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Please point us at the land-bugs with a taste profile like shrimp / lobster / crab / other edible crustaceans enjoyed by humans.
by throwaway-blaze 2y ago
Please point us at the land-bugs with a taste profile like shrimp / lobster / crab / other edible crustaceans enjoyed by humans.
- ge96 2y agoThere is a pretty meaty cockroach, maybe with enough butter it would be like a lobster tail
- dboreham 2y agoLobster tasting good is a construct. 200 years ago lobster was the lowest peasant food that nobody with the money to buy other food would touch.
- ziddoap 2y ago>Lobster tasting good is a construct. I'm not really sure what this even means. I enjoy the taste of lobster, and the fact that it is no longer peasant food doesn't play any part in that.
- jamster02 2y agoThe fact that it is no longer peasant food doesn't consciously play any part in that.
- ziddoap 2y agoI ate lobster maybe 100+ times (and enjoyed it) before I learned that it used to be peasant food.
- suriya-ganesh 2y agoI think what the parent comment is saying is that, lobster was likely introduced as an elite/rare dish to people in the current century increasing the appeal
- cortesoft 2y agoThat is exactly the point they are trying to make... that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food. I think the point is a little overwrought, really... while our expectation is part of what makes it taste good, it doesn't completely change what we think... there are a lot of foods that are considered delicacies that a lot of people don't like.
- ziddoap 2y ago>that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food When I was a child, I didn't even know the word "delicacy" let alone have any concept of whether what I was eating was a delicacy or not.
- cortesoft 2y agoLike I said, I disagree with the person's overall thesis, just pointing out what they were trying to say.
- IOT_Apprentice 2y ago
- saghm 2y agoAs usual, there's a (somewhat) related xkcd for this https://xkcd.com/1268/ https://xkcd.com/1268/
- tester457 2y agoTherefore with the right preparation some bugs might become delicacies.
- cortesoft 2y agoI think lobster tasting good is mostly about the amount of butter used. Really, though, a lot of it has to do with food preservation technology - lobster only tastes good fresh, and goes bad very quickly (which is why you will often see them alive in tanks at the grocery store, and they are often cooked alive). Before we had the tech to either keep them alive before cooking or refrigerate immediately, they didn't taste very good.
- burnished 2y agoNo, we cooked it like shit. It gets rubbery and unpleasant real quick.
- maxerickson 2y agoIt was also wildly abundant.
- burkaman 2y agoI think this is sort of a myth. There was a relatively brief period of time in the US when lobster was considered poor people's food, but in the rest of the world and the rest of history it has generally been very popular and often associated with the upper class. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#History I also think it's pretty common for historical "peasant" foods to be popular today, like tacos or potatoes for example. If anything, "poor people love it but rich people won't touch it" is probably evidence that the thing not tasting good is a social construct.
- conductr 1y agoPoor people have an incentive to find ways to make unwanted (aka cheap/available) food taste good, this simple fact is responsible for peasant food all over the world being generally amazing and why even a lot of upper class dishes have some origin as a lower class food. I’m in Texas and we’re pretty well known for brisket and fajitas which are sourced from fatty/undesirable cuts of beef.
- pfdietz 1y agoI've always been surprised how good the "bad" cuts become when cooked long and moist to convert the cartilage to gelatin.
- carabiner 2y agoPalm grubs?
- lysace 2y agoThe colder temperatures of their new environment might have made them tastier to us. Also, salt. I find shrimp from the cold north sea (Pandalus Borealis) a lot more tastier than the much larger shrimp found in more temperate seas.
- LPisGood 2y agoI think the biggest problem is how small land-bugs are. They don’t have a large chunk you meat you can yoink out and grill; you have to eat the shell.
- flysand7 2y agoShrimp are mostly tasteless though, aren't they? If you bite into a shrimp and really pay attention to the taste, you'd notice that it's not really a "taste" that you're feeling, but mostly the soft texture giving the illusion of tastiness.
- kupopuffs 2y agoAnd the fat. there's some shrimp with a lot of fat. Which is really just a platform for other great flavors
- Zardoz89 2y agoShrimp taste. Go net some shrimp, filet them alive and eat them, guts removed. Report your finding.
- airstrike 2y agoWhy do they have to be alive while you filet them?
- panarky 2y agoShrimp and lobster are really just delivery devices for butter, garlic, lemon, etc.
- andrewflnr 2y agoI've seen people claim that they actually do taste very similar if you can isolate the insect's muscle, but usually insects are eaten with their exoskeleton, which changes the flavor.
- belorn 2y agoIs there insects with a similar tail muscle of a shrimp? The muscle is evolved to push water in order to create propulsion. The only thing that I can think f that seems similar would be snakes.