Slashdot Mirror
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.
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*
What's Stopping Us From Eating Insects?
Windshields.
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!
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.
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
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.
You are deluded, there is nothing sociopathic about killing and preparing an animal's flesh for a meal. Mankind and his predecessors have been hunting, preparing and cooking animals for over a million years. It's natural.
Humans also have eaten certain insects, most of us have eaten some of the aquatic kinds of insects. But most prefer fish, livestock, poultry, amphibians. Eating one is no more evil or wrong than eating the other.
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
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.
Exactly. The same reason we don't eat pigeons or rodents anymore, it's just too much work to cook them for that little meat. And those animals are still giants compared to insects.
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.
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...
It's natural.
"It's natural" is one of the worst non-arguments there is. Flinging poop is natural. Many parasites are far, far more disgusting and entrely natural. There are plenty of natural things which are beyond disgusting and whose behaviour we wouldn't want to replicate in a remotely civilised society.
There is much that we do that isn't natural, living in shelter, eating cooked food, wearing clothes, arguing on the internet and I for one am very glad of it.
most of us have eaten some of the aquatic kinds of insects
I doubt that very much. Perhaps you are talking about crustaceans? Crabs are about as close to insects as cows are to sea squirts.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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?
Give me some tasty recipes.
1. Feed insects to chickens.
2. Cook and eat chickens.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Process it like a hamburger or a hotdog and there will be a lot less resistance.
> 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.
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
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").