XKCD 1268 by Randall Munroe (CC BY-NC 2.5).
Transcription:
Imagine you were transported to an alternate universe just like your own, except people occasionally ate spiders. You can't convince anyone this is weird. [[Two figures stand. A woman is holding a big spider. The other figure looks shocked. There is another spider on the floor.]] Woman: Mmm... Figure: No! What are you doing!? This is how I feel about lobster.
{{Title text: As best as I can tell, I was transported here from Earth Prime sometime in the late 1990s. Your universe is identical in every way, except for the lobster thing and the thing where some of you occasionally change your clocks for some reason.}}
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It wouldn’t be weird to land bugs if they had that tasty meat crustaceans do. I’m big for alternative sources of protein like bugs, but the fact is they taste like shit.
If there were 2lb spiders that taste like lobster roaming around on land I would sure as fuck be out in the woods with a net every weekend.
agreed. ive had crickets at a local restaurant and once when i went to ecuador i had these giant roasted termites. both were well prepared and tasted good, but they also both (the termites in particular) had a bad texture and had pieces that just didn’t want to get swallowed. like if popcorn had 200% more kernel.
agreed. ive had crickets at a local restaurant and once when i went to ecuador i had these giant roasted termites. both were well prepared and tasted good, but they also both (the termites in particular) had a bad texture and had pieces that just didn't want to get swallowed. like if popcorn had 200% more kernel.
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
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
Not really... but yeah there was no question that's what tou meant, in my mind at least.
Agreed. I've had chocolate covered crickets and candy bugs and stuff because I travel (military; not rich) and like eating new and interesting things. The best you can do is cover up the taste and texture. Neither are palatable.
When I think too much about it, eating any meat really does gross me out. I still do but occasionally get tempted to try going vegetarian or something. I'm just too damn lazy
You don’t have to do it religiously. You can eat meat in one occasion, and avoid it in another. Especially these days the meat-supplements are getting pretty good. I would opt for them more often if they weren’t more expensive than real meat.
I myself find all those industrial meat alternatives pretty disgusting, especially considering what stuff they put in it to make it taste and feel like the real thing.
I'd rather mix my faux-meat myself, even while I'm not completely vegetarian, just almost.
Soy proteine, boiling water, some wheat flour, eggs and whatever spices you like. Makes for great burger patties. Don't have the exact ratio of ingredients in my head right now, though.
I can relate to this so I'll just add that aligning my diet with my values was the best decision I've ever made. Being able to eat without feeling guilty/confused/complicated was life-changing. I didn't do it all at once, or torture myself.
And we live at this amazing time when you can be lazy AND get amazing not-morally-horrible food! Typing this as I munch on an entire package of addictive store bought animal-free chocolate chip cookies :P
Even before I went vegan I never understood seafood. Who wants to tear a crab leg apart for a tiny bit of meat?
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.
I feel the same about lobster and crayfish. A lot of work for a lot of money and very little gain.
It's part of the experience. Same thing can be said for something like chicken wings or un-shelled nuts
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
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?
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 just have to channel your inner frog and swallow the living animal whole
(i have never eaten raw oyster)
It's a relatively common practice. Oysters especially.
The guy complaining about how common it is doesn't seem to live in any of those regions though. Most seafood is not consumed live, even in those places. It's weird that that's the major complaint with seafood.
Many people go their entire seafood eating lives while never eating from a live creature.
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.
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.
All animals are basically digestive tubes with add-on parts to help move it and keep it alive.
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.
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 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.
Crickets when fried are basically like chips, but with more texture (crunchier)
Definately a level 1 level of trying insects.
You can buy them online if you just wanna try them. This seller has a YouTube channel too.
They are decently popular in Mexico. From what I have heard it tastes like the fry batter and seasoning so basically delicious.
Meanwhile I don't like crustaceans, but if you made a hamburger out of crickets I would be fine with it.
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.
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!
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.
Wet bugs are very distantly related to earth bugs.
Won't you eat chicken just because pidgeons are disgusting? (yet also eaten sometimes)
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.
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.
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.
Well, wet bug meat are actually tasty, those land bugs are mostly chitin shells and not much protein, also the taste is not good.
Chocolate covered crickets, at least, are a regional delicacy. I'm sure some culture has figured out how to prepare large beetles and centipedes as well.
also the taste is not good.
How do you know? Have you tried them?
I've heard they're delicious.
Fun fact... lobster and crayfish were so disdained once that it was literally only used to feed prisoners.
*Preserved crawfish and lobster, which tastes like shit because it's been transported in a barrel for many days.
Most of what we eat today is either fresh or frozen, not mushy decomposing meat.
The practice was to grind the whole thing up into a paste, but yes it's all about perception and preparation.
That said I'd be drawing my vegetarian card if someone offered me Beetle Bisque
I do sincerely worry about insects being added as filler materials as time goes on. I have a shellfish allergy, and the same allergens that exist in the shells of shellfish also exist in most insects.
Proper labelling would seem to be a requirement anyways if they aggravate shellfish allergies, I think the concern is more "if this starts getting used in more foods my choices for food will shrink and I may no longer be able to eat the foods I like now".
It's definitely both. A lot of folks don't understand that insects and shellfish are similar, and I've yet to see "product may contain insect meal / aggravate shellfish allergies" on things that have crickets or are processed in facilities that handle insect meal. So, the FDA likely needs to catch up. But, it's also a cheap filler protein that's easily grown, and companies are cheap bastards, so it's going to slowly find its way in and push out more expensive protein options.
I'm pretty sure I gobbled up a spider and/or a small stink bug while eating berries the other day
Oh well
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.
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...
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 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.
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