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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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