to a big city on "the mainland" that she encountered large numbers of visible minorities, and the first time she met any who were not well-off.
What is stopping us from having too many kids, so resources are not strained??
Yes, but in the US it is _illegal_ LOL... we are so weird. Naturally, we are still allowed to sell them for slaughter. Because, you know, it doesn't matter that the horse is eaten, just that it cannot be eaten HERE.
As a matter of federal law, the consumption of horse meat is legal. It's also legal to grow horses for meat consumption and to export them for slaughter (e.g. to Mexico & Canada) and then re-import the meat for consumption. It's also technically legal to slaughter them for consumption, but only if the USDA inspects the slaughtering facility for this purpose, and the USDA has not allocated any money to horse-butchering operations since a rider in budget bills explicitly banned them from doing so from 2007-2011. That pretty much killed the industry here, though some are looking to start it back.
Now, several states do ban horsemeat production and/or consumption, and much of that came about because of terrible abuses in the industry, such as the infamous Beltex plant in Texas, and concerns over the use of horse drugs not safe for human consumption commonly used in old race horses.
Personally, I'm allergic to horse hair and thus never developed an enchanted love for the beasts that so many others suffer from, which is probably why my opinion of horses and horsemeat tracks pretty well with The Oatmeal's.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Most/all of us in the US are brought up to think insects and similar animals are "icky and gross" No wonder we wouldn't want to eat them.
It is also in the taste. I have tried pretty much everything from snail to frogs (cue to joke here folk) to cricket like (rosted on BBQ, or with honey) various species of big spider (marine and terrestrial) eggs from spider, sea arthropodes and I pass over many other options. The plain fact is that while I don't care for teh appearance (except spider) the taste were bland to not good at all for most of those. There were a few exceptions (the cricket in honey, but I would wagger the honey was the part I liked....). I don't think fighting any perceived disgust will change I disliked that stuff. Just like I am still disliking bruxel sprout, and quasi all alcohol except apple cider (at 2%).
You know that people eat it for the protein does not mean it taste good. And so far since tehre does not seem to be a food shortage here around, I would like to spend the few years I have left eating good stuff.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The fact that they are disgusting.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
for YEARS.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
it's better to let your cat keep the rats away than to eat the cat
The last mouse I've seen was 30 years ago. Until I got a cat, that is: he brought home three this month already.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I think one of the big hurdles to eating insects is a clean food supply.
Currently you can't just go to a shop and buy crickets for instance, and the ones in your basement are probably not sanitary.
Also, where are the recipes? How do you cook ants? How do you cook crickets? What parts are okay to eat, and what parts are just chitin?
I don't know enough about how to cook them, nor do I know what to cook them with.
It is not that we don't have the stomach for it, it's simply a matter of how to cook them and how to make them tasty.
I remember back in the 80s when escargot was considered disgusting, and when people would talk about eating sushi and others would interject 'but won't that make you sick?' the same with steak tartare. People get over the gross factor if they can try it and it's tasty, but they need to have a source that is readily available for them to jump on the bandwagon.
We already eat insects.
See he caught mice you didn't even know you had ;)
Part of it is in our heads. Also, we eat mammals, not creepy-crawlies, because mammals aren't poisonous.
This is incorrect. There are insects that carry disease, but generally most insects are less risky for us to eat -- just think of swine flu, bird flu, mad cow disease, salmonella. We do eat prawns, crabs, etc -- these are pretty much 'sea insects' (and are not considered food in many cultures).
Meat (mammals, birds) is also highly concentrated food.
By weight, insects have much more protein (up to 75%).
There is a dividing line in the state of Louisiana around the "ankle of the boot". People north of the line eat stew, while people south of the line eat gumbo.
Oh, and goulash is any dish you make then add corn to "make it better". *cringe*
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Grazing mammals are probably the safest meat you can eat: fewest diseases, lowest accumulation of toxins and heavy metals, no intrinsic toxicity. Both insects and carnivores are far more susceptible to these problems.
Americans unwittingly eat a pound of bugs a year, so the question is moot.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
As above, you can't just remove the top layer plus a little more and be safe. By the time you've spotted the mold, the toxin (Botulinum) has already spread throughout the sauce. And then there's the spores, which you can't see and which can travel a considerable distance from the initial colony.
Plan My Week for iPhone
We already do eat insects but they are not terribly efficient to raise. It is far easier to put cattle, pigs and poultry out on pasture, all of which can thrive on just pasture without any need for grain, high energy inputs like factory farms or laboratories. Pasture raised livestock have been perfected over a period of many thousands of years. They efficiently convert sunshine captured by plants into high quality lipids (fat) & protein (meat). They also concentrate vitamins and minerals.
Don't confuse the modern factory farm, the CAFO, with pasture based livestock. CAFOs are what it would look like if Big Ag were raising insects. The only benefit of insects is they're not as cute so they don't trigger the emotional reaction from hyper-empathic people. Fortunately hyper-empathy is a curable disease.
If you want sustainable, buy meat from your local pasture based farmers.
Fried Ants are the worst, hours later I'm still picking legs out out of my mouth.
Chocolate covered Grasshoppers are just horrid, not the Grasshoppers but the Chocolate.
Areas where flour isn't stored properly (Philippines, Azores, Viet Nam (for me)) small Beatles will get into it
At first I'd pick them out; then just didn't care. Spread butter or gravy over the bread you never knew.
Does it actually taste great, or does it taste great in the same way that a "veggie burger" tastes great...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
That's interesting. Here, the same mushrooms are most often smoked. Maybe that's because weed, which is better smoked than eaten, is so popular here. Perhaps if people are accustomed to smoking stuff ...
The blurb mentions it's easy to breed your own sterile and pathogen free insects. But the device isn't actually available for purchase. It's not easy, because there's no demand. There's no demand because it's not easy. If it was as simple as with the linked device I'd do it. But I won't devote the time needed for more difficult and less cost effective ways.
Everything will be taken away from you.
NEVER. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.
Sure, when cooked well the lobster is awesome and needs no butter. I can tell you that when cooked poorly no amount of butter will make it taste good. When I was in the Navy we would have a lobster day every couple of years or so. The smell alone would have kept me from eating it.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Suppose we just go for the thigh meat. We cut off the joints, then push the meat out with a blunt metal probe. (should work on grasshoppers at least) Although this is more wasteful than a fancy fillet, the equipment would be way faster and cheaper.
The result is also a chunk size suitable for burger. It doesn't need to be treated like pink slime. It need not be breaded and fried.
I've ate a Slug by mistake once. it was *uck*&^% grotesque in the extreme. with or without an exoskeleton the reason we don't eat insects has less to do with culture and more to do with taste. If the French have yet to find culinary wonder in the myriad of insect life that surrounds us then no one will.
the Bacon Cheese McBug wrap in a Happy Meal with a Hoppy The Grasshopper toy.
Oddly enough, the Western predilection for certain sources of sustenance becomes a moot point in about 7 days. Since our young love every nutrient they Get, remember each & every nutrient.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It takes a social infrastructure to "grow" insects. Their food needs to be harvested and stored. Then the insects need to be caged and contained. Building a bug proof anything is darn hard if you toss your resources back a couple thousand years.
Further healthy bugs and unsanitary bugs are not mutually exclusive.
Infestations of bugs in food stores are just down right nasty. Bug poo is still poo. Bug guts are full of stuff that our gut does not like. This alone may be the root of our social prohibitions to some degree.
Today however we can spin steel into screen. We can freeze food to kill many insects and insect eggs. We can put the dead bugs in a low to zero oxygen bubble to kill them.
It may be that modern technology will put solar food energy much closer to our ever increasing and all consuming wants and needs. In the case where vegetable material is low on protein bugs that eat is may be rich enough to justify high temp frying in oil to sanitize the buggers.
And BTW, Lobsters were considered bugs and bad food because it was poor people food.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
I've choked down some mealworms and crickets. Live and cooked. The biggest barrier between me and enjoying it, is the fact that I'm eating their digestive systems. I'm eating their poop. There's just no avoiding eating poop if you're eating bugs.
...
the fact that they don't sell it at the cornerstore or supermarket for cheap dumping prices or maybe better elitist exotic prices with a little hype anything goed down, even caviar ... (which probably tastes like someone ejaculating in your mouth as someone once told me hah hah hah)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
This is a tough one. What indeed? i can't figure it out...
Hmmm... Does anybody have an answer? Tough one, isn't it?