A friend of mine just returned from America with a small gift for me - it’s a small rectangular block of hard, transparent orange sugar candy, with embedded insects. A mealworm and a small cricket, to be specific.
I’ve seen stuff like this before - this one is supposed to resemble a piece of amber, which it does reasonably well, but it’s also intended to be eaten.
I’ve never deliberately eaten insects (for about the third or fourth time this week I thus demonstrate my username to be inappropriate). I am warming to the idea - I reckon I could eat fried mealworms or locusts - I’ve heard they’re pretty tasty.
But this candy thing fills me with horror - I think its because there would be no way to end up eating the whole insect in one bite - I’d either have to crunch the candy, ruining my teeth, or suck it until parts of the insect are exposed, thus consuming them gradually.
So… insects in candy, or insects au naturel? Which would you prefer to eat? Or least despise?
I would eat insects, candied or otherwise, if I was in a country where insect munching was commonplace and I didn’t want to offend the locals. I think that bugs sans candy would be the way to go; a quick couple o’ crunches and then down the hatch.
Luckily, where I’m from the only insects that are routinely served up are at the bottom of a bottle of Mescal.
I am guilty of buying suckers/lollipops like the above described candy when we were in Colorado this summer to bring back to some teenage friends, but I must admit I didn’t really expect them to eat it. I have eaten chocolate covered ants and grasshoppers, but aside from the crunch, what you mostly taste is the chocolate. The thought of bugs didn’t bother me much, as they were cooked, and they’re supposed to be nutritious or at least, low-fat, right?
T must admit that I have a considerable mental block against consuming insects, but it’s a practice that goes back before people were people, and continues to this day. I’ve mentioned many sites and sources about insect-eating on this Board.
That said, insects are probably closest to lobster and shrimp, among things I do eat (or did, until gout made me stop doing it). An insect embedded in hard candy thus strikes me as something like Lobster in Hard candy.
I think I’ll take mine with teriyaki sauce, or something like that, imnstead, thanks.
Bear Grylls eats bugs (and snakes and frogs and grubs). He says on his show they taste like gritty putrid bags of pus, but they give him remarkable energy in order to fell several trees to make a raft.
Myself, I would be darn curious about an insect that’s supposed to taste like lobster. The last lobster I had was 10 years ago!
I wonder why humans (me included) are so against eating incests. They’re probably for the most part just protein and we eat all other kinds of things.
Obviously you wouldn’t want to eat honey bees because if they turned out to be delicious then we wouldn’t have any honey, which no one really likes anyway, but well you wouldn’t want to put the honey beekeepers out of business, would you?
I recently ate a couple grasshoppers I caught & deep fried all on my own. Crunchy!
I’ve never seen insect (or incest - Markxxx) candy in the US. I’ve heard it’s a deep south thing, chocolate covered ants and such, but it really is not something you’d find commonly.
Anyhoo, I’ll eat an insect fried up and salted, but no, I wouldn’t go for an insect lollypop.
That’s all part of his hard man act - he also makes sure not to put them entirely into his mouth in one movement, then to eat them with his mouth open, so you can see all the legs and wings. I felt just as sick watching him eat a trout as I did when he ate a longhorn beetle.
Of course, I’m sure some insects do taste like gritty bags of pus. Toasted mealworms supposedly taste like popcorn or peanuts.
I’ve seen these in Selfridges (in London). Can’t say I tried one, and it’s not something I’d expect to catch on TBH. Clearly they considered them worth importing, though.
Are we, though? Mopane Caterpillars are a staple food in parts of Southern Africa, and the Yanomamo love palm grubs enough to deliberately encourage them by cutting down trees to facilitate their proliferation - “farming” them in a manner odf speaking.
Me, I’d say insects are better not embedded in candy. Mopane worms are usually salty. But, if you can get hold of honeypot ants, you get the both of best worlds.
For the record, I’d prefer insects without a taste-obscuring candy covering. What’s the point of eating them if you aren’t going to find out what they taste like?
(And really, isn’t eating a crab grosser than eating a grasshopper? After all, the grasshopper eats the same thing cows do, rather than rotting decaying fish).
I’ve had mealworm salsa, cricket cookies, baked salted crickets, and some sort of grub chutney. Part of the fun you experience at New Orleans’ Insectarium.
Can’t say they added much of a flavor. You just had to get over the thought of what you were eating.
Sucking on an insect filled piece of candy sounds much worse.
I agree. I think it may be grasshoppers on this year’s wild food menu, or a project to raise my own mealworms (I have no idea where to buy them live for human consumption - although I suppose the ones for sale in pet stores for feeding pet animals would be fine).
I’d eat a crispy, roasted locust or cricket. I bet it would taste real good with some kind of spicy southwest seasoning. As far as candy I think chocolate covered bugs would be pretty tasty, but insect hard candy doesn’t sound very good. For one thing, it’s meat inside candy (would bugs be considered meat?), and who wants to suck on that?
Meat in candy doesn’t bother me too much - if it was a chunk of bacon in there, I’d try it even if the combination of flavours tasted horrible.
It’s the fact that eating it is, in practice, going to entail biting off part of an insect and sucking out whatever is inside (which isn’t a particularly entertaining thought - I guess these are probably sterile inside the candy, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be fresh).
