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The many flavors of edible ants
- blovescoffee 3y agoChicatana ants are so incredible. They're a seasonal delicacy in Mexico and have a great nutty, proteiny, chocolately flavor.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI ate some in Oaxaca. Mine were fine, but nearly lost it from the intense flavor. Still don’t know if hers were actually different or just our tongues. Strangest thing. The grasshoppers were fairly good, though only in moderation.
- canadianfella 3y agoWho is her?
- OJFord 3y agoThe (missing word) person who 'nearly lost it due to the intense flavour'.
- com2kid 3y agoMy toddler was amazed when I introduced him to edible bugs (grasshoppers in our case, but we have a jar of ants around as well). His eyes lit up, it was like a toddler dream come true! Bugs he could eat! Related, recently I accidentally ordered some blood soup at a restaurant[1], and when he asked what it was I was about to say "blood, icky" but I remembered to not let my cultural biases predetermine what he ate, so I let him try some instead. tl;dr Toddlers love eating ants. [1] The menu listed it as shrimp cake soup, blood was a major ingredient that was not mentioned. Given every soup above it did list blood cubes, I should have asked.
- random_kris 3y agoThe many flavors of people...
- UncleEntity 3y agoAlmost like Adam Ant joined The Cannibals?
- moralestapia 3y agoNo idea why you got downvoted. Unusual, yes, but not a bad thing.
- teekert 3y agoAs a toddler my wife was known for lifting up rocks and just picking and eating all the crawling things. It’s our culture that removes these tendencies :). We still have the occasional good laugh about this story.
- postepowanieadm 3y agoCultures in most parts are rational when it comes not to eating specific things, when it comes to animals/insects it's mostly about parasites.
- master-lincoln 3y agoDoesn't cooking get rid of most parasites?
- sva_ 3y agoThat reminds me of the story of Sam Ballard, who ate a slug due to a dare and fell into a coma, woke up paralyzed, and later died. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/05/health/man-dies-after-eating-slug-on-dare/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/05/health/man-dies-after-eat...
- 3y ago
- lwhalen 3y agoHard pass. Happy to leave edible bugs to the globalists, I'll keep my steak, thanks.
- blovescoffee 3y agowhat does this even mean, the globalists? anyways more ants for me!
- papertokyo 3y agoI almost want to leave peoples' minds closed about this kind of thing to avoid an increase in demand. I don't want my Sal de Gusano doubling in price either.
- ByQuyzzy 3y agoMe too, but eventually you just get so excited about eating the bugs that you can't help but to run around enthusiastically telling everybody you know about how great it is. I can't help raving about them even though I'm like you and tried my best not to blab. It's the secret that we're not supposed to let out!
- rsynnott 3y agoIf anything, you'd expect 'globalists' would be, at least passively, on the anti-ant side; globalisation has tended to diminish regional cultural practices. (As far as I can see, though, most people who use the term 'globalists' (vs globalisation) are actually using it to mean essentially a reheated version of Nazi conspiracy theories, so, well, who knows.)
- giraffe_lady 3y agoIt's a far right conspiracy theory about jews, of course. It always gets mentioned in this context because the other part of it is a fantasy about there being a plot to enslave people and force them to eat bugs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalism#Right-wing_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalism#Right-wing_usage https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1166649732/conspiracy-theory-eating-bugs-4chan https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1166649732/conspiracy-theory-...
- dekhn 3y agoEvery time I get ants around my desk I notice their strong, unpleasant smell (probably formic acid, but maybe some alkanes?). If I even brush a surface they've walked across, I can smell it. It's quite unpleasant and I can't imagine wanting to use it in cooking.
- tekla 3y agoThe article is partially about dealing with this issue.
- ByQuyzzy 3y agoThis is so heckin' cool, I love science.
- withants 3y agowith ants
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoGo vegan
- seer 3y agoHah I remember as a 4 year old I discovered a tree crawling with ants, back where I was growing up in the middle of russia. I distinctly remember trying to eat them, as any self respecting 4 year old would, and discovered they were surprisingly tasty - sour-y, salty kinda taste. Now this discovery was not totally random, I had heard “stories” that you can poke a branch into an anthill the ants attack it to defend their hive and after a while if you get the stick out and lick it, it would taste sour. Maybe someone was just messing with me as a kid. Anyway I ran off to my parents to show them my new discovery and was immediately scolded and instructed not to do it again. But it still stuck with me - ants in that part of the world have flavor, and it’s actually tasty.
- rob74 3y agoI discovered the taste a bit later, while drinking some cola where an ant had fallen in and accidentally biting the ant - tasted very sour, despite the sugary drink...
- mettamage 3y agoA few select high end restaurants use ants for their sour taste. Why specifically ants? No clue. I do know that such restaurants like to switch it up and be a bit unconventional.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoThere is a set of techniques refined and published by noma that have been really influential in high end cooking the last decade. They use koji (the catalyst for miso and soy sauce, among other things) to break down protein and/or starch into sources of deep umami or complex sweetness. The liquid forms of this are being called garum, though it's not a continuity of the ancient food by that name. The original book published a grasshopper garum, but recently I have seen much better ones based on bee brood, and a chicatana ant garum is one of the best things I've ever tasted. They are very complex and unique flavors, nothing is quite like them.
- seer 3y ago
- throwup238 3y agoTurns out you can find some of these on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Yerbero-Chicatana-Chicatanas-Guacamole-Traditional/dp/B0CNY83TX1/ https://www.amazon.com/Yerbero-Chicatana-Chicatanas-Guacamol...
- Dunati 3y agoThere is a distillery in Cambridge UK that makes a gin flavoured with formic acid from ants: https://cambridgedistillery.co.uk/products/anty-gin https://cambridgedistillery.co.uk/products/anty-gin It's expensive, but the taste isn't really distinctive (unlike their truffle gin, which is very unusual).
- Razengan 3y agoMy only quibble with eating corpses whole: Are they clean? i.e. what happens to the poop inside their bodies? See with shrimp you "devein" them to remove the intestines before consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp_and_prawn_as_food#Preparation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp_and_prawn_as_food#Prepa...
- master-lincoln 3y agoas Wikipedia notes, this is just for aesthetic reasons. It's neither poisonous nor tasting intensively
- somishere 3y agoWe have a lot of green ants around our house (otherwise known as a weaver ant, mentioned in the article). They're a little aggressive but fascinating creatures all round and great for a nibble, tho I tend to only eat the bum ... tart but satisfying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaver_ant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaver_ant
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agoWe're already talking about how great it's going to be to eat the bugs? That wasn't supposed to happen for years. Which one of you morons leaked the script?
- optimalsolver 3y agoHoneypot ants are particularly edible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_ant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_ant
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- piva00 3y agoI've eaten some Amazonian ant in Brazil which tasted very similar to lemongrass, was surprised how tasty they actually were.
- somedude895 3y agoWhen I was a kid, I once diluted some dark raspberry syrup in a glass of water. After mixing I discovered there were tons of ants in there. I drank it anyway and the ants were really sour like lemon pulp when you bit on them. I think them steeping in the syrup helped. It was really tasty!
- gopal_virtual 3y agoI don't recall the bread, but ones in childhood my cousin brother had me eat ant eggs. It's sour-n-sweet in taste. No yuk memories though.