So…what do they taste like?
I wish the people of Israel well. Thankfully they’re not a totally agrarian culture.
However, in case you hadn’t heard, the whole of sahelian Africa (as well as north Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean) is suffering from severe plagues of locusts, that is devastating entire crops, and could lead to widespread famine. I heard on the radio the other day that a typical swarm in Mauritania is 1 kilometre wide, and ten kilometres long. It contains 100 billion locusts. And there are thousands of swarms. Each locust consumes its own weight every day, and they can strip a field in ten minutes, that would take humans three months to consume. It’s a very very serious problem. UN planes fly in to help destroy locusts.
Technically, Locusts are kosher, but Cecil claims that the specie of locust cannot be identified with certainty. Therefore, I can’t see any Orthodox Jews risking breaking kashrut just to try a locust chip.
Well, come on. Food supplies were less certain in ancient times. I mean, you just KNOW that if there were seasonal swarms of 100 billion pigs, they’d be kosher, too.
Didn’t John the Baptist surrive in the desert on locust and honey for a time. I assume that he was Jewish before Christ came along wasn’t he?
If a swarm of big bugs eats all your crops, the logical thing to do is to eat the eaters. I’m not surprised that locusts are kosher. Lots of folks ate them, including the ancient Greeks. (In the recent movie Hidalgo, Viggo Mortenson’s character eats locusts, too, using the same logic.)
As for pig, well, I’ve suggested the writings of cultural anthropologist Martin Harris before. Check them out – his Cultural Materialism theory offers an explanation for just why locusts are OK and pigs (throughout the Middle East) aren’t.
I can just about be 99.9% sure that they don’t taste like chicken. Sorry, just had to say it. :rolleyes:
They were described on the documentary as being like shrimp.
A lot like shrimp, although without the salty “seafood” taste: they fry up good and crispy, and make excellent beer snacks. Hell, they’re just shrimps with wings.
Well, gimme some locusts and coctail sauce, then! Y’know, lets make some lemonade out of these lemons. Sure, it sucks that your crops just got eaten, but if you can net a ton of locusts, you’ve got a feast.
Yeah, but what Viggo actually ate was marzipan shaped like a locust which I’m sure was much tastier.
I’m sorry but I can believe that they taste like shrimp. Shrimp seem to be mostly flesh with a tiny brain and nerve and not much in the way of gooshey insides. Stepping on and squishing a shrimp is nothing like stepping on a bug and having it go splat. So it seems to me that eating a locust raw would cause all sorts of noxious fluids to squirt.
::puking smiley::
So, a plague of locusts, huh? Do you think someone is trying to tell them something?
slipShod:
Ashkenazic (European-descnded) Jews have long since forgotten the tradition which identifies the specific species of locust which are Kosher, but a number of Sephardic (Middle-Eastern descended) Jews maintain that they still have that traditional knowledge, so they’re probably the ones who feel confident about eating the locust-kebabs.