I haven’t given it much thought or researched it, but if there were money in it, I would imagine they could be farmed, rather than gathered. Sounds like crickets are pretty easy to raise and nutritious.
never mind
My Dad said that bear on a salmon diet tasted terrible, but berry eatin’ bear was tasty.
Most of the animals we eat are turning grass, grain, or garbage into meat. There’s no real point to farming an animal that just turns meat into a different kind of meat.
I’m sure it tasted beary berry good.
Happening. (As your link also says.)
Gift link:
If my cats’ experience is true of all mammals, I would suggest pulling the legs off your locusts so you don’t puke them up on the carpet later.
Not necessarily eaten. But if the humans were starving, what would be left over to feed the cats? They starved to death, too, just before the humans.
They were very likely eaten; by people who knew they couldn’t feed the cats, and the cats would die anyway. (And, of course, by people who were starving and who didn’t give a shit about cats.)
I thought the implication was that the humans were eating everything–dogs, cats, rats, mice, etc.
Pets can be a great comfort in times of trouble. Particularly famine.
I’ve heard people say that bears who are eating garbage taste terrible, but the ones raiding your apple orchard are delicious.
Naw, those grinding molars we have are good for that. I’ve eaten grasshoppers (cooked) and none of our party had any problems with the legs, at any point in the digestive process.
Cooking them crispy probably helps!
Indeed – we fried them in butter. It was kinda like cooking popcorn. When they stopped hopping, they were done.
Certainly true. But being unable to feed them must be terrible. There’s no way to explain to them that you haven’t any food, and aren’t just refusing to give them any.
I can imagine that some people who can’t stand watching this any longer might give a quick death, if they’re able to do that. It must be an awful position to be in. I don’t know whether they’d then be able to stomach the remains; but they might give the body to someone else rather than bury it, in those circumstances.
Yesterday I saw a video of 2 goats fighting to the death. I can never un see it. The cruelty humans are capable of is unfathomable. They felt the fighting would improve the flavor of the meat. One of the goats repeated tried to hide behind its owner, it did not want to fight. It was bloody and too dizzy to stand yet his owner repeatedly stood him up to take another blow. I will never be able to unsee this. .
When faced with their children starving to death before their eyes, most parents have historically been able to turn the family livestock and pets into nourishment. I saw our ‘pet’ chickens and rabbits get turned into meals as a kid, and considered it pretty normal.
We raised a calf with the kids when they were young. When it got too big to play on the lawn we fenced it in. Fattened him up and had him butchered. My kids have never forgiven me for trying to feed “Flip flop” to them.
I did have fat Betsy the Beagle who had real nice hams on her. I often said we’d eat her if times got tough. I’d never eat dog
Makes sense.
This article at History Today tells how it is thought that the Leningrad authorities did not kill or eat any of their zoo animals, and many of them survived the war! Unlike many other cities (London, Antwerp, Tokyo…)
Compare to this menu from Paris, 1870 which, besides the expected cats and rats includes elephant, camel, bear, donkey, antelope…
This article on a Russian state news site says that
and that in 1943, when the blockade was breached, one imported kitten was worth 10 times the price of a loaf of bread, which was itself in short supply.
This article repeats the story that most citizens had eaten their cats and that bringing in trainloads of cats was necessary to deal with roving gangs of rats that were “organized, intelligent, and brutal”.