If you've got cleaned, cooked seafood that smells like fish shit, you're at a shitty restaurant. My only takeaway from this is that we should really see if we can make terrestrial insects taste as delicious as we make aquatic insects taste.
oh there's some tasty bugs out there already. people are just too squeamish about it.
For me its mostly the legs/heads. I dont fuck with heads on anything and legs need to be way bigger for me to be interested. I'd try one of those fly/mosquito burgers tho.
Or you could, y'know, just eat beans instead.
The bottom ones have delectable white meat inside. The top ones are all brown guts and crispy, musty shell. Nobody is shelling crickets for a worthwhile piece of meat inside like you do a shrimp or a lobster.
They look similar to bugs, sure. But let's not pretend it's the same thing.
Sounds to me that the common preparation is to just blend them into a powder at which point they're just a non descript protein rich powder
Still no tasty meat.
Well yeah, this would be a poor substitute for meat, but I haven't really seen it suggested as such, just as another way to introduce protein.
In asia the bugs are often put with other condiments, lollipop, spices etc... to make them taste something.
And they are mostly like snacks. I don't know any culture that have them take the place of a meat in a dish.
We're pretty close to creating real synthetic milk by means of modified bacterial culture.
If we can have real milk, cheese, whey protein etc. from cheap feedstock in fermentation vats, I don't see a single reason why someone would choose bug powder over that as a protein source.
Well the latter have more "meat" on them, whereas bugs are mostly just "shells" once they die. You aren't eating the shells of crustaceans, you're eating the innards
You got a point, but the kind of bugs eaten in some parts of the world are usually the fatty kind .
See, at a glance, that thing looks disgusting. I have an instinctive revulsion to the thought of eating it.
I guess some people would say the same for whole live shrimp though, and I grew up fishing them out of the sea and boiling them up in a pot.
Oh I can explain it easily! One of them tastes good and the other one tastes bad. That's pretty much it... Not sure how it's so confusing though
Have you ever tried insects? Those who have have said that they taste good. They said it tastes like shrimp.
I dunno I feel like most bugs would be pretty decent fried in Gaelic butter with salt.
TL;DR: disgust is learned.
Bottom line is that while there are things that we're hard-wired to reject, the rest is more about what social groups teach us at a young age. Also, we can overcome the hard-wired aspects to an extent, again through social reinforcement.
I live in a fishing town, and I used to love crab, until I was adult and it was my turn to prep them. The first time I turned a crab over and saw the bottom, where all its freaky little legs connect, I had a real "oh god this is either a bug or a space alien" moment. I can't stand crab anymore, just the thought of it makes me feel nauseated. Lobster too. Somehow shrimps are okay, though.
It's gross sure but i never understood how that would make someone stop eating it. For me no matter how gross something is the taste is the only thing that matters.
Other examples, rabbit's brain, black pudding, or in general how we kill most animals to make steak... It's always creepy, gross or a bit disturbing, but it never changed my taste for it.
In case your serious that you don’t get it. The bottom pic is all crustaceans that are more closely related to insects than fish.
Op is saying they don't get why many ppl frown upon eating terrestrial insects but do eat aquatic ones.
Of note, insects diverged from the arthropod line that would become crabs, lobsters, etc in the beginning of the Carboniferous or late Devonian, a solid 350-400 million years ago. This means crabs and grasshoppers are more distantly related to each other than humans and frogs.
If all the meat on earth disappeared tomorrow, I would become a vegetarian before ever knowingly consuming a bug.
What if they were raised in a hermetically sealed environment, dried out, ground into a fine powder, then added to batter to make pancakes?
I don't think I could eat whole bugs, but bug flour? Easy.
I've had crispy dried grasshoppers that were chill once, and some BANGIN cricket tacos in NYC.
They're actually pretty great for protein.
I'll eat as many bugs as a billionare eats.
But aren't billionaires completely sick in the head? I'd be careful with a claim like that
Stamets, do you want me to catch the 4 inch cockroach that I've been raising free-range in my apartment and send it to you to find out? It's on a non-GMO diet.
Most people are definitely quite squeamish about eating unshelled shrimp. This feels like a strawman.
Sea roaches
they’re in the water so they’re clean obvs
It's all about presentation. I can prep crickets in a way that almost anyone will eat them. Feed them oatmeal for a few days, then slow roast, powder in a blender, combine with sesame oil, salt, and spices, stuff it into wonton wrappers and steam. If nobody knows what's in them they disappear. But if I do fried crickets like the ones the Korean street vendors sell, very few non-Asians would touch them.
A lot of insects can be prepared using familiar presentations and the unsuspecting will devour them. I found ant cookies delicious - like a molasses cookie. And ground rolly-pollies (sowbug/pillbug/armadillium) could be used to make shrimp shumai and nobody would be the wiser.
So they're really popular if you pulverize them so they're totally unrecognizable and then trick people into eating them without respect for bodily autonomy‽
It doesn't sound like a trick, it sounds like a simple offer that people take up without bothering to ask what's in them.
I'd rather eat bugs than shellfish. Never had bugs but I know I don't like seafood so at least there's a chance the insects won't be bad.
I don't get it either, but head says no no and yes yes.
Oh, you eat bugs. You just don't know it.
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