[QUOTE=araminty]
You don’t want to eat hissing roaches. They store nitrogenous compounds in their tissue to deter predation - think urea/ammonia. Not tasty to humans.
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Great…now you tell me…
[QUOTE=Leaffan]
I would try it, maybe, on a dare or something. But why? I mean, did you run out of “normal” food or something?
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I dont know why Mangetout did it, but I actually think it’s pretty cool to push past an aversion that is based on cultural conditioning.
ETA…we cross posted. I do see why Mangetout did it now.
Yeah during Lent/Fridays, bugs are okay. If you’re Jewish and kosher, only locusts are allowed. I guess the ancient Jews realized, locusts are dicks, and we can make an exception for these bastards. I think if you’re less strict about your diet, grasshoppers might be okay? (Since the Torah/Talmud isn’t so specific).
I could’ve had cricket sushi, but I pussed out. No, not at the insect, but that they wanted to take pictures for their website mid-munch and I value my soul. I did eat a mealworm once. Re: the OP: yes, there was beer.
Put 100 vegetarians in a room, and you have 100 insect eaters. You’re just the only one who admits/knows it. Remember kids, the FDA considers at least 1 insect per 50 grams of cornmeal, or 25 insect parts per 25 grams to be two much. But 20 chunks and you’re good!
Anthropologist Marvin Harris, in his book Good to eat/the Sacred Cow and the Abominable pig, makes the point that the insects and arthropods that get eaten the most are those that are easily caught, contain a lot of edible muscle tissue, and (as a byline, really) don’t carry disease. You CAN eat ants, but, unless you’re out on the savannah and there’s nothing else, they’re not a good bargain – they’re mostly chitin and little meat, and they bite and sting. As pointed out above, cockroaches aren’t chemically welcoming. Also, despite David George Gordon’s giving a recipe for centipede, most of them aren’t really edible, either.
What is edible is, for instance, the grasshopper, which you’ve got. They have a prodigious muscle for jumping. Silkworm larvae were good eating, mainly because they have a lot of muscle tissue and they were a ready byproduct of silk manufacture (kind of like the British eating mutton as a byproduct of the wool industry). Insects that are mostly “goop” and “bug juice” don’t really provide a lot of nutrition. but Giant Water Bugs in Southeast Asia are both big and well0muscled. They eat them like tiny lobsters, pulling the meat out with tiny bamboo picks.
I thought the muskrat dispensation only applied to Catholics in southeastern Michigan. Also, capybara is okay for Lent (not sure if it’s only in some places or universally.)
Crickets are a delicacy in a part of Japan that I used to live in and when we compiled a recipe book from a bunch of English students, we got Inago Tsukudani recipes. The students all said to catch the crickets and leave them in a paper bag or cardboard box overnight to allow them to empty their guts first.
They don’t freeze them first, the advice was to tip them out of the bag and get the lid on quick!!!
tsukudani is usually done with soy sauce, mirin, sake and sugar and sometims a bit of hot chilli pepper, and is more often used with small inch or so long fish. You pan fry the things, then add the flavouring and continue stirring and mixing till the whole thing has gone sticky and coated the fish/crickets so there’s no liquid left but it hasn’t burned. They keep in the fridge several weeks after that.
Larvae and pupae are a good bet - as long as they’re not toxic or noxious (so in general, the ones that are protected by being hidden away underground, or deep inside timber, etc) - as they’ve spent a lifetime collecting food reserves for their adult form.
Anything else where the adult form is ephemeral (cicadas, mayflies) is probably also a good bet, if you catch them as soon as they emerge, and especially if (as with the aforementioned) their strategy is to overwhelm predators by sheer weight of numbers, rather than to be poisonous.
I don’t think you’ll get much meat off a mayfly – It’s a chitin sheath wrapped around a reproductive system and enough muscle to run the wings. But Cicadas might be a good bet. My cat used to catch them.
I’ve heard about the economic promise and culinary benefits of insect cuisine before, but it didn’t work out too well for Stephen Fry when he tried to sell the idea on his panel show, QI: - YouTube
Adult mayflies aren’t even capable of eating, as their guts don’t work and they don’t live long enough for it to matter. But they get 2x the genitals!
Cicadas are edible, and apparently pretty good. Some claim they taste like shrimp… You just might have to wait for many, many years to eat some species.
Their lack of mouthparts means that the emerging adults must contain sufficient stored energy for their nuptual flight, mating and the laying of many eggs (itself an energetic task - the female dips repeatedly onto the water surface and back up again, dropping the eggs one at a time) - having caught and examined mayflies, I’ve found them quite energetically squirmy in the abdomen - they’re not insubstantial organisms for their size.
I maintain that if a sufficiently easy method existed of catching them soon after their emergence as adults (especially if the females are still loaded with eggs), they would be a worthwhile food source - after all, trout grow fat on them.
When we had our last big wave of cicadas a few years ago, I caught one and dunked it into some boiling water to have a taste. They don’t remind me of shrimp at all, but they were not bad. It reminded me of almonds, grass, and canned asparagus.
Yesterday my sister made cupcakes. When I picked one of the cupcakes up out of the pan to eat it, there was a dead mayfly-type insect stuck to the wrapper (it must’ve gotten in there, alive or dead, before the baking process, and consequently got baked, along with the cupcakes.)
The dead insect reminded me of this thread, but I didn’t eat it. I just picked it off the wrapper (it hadn’t touched the actual cake) and ate the cupcake.
Come to think of it, the bug might’ve been more nutritious than the cake.
Actually, it’s mostly northeastern Thais who eat insects. The other Thais including my Bangkok-born and -bred wife disdain the practice, to say the least. That includes natives in Phuket, which is in the South. But you will find bug carts around the country, mostly to serve the Northeasterners, who are the country’s chronic itinerant laborers, everything from construction to prostitution.
I feel deceived. After all these years of assuming Mangetout ate everything, turns out that’s not the case. I think the mods should change his handle to Presqu’Mangetout.
Indigenous Australians in the southern Alps once used to gather to harvest bogong moths in the summer. They were roasted over fires, and the taste has been described as buttery and delicious. Hmm.
