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We should all be eating insects
- binarymax 13y agoI agree with this article, unfortunately many of us are so psychologically averse to the thought, that it would be very difficult and require a cultural shift. I can't imagine eating them (even when ground up, or even if they had a "better name"), but maybe my children or grandchildren will (or must).
- dcminter 13y agoAre you sure you don't already? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine
- yareally 13y agoI believe there's also an allocated % of accidental bug material that is allowed in food by the FDA because it can't always be avoided. If you've ever had ketchup, you've most certainly had a little bit of additional protein in there with it :)
- bluedino 13y agoI think the easy way to do this is not eat them in their regular form. Mix them up and add them to a recipe. You might not want to eat a spoonful of beetles but if they're ground up into a sauce, you'd never know.
- riggins 13y agoI can imagine eating them. but I'm not much of a foodie to start with.
- benjamincburns 13y agoI'm right there with you. Imagining crunching on a bug's exoskeleton and swallowing it nearly makes me gag. Repeatedly imagining it kills my apetite and makes me feel nauseous. However, I think there's hope for you and I. For a few years growing up my mom (a single mother) had trouble putting food on the table, so most nights we'd eat spaghetti with olive oil and broccoli. She was very anti-hunting, but she started dating a guy who hunted deer. After a while the prospect of large amounts of high-quality free meat (we almost never had meat) was too appealing to turn down. I remember the first time I witnessed a deer being butchered I experienced the same revulsion I describe above. My mom's boyfriend had a trick up his sleeve, however. Before we ever saw him butcher a deer, he made sure that we tried (and enjoyed) fresh deer loin and deer heart (sounds gross, but smooth muscle is delicious if prepared correctly). He didn't tell us what it was at first, and he cooked it in a way that pretty much any self-respecting meat-eater would love. It's kind of a tradition for the hunters in my hometown to cook up a fresh loin (and liver) they day they butcher a deer. Quite often that cut of meat never makes it into the fridge, and it's the best damn meal that animal will produce. Writing this it's hard not to salivate thinking about fresh loin sautéed in butter and garlic. Needless to say, after going through the process several times I went from being disgusted by the gutting, skinning, and butchering to being excited to participate and hungry for the results it would produce. If I can have that drastic a change over one type of food, why can't I over another?
- joonix 13y agoExcept food is already so cheap in America that there is no incentive to eat bugs. The raw fish example doesn't work because raw fish is a delicacy.
- ImprovedSilence 13y agoSoooo, make crickets a delicacy, get some good pr up and running to make it socially acceptable, and charge health-conscious yuppies $40/lb for em, and it'll sell. It's all about presentation, appearances, and marketing.
- kasbah 13y agoCan you really see that happening though? The negative associations attached to insect eating are too great. I think it would take more than marketing to change such social norms.
- warfangle 13y agoYou obviously haven't watched Mad Men. Just toast them! ;)
- graeme 13y agoA committed sub-group could also change things. I'm part of the paleo community. I'd love to try eating bugs, and I think most of the people I know in the community would agree. It could then spread out from that and similar groups. This has already happened with such things as eating offal, which is experiencing a resurgence among paleo groups (and probably foodies, but i'm not one).
- rthomas6 13y agoDon't be so sure. How many untraveled Americans would consider raw fish a delicacy 50 years ago? Marketing has already created and changed more social norms than we'd like to admit.
- bluedino 13y ago
- petepete 13y agoThere was a very interesting documentary by Stefan Gates on this very subject a month ago on BBC4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01599yk http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01599yk
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- jecs321 13y agoI am totally up for eating insects. I've had them before in Korea. I wish there were a place to get them in the US.
- grimtrigger 13y agoIs there anyone who grew up in a non-insecting-eating society who has acquired a taste for them? If so it'd be interesting to hear how they made the switch. I'm not talking about eating bugs just to know that they're like, but someone who actually enjoys them.
- tellarin 13y agoI guess I qualify. I usually make a point of trying new food, and insects were no exception. After trying some I really became fond of them. Of course, occasionally I try some new ones that turn out to have an awful taste. :) But the same applies to other food anyways.
- ImprovedSilence 13y agoI grew up in a big college town. Every year the university would have an "insect fair", where among other things, they had a big tent with all sorts of insect food. I remember eating millworm soup, some type of bugs in pasta, chocolate covered crickets, and probably some other stuff too. I thought it was pretty tasty, and now I consider myself very willing to eat insects as food every now and then or at a fancy restaurant. Then again, I also consider myself much more open to new experiences and tastes than most of my peers. So in short, yes, I enjoy them, but I don't eat them on a regular basis, or necessarily seek them out.
- leishulang 13y agoafter couple meals of deep fried bugs, you will see them as good as french fries.
- lightweb2 13y agoChickens and other poultry eat insects if they are raised on pasture. They directly convert this abundant food source for us. Chickens taste better and are easy enough for anyone to raise.
- DanBC 13y agoChickens are also easy to infect with a variety of diseases that can affect humans. And there's the small but significant risk of a bird flu developing in the poultry population.
- lightweb2 13y agoChickens are easy to infect when they are genetically compromised as you get with birds raised on commercial poultry feed and living in confined spaces. Birds raised on pasture are much less susceptible to this. There is a world of difference between the two. Much has been written on this subject.
- tellarin 13y agoNot really. Especifically in the case of the bird flu, that was mentioned above, chicken get them from birds in the wild. So commercial poultry sometimes might have its advantages.
- lightweb2 13y agoOr so you've been told by whatever industry... I take all of that with a grain of salt and concentrate on providing the best farm environment possible and allowing nature to mitigate the issues for me. This is way it was done for millenia before corporate agriculture and media got involved. Non-mainstream education is paramount in this area.
- tellarin 13y agoI disagree that chickens taste better than most insects. My experience is quite the opposite. Chicken is usually more bland, I guess. While insects vary a lot. Some can be pretty tasty, others quite awful.
- tellarin 13y agoIn many places people have no trouble eating them; some are even considered a delicacy. From the ones I've tried, some are actually pretty tasty. The best are: bamboo worm, barbecued silk worm, fried spider, water roach, and fried crickets. If anybody is curious, I can comment more on these and others. :)
- mkl 13y agoSpiders and crickets seem like they would be mostly exoskeleton. Which bits do you eat, and how do you avoid getting all that chitin in your teeth?
- tellarin 13y agoFor crickets, yes, when fried they just become salty and crunchy. And you can eat the whole thing. Which is great with beer. :) For spiders, I've only had the larger ones. So there is actually some "meat". And the taste reminds me of crab.
- dsirijus 13y agoDon't know about spiders, but as for grasshoppers, crickets and locusts, gently swat with clothes to kill, remove anteannae, wings and leg spurs. Roasting is the best as it kills potential parasites and they taste best that way (as well as helping to easier powderize all that chitin).
- coldarchon 13y agoYou do know that chitin or chitosan is an important part of your tooth paste?
- ImprovedSilence 13y agoWhere do I go to get them, and how do I prepare them?
- tellarin 13y agoI currently live in Asia, so it's relatively easy for me to find them. Where are you based? If in the US, I suggest looking on the Internet for some cicada recipes! Roasted. Most insects can just be fried. Sometimes people add some salt, or some other sauce/seasoning and that's it.
- pstuart 13y agoPerhaps indirectly. I've been researching raising Black Soldier Flies as fish food -- there are some interesting possibilities there: they feed on waste and "self harvest" (when larvae are ready to pupate they climb up, and if a ramp is set up for that they go up the ramp and drop into a container.
- karamazov 13y agoWhy does the food supply need to double to feed an extra 2 billion people?
- talklittle 13y agoA lot of today's population is underfed or suffers from nutrient deficiencies. To "feed" today's population we already need to increase the global food supply. Here's a UN press release from 2009 titled "Food Production Must Double by 2050 to Meet Demand From World's Growing Population": http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/gaef3242.doc.htm http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/gaef3242.doc.htm
- joshuahedlund 13y agoI believe the theory is that we are currently on an unsustainable path that is drawing down our existing inventories of global food faster than we are replenishing them (ex. overfishing of oceans), so to feed 1) our first-world selves, 2) our third-world friends who are becoming first-word (i.e. eating more food), and 3) an additional 2/7 population... that will require a growth in the food supply. I think some of those on the more doom-mongering side tend to underestimate the general agricultural innovations of both past and future, and the market forces that drive them, but there are some compelling arguments that this may not be enough.
- hkarthik 13y agoI've long believed this to be true, so it's interesting to see this article. I grew up in a traditional Hindu family where nearly everyone was vegetarian. When I came to the US, many of us started eating meat. 15-20 years ago, this horrified many of my cousins who stayed in India and remained vegetarian. Fast forward to today, many of those same cousins have started eating meat in India. I read an article the other day saying the traditional Hindu vegetarian diet is falling by the wayside, and poultry consumption in the subcontinent has skyrocketed. In another generation, I expect to see a large rise in red meat consumption where the natural resource needs are much higher. This got me thinking, can the planet really sustain another 1 billion, full-time meat eaters? If humans have such high protein requirements that can't be satisfied by a plant-based diet, isn't eating bugs the only ecologically sustainable choice?
- subsection1h 13y agoIf humans have such high protein requirements that can't be satisfied by a plant-based diet Do we have such requirements? Beans, lentils, quinoa, etc. aren't enough?
- hkarthik 13y agoClearly not. We domesticated those plants thousands of years ago and they weren't enough to replace meat in most diets. Maybe it's more a question of taste than health, but for whatever reason, animal protein has and always will be a major part of the human diet.
- contingencies 13y agoExcellent quote from a famed Japanese microbiologist: "During the war, when I worked at the research center, I was assigned to determine what insects in Southeast Asia could be eaten. When I investigated this matter, I was amazed to discover that almost any insect is edible. For example, no one would think that lice or fleas could be of any use at all, but lice, ground up and eaten with winter grain, are a 'remedy for epilepsy, and fleas are a medicine for frostbite. All insect larvae are quite edible, but they must be alive. Poring over the old texts, I found stories having to do with "delicacies" prepared from maggots from the outhouse, and the flavor of the familiar silkworm was said to be exquisite." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI try to do everything to avoid eating invertebrates. The only reasonable exception is shrimp and alike.
- zeidrich 13y agoWhat about that soylent diet? There's other reasons we eat than just nutrition. If it was just nutriment we were looking for I'm sure we could do it easier than eating bugs.