If land bugs were as meaty and tasty I’d be eating them too.
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Dried grasshopper does really taste like prawn crackers.
Not sure whether this is about seafood or racism against District 9 residents.
Well… They are
Feed meal worms oranges and then cook them up. Tasty!
No.
Nah, they have parasites
Perhaps, but you are aware that shrimp, lobster, crab and fish in general all have parasites too right? People get sick from seafood pretty often
Those are sea parasites which cannot live in a human body for long. Land parasites are a different story.
I assume you mean they can have parasites, not they do. In which case, so can most things. People are fine with eating cows even though they can have parasites. I have never actually heard of any significant issue with eating insects. I’ve only heard of them being great protein options that require much fewer resources to produce.
A family member has bit, hook, line and sinker. Om the great reset conspiracy theory. He says Bill Gates wants to force us to eat bugs. I respond “You love shrimp?”. He states its different I don’t see the difference…
Bill Gates came to my house last night with a gun and a plate of cockroaches.
He told me if I didn’t eat it he would shoot my family and shoot me last.
Listen, he should’ve at least offered to kill you first. That’s the problem with billionaires these days; no honor.
Crustaceans aren’t insects, for starters
The difference is that shrimp are delicious? Last time you got a bug in your mouth what was your instinctive response?
The great reset is bogus but there’s definitely a “conspiracy” to get us to eat bugs… A boring, capitalist conspiracy. Just the next step in the race to the bottom, another cheap and low quality food that the unwashed masses can afford to keep them alive and trudging off to work.
I will eat bugs when I see the billionaires have them on their plates.
Fuck billionaires, if eating bugs is delicious and cuts emissions from factory farming, I’m in. The environment doesn’t fit into some dick measuring contest with the rich and they don’t decide my moral position.
That’s the problem, it isn’t delicious. That’s why they keep coming up with schemes to use them as a protein additive, like “cricket flour”.
I raise lamb free range on pasture, no inputs other than grass, and that’s what I’ll be eating for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you, that’s delicious.
I would encourage anyone else concerned about factory farming to find a small producer, most of us will gladly even give you a tour and let you see our herds, we love to show off healthy animals on green grass. And we’re often cheaper than the supermarket these days, no greedy middlemen to mark it up.
That’s the problem, it isn’t delicious. That’s why they keep coming up with schemes to use them as a protein additive, like “cricket flour”.
I’ve actually had a bunch of delicious insect based dishes, if you’re open minded about it they aren’t all that hard to find. Asian cooking is where they’re at.
I raise lamb free range on pasture, no inputs other than grass, and that’s what I’ll be eating for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you, that’s delicious.
That’s cool, I grew up raising steer and sheep, I’m also aware of the environmental issues. I also still eat them although I’ve cut it down drastically.
I would encourage anyone else concerned about factory farming to find a small producer, most of us will gladly even give you a tour and let you see our herds, we love to show off healthy animals on green grass. And we’re often cheaper than the supermarket these days, no greedy middlemen to mark it up.
I personally know many small producers, slaughter and dress my own meat, and I still think that, environmentally consciously, we should all switch to a mostly plant based diet and explore meat alternatives without fear.
I still think that, environmentally consciously, we should all switch to a mostly plant based diet and explore meat alternatives without fear.
I don’t have an issue with this statement, in fact I have friends who grow beans and lentils and I cook and eat dry beans every day in addition to my lamb. Plant proteins are healthy and delicious, and they easily stand alongside other standard dishes on our plates. Everyone I know eats a lot of beans.
My issue with the bugs is the same as I have with soy protein. Soy protein has been snuck into all manner of processed foods to boost protein numbers while replacing the higher quality proteins that you would expect in those foods (i.e. many cheap chicken breasts are injected with a solution of salt water and soy protein to plump them up and make you think you got more “chicken”)
I feel like using insects this way just is another step in adulterating our food supply, separating those like you and me who know what we are eating from the “commoners” who will not.
I have no problem with explicitly eating bugs outright if you choose to, I just don’t want to have them snuck into my hamburger at a restaurant.
Interestingly my ex-wife was from Taiwan and had never eaten insects except as a novelty - so it must be a different part of Asia where it’s common. Taiwan tends to like fish, pork and chicken as well as tofu and black beans.
I’ve never had a raw shrimp randomly fly into my mouth out of nowhere. I’m certain my response would be disgust. I don’t like it when bugs do that, but I can’t say it’s ever been an issue because of the flavor. I can’t say what the flavor even is.
There’s no “conspiracy” to eat bugs, but there is a movement, which I agree with, promoting insects as a low resource cost protein alternative to meat. If you are flour made from grasshoppers you likely wouldn’t even know unless told. I’m certain you don’t actually know what they taste like, so how can you say they taste bad?
Valid point. When I grew up fishing for shrimp as a kid I was quite terrified of them until I was taught how to eat them.
I can assume they taste bad, because otherwise we would all be eating them already. Humans eat just about everything on the planet if it’s tasty, even if it’s really weird. Example: shrimp, lol.
Personally I don’t see the need for it when we have plenty of plant sources of protein like pulses, and we can raise ruminants on otherwise useless land (like my hilly, rocky farm).
It seems to me just an excuse to continue overpopulating the planet. Sure, we could develop new protein sources to feed 10 billion - but if we had kept our population to the 4 billion it was in the 1970s we could all be eating thick beef steaks and salmon without worrying about straining the carrying capacity of the planet.
Maybe we should focus on getting our population down to a sustainable level before we worry about new and exotic foods.
I think the issue with them is twofold. Presentation is hard to make look alright, and I think we do have a built in aversion to them, because evolutionarily bugs mean food that’s gone bad. That said, plenty of cultures do eat bugs. It’s mostly a European thing that bugs shouldn’t be eaten. Places in both Africa and Asia do eat them, and I imagine other places as well. I have heard they can be tasty. Lobster was considered bad for a long time, but it’s delicious when prepared properly (and butter helps).
I think another good source of animal protein are oysters. They’re pretty easy to farm and they don’t have a nervous system so don’t feel pain. That said, most people think it’s disgusting to eat raw oysters (which are even alive when eaten), but they’re also delicious. It’s just a culture thing. Plenty of foods that seem disgusting aren’t.
I don’t disagree eating plant sources is a good idea, but they do have different nutritional profiles. Animals have nutrients that we need that you won’t get from almost any plant. We need diverse sources of food. I have no issue with small scale animal farming, but large scale is wasteful as hell. We grow so much corn to feed cows and other animals that could better be used for other things.
I disagree with this though:
It seems to me just an excuse to continue overpopulating the planet.
What is “overpopulate” mean? If everyone is fed and taken care of, isn’t that by definition not overpopulated? Who decides what the correct amount of people is? If you’re religious then certainly more people alive means whatever god(s) decided that, and if you aren’t then you must know it’s arbitrary. More people isn’t bad, as long as it’s sustainable and doesn’t cause damage to the planet. That said, we are causing damage to the planet and we aren’t going to stop reproducing just because someone said so. We should reduce the impact people have instead, because that’s the only real choice we have. A mandate stopping reproduction is not a real choice.
I draw the line at “overpopulated” when our resource consumption is unsustainable to the point where we are becoming the sole consumer of the planet.
It’s commonly stated that we would need 2 planets the same size to sustain our current population in a way that doesn’t result in eventual collapse.
We’ve cleared vast land areas and scoured the sea of fish in our quest for calories. Eating bugs will not be the solution that makes us sustainable.
It’s been proven our population increases every time we increase our carrying capacity, such as through the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, mechanized agriculture etc. And there has never been a time that there were not people starving somewhere.
If we carry on this path we will be eating bugs and people will still be starving while ecosystems continue to collapse. It sounds like there is no net gain, IMO.
It’s almost all about resource allocation. We can easily support a much larger population, but we have so much waste.
If we carry on this path we will be eating bugs and people will still be starving while ecosystems continue to collapse. It sounds like there is no net gain, IMO.
Yeah, I don’t get this. The bad thing in this sentence seems to be emphasizing the eating of bugs. I could write the same sentence and say corn instead. I still haven’t seen a reason of why eating bugs is a bad thing, besides you just thinking it’s gross. I eat raw oysters. Gross is relative, not intrinsic.
The carrying capacity of Earth is based on how efficiently we use resources. We could feed everyone on earth today if we didn’t have waste, and we aren’t even using all the arable land that’s available, let alone using it efficiently. Farming bugs would easily multiply our efficiency.
I can only see that as a good thing. More people means more ideas. More ideas mean more innovations and things that could move us forward. I see Humans, assuming we survive the next century or so, as a multi-planet species. If we can get to the point that life as we know it isn’t stuck to one rock I see that as a good thing to seek. If we have more innovations, that can only speed up that process and increase the chance we make it.
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Fun lobster fact: They used to feed lobster to prisoners in Massachusetts because they were considered unclean animals since they crawled along the ocean floor and nobody else would eat them.
Fun fact about that fun fact. They ground them up shell and all before serving them to the prisoners so yeah it was still garbage food.
crunch
Mmmm, gourmet
This is some serious gourmet shit
Recently, we were in the canteen at work and a colleague, who moved here a few years ago, told that she never had rhubarb before.
Then she asked me, probably just for vocab reasons: Rhubarb is a vegetable?
Uhh…
I had never thought about it. I mean, what the heck is this:
Could be a salad, a leafy green. It’s kind of similar to celery, but is celery even a vegetable? Well, and of course, rhubarb is often used like a fruit, so uh…
Well, I looked it up, and scientifically, it does count as a vegetable, but colloquially, it’s often considered a fruit.
Like today’s computer scientists, early biologists sucked at inventing new words, and simply reused existing ones. “Berry” in common language is a small, usually sweet and edible, fruit. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries are all berries.
Then biologists came along and decided, actually, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are out, but watermelon and bananas are in, because the size of the fruit doesn’t matter, only the placement of the seeds decides whether something is a proper, scientific
berry.A similar thing has happened with “fruit” and “vegetable”, where scientific
fruitsinclude cucumbers, eggplants, and pumpkins. Luckily, all three of these are alsoberries.I say we ignore them, and use words to mean sensible things.
Or we move on with our lives and accept that fruit don’t have to be sweet and vegetables don’t have to be savory. Life is beautiful and nature constantly challenges expectations.
🅱️erries
If a new berry was invented, computer scientists will probably call them “βerries”, next one “ϐerries” (cursive beta)
Γerries
Pronounced “cherries”
i prefer to classify all of what you said as simply “food”
simple yet accurate. I’m a scientist now.
simple yet accurate
this describes engineers more in my experience. science embraces the chaos of discovery. engineers just want to make fruit salad.
Rhubarb is pretty weird, especially for people who grew up where it’s not a thing.
I’ve never had rhubarb. I’ve heard it’s sweet (people make pies out of it), but it looks like celery, which is one of my most hated foods. What does it actually taste like? Is it palatable raw?
The best jam I ever had was raspberry rhubarb
Rhubarb is actually really sour. As in, if you eat too much of it, your teeth will start feeling as if they’re covered in fur, because it genuinely fucks with your enamel. (Rhubarb contains oxalic acid, which is also used in some tooth whitening products).
But it’s basically never eaten without adding a boatload of sugar to it. So, you can kind of imagine it like those sour sweets, but stronger, and of course, it’s a plant, so the taste is somewhat richer (although still not very rich for a plant).
As for eating it raw, well, then you can’t really add sugar to it, so basically not palatable. I mean, you can do it, but unless you really like sour, it’s just not good.
And it’s only really similar to celery in terms of its texture and crunch. The taste is completely different.
Bugs is good
Not all, shrimp is kinda gross TBH. But I’m excited to try new cicada recipes this summer.
You refuse to eat bugs because they are “disgusting and gross”
I refuse to eat bugs because I love them too much. We are not the same.
Would you eat a spider?
Apparently I eat
38 spiders every night.Oh you’re right, sorry. Eight.
I’m allergic. No bugs for me!
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If you’re allergic to shellfish, there’s a high chance that you’re also allergic to insects
I’m allergic to the shit of bull
I’m legitimately curious- why do you think the above claim is bullshit? To me, the fact that both shellfish and insect carapaces are made of chitin makes it seem reasonable that they would trigger similar allergic reactions, but I wonder if that’s not the case?
Edit: I looked it up, it’s a protein called tropomyosin and it is carried by some crickets, along with other bugs like cockroaches.
I found an article here
Oh sorry. Non native speaker here and learned a new phrase. I’m sure the chitin could have a protein structure causing allergic reactions to those who never got exposed to it when they were young
No worries! I figured out its not chitin- who knew that mushrooms had that too??
I thought you were saying you didn’t believe that there can be shared allergies between shellfish and insects, to which my brain said “wait, they’re made of the same thing”. For your reference, English speakers “call bullshit” on one another when they think someone is lying, hence my curiousity.
Mushrooms have chitin, so I’m guessing there’s not common trigger
TIL! Thank you!
Crawfish are literally called mud bugs in a lot of places. I think lobsters and langoustines should also be under the bug umbrella.
In Arabic, shrimp are called sea locusts and are technically halal. (Depends on what school you follow)
guy on the right knows shellfish and bugs are equally gross
And will still eat both.
just to spite the middle people and see their reactions while chewing ocean bugs
Ahh… sea roaches, quite good in a salad
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And I eat snails, so what?
*wet bug
Rollie pollies is shellfish
I don’t really care which end of the bell curve I’m on and I don’t really care.
