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>my intuition here was way off. I expected insects to pose far fewer risks from parasites to humans. Weird, my intuition was the exact opposite. The thought of
by weberer 4y ago
>my intuition here was way off. I expected insects to pose far fewer risks from parasites to humans.
Weird, my intuition was the exact opposite. The thought of eating bugs triggers a disgust reaction, similar to the thought of eating crap. Humans developed those reactions over hundreds of generations for a reason.
- orlp 4y agoA disgust of eating insects is not universal in all cultures.
- weberer 4y agoIts instinctual, not cultural. I'm going to guess you're referring to hunter-gatherer societies that frequently have to overcome famine and eat bugs out of desperation.
- sidkshatriya 4y agoThere will always be some cultures that are different from the norm. 100% uniformity in human culture is very rare. But look across the globe: I would posit that a large percentage of humans have a taboo against insect consumption. If there are any counter examples that you can state from the world one must analyze how numerically large that community is within that country and the world. In other words, don't count the number of cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption, count the population of the cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption.
- VBprogrammer 4y agoI don't think taboos are in anyway useful in determining health implications. For example, are dogs or horses in any way materially worse than cows or sheep for people to eat? Why are the French happy to eat frogs and snails? I'm reasonably certain the idea of certain food being taboo is almost completely due to cultural norms.
- justthinkhn 4y ago
- _flux 4y agoSo what happened to those countries that eat bugs nevertheless? They're going against their instinct? Or maybe it just is cultural, but in your culture it doesn't seem that way.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoWith the right conditioning, people can be made to accept all manner of madness.
- hnbad 4y agoThe rejection of things can be "madness" too. We know that plenty of "natural" phobias are actually cultural, i.e. learned behavior. Toddlers and even infants pick up on social cues and develop fear and disgust responses by mimicking the behavior of adults and older children. "Conditioning" is an unnecessarily spooky framing for what is quintessentially "culture". My toddler's first reaction to ground pepper was to cry out in pain, exclaim "hot!" and never want to go near it again. Would you call it "conditioning" if my child later in life develops a taste for peppery dishes?
- MichaelCollins 4y agoSome aversions are cultural, others aren't. Which are which? The fact that bug eating remains niche around the world, generally only seen in regions with a recent history of food insecurity, suggests that the conditioned madness is eating bugs, not aversion to bugs.
- VBprogrammer 4y agoI don't believe we have any such instinct, we only have cultural norms. I can't imagine any ethical experiment which would adequately separate the two factors. It's difficult to raise a child without influence of their surrounding culture. Predators in the wild tend to eat the vital organs of their prey first, yet for a great many people eating organ meats is gross.
- justthinkhn 4y agoYes, it was overcome in places where abject famine made it a necessity for survival.
- prometheus76 4y agoA lot of cultures also have much higher rates of parasitical infestation because they are too poor (or have been historically) to avoid it.
- jmprspret 4y agoMy gut reaction to the smell of pork, bacon or any meat derived from pig is disgust. That doesn't mean this feeling is some kind of natural primal intuition, it just means I didn't grow up eating it.
- kentrado 4y agoActually, pork meat can be really dangerous!! That's also another reason why some religions ban it's consumption. Nowadays, we learned enough to overcome the dangers of pork but that's a result of modern society.
- verisimi 4y agoAnything to do with eating any meat can be dangerous. We don't know why religions banned certain meat. Anthropologists etc give us post facto rationalisations, and, to my mind, even the holy books might be retrospective excuses.
- TuringTest 4y agoThere are two main reasons why religious books of law ban certain behaviors: - to encode social and higienic rules as understood at the time - to signal heressy, prohibiting a common practice carried out by heretics (double points if it is a practice central to those heretical beliefs). For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled.
- verisimi 4y agoSo certain. I guess you were there...
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoWe have lots of written history that validates his generalization and zero reason to believe that peoples who's records did not survive would have done those same things for different reasons.
- makeitdouble 4y agoWe have a somewhat similar reaction to eating brains for instance, yet that’s probably one of the safer part or the animals we eat. I think a lot of the reactions we built over hundreds of generations need to be revised in the world we are in today, and in light of what we know now. One of the interesting one is our reaction to body sizes, and how we still have an instinctive reaction to tall people, when it makes no sense in most of the societies we live in.
- zweifuss 4y agoPrion transmitted diseases similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease seem to be not that rare in nature. You need to cook the brains extremely well and long to be on the safe side. Thankfully BSE (Mad Cow Disease) was not as transmissible as feared.
- mtsr 4y agoPrions are proteins and need to be denatured to be rendered harmless. Cooking is generally not enough to achieve this. See WHO guidelines for prion sterilization as mentioned in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization.