People eat bugs all over the planet.
2 billion insects eaters over 7 billion humans worldwide to be exact
Wet bugs are very distantly related to earth bugs.
Won’t you eat chicken just because pidgeons are disgusting? (yet also eaten sometimes)
For a foreigner: shouldn’t it be “distantly related” instead?
Oh, I’m no native speaker either
Yeah that or distant relatives
Pigeons literally exist in the us because they were imported for food iirc
Depends on the pigeon, some are absolute Chads
That thing is an abomination that won’t survive in the wild, let alone cross the bering strait
Oh yeah, no question. People photoshopped the poor bird before there were photos, something like that shouldn’t exist.
No problem with pigeon if it’s been raised for food, or had a life in nature. I’m just not eating the ones in urban centres that have been eating trash all their lives.
I should’ve come up with a better analogy…
Crustaceans are the closest relatives of insects.
Pigeons are delicious though
yeah look up the passenger pigeon. Used to be delicious
My uncle had an old silo with a broken roof and he and my dad would sit at the bottom and shoot the pigeons for dinner. I still remember my grandmother sitting outside the house plucking feathers all day. The 90s were fun in my family.
Stop don’t do this to me
Megaloblatta Longipennis
yeah i’ve been vegetarian my whole life and lobster / crab always seemed particularly disgusting. the bodies are segmented!! they have exoskeletons!! vile!!
The whole boiling alive thing always put me off. Torturing a creature to death for a morsel of food never seemed quite right to me.
Common practice nowadays is to kill it just before cooking with a quick knife blow to the noggin
I’ll play devil’s advocate. I think a lobster suffers less in 20 seconds (or whatever) of boiling than a pig being raised for a few weeks.
You’re probably not wrong, but a pig does at least provide more than a few mouthfuls of food.
Not that I condone the suffering.
Funny this could be used to describe a peanut
I’ve wondered about this before, just from the perspective of North Americans. Bugs that live in the water? Delicious and fine to eat. Actually look at a shrimp, though. If it lived on the surface people would never consider eating that. I also noticed a lot of people don’t really realize that at some point shrimp have heads. What gets me is how people have strong feelings but don’t seem to have thought it through.
Aren’t shrimps are basically cockroaches of the sea? They’re delicious though lol.
I believe shrimp are closer to isopods (roly polies and such), though I may be mistaken
I think it’s the lobster that’s the ocean cockroach. Maybe shrimps too, I dunno.
if that lived on the surface you’d never consider eating it
If it lived on the surface and tasted like shrimp I’d have to be convinced once and only once.
The thing is most people here are completely revolted by the idea of eating insects and would not consider trying to eat one to find out. It’s a lot more being viscerally repelled than any analysis of flavor.
Okay but that’s entirely a cultural thing. There are cultures that readily and enthusiastically eat insects. There are cultures that are disgusted by pork, or beef. There’s at least one culture I can think of where the average person is viscerally disgusted by the idea of eating garlic or onion because harvesting the plant necessitates killing it.
The presumption in this whole thread is that there is something essential to insects that makes them wrong and bad to eat. Everyone in this thread is, of course, welcome to eat anything that they like, but if you’re disgusted by insects that’s something that’s been cultivated in you rather than something inherent to insects.
Besides, there are a near infinite number of things we eat routinely that I think most of us would find disgusting if we hadn’t been conditioned to it. Think about oysters. Who was the first person to think “I’m gonna bash this rock with that rock and eat the booger that lives in the middle?” Someone who was absolutely right, because oysters are delicious, but still had to be very brave to try it at first. Don’t even get me started on the myriad cultured and fermented foods that we all eat on the regular…
I agree, it’s definitely. My instinct tells me to simply not eat beef, yet everyone around me does, and so I’m dragged into this. Insects, on the other hand, aren’t so gross to me, given the right species.
Sure, it’s absolutely a cultural thing. If you look back to what I said originally, I specified people in North America. I’m aware that it’s different in other cultures and I agree. The fermented food thing is interesting too, like, cheese… okay, we’ll squirt some stuff out of a large mammal’s breasts, leave it sitting around in a cave to be digested by bacteria for a while, then consume it with great joy. And of course, some cultures like China don’t consume milk or cheese at all (last I knew), while in nearby Mongolia, fermented yak’s milk is popular. On some level that would be horrifying, such as I am horrified by ‘stinky tofu’ but I love bleu cheese. I also have similar feelings about oysters and clams, like, why would I eat this bizarre weird bug living on the bottom of a lake?
So really what I mean is it’s interesting how people have such firm feelings and beliefs about what sort of food is appetizing or not based on culture. It’s essentially all upbringing, societal pressure, familiarity and habit, and nothing at all about rationality.
If it’s a cultural thing that means at one time it wasn’t that way, and it can change back. That’s all.
I’ve had strong feelings ever since I realized the little nubbins were where its legs used to be. Now I just eat them anyway and consciously don’t think about it
I never had lobster/king crab.
Anime says it’s tasty. Is it?
Lobster is a bit overrated IMO but crab is the best food there is.
It’s worth trying. Lobster has a mild flavor and a smooth chewy texture. It tastes great with butter and lemon, though there are probably better ways to enjoy it. Crab is similar. One thing that takes some training and patience is removing the exoskeleton. But, that’s pretty fun, too. My kiddo likes to play with the claws afterward. When no one’s looking, I do too.
IMO lobster kind of sucks. People douse it in butter because it does not have a ton of flavor.
Never had king crab. I do love occasionally having dungeness crab out of the Sound though.
😱
overrated, but good enough to give it a try.
Fuck yes, people freak out about eating crickets or shit but then proceed to eat a huge spiderlike creature that’s mushy inside (crabs)
To be fair, I had ice cream with crickets all over them, and honestly it had a kind of woody / pukey aftertaste that I couldn’t get through. I wondered if part of the problem is you can’t de-vein the little things. Aren’t you basically eating their shit?
I can de-vein a shrimp, and I only care for lobster tail.
That vein is their digestive tract : )
It’s not a vein.
I actually wanna try those crickets I heard they sell at a baseball stadium somewhere in the Eastern side the states. Apparently, they are the most popular concession there and they come in a variety of flavors like sour cream & onion.
Crickets when fried are basically like chips, but with more texture (crunchier)
Definately a level 1 level of trying insects.
That kinda makes me want to try them
They are decently popular in Mexico. From what I have heard it tastes like the fry batter and seasoning so basically delicious.
You can buy them online if you just wanna try them. This seller has a YouTube channel too.
Crickets actually aren’t bad on their own. We did a “Fear Factor” themed fundraiser for Katrina relief back in high school. We made cricket sugar cookies, cricket-covered chocolate strawberries, flavored mealworms, things like that. Things weren’t selling as well as we would have wanted, so, being the weird kid with an extra bag of crickets, I stated that I would eat a live cricket for every $20 that was pledged. That ended up raising an old extra $140, and I ate 7 crickets in front of my classmates. They were relatively tasteless, and, since I found that it didn’t gross me out, years later, when I was an educator at our local aquarium, I would use, “Wanna see me eat a live bug?” strategically to bribe my summer camp kids into staying calm. If they were well behaved for an hour after lunch, I would pop one of the feeder crickets into my mouth. It brought much joy and disgust to the 10 year olds.
Grilled crickets taste like chicken with walnut imo
Almost like they have actual meat on them?
Trying to gaslight into “eat the bugs” isn’t going to work
They’re pretty much all meat? Bugs aren’t empty. Chill out man
I’m not trying to convince anyone, I do think the double standards are pretty stupid. I never ate a tarantula but I’m sure its pretty meaty.
Also everyone uses gas lighting in different contexts so I think the word should be banned. I don’t have a clue anymore what it is supposed to mean.
When I was in Cambodia, I saw street vendors frying up tarantulas, with lots of locals gathering around for snacks.
I’m not sure I’m ready to eat that, but they seemed to like it.
Meaty?
The gas lighting is real
Gaslighting is when I like something that you don’t
Claiming bugs have meat
Ah, so you’re treating your intuition like it’s universal fact and then claiming to be the victim of gaslighting when someone disagrees. Have a great life!
Because they aren’t meaty at all lol
tell it to the frogs
They have more meat than an insect tho
Okay, insecty then whatever you want to call it
Well how are you defining meat? Terrestrial insect meat and crab or lobster meat is structurally pretty much the same. It’s all muscle fibers.
The big difference is that you can’t really extract the insect meat like you would with a crab, so you’re stuck eating the whole thing, meat and everything else, which is probably where a lot of the apprehension comes from. And to be fair I think that’s a pretty big difference. A lot of cultures try to avoid eating “everything else” up and down the food chain.
Meanwhile I don’t like crustaceans, but if you made a hamburger out of crickets I would be fine with it.
Jerma made this meme
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vegetarians
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I kind of miss when Hot Topic used to sell crickets and snacks, they were pretty good no cap
Sea bugs are delicious and have more meat than land bugs, I’ve eat crickets before and it’s 80% bones/ definitely not meat and 20% actual meat
Snail is a “bug” and it’s 100% meat.
And you have escargot for just that. Guess I’m missing your point.
Snails are more in the same category as squids and octopuses, and I know people who won’t eat those because they’re ‘gross’
You’ve eaten interesting crickets. Those that I know have no bones.
You’re thinking of in bones. Crickets have out bones.
Exoskeleton is still a form of bone, I use bone because it’s shorter
Not really… but yeah there was no question that’s what tou meant, in my mind at least.
It’s not though. Bone is a fundamentally different material.
We knew what you meant, mind.
The bones of my house are also fundamentally different material to human bones. Not really sure what point I’m trying to make here but there you go
Is your house a 15th century gothic chapel?
Even before I went vegan I never understood seafood. Who wants to tear a crab leg apart for a tiny bit of meat?
Agree. That’s why I go king crab!
I feel the same about lobster and crayfish. A lot of work for a lot of money and very little gain.
The meat is that good.
Me!
So fucking gross, I’ll literally never be able to wrap my head around it. Also what’s worh seafood lover’s obsessions with eating things alive yo that’s psychopath shit
Like a shrimp is basically a rectum.
All animals are basically digestive tubes with add-on parts to help move it and keep it alive.
I love seafood, and eat all manner of seafood, and have not once, in my entire life, seen anyone eat LIVE seafood.
Who the fuck are you hanging out with?
It’s a relatively common practice. Oysters especially.
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I literally can not even be around people eating seafood, like if younwere the most fantastic person and I were madly in love with you and you asked me to meet at a sushi bar or go home, I’d be on my way home.
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Ok. Doesn’t change my reality or statement so
What if I promise to bring you Chicken fingers and french fries?
I would appreciate the intent, and attempt to meet me part way, but I really can’t eat around seafood tbh. It makes me nauseous to smell it even. No idea how so many other people go through life without this curse.
Oysters on the half shell, raw, are alive not dead. I love seafood too, and eat raw sashimi grade fish all the time but yeah I’ve never eaten a raw alibe oyster either.
You gotta try it bruh, on the half shell with cocktail sauce and horseradish 🤤
you just have to channel your inner frog and swallow the living animal whole
(i have never eaten raw oyster)
I absolutely love both the flavor of the meat and the feeling of ripping it apart with my hands.
Having had lobster exactly once, I really don’t understand. The meat tastes like nothing, exactly like 99% of all meat. The only exception is a good beef cut, and that still has to be prepared correctly. Everything else is just about the butter, salt, spices.
The manual part I can kind of understand, honestly. There’s something rewarding about working for your food. Though I did feel like I’m using more energy to get the food than I end up consuming. It’s like a lick-mat for dogs.
It’s part of the experience. Same thing can be said for something like chicken wings or un-shelled nuts
Top right image just needs more Old Bay
well obviously wet bugs are cleaner since they’re surrounded by water all the time
And presalted lol.
