Edible insects are a novelty today, but they'll be mainstream tomorrow
foodnavigator-usa.comThe article capitalizes on a popular foreboding about resource limits with a thrilling "ick" factor, but it's premise is unsubstantial.
I once met an ancient Jewish gentleman who, due to poverty, had been forced to eat lobsters as a youth. In that day they were considered on par with rats as a food source (not to mention they were forbidden by his religious culture) and he had never recovered from the experience, and still considered them revolting.
I can relate: if it became popular with the youth of tomorrow to broil rats and serve them at market price, I'd probably never get on board.
Like insects, Lobster was once a cheap and common food resource. Money could be made by packing and shipping it of to places where it was exotic and unheard of to the majority of people, and so it's image was specially crafted to make profit.
But unlike insects, lobster had the advantage of a fresh market. It was only viewed as the food of impoverished immigrants in port cities where it was common.
The vast majority of the market, at least in the USA, considers insects icky to look at our touch, let alone to eat.
More substantially, I think any serious study would find that people's eating habits rarely change based on broad, even minded assessment of future resource limits. Current rates of meat consumption are a good example: we know it can't last, but few people change their diet so that their great grandchildren can eat more chicken.
I do think insects will be a food source in the future, but that will be because a clever marketer discovers the killer bug that is both exotic and delicious. In general I think it will be a very long and slow process by which everyday insects like crickets become palatable to the status quo.
The article is about cricket flour, not eating whole crickets. Cricket flour products are already on sale in hundreds of stores. The key is to mass produce the flour as right now it's quite expensive. That's what's specifically addressed in the article, not the issue of convincing people to eat it in the first place.
Whether the challenge of mass producing cricket flour is actually worth solving of course, depends on demand for the product extending beyond novelty value, which is part of the problem with edible algae, also widely available in stores and rather simpler to produce and yet far from being a mainstream foodstuff.
As far as I'm aware use of cricket flour is also virtually nonexistent amongst the many cultures that consider whole insects a delicacy.
On the basis of both of the above I'd hazard that cricket flour is unlikely to become a significant staple food even if niche businesses perfect the art of cricket-farming.
It has the "ick" factor regardless of whether ground up or not. And the article does talk about flavor, etc.
I understand that Cricket Powder contains protein and other nutrients. But is it more efficient than just using plants as a source of those things? Surely the choice is not steak vs crickets but crickets vs soya?
Plant protein is subpar because of its amino acid profiles. I'm not being anti-vegetarian here, it's the basic truth and it's why strength athletes etc. don't count plants as significant sources of protein.
Basically, bugs are better, comparable to any other animal source.
There are other cultures where lobster is available domestically but without the negative connotations; I have good memories of eating fresh-caught lobster for dinner in a tiny fishing village in Ireland, where people had been enjoying them along with crab for many generations.
Shellfish are considered unclean in Judaism, but you shouldn't generalize from that to assume every other culture views them the same way, as with pork, the religious prohibition probably originated with the elevated risk of food-borne illness that was exacerbated by the climate.
In Bangladesh, it's always been considered a treat, though one affordable to villagers before the export market became a thing.
> I can relate: if it became popular with the youth of tomorrow to broil rats and serve them at market price, I'd probably never get on board.
Then you will become like most old people.
New things like interracial marriage, gay marriage, trying to not use a lot of resources(baby boomers not pre war), computers etc frighten old people.
And you also will get older and die, like they will before you.
But while you are dying off the youth will embrace the new and the better.
I just feel sad you have pin holed yourself already to not even want to try.
And although I don't like boiled meats, BBQ rat tastes fine.
[Edit] broil != boil I see from Google :)
>But while you are dying off the youth will embrace the new and the better.
Yeah, ain't that a shame? Those old belle-epoque people getting older, while the younger generations embraced Word War I and then the Nazi party.
Or those people that got older after the sixties, were the younger generations embraced Raeganism...
Sarcasm aside, new is not necessarily better. It's not even a strong correlation. There is new stuff that can be better than old, and old stuff that can be better than new in equal measure.
Only technology monotonically progresses to better and more advanced things. Morals and customs (and aesthetics) can and do change either way.
>new is not necessarily better
Sure, sure, but getting rid of prejudices that are objectively nonsense is better. Things like which foods are delicacies and which are icky that are not at all based on nutrition, sanitation, etc.
Rats, raised in clean conditions and fed properly, would probably make a good food source. People eat rabbits and squirrels, there's really not much difference.
True, but what you consider clean conditions is relative. City streets are dirty, but so is the bottom of the ocean! where sharks vacate and whales rot to bits and all kinds of sediment and detritus gathers: there's your market price lobster's "clean conditions and properly fed". So would you knowingly eat a rat off the city streets? Well, I probably would too in fact, even if the thought truly disgusts me :}
It is all pretty disgusting, be it bottom-feeders or beef in the lot. Our protein sources are generally grown and nourished in close vicinity to massive amounts of faeces. At least lobster is free range.
I think the idea of producing cricket meal as a protein supplement/food additive is pretty novel, but it will be a long time before I cook with it directly.
They used to have laws limiting how many times a week you could feed lobster to prisoners because it was considered inhumane.
I grew up in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa. I speak in general that eating insects is a delicacy and is favoured as a snack most of the time.An example, the [1] mopani worm is an excellent source of protein and is increadibly cheap in Southern Africa.The guts are removed, cleaned and dried in the sun before being packaged for sale. They also taste delicious once fried in butter and mixed with vegetables.
It might be a novelty right now in the western world but its been years of tradition in African or Asian countries.
I'm pretty sure most things are delicious once fried in butter and mixed with vegetables.
Incidentally, I'd love for microlivestock to be more widespread in the US--it could be such an affordable protein source!
It will be a interesting perspective as it becomes more common to eat insects in Western countries. The main barrier to break down would be the 'ick/ew' factor, which has been mentioned in this threads comments, that is usually cultural.
But judging from the way some domestic animals are treated by some farms, the ick/ew factor of eating insects becomes less of a barrier.
I'd try it. I eat raw fish, urchins, rare eggs, rare-ish meat of mammals and fowl. Who knows? Who would know if I would like it better than me?
I've eaten whole insects including crickets and the flavor was whatever. The texture of the legs was like trying to eat the tail of a shrimp - impossible. I'll be interested to see what the processing is like as I'm not sure about the utility of a flour that includes fine grains of exoskeleton. Proteins turn into magical things during cooking and shells don't do quite as well. Flour hints at baking, but I don't think it would function nearly as well.
From the first link on google, the baking results look like it doesn't form anything that can trap air or steam, so dense and mushy seems likely.
I've had cookies made with cricket flour, they tasted normal; wouldn't have been able to tell you anything was different from the taste/texture alone.
the tail is like, the whole shrimp :} haha, but I know what you mean. Maybe it's good, maybe it's the kind of baking goth teenagers carry on just to disgust their stiff parents!
People have been publishing this article every few months for as long as I can remember.
They may well be an efficient form of protein but... squick. Basically.
It's just unfamiliarity - you would have the same reaction to a prawn if you hadn't grown up with it. And many outsiders would have a similar reaction to squid cooked in its ink (Spain), half-rotted herring (Scandinavia), or even just strongly flavoured blue cheese (everywhere). For that matter, lots of people feel icky about fresh tomatoes.
It's not likely to become something which is mainstream overnight, but there are large parts of the population in the West who actively seek out different experiences. Or, to put it another way, the food market is heavily segmented by interest, class, age, location (national, regional, and metropolitan/rural), and so on. In the short term, you're likely to get movement into early/adventurous adopter parts of the market.
Or any kind of meat -- just a fuckin chuck of animal muscle, tendon, gristle, sometimes even skin.
I think there'd be a lot more vegetarians if everyone had to do their own butchering.
I suspect there'd be a lot more carnivores if people had to grow their own veggies, too.
Actually, butchering has given me a new appreciation for meat and the variety of cuts.
It definitely gets you over the "ew, there's blood in my pack of chicken breasts."
> I think there'd be a lot more vegetarians if everyone had to do their own butchering
I know I would be. Of course I already knew I would be if I had to raise my own food.
When I look at it the only way I can eat meat is because I can ignore the fact that it was an animal at the point I eat it.
That's the thing though - it's been there for years (maybe not in the form of cricket flour), and it gets hyped every few months, yet AFAICT there's not been any indication of it being any more than a niche interest.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the sector is really growing this time...
I can't speak about the other foods on that list, but half-rotted herring is far from a mainstream food in Scandinavia. It more or less a ritual in the fall, in which people eats it while drinking a lot of Vodka and beer.
I always like to bring visitors to Padova down to the piazza for drinks. On some evenings, there's a guy who cooks up delicious octopus that you eat from a plate with toothpicks. My kids love this, and happily slurp up the tentacles and then ask for more. So do I, now, but it did take some getting used to.
I do have the same reaction to prawns and I did grow up with them.
People feel icky about fresh tomatoes? Really?
Tomatoes are so bitter I'd assume they were poisonous if I didn't know about other people eating them.
I can't think of anything else that's even close to tomatoes. I don't touch beer or coffee with a ten-foot pole either, but tomatoes are worse even than that.
There's a chemical(s) in raw tomatoes that most people just aren't able to taste. Cooking alters it in some way; I like tomato soup and stuff, and was very surprised to learn, at 25, that most people find tomatoes and tomato soup taste similar, when they couldn't be more different to me.
Liking tomatoes is basically like being colour blind, except that they're a majority, which makes the non-colour blind people the weird ones.
But kudos to them for working the word 'artisanal' into a story about eating insects
Isn't cricket feed mostly corn and soy? Seems like it would be more efficient to eat the raw ingredients rather than the crickets.
Crickets are less metabolically demanding than humans. We need tricksy things like fiber and animal protein, but crickets can get by on simple sugars and cellulose.
Don't think so. We'll rather have lab-grown meat.
I'm looking forward more at Soylent[0] than lab-grown meat.
"Dont drink Soylent! Buy all these things I'm getting a commission on instead!" This article has absolutely no ethos. It is little more than an advertisement wrapped in logical errors and playing off contrarianism.
You can easily find blogs talking about how anything is terrible. Just offhand, your link recommends multivitamins, but there are many more-credible sources that will tell you that multivitamins are bad for you.
FUD, FUD, and more FUD.
Also outdated, the new version 1.4 of their formula removed more than half of the maltodextrin in favor of lower GI carbohydrates, which was one of the few potentially legitimate complaints.
That article is attacking the current implementation, but I'm looking more at the idea and want to see where it goes. Implementations can be made better.
Like ensure or enfamil?
This article is full of misinformation and unbased speculation. Any of the arguments provided in this article can be refuted with a little bit of research, but if guidance was needed, their "about" section and FAQ are quite in depth [0]. This article also employs a logical fallacy of appealing to nature in just about every paragraph [1], just because it's not found outside in nature doesn't mean it's bad. And vice versa, nature makes bad things too, see arsenic, found naturally in many minerals and is toxic to humans.
Lets start with the the addressing of the fish oils found in soylent. They claim fish oils are good, "but just how high-quality is the fish oil going to be in a mass-produced beverage?", yet they didn't think to check the website where they cite that their fish oils come from algae and even provide information on the shelf-life of soylent based on when the oils in it are likely to be rancid[2]
Moving on to sucralose. The study it cites that was published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health has been revised by studies that have been conducted since then and found that the study was "deficient in several critical areas" and that its conclusions "are not consistent with published literature and not supported by the data presented".[3] But hey, why cite that when we could just be scared by old crappy studies. The other wildly inaccurate claim of the article is it addresses the effects of "cooking with sucralose at high temperatures" when that will literally never be relevant while consuming soylent which is recommended to be prepared at room temperature and stored at even lower temperatures. Another case of employing scare tactics instead of a little bit of critical thinking.
As for maltodextrin? The claim in the article hinges around the high blood sugar spike from maltodextrin which is offset by other ingredients in foods, but if that's not enough, they've measured the glycemic index of previous recipes of soylent and they're doing so for Soylent 1.4 (the most recent recipe)[4]. The point is, this isn't some hidden scandal that this author uncovered in the two seconds that they looked at the ingredients list, it's known and tested and accounted for.
The list goes on with every one of the other concerns with appeals to nature here and scare tactic there (including a false and now corrected claim about an ingredient coming from "a beaver's ass. Literally."). In conclusion, I think the source you cited is not a very high quality one and readers should be aware of it.
Edit: Spaced out sources to be more readable.
[0]:https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/sections/200307055-About-Soy...
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
[2]:http://diy.soylent.me/wiki/perishability
[3]:Brusick, D. "Expert Panel Report on a Study of Splenda in Male Rats." Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology 2009 Oct;55(1):6-12.
[4]:https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/articles/201273715-Soylent-a...
Am I the only one bothered by the sheer amount of killing this means? You might have to feed poultry 2lb to get 1lb of food, but you kill only one living creature. With insects, how many living creatures are you going to kill to get 1lb ? (even though that would only require 1lb of feeding). Yes I know, they are not conscious at the same level, and are killed in a way so that they don't suffer, but still.
I'm sure you're not the only one, but you're pretty unusual.
Eating meat doesn't bother me, but if I imagine myself attaching more moral value to nonhumans, I would rate insects a lot lower than chickens a lot lower than pigs, and switching to insects being a net gain morally.
Does it bother you to eat plants? Things made with yeast? Do other activities that kill lots of insects bother you?
Not trying to needle you and I hope I am not setting off your scrupulosity, I'm just wondering how far it goes. I am also curious if this is a "thing" in the West now, I know something similar is sometimes practiced in India.
I have had the same reaction as him.
I know insects and plants are not "at the same level" as mammals or birds, but I always have the thought that squashing insects or eating plants is still killing living beings and I can't help being bothered by it. Yes, I also do have a thought for the yeast I'm using when baking bread, waking it up from stasis just for baking it in the oven soon after... but unicellular beings seem much less important as they're mostly clones, they don't have the same individuality.
I grow plants as a hobby, and having a few small trees that have grown from seeds, in pots where they entirely depend on me for their life, makes me really see them as individuals - especially since the genetic variation that comes with growing seeds also means they have observably different behaviours.
On the other hand... I do eat some meat, and for some reason I don't have a single thought for the pigs that have to get killed to make the dry sausages or cured ham I eat. I guess that is because I am just so used to eating these, and they are less recognizable as animal parts than, say, chicken wings.
In the end, you just can't live healthily by only eating things that don't harm any living being, so I just live with it, knowing that I have to kill things to eat.
About the India thing, I have thought like this for a very long time, I remember in kindergarten trying to stop other kids from stomping on ants, and (a bit later of course) my parents being amused when I talked about plant being like ununderstandable aliens. So I don't think this has much to do with trends, it's just a thinking you can come up with on your own.
Hmm, I have been a vegetarian for 25 years, but I am unfazed by it, broadly. It's a quantity vs. quality argument; the chicken has a much more complex nervous system, much longer lifespan, and frankly is a more empathetic creature. Cows and pigs, even more so, on all counts. So I would personally consider it a significant step forward in human morality if fast-food burgers were made of crickets.
I kill insects in my house all the time so I'm not bothered by it.
I can say that bee larvae taste like raw almonds and cow milk butter and I eat on sight.
I'm going to be seriously disappointed if bee larvae in my region taste differently than raw almonds and cow milk butter.
If I agreed that edible insects were a novelty today I might be persuaded that they'll be mainstream tomorrow. Since I believe that edible insects are a source of revulsion to most Westerners (at least) today, I'm doubtful that they'll be mainstream tomorrow. There's a general principle of argumentation here: if you want me to believe your apodosis, make sure we're on the same page with your protasis.
I'm a Westerner and just don't understand the revulsion, except from a vegan. Yes, I wouldn't chomp down on a raw cricket from the backyard, but the same goes for a rabbit, only more so -- a rabbit seems more conscious.
I gave a friend some cricket bars and he thought I was joking about the ingredient until after he'd tried it. Well, that's one answer to the ick factor.
That article was fascinating but ignored the branding factor. I realize that was intentional, but it is an important factor. What's considered food is basically a cultural/fashion issue, and can be explicitly changed by marketing (e.g. rapeseed can sound horrible in the US but was made acceptable by rebranding it "Canola", and likewise the Chinese gooseberry was much more successful as the Kiwi Fruit).
This is different from passive shifts of food from scorned to fashion, such as lobster or oysters, or how açai briefly swept the Whole Foods set -- that's more of a Veblen issue. Once the technical issues are worked out, someone's going to make a killing (literally I suppose) by rebranding ground up mice and crickets as "Natural Field Protein"
BTW I enjoyed this quote: > "Journalists always ask me what do you say to people that can't get over the psychological hurdle of eating insects?", said Crowley. "I say, 'nothing' - we're not targeting these people. We're targeting people that are receptive to our message, that will be our early adopters."
Good for him!
When will crickets NOT be $40 a pound? And then I'll consider it...
Which is sushi, novelty or mainstream? Or tofu, or non-wheat flour?
Or maybe there's a middle ground where things are neither.
Sushi in Vancouver or Tokyo? Mainstream. Boise, Idaho? It's all relative to where you are.
Eating insects here is currently novelty. But in many parts of the world, it is a part of daily life.
Kind of interesting how many people would rather eat bugs than not eat meat at all.
Not really, considering the nutritional profile of insects. There are some nutrients you can't readily get from plant-based foods, or only in poor amounts, like DHA/EPA, carosine, lysine, etc. Not to mention all the things you'd normally miss out on with traditional meat, because we're not used to eating the bones and innards of large animals here, but that you get from insects cause you'd eat them whole, so you'd get plenty more minerals, vitamins, and rarer amino acids that way.
I recommend reading this book if anybody's interested in more specifics about insect-based nutrition, and why it's actually more unique and useful than most people realize:
http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Adventure-Eating-Insects-Planet...
Beans are full of lysine and, for ovo-lacto vegetarians, so are eggs.
(I don't consider dha/epa and carnosine to be essential nutrients.)
> I don't consider dha/epa and carnosine to be essential nutrients
We're at a point where we don't even know what we don't know about nutrition, so it's fair to have "beliefs" like this I suppose. But there is substantial evidence for DHA's impact on brain development if nothing else, including the brain development of children birthed from mothers low in DHA stores. Not much significant evidence suggests equivalent impact from ALA/plant-based fatty acids, nor do they convert predictably in the body to forms the forms that are actually directly useful. I will grant you that EPA is more debatable, but DHA is pretty solid. And while I don't trust speculative 'evolutionary' evidence, it does make sense that human brain development (and thus human development in general) supposedly started to take off once they migrated near the coasts where there was an abundance of seafood to hunt.
Not to mention that plant fats/oils are the largest contributors to the problem of having imbalanced omega-6 to omega-3 ratios to begin with:
http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000141000000000000000-w....
Either way, "essential nutrients" and nutrition in general aren't things that we can assume as being settled, because much of what we "know" about all that will almost certainly become outdated in a few short generations. In the meantime, I think moderate diversification of nutrients isn't a bad idea.
Edit: I also made no mention of vegetarianism/veganism, I simply referred to plant-based food sources specifically, because many animal-derived products (including eggs as you mentioned), most certainly still have the benefits I was describing. It's not about lifestyle or ideology, it's about finding quality sources of things that promote optimal human functioning.
Have you ever had a bug burger? They're NOT bad at all.
I suspect it won't be terribly long before we have genetically modified plants to produce a more complete fat and amino acid profile, and this will essentially replace meat in most cases. Probably this will happen before anything like cricket eating goes mainstream. I wouldn't bet on this at all.
Japan got over the ickiness of insects a long time ago: http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-the-west-fears-insects-w...
You can buy some on Amazon today for $40 a pound: http://www.amazon.com/JR-Unique-Foods-Cricket-Flour/dp/B00OM...
I don't know how much of the process of raising and making flower from insects is proprietary, but some kind of open source knowledge base might provide appeal for people to refine production and innovate on consumption.
Why is there a push for crickets, grinded-up-bug-meatballs and insect flour when there's one that people aren't actually disgusted by -- escargot?
Cricket bars are yummy. For me, they pass the taste test. Not a lot of real kick factor. Hope they get the price down with mass production.
If anyone wants to get into this game, I'll sell you edible-insects.com and https://twitter.com/edibleinsects :)
And you thought chicken farms were disgusting...
I definitely think chicken farms are disgusting (and I've been a vegetarian for 21 years for that reason among many others). Cricket farming, on the other hand, I've considered trying. I'm not entirely confident of the ethics of eating bugs, but it's so vastly superior to the environmental disaster and suffering caused by eating meat, that I think making bugs a part of the average human diet is a net win.
If it tastes good, is healthy, requires less land/water/resources to products, and leads to lower meat consumption, I don't see how it can be a bad thing.
Unfortunately, costs are still very high. I'm not sure why that is, given all the hype about "bugs are a low cost protein!"
> Unfortunately, costs are still very high. I'm not sure why that is, given all the hype about "bugs are a low cost protein!"
My guess is that while bugs are more efficient than most animals at converting energy, the equipment and methods to raise the bugs and convert them into human-ready products have not had the centuries of optimization that mainstream animal husbandry enjoys.
Insects might be more economical, or at least eventually when their production is more mainstream. But food is relatively cheap today anyway; what is expensive is rent/or mortgage. Food for a single, working person doesn't really make such a dent in the budget that they are forced to thin "damn, there has to be some alternative to this", compared to what they spend on their rent. So I don't think it's that much incentive to eat insects, from an economical perspective.
If this were the case, why does Coke contain cheap corn syrup instead of good-tasting cane sugar?
Even if there's not enough of a difference for an individual to choose one over the other it doesn't mean companies with huge economies of scale won't choose differently.
As with bacteria, human living conditions will get quite ugly near our population's stationary phase.[1] Exponential growth does not last forever.
Unlikely. They are icky, unappealing and do not have the "man" quality one gets from real meat.
Food is mostly about taste and convenience today, because we have access to enough of it - insects doesn't really give you either.
In short it is highly unlikely that I will wake up tomorrow and eat insects, nor that the majority in the developed world will.
And yes shrimp may technically be insects. Technically correct does nothing for the ick factor.
There have been successful attempts at simply grinding the insects and making them into "meatballs" etc. All that's left over is a sand-like form of them that is highly nutritious and can be processed further.
Sustainability may be a choice today, but it won't be in the future. That's not even a debate.
Looking at r/fitness and trillions of similar boards online, people are readily willing to chug down any sort of powder without need for control through FDA etc. You know, for them "gainz".
So if insects' weird forms are never even detectable by your eyes or tongue, than why should people shy away from them?
I find it pretty crazy that a mental image of a cricket is considered more unappetizing than a bleeding out cow, than a pig kept in a 5ft x 5ft space for all of its life, than newborn chicks ground to shreds by some vacuuming grinding machine because they aren't profitable etc....
You can also convert soy into 'meatballs' as well. It hasn't caught on widely either. Taste is the deciding factor.
In the case of soy-based fakemeat, it's more about texture than taste. The taste isn't that hard to get down; good luck getting it to have the same mouthfeel as a slice of bacon or a nice, juicy steak though.
You didn't read the article. I can tell because my initial reaction was much like yours, but after reading an article all about cricket flour I realize it doesn't matter to the topic at hand. What obstacles there are to serving people whole insects are perhaps not wholly absent to serving them as an invisible ingredient, but are certainly greatly less.
If insects are going to be introduced into the American diet, this is exactly how it will start. And may well end; I could easily see whole insects never going mainstream. But... they don't have to.
Lobster is a bug; it used to be 'ick' and now its 'yum'. The ick factor is cultural. No reason the OP can't be right - if bugs are tasty, and some people start eating them, and then more people, they could easily become a regular thing.
I have a friend who is an entomologist, a doctor of entomology no less. He doesn't eat lobster, or any other type of mollusc, on the basis that they filter-feed and will quite happily chow down on faeces, just like any other insect.
Mind you he finds the texture of boiled eggs repulsive too, so it might just be him.
> on the basis that they filter-feed and will quite happily chow down on faeces
Just like cod, which my Hull fishing-town relatives taught me is a dirty, wormy fish unsuitable for consumption. All you can do with it is sell it to the naive land-lubbers...
> lobster, or any other type of mollusc
Lobsters aren't molluscs, they're crustaceans.
Not even the same phylum.
I didn't say I was a doctor of entomology :)
So do plants, more or less.
Yeah after reading the article I am slightly less skeptical - the headline, as usual, war promising way too much.
That said we are going to look at a timeline of decades rather than tomorrow. I mean Tofu has been around for how long? And it is still somewhat of the beaten path.
People already eat bugs in other countries where bugs are hardly disgusting compared to their usual food. Convincing Americans to eat bug food might be harder, but Americans only make up of 5% of the earth's population. I've consumed roasted tarantulas in asian countries and they taste quite good, so I can see that insect consumption in those countries will be quite a bit easier.
Lobster is 100% bug to me - huge yuck.
You should seriously consider to task it if not done yet, is simply delicious if properly prepared. Just keep trying, is just a cultural wall. You'll thank me in the future.
That applies to more than just bugs. Given a long enough timeline, anything nutritious could become culturally mainstream. That doesn't guarantee that it will.
I don't find lobsters scurrying behind my trashcan though.
Well, actually... http://i.ytimg.com/vi/z54da6-fz94/hqdefault.jpg
Okay, so it's a coconut crab, not a lobster, but...
One problem is that, in a world seing the vanishing of bees and other invertebrates by pesticides, insects are just not so reliable as source of safe food now.
You don't eat wild insects because they could be carrying disease.
You eat farmed insects which are clean and you can be sure they're free of pesticides or other agrichemicals.
Farming insects uses less land and water than farming meat and is less problematic regarding cruelty.
"cruelty" is a false problem, a species of new religion that can accept as perfectly good move to set free a mink from other continent that you know will kill thousands of native birds later. Just a modern fairy tale, that did never prove to solve absolutely nothing. Is just manipulation.
If there is a market for bugs something will end selling ilegally wild bugs (cheaper, better profit margins). This is what history tells us again and again.
I really hope that we as species can be more smarter in the future about this. Famines are not caused by people not eating bugs, are caused by people creating wars by design, etc...
Lobsters, shrimps or mussles are actually delicious, and are thus expensive. Insects or dog/cat meat on the other aren't, as otherwise they would have been adopted into worldwide diet long time ago. So today they still remain a cheap source of food in some third world countries.
I hate to correct you, but this isn't correct (your 'downvoted' status might reflect this).
Canine / felines are carnivores (omnivores these days, but you get the gist) and their muscle structure / diets cause them to taste 'off' and be tough fleshwise. Not to mention that they're worth more as biological weapons / companions.
There are also more scientific reasons, for example:
There was a quick deterioration in the men's physical condition during this journey. Both men suffered dizziness; nausea; abdominal pain; irrationality; mucosal fissuring; skin, hair, and nail loss; and the yellowing of eyes and skin. Later Mawson noticed a dramatic change in his travelling companion. Mertz seemed to lose the will to move and wished only to remain in his sleeping bag. He began to deteriorate rapidly with diarrhoea and madness. On one occasion Mertz refused to believe he was suffering from frostbite and bit off the tip of his own little finger. This was soon followed by violent raging—Mawson had to sit on his companion's chest and hold down his arms to prevent him from damaging their tent. Mertz suffered further seizures before falling into a coma and dying on 8 January 1913.[8]
It was unknown at the time that Husky liver contains extremely high levels of vitamin A. It was also not known that such levels of vitamin A could cause liver damage to humans.[9] With six dogs between them (with a liver on average weighing 1 kg), it is thought that the pair ingested enough liver to bring on a condition known as Hypervitaminosis A. However, Mertz may have suffered more because he found the tough muscle tissue difficult to eat and therefore ate more of the liver than Mawson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Mawson#Australasian_An...
It is highly likely that if those explorers had asked the original breeders of said animals, they'd have been told strongly that eating them was a bad idea.
Lewis and Clark ate plenty of dog, though I doubt they ate Huskies. I imagine they ate dog meat because it was generally available and more sanitary.
http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=1806-05-0...
They ate dog because the tribes they were visiting had little else: when in areas with other game, they preferred that.
Clark never ate dog, couldn't bring himself to break the cultural taboo.
In the dry areas of what is now eastern Washington, in fact, where there was little if any game and the only other choice was dried salmon, usually impregnated with sand, the men came to prefer dog.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/12/1204_031204_...
Oyster are expensive because rarity. They used to be food for poor people.
http://www.missfoodwise.com/2013/03/beef-stout-and-oyster-pi...
Expensive because they are classified as "luxury". More than 91.000 Kg of oysters produced each year in Europe exclusively for human food.
>Lobsters, shrimps or mussles are actually delicious, and are thus expensive. Insects or dog/cat meat on the other aren't
Deciding something is delicious or not has more to do with culture and upbringing than actual taste.
Tongue receptors are the same in all humans. If fresh, properly prepared and cooked by a competent cook, lobsters, shrimps and mussels are one of the finest foods available. If an insect or spider can taste like this I will try it.
Cats are said to taste pretty much like rabbit. Edible, but nothing really special.
The ability to taste some compounds varies. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylthiocarbamide
So everyone can taste bitter, but not always from the same things.
A similar thing is probably at work in people who find raw tomatoes extremely unpleasant.
I grant you that point. Food-allergies are also a problem.
It would only take a generation to change that.
Indeed - raise your kids to eat insects or insect products, and they won't think twice about it. My wife grew up in Eastern Europe and savours the thought of chowing down on blood sausage, whereas I grew up in Australia and it just seems like a 'scab tube' to me! Besides more extreme examples, most food is an acquired taste, and inspect / insect products would be no different.
