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many of us have a deep, instinctive revulsion to eating insects This could be cultural blindness, there's probably lots of places outside of your own culture t

many of us have a deep, instinctive revulsion to eating insects This could be cultural blindness, there's probably lots of places outside of your own culture that find eating insects the best thing ever. As hard as that may be for you to imagine, given your experience, which as it is linked to the culture/s you have lived in, is naturally limited. Some examples that occur to me: - Many Israelis may find eating pork disgusting - Many North americans may find eating livestock intestines disgusting - Many Anglo-saxons may find eating chicken feet disgusting - Many non-Nordic folk may find eating putrid-smelling fermented fish (one is: Surströmming) disgusting - Many non-South americans may find eating hamster meat disgusting Yet for the people actually in those cultures they probably find it the best thing ever. So I think it's mostly cultural (and temporal) blindness. Here's some more ideas: - "For Most People, Eating Bugs Is Only Natural" https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/eating-bugs-cultural-cuisine https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/eating-bu... - "Eating insects has long made sense in Africa. The world must catch up" https://theconversation.com/eating-insects-has-long-made-sense-in-africa-the-world-must-catch-up-70419 https://theconversation.com/eating-insects-has-long-made-sen... I think cultural food preferences are probably strongly linked to food-source availability. For anyone thinking I'm pushing some ideology, or food-preaching, cool your heels: I'm just stating some facts and making a point about cultural relativism. When you use the world "normal" (especially for food), you probably speak with ignorance of other parts of the world.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Guinea Pig, right? Instead of Hamster
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
  Generally, we Americans balk at any eating of rodent. Missing out! Americans need to get on a Nutria diet stat.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Yes. Cuy, cuyes. Different names. Named "conejito de Indias" in Spanish, bunny of the Indies, stedda Guinea Pig. It's not from Guinea. It's not African. It couldn't use the n word without getting fired even if it did talk. They would get a genealogical (Guinea-logical) chart and say, uh, not African, fired. And yeah it's more like a bunny than a true rodent. I would totally. Totally willing to eat them. To the extent I can. Like the way I eat chicken, eat the solid contiguous meat parts, I can't skeletonize chicken like other Chileans can. Like it's incredible, nothing left but bones, like museum quality nothing left to rot, dude like if you fed the leftovers to pirañas all those fish would starve.
wowokay 4y ago
That is true, I’d be more curious about the food source evolution. Even in this article the writer pointed out that it was a tradition and that sourcing the wasps was getting harder each year due to pesticides. Does this mean culturally they have moved past eating wasps and moved on to more “normal” food sources? I’ve never thought of eating insects as a primary source of food for a culture unless they were poor and couldn’t afford better foods.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  When I look at the history of the Netherlands there's always been a ton of good farming land available (no mountains!) and the North sea is teeming with fish. Starvation was a rare occasion but in times of war or flooding people ate anything that moved.
- graderjs 4y ago
  You can't really say it's "more normal" to not eat insects. That's cultural relativism bias. "unless poor or couldn't afford better" again cultural relatvisim bias. Stop that, it's jarring.
somenameforme 4y ago
There's a huge difference between something being made edible, often out of dire circumstance or extreme poverty, and something being desirable, let alone "the best thing ever." Surströmming is such a perfect example. It came from a different time and a different place, where you're eating your unpleasant fermented fish while trying to make it as tolerable as possible, or you're going hungry. The reason their eating habits changed is because through economic and technological development, they were able to move beyond eating what they can to eating what they want. In short, progress.
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  Hmm, but what people want is strongly influenced by culture... Fermented foods interestingly aren't just a good way to preserve things for hard times, but have beneficial effects on our guts. Even the shift you're describing from hardship to plenty has a dark side, it's an abundance of a few foods at the loss of a wide variety of nutrients and flavors, some of which I am sure many of us now find 'funky'. As for entomophagy, I see that other primates do quite a bit of it[1], though my assumption is that as we get bigger, eating enough of them becomes more work (until you can make nets...) 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23039342/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23039342/
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Not at all true. Your tastes aren’t progress either
- numpad0 4y ago
  Climates also play roles. Nordic winter could be cold and dry enough that Surströmming might naturally become sterilized as it is processed, whereas pork in Israeli desert or intestine processed in Midwest America could not have been safe, possibly as late as early 20th century.
- kman82 4y ago
  I agree with this. I live in a country where blood pudding is “cultural” but many ppl find it disgusting.
- 4y ago
dcx 4y ago
I found the National Geographic piece interesting. But you've made a lot of unnecessarily condescending and incorrect assumptions about me: I was not raised in the West. I enjoy many of the foods on your list, and am also very familiar with induced disgust originating in religious taboo. Yes, some cultures do farm and raise insects. The point I'm making is that it's unusual that pretty much every culture worldwide that is prominent economically today has mostly moved away from entomophagy, considering its apparent sheer efficiency. (Whereas we pretty much universally all still farm honey) Also, the assumption that eating insects is merely a cultural taboo may not hold water: a quick Google finds scholarly research around insect and arthropod disgust being a worldwide phenomenon, which lines up with my initial speculation. I also see academic hypotheses that this was indeed evolved due to the "parasite avoidance theory of disgust". Just like culture can be used to create disgust taboos, it can also be used to override them.
- graderjs 4y ago
  Man you're totally being ignorant. It doesn't matter that you got a bit of science behind it, you can find science to do anything--especially to back up some "norm" specific the culture the science comes from. Science is a discourse, not a settled matter. Ugh, I didn't assume anything about you. I took it from what you said. Stop being such a cultural supremacist. I was right about you: you are ignorantly speaking from your own limited experience. That's not condescending it's the truth. Everyone has a limited experience, what you're doing wrong is saying you're way is better than others, "more normal", "more advanced": "unusual that pretty much every culture worldwide that is prominent economically today has mostly moved away from entomophagy", it's just white-washing for neo-colonialist cultural supremacy: savages eating "lower" foods, while the cultivated civilized elites eat the "better" stuff. It's bs, man. I never said you were raised in the West. I mean this kind of "relativity-blind cultural supremacism", I'd wager is big foundation of racism. "pretty much every" "prominent economically today" "mostly moved away from"--it's a pretty weakly worded claim (weaselly worded to take the stance of another commenter, which to me suggests you're merely arguing for troll sake, by loosening up your position to give you the most strategic room to manoeuvre. If that, I'd just say pick a topic that makes you look less dumb and insensitive). It's also completely incorrect: Brazil, India, China -- they like their insects. Economic prominence: admittedly, I think this view is controversial, but according to CIA and IMF China is now larger than US economically[0]. And using more traditional metrics, the BRICS block combined GDP is larger than the US, the "most of" the BRICS block (of em, "economically prominent" countries to put it, um, delicarely) eat insects. You are the backward ignorant bogan looking into your neighbourhood and proclaiming it the whole world, while speaking of things ignorantly and arrogantly outside your ken. The Court Philosophers who would hang Galileo for challenging their Precious belief that Earth was the Center of the Universe. Come on, man. That's not scientific. That's backward, and ugly. I'm sorry, but it's true. :P ;) xx ;p [0]: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/china-now-worlds-largest-economy-we-shouldnt-be-shocked https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/china-now-worlds-la...
cafed00d 4y ago
You hit the nail perfectly right on the head! Cultural blindness! - Many Indian vegetarians would find eating _any type of meat_ (chicken, beef, pork, fish, even eggs) repulsive.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
Dude as a Chileanized American (who sought to Americanize from overseas, normally spent all my allowance on American cultural exports) I would totally eat that hamster meat. Yeah rodent but there were rodents the Irkutski (originally Native Americans come from Irkutsk) ate, 1 ton rodents. That's meat. Plus these Peruvian Beef Hamsters are meaty (I forget what the Kechwa name for them is EDIT: Cuy is the name), like bred for that, and there's hygienic practices they follow these aren't rats. And they IIRC weigh a kilogram or so. Dude the shellfish in Chile are much more exotic than that, dude Piure, I want to eat, tastes like money, supernaturally high in vanadium metal, and that's not even the most exotic. And when I was little I would put insects in my mouth, with intellect to know why were clean which weren't. Oh you want something fun for your catalogue of foods? Alright so in Chile in the South in January, might as well bring a tennis racket to deal with the Colihuachos. These fucking bumbling slow things menace, they land, they eat a piece of flesh, almost enough to leave scars. And in January it's flooded, twenty per person, the air is flooded, nuts. So they're hated. But there's revenge. So first you capture one. For instance with a racket, that works great. First off rip its head off. Now it's chilling, great. Why couldn't they all be born headless? Well now we get to the revenge, you take a stick, and carve it's backside out--I guess you'd need to see it done to understand the stickwork necessary--and then you GET TO THE GLAND! There's a gland, it comes out whole, it's nectar they collected before they could fly, in like an instar larva nymphal whatever nonbiting November stage. Nonbiting November stage. They like get nectar from flowers, high sugars. So this totally black insect has this honey gland, and it's like 100 milligrams, but you take it, eat it, tastes good. It's cool. Love it. The predator gets predated.
Natsu 4y ago
Most of those will make you sick without special preparation, so pointing at variation in taste across cultures that have (sometimes by necessity) found ways to safely eat those things isn't contradicting the idea that our sense of disgust is an evolved trait to keep us away from things that are likely to lead to disease.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Guinea Pig, right? Instead of Hamster

bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
Generally, we Americans balk at any eating of rodent. Missing out! Americans need to get on a Nutria diet stat.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
Yes. Cuy, cuyes. Different names. Named "conejito de Indias" in Spanish, bunny of the Indies, stedda Guinea Pig. It's not from Guinea. It's not African. It couldn't use the n word without getting fired even if it did talk. They would get a genealogical (Guinea-logical) chart and say, uh, not African, fired. And yeah it's more like a bunny than a true rodent. I would totally. Totally willing to eat them. To the extent I can. Like the way I eat chicken, eat the solid contiguous meat parts, I can't skeletonize chicken like other Chileans can. Like it's incredible, nothing left but bones, like museum quality nothing left to rot, dude like if you fed the leftovers to pirañas all those fish would starve.

wowokay 4y ago

That is true, I’d be more curious about the food source evolution. Even in this article the writer pointed out that it was a tradition and that sourcing the wasps was getting harder each year due to pesticides. Does this mean culturally they have moved past eating wasps and moved on to more “normal” food sources? I’ve never thought of eating insects as a primary source of food for a culture unless they were poor and couldn’t afford better foods.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
When I look at the history of the Netherlands there's always been a ton of good farming land available (no mountains!) and the North sea is teeming with fish. Starvation was a rare occasion but in times of war or flooding people ate anything that moved.
graderjs 4y ago
You can't really say it's "more normal" to not eat insects. That's cultural relativism bias. "unless poor or couldn't afford better" again cultural relatvisim bias. Stop that, it's jarring.

somenameforme 4y ago

There's a huge difference between something being made edible, often out of dire circumstance or extreme poverty, and something being desirable, let alone "the best thing ever." Surströmming is such a perfect example. It came from a different time and a different place, where you're eating your unpleasant fermented fish while trying to make it as tolerable as possible, or you're going hungry. The reason their eating habits changed is because through economic and technological development, they were able to move beyond eating what they can to eating what they want. In short, progress.

blacksmith_tb 4y ago
Hmm, but what people want is strongly influenced by culture... Fermented foods interestingly aren't just a good way to preserve things for hard times, but have beneficial effects on our guts. Even the shift you're describing from hardship to plenty has a dark side, it's an abundance of a few foods at the loss of a wide variety of nutrients and flavors, some of which I am sure many of us now find 'funky'. As for entomophagy, I see that other primates do quite a bit of it[1], though my assumption is that as we get bigger, eating enough of them becomes more work (until you can make nets...) 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23039342/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23039342/
wahnfrieden 4y ago
Not at all true. Your tastes aren’t progress either
numpad0 4y ago
Climates also play roles. Nordic winter could be cold and dry enough that Surströmming might naturally become sterilized as it is processed, whereas pork in Israeli desert or intestine processed in Midwest America could not have been safe, possibly as late as early 20th century.
kman82 4y ago
I agree with this. I live in a country where blood pudding is “cultural” but many ppl find it disgusting.
4y ago

dcx 4y ago

I found the National Geographic piece interesting. But you've made a lot of unnecessarily condescending and incorrect assumptions about me: I was not raised in the West. I enjoy many of the foods on your list, and am also very familiar with induced disgust originating in religious taboo. Yes, some cultures do farm and raise insects. The point I'm making is that it's unusual that pretty much every culture worldwide that is prominent economically today has mostly moved away from entomophagy, considering its apparent sheer efficiency. (Whereas we pretty much universally all still farm honey) Also, the assumption that eating insects is merely a cultural taboo may not hold water: a quick Google finds scholarly research around insect and arthropod disgust being a worldwide phenomenon, which lines up with my initial speculation. I also see academic hypotheses that this was indeed evolved due to the "parasite avoidance theory of disgust". Just like culture can be used to create disgust taboos, it can also be used to override them.

graderjs 4y ago
Man you're totally being ignorant. It doesn't matter that you got a bit of science behind it, you can find science to do anything--especially to back up some "norm" specific the culture the science comes from. Science is a discourse, not a settled matter. Ugh, I didn't assume anything about you. I took it from what you said. Stop being such a cultural supremacist. I was right about you: you are ignorantly speaking from your own limited experience. That's not condescending it's the truth. Everyone has a limited experience, what you're doing wrong is saying you're way is better than others, "more normal", "more advanced": "unusual that pretty much every culture worldwide that is prominent economically today has mostly moved away from entomophagy", it's just white-washing for neo-colonialist cultural supremacy: savages eating "lower" foods, while the cultivated civilized elites eat the "better" stuff. It's bs, man. I never said you were raised in the West. I mean this kind of "relativity-blind cultural supremacism", I'd wager is big foundation of racism. "pretty much every" "prominent economically today" "mostly moved away from"--it's a pretty weakly worded claim (weaselly worded to take the stance of another commenter, which to me suggests you're merely arguing for troll sake, by loosening up your position to give you the most strategic room to manoeuvre. If that, I'd just say pick a topic that makes you look less dumb and insensitive). It's also completely incorrect: Brazil, India, China -- they like their insects. Economic prominence: admittedly, I think this view is controversial, but according to CIA and IMF China is now larger than US economically[0]. And using more traditional metrics, the BRICS block combined GDP is larger than the US, the "most of" the BRICS block (of em, "economically prominent" countries to put it, um, delicarely) eat insects. You are the backward ignorant bogan looking into your neighbourhood and proclaiming it the whole world, while speaking of things ignorantly and arrogantly outside your ken. The Court Philosophers who would hang Galileo for challenging their Precious belief that Earth was the Center of the Universe. Come on, man. That's not scientific. That's backward, and ugly. I'm sorry, but it's true. :P ;) xx ;p [0]: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/china-now-worlds-largest-economy-we-shouldnt-be-shocked https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/china-now-worlds-la...

cafed00d 4y ago

You hit the nail perfectly right on the head! Cultural blindness! - Many Indian vegetarians would find eating _any type of meat_ (chicken, beef, pork, fish, even eggs) repulsive.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

Dude as a Chileanized American (who sought to Americanize from overseas, normally spent all my allowance on American cultural exports) I would totally eat that hamster meat. Yeah rodent but there were rodents the Irkutski (originally Native Americans come from Irkutsk) ate, 1 ton rodents. That's meat. Plus these Peruvian Beef Hamsters are meaty (I forget what the Kechwa name for them is EDIT: Cuy is the name), like bred for that, and there's hygienic practices they follow these aren't rats. And they IIRC weigh a kilogram or so. Dude the shellfish in Chile are much more exotic than that, dude Piure, I want to eat, tastes like money, supernaturally high in vanadium metal, and that's not even the most exotic. And when I was little I would put insects in my mouth, with intellect to know why were clean which weren't. Oh you want something fun for your catalogue of foods? Alright so in Chile in the South in January, might as well bring a tennis racket to deal with the Colihuachos. These fucking bumbling slow things menace, they land, they eat a piece of flesh, almost enough to leave scars. And in January it's flooded, twenty per person, the air is flooded, nuts. So they're hated. But there's revenge. So first you capture one. For instance with a racket, that works great. First off rip its head off. Now it's chilling, great. Why couldn't they all be born headless? Well now we get to the revenge, you take a stick, and carve it's backside out--I guess you'd need to see it done to understand the stickwork necessary--and then you GET TO THE GLAND! There's a gland, it comes out whole, it's nectar they collected before they could fly, in like an instar larva nymphal whatever nonbiting November stage. Nonbiting November stage. They like get nectar from flowers, high sugars. So this totally black insect has this honey gland, and it's like 100 milligrams, but you take it, eat it, tastes good. It's cool. Love it. The predator gets predated.

Natsu 4y ago

Most of those will make you sick without special preparation, so pointing at variation in taste across cultures that have (sometimes by necessity) found ways to safely eat those things isn't contradicting the idea that our sense of disgust is an evolved trait to keep us away from things that are likely to lead to disease.