> For the same reason we don’t eat grass. We get them preprocessed by other animals and then eat them instead because they are tastier.

The reason we don’t eat grass is because our digestive system can’t really absorb much energy from it. Eating grass requires a very specialized digestive system, and we just don’t have those specializations.

The reason grass isn’t tasty is because our taste has coevolved with our digestive system so things we can digest are tasty.

Bugs are tasty. We can get nutrients from bugs. Do you like breadcrumbs on your macaroni and cheese? Try ants instead. They give the same crunch and a similar texture, but a bit of a different flavor. I think it’s a nice contrast to the load of soft carbs and fat in macaroni and cheese.

That said, I’m still going to use breadcrumbs. I’m just not that adventurous. Bugs are treated as novelties, not food, in mainstream US culture. If they’re not part of your tradition, you end up making a big deal out of them.

The answer to what? The post you replied to didn't raise any questions like that.

Also, why not just say what your point is rather than being vague and cryptic. And your point about what percentage of insects are edible isn't very relevant because there are like 5k species of mammals and over 900k species of insects, and we don't need more than a handful of different species to actually eat.

And if your 1000 sheeps escape in the wild, you have a chance to get some back, and you will be able to protect you fields against them.

It's practical.

Plusyou don't have to care about venom when cookinh lamb.

Doubt that. Livestock eats up much more energy than its meat gives back (i.e. you would have to feed 7kg of soy protein to get 1kg of meat protein).

With insects such as Mealworms that's much easier. They basically eat anything and they turn it almost 1:1 into valuable protein. Also you can raise them pretty much everywhere, even in crammed indoor farms without it being cruel.

It's sounded more like you were imagining wild crickets being collected from grass fields or something... which is obviously not a good solution.

I looked up the feed conversion ratio for mealworms, I found values around 5:1. This is comparable to beef. Chickens are much better, somewhere around 1.5:1. Some other insects are better or worse in terms of FCR.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689427/

Raising it was super hard, it was in a plastic box with a few lights, fed our food waste and kept in a closet.

The trick is to get people to eat them, I tried and it was tasting like chips but I wasn't too hard to convince, my girlfriend on the other end couldnt even look at them...We managed to sneak some one day and she liked it but lost any trust in the food my roomate or myself cooked.

No comment on the taste, but you can do similar things for a variety of non-cockroach insects that may have different taste / texture / emotional connections.

If someone makes a tasty product, I'll give it a shot. Until then, I am waiting for the vat-grown beef.

http://theconversation.com/the-parasite-a-crickets-nightmare...

He replied "I eat bugs because they're the enemy!"

Not a vegetarian.

The idea that all bugs are gross is largely due to unfamiliarity. Most unfamiliar foods are considered gross the first time someone tries them (as anyone with kids can attest).

With that said, some of the large ants commonly eaten in southern Mexico are extremely bitter. Not my favorite for sure.

I'm really, really skeptical of this idea. One of the most interesting phobias is Trypophobia, fear of irregular patterns or of small holes/bumps. It's not really a fear, ... but more of an evolutionary response. Humans are good at recognizing patterns and irregular holes/bumps tend to mean disease or "something gross and dangerous probably laid eggs here". Those things tend to be insects, or bugs, or whatever.

As an aside, eating bugs has become all the rage with some of my more culturally eccentric friends. I don't really know why, since they can definitely afford actual food and seem to engage in this as some kind of signal of cultural experience or "competency".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia

I don’t see why Trypophobia would have anything to do with a fear of eating insects rather than, say, honey, pomegranates, sunflower seeds, or strawberries.

There are many things commonly eaten in e.g. the USA which are considered disgusting by some people in other countries. Fermented cabbage, non-dairy “cheese” product, twinkies, weird stuff made out of jello or marshmallows, deep-fried butter, wonder bread, raw kale, ...

There are also many foods eaten in other parts of the world which don’t look weird and have nothing to do with bugs but most e.g. Americans refuse to eat for no apparent reason.

If you take any bug and you eat it without cooking it, you risk diseases or venom, and you'll get a hard crunch shell.

So batch preparing those little things requires deep fry, which is a quite recent addition to our life.

Besides, it was hard to safely gather or raise enough of them to nourish a village. So we did eat some of them anecdoticly, but that's all.

And bugs are more resistant than chickens, and can hold many dangerous agents that are dangerous for us without being sick themself.

When I was very young growing up in Zambia, we used to eat those flying termites that appear everywhere after the rains, as well as a certain type of caterpillar.

And I remember them being delicious. Then we flew off to the US for about 6 years.

That was enough time for me to completely lose the taste for them on a very visceral level.

I guess if you take grass, deep fry it and put cummin on it, it tastes ok too.

You can eat a cucumber, a carrot, an apple or a steak raw. Even things you need to cook, such as wheet or potatoes, taste alrigh by just being boiled in water.

Depends on the bug. Different bugs have different flavors. It depends on their diet, too, like many animals. There are lots of ways to prepare them. Some of them are bland, others are very flavorful. I don’t see how this is any different from other foods. As a category, bugs are flavorful and interesting, but again, it depends on the bug and its diet.

> I guess if you take grass, deep fry it and put cummin on it, it tastes ok too.

No. You’re just tasting the fry oil and the spices.

> Even things you need to cook, such as wheet or potatoes, taste alrigh by just being boiled in water.

I think bugs taste better than potatoes or wheat boiled in water.

The human digestive system evolved in the Paleolithic to easily digest starchy roots like the potato. Besides meat, starchy roots were a favorite.

Wheat btw is a Neolithic phenomenon. And there is some proof that grains are toxic and that some of those toxins aren’t annihilated with cooking. Grains being toxic is an evolutionary trait meant to discourage mammals and insects from eating the seeds. Fruits are meant to be eaten, but not seeds.

Could insects be toxic too? The dose makes the poison, plus it takes decades for us to observe the effects.

Also deep fried food is unhealthy, no matter the food. Vegetable oils and high temperatures don’t mix well.

https://youtu.be/yxXoRtRr3WE?t=65

Also happens to be hilarious, but I don't disagree with the point he's making.

TL;DR Most people don't live like that because more desirable choices are available, and they're prepared to spend more to achieve that.

How many millions of years ago would we need to go back, to find the common ancestor?

Whales and deer are not alike in the same way.

Same question, I suppose. A longer span of time, or shorter?

The main reason we don't eat whale is that they're going extinct in the wild and are impossible to farm (neither which are true about insects). Before we realized that large scale whaling was a bad idea we ate a lot more whale.

In places where it is/was eaten does that happen sustainably? (Japan excluded...)

My understanding is that it used to be quite normal in Europe back when whales were plentiful and relatively easy to catch off the French and Spanish coasts. However by the end of 17th-century whale stocks there had completely collapsed due to overfishing, and it fell out of favour as food. In Europe it's really only Norway, Iceland and Greenland that continued eating whale into modern times and even there it's popularity has dropped dramatically since the 80s.

I think that's a pretty convincing argument that people considered whales to be food for some time.

It's the mental block that we've been conditioned with. That bugs are "disgusting" things.

The crickets tasted/felt like semi crunchy shells. Not very enjoyable to eat and the after effect was lumps of ground up shell in my teeth.. meh

The mealy worms were not quite as bad as the crickets but waaaay overpowered by the herbs and stuff mixed in with them.

I'm also very much anti deep fried anything so I'd really like to try them prepped another way.

My ancestors (up to a generation ago) lived in a place that was a frozen wasteland for half the year (so no bugs for all that time) and basically subsisted off grains, cabbage in various stages of decomposition and products of animals that could actually survive long enough to be useful.

As efficient as it seems today to be able to farm crickets, for farmers a few generations ago it would have been much easier to simply keep a few cows, pigs, and plant things than waste time trying to catch crickets and grasshoppers who can't even survive the winter. There's a reason the cultures who do eat bugs do so opportunistically and don't waste a ton of resources on it.

We don't eat cattle whole. When we make burgers, we leave out the skin and poop and horns and teeth. Bugs aren't any different.

Our sardines and anchovies have the head and guts removed, and probably the tail. We do sometimes eat skin and bones. The same goes for canned salmon and herring.

We also peel, decapitate, and gut our shrimp. This is probably a better comparison because the exoskeleton is similar.

You now buy an insect burger in Germnany https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/22/bug-appetite-g...

I look into this every couple years and I have yet to find anything good.

I don't know if it's a fact or a myth

Perhaps when buying ground coffee instead of beans. But then, all industrially processed food items contain parts that you wouldn't intentionally put in, simply because it's hard to prevent foreign objects completely at scale. Heck, I guess apple juice might have quite a few bugs in it, too.