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Old 05-13-2013, 10:58 AM   #1
Talon87
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UN urges people to eat more bugs

The BBC reports.

I was actually having this conversation with a friend the other day. He was telling me how, in the West, we didn't really eat shellfish much until the era of the locomotive. Before that time, shellfish were seen as "sea bugs" by most people, understandably so:



"Mantis Shrimp" indeed.

This wasn't true for all cultures of the world obviously -- many Native American tribes fished shrimp, and so too did the Chinese -- but apparently in the West, eating shellfish were seen by most well-to-do people as something utterly beneath them. But what happened was (or so my friend tells me), lobster was used to feed the workers on train lines, and at some point someone in the upper class car managed to sample some of the (prepared) meat. Loving it, and not knowing what it looked like while it was still alive, they inquire as to what it was. "Lobster, sir." Word soon spread amongst the wealthy what an amazing food this was, and before long, lobster went from being a "sea bug" that only the poorest of paupers would eat to being a delicacy affordable only to the very rich.

Now, whether my friend's tale is 100% true or not, I don't know. (Wikipedia not only seems to not corroborate it but gives mention of many historical examples of European countries, including England, trawling for shrimp.) But I bring it up since I think there's a parallel to it here, in this contemporary tale of getting us to treat the idea of fried locusts and chocolate-covered crickets the same way we do other edible specimens, including the "sea bugs". Speaking for myself, I can definitely say that I have a huge (overwhelming) aversion to the idea of eating bugs. They're gross to me. They strike me as filthy. I imagine eating them would taste a lot like eating fingernails and foul-flavored guts. I don't imagine it would taste anywhere near as good as turkey or pork or beef. So that image in the BBC article of a man eating bug-covered pizza isn't something I'm just neutral towards: it's the sort of thing that'd make me want to puke and/or punch you in the face if you tried to force it on me. But it *is* interesting to consider just how much of this aversion to eating bugs may be a culturally-engrained thing, the result of growing up in a society which portrays bugs as gross, disgusting, filthy, and above all else not for eating. I wonder if the UN's goals will really be able to take root in America. I wonder if, in my lifetime, we'll see pizzerias offering crickets and caterpillars right alongside pepperoni and sausage. I so very much doubt it. But I'm intrigued by the possibility.
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Old 05-13-2013, 11:21 AM   #2
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Oddly enough, most bugs taste nothing like what people would imagine, and are incredibly healthy to eat. Their shells may be crunchy, but they're not tough like fingernails or shellfish shells or anything, instead picture them like breadcrumbs... breadcrumbs packed with tons of nutrients. And their insides aren't all that different from seafood, save for things like caterpillars which are, in fact, closer to a fatty pork.
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Old 05-13-2013, 11:23 AM   #3
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Ducking in just to say that fried woodlice are really nice, kinda like crisps.

Locusts are nice if done well too - pull off the spindly bits and wrap them in foil with some garlic butter and put them on the fire. Gorgeous.
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Old 05-13-2013, 11:24 AM   #4
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I've always wanted to eat several bugs. Sadly I live in civilisation and was a sheltered baby.

Society's stupid, insects are healthy as fuck and they're everywhere and most of them which are edible anyway usually carry no diseases that can affect humans. Chow time already, dammit.
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Old 05-13-2013, 11:57 AM   #5
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>Mantis Shrimp

onetwothree DEATH!!!
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:10 PM   #6
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Bugs aren't kosher so they're a no-no for me. I stopped eating shellfish when I learned they weren't kosher either. However, locust IS kosher so I'd be willing to eat it if I could. But, hard to find locust in the United States. I would have loved to have experienced the Ten Plagues of Egypt - it would have been a buffet every night for me!

Incidentally, I don't like eating animals whole. Eat them whole, eat their digestive system = eating poop. One time my mother made me some white fish with egg and pepper on it. I liked it until I saw the white fish itself, then realizing the pepper sprinkles were actually eyes. :X
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:17 PM   #7
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Well obviously you have to prepare the things properly. That's the one thing people don't realize for some reason and is the reason for eating bugs being such a big thing with people. They don't seem to use logic and figure out that most of them are prepared similarly to some form of shellfish only smaller.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:27 PM   #8
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Well, I don't know how much there is helping the poop thing: a lot of the restaurants I've been to which serve chilled prawns/shrimp serve ones which still have their poop lines intact. I would think it'd be a similar case for beetles or locusts or other bugs which were served in restaurants were the bug thing to catch on. And if you're eating the entire thing whole, shell and all, then you really don't have much choice.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:36 PM   #9
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>a lot of the restaurants I've been to which serve chilled prawns/shrimp serve ones which still have their poop lines intact

I'm a prep cook who deveins hundreds of shrimp on a daily basis because the above scenario makes them taste like dirt. There is always a way to prepare any kind of animal to be properly eaten and not taste horrible. Even stuff like shark which urinates through its skin (albeit incredibly difficult to prepare properly).
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:40 PM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sneezey12 View Post
>a lot of the restaurants I've been to which serve chilled prawns/shrimp serve ones which still have their poop lines intact

I'm a prep cook who deveins hundreds of shrimp on a daily basis because the above scenario makes them taste like dirt. There is always a way to prepare any kind of animal to be properly eaten and not taste horrible. Even stuff like shark which urinates through its skin (albeit incredibly difficult to prepare properly).
You could be Gordon Ramsay for all I care and it wouldn't change the truth of what I've said. Just because you do it right doesn't mean others do. I'm saying, a lot of restaurants serve prawn with the poop still in 'em. This isn't exactly a secret or a rare occurrence: you'll find plenty of people asking "What's that black gritty gunk in shrimp? " on the Internet if you look.
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Old 05-13-2013, 01:11 PM   #11
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My God. The laughing emoticon makes me want to murder everyone who uses it.

Anyway about time on the bugs thing. It'll take a lot of years but we'll move towards a lot of bugs in the diet before too long.
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Old 05-13-2013, 01:22 PM   #12
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I didn't mind eating bugs too much as a kid. However I've been conditioned to find them disgusting, and haven't eaten any (on purpose) in years. I would eat some well cooked ones given the opportunity though.

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Old 05-13-2013, 01:49 PM   #13
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You could be Gordon Ramsay for all I care and it wouldn't change the truth of what I've said. Just because you do it right doesn't mean others do. I'm saying, a lot of restaurants serve prawn with the poop still in 'em. This isn't exactly a secret or a rare occurrence: you'll find plenty of people asking "What's that black gritty gunk in shrimp? " on the Internet if you look.
My point wasn't to disagree with you, as I've been to restaurants where they don't devein their shrimp more times than I can count... I just don't go to them anymore, because if they can't take the half hour out of their day to have one person devein enough shrimp to last them a full day then I'm not going to eat there and have shitty shrimp. My point was simply that there is always a way to prepare food properly, and that people just don't care to in a lot of situations because it takes time and a small amount of effort.
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Old 05-13-2013, 02:03 PM   #14
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Sure. But I've met many people who just outright refuse to eat shrimp at buffet restaurants because of concerns like the poop being left in, shellfish-related food poisoning, and so on. So what I'm saying is, you may have trouble with bugs too. Both for Reasons A and B.
Reason A: like shrimp, even if you gut the bug, a lot of people may still not want to eat it because they've heard about / seen with their own two eyes cases of bugs not being gutted and served with all their poop still inside. The serving on the dining room floor is clean! But they still don't want to touch it because of "just in case " squeamishness.

Reason B: unlike shrimp, many bugs are actually served whole and thus are not gutted. (Because to gut a bug, you have to crack open the exoskeleton. You're not going to be able to stick a metal needle up the anus and get those guts out Egyptian mummification-style. Would take way too much time and effort. No small time mom & pop restaurant is going to do that.) And so I'm saying that in those instances, people who have an aversion to eating cooked invertebrate poop (as is the case with shrimp) are almost certainly going to have a problem with eating whole bugs.
That's all I was saying in my post. That I imagine a lot of mom and pop restaurants or buffet restaurants staffed by lower-class individuals would serve bugs with their guts (w/ poop) still in, and this would have the effect of turning many people off eating bugs period, even the ones which claim to have been prepped properly.
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Old 05-13-2013, 02:12 PM   #15
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Most mom and pop places that I know of actually go the extra mile to make sure things are quality, though. I'd be more worried about eating bugs at chains. For example, the place I described in which I work where we deshell and devein every individual shrimp out of the hundreds we get a day, is a mom and pop place. They go the extra mile because not going the extra mile would cause them to lose business that they can't afford to lose in most cases. If a chain loses a few customers they don't care, because there are hundreds if not thousands more that come to that very store on a semi-regular basis that will simply eat something else if they didn't like what they ate the previous time.
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Old 05-13-2013, 02:29 PM   #16
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Right. But as I'm sure you're aware, mom and pop chains tend to run the wide gamut from "some of the best restaurants out there" to "should be shut down by the Board of Health Inspections", examples of the latter being shown on programs like Fox's Kitchen Nightmares. I absolutely agree though that your average mom and pop restaurant *has* to make up the difference in quality: because they're usually not making it up in volume-bang for one's buck. That's the fast food chains' domain. Or better yet, cooking it at home yourself. (One five-pound chicken + half an onion + olive oil, salt, and pepper for seasoning --> $5.50 for enough meat to serve three average adults until they're full, never mind sides. But good luck finding those prices at a McDonald's or a mom & pop restaurant! )

Interestingly enough, though, this one amazing Chinese buffet near where I live managed to buck that trend. They offered some of the best buffet-style Chinese food in town and for the low, low price of only $4.75 at lunch and $6.75 at dinner. It was a steal. I hope it's not the reason they went out of business ^^; , but I tend to think it wasn't since they were around from at least 2006 to 2012, having only gone out of business just last spring. And they didn't even really go out of business. They closed the store for reconstruction, we were all told, and planned to open back up in May. But ... reconstruction never happened. And they never came back ... [/tangent]
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Old 05-13-2013, 03:39 PM   #17
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You know we are eating the world dry when the UN tells us to eat bugs.

What happens when the bugs start to die out because we're eating them all?

EVERYONE! EAT ROCKS!

EDIT: Sorry, the more obvious choice is actually Soylent Green.
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Old 05-13-2013, 05:36 PM   #18
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I give it a day before someone decides that the UN recommending bug-eating is an assault on American freedoms and starts a shitstorm.
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Old 05-13-2013, 06:12 PM   #19
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I give it a day before someone decides that the UN recommending bug-eating is an assault on American freedoms and starts a shitstorm.
If that happens, then I give it a day before an American B-list comedian cracks the joke:
Quote:
"But I thought we already had Freedom Flies? " - some Japanese-American guy
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Old 05-13-2013, 06:31 PM   #20
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Is it bad that I want to throw up? :/
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Old 05-13-2013, 06:51 PM   #21
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Is it bad that I want to throw up? :/
No, that's quite a typical response to one of my bad jokes.
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Old 05-13-2013, 07:23 PM   #22
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It quite is.

But on the subject, I'm with Merc on "It's about fucking time." Bugs are definitely healthy and some are quite nice-tasting. I've of course had the classic grasshopper-in-a-lolly, and I've had dried crickets, if I remember right. Those things are healthy and full of nutrient things.

Not sure where I'd stand on bugs personally, though, as a vegetarian...
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Old 05-13-2013, 07:50 PM   #23
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You guys might be surprised to know that a lot of bugs are in fact ground up with grain all the time. Eh, we need the extra protein. I've had stuff like fried mealworms before, they're pretty much like French Fries. Toss on some seasoning and you'd hardly tell the difference. Of course, how is eating bugs any worse than eating any other animal? Pound per pound, insect have more protein and less fat than any other meat. Of course, there are problems with using insects for food. How do you raise and catch large amounts of them? There certainly are a lot of them though and probably don't need must to raise.

Oh, and before you say anything about insect poop, entire cows are used for ground beef, which of course includes the intestines. Which is why there are E-coli outbreak around ground beef. There certainly is a lot a stigma around bugs. :/
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Old 05-13-2013, 07:56 PM   #24
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Uhh, not the entire cow is used for ground beef, and intestines aren't used to make it.

EDIT: Must be different in America, since I am fairly sure that the intestines aren't used here in Australia.
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Old 05-13-2013, 07:57 PM   #25
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Quote:
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Oh, and before you say anything about insect poop, entire cows are used for ground beef, which of course includes the intestines. Which is why there are E-coli outbreak around ground beef. There certainly is a lot a stigma around bugs. :/
This is misleading, while it is true intestines are used, the meat is washed before it is ground up. Moreover, the CDC found that E.coli outbreaks occur more from handling, transportation and preparation than from the original meat itself. In the case of steaks, the bacteria is on the outside of the steak and gets into the meat itself when the knife cuts it, taking the bacteria into the inside of the steak where it isn't cooked as thoroughly.
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