Once upon a time I would have objected to sushi due to “ewwwwwwww…raw fish!” but now it’s everywhere and every so often I go face down and nom-nom-nom into the nigiri, maki, and shashimi. I suspect the first bite is the hardest.
The ew factor is a steep obstacle, but it could happen. Not expecting it, but with the right marketing 20 years from now it could become a trend or even a staple.
Insect meat patties that look very similar to cow patties is one method to get over the visual problem. Various pastes and even breads can be made too.
The bottom line is entomophagy is seemingly a cheaper, healthier, and more economically sound alternative to the current farming methods of ‘developed’ countries, and may very well offer a life-support for less fortunate countries. As Spock would say, it is most logical.
Hell, we could even get Biblical in here.
*"[Even] these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind." *-Leviticus 11:22
Plague of locusts? More like free food for months.
People can and do. One of my prized possessions is the Eat a Bug Cookbook by David George Gordon (who also does personal appearances). this book afforded me no end of joy on the long car ride home after I bought it (I wasn’t driving). It’s filled with wonderful recipes that would be delicious, if only they didn’t contain insects. The book finishes up with how to cook a South American Bird-Eating Spider. I kid you not:
Gordon is in earnest – he really does eat bugs, as do many other folks who have promoted the idea. Insects require less acreage to raise, and are pretty efficient at turning vegetable matter into protein-filled muscle (Insects aren’t all “goop” inside). So why not eat them? Why are people hostile?
My favorite anthropologist, Marvin Harris, offers an explanation in his book Good to Eat, which devotes an entire chapter to eating insects. Insects have a long history in human culture. Until I read his book, I didn’t know that the ancient Greeks ate insects with gusto. Aristotle liked locusts, calling them “four winged fowl”.
in essence, Harris’ cultural materialism approach makes use of the theory of optimum foraging – insects are a poor investment of time and effort if finding them, and preparing them (including cooking and removing the carapace) is a lot more effort than hunting, butchering, and cooking, say, a deer. On a pound-for-pound comparuison, one big deer gives a lot more meat that the same quantity of grasshoppers caught with the same effort.
This isn’t true if you have, for instance, a plague of locusts. If locusts have eaten all your grain, and they’re all over the landscape, gorged, it’s easy to throw a net over them, or stupefy them with smoke and cook them en masse, which is exactly what people did. If you’re raising silkworms for the silk, and have cocoons boiling in water to soften the glue holding the spun silk together, it’s tempting to eat the parboiled larvae. according to Harris, this is exactly what the silk-makers did, all the time. Our problem is that we’re too affluent and have access to easier protein sources. Grasshopper isn’t real competition for a steak, or chicken.
Insects got associated, in most western minds, with dirt and disease. Cockroaches do spread disease, and live in unhealthy circumstances. But even the crop-devouring locusts are pretty clean-living (as both Harris and Gordon point out), and offer relatively large leg and wing muscles to eat. Is it really all that different from eating lobster, crayfish, crab, and other arthropods?
It varies considerably from insect to insect. As the books above note, eating Giant Water Bug , cracked out of its shell, with bamboo slivers as picks, gives you a filet of lobster-like experience which is completely different from grabbing a handful of termite drones and chomping down, bonobo fashion.
I guess insects aren’t any uglier than shrimps, crabs, crayfish, or lobsters. Yet even though I have no trouble eating a soft shell crab sandwich, legs eggs eyes assholes and all, I believe I’d retch if I tried scorpion-on-a-stick Andrew Zimmern style. Processed in some way_Maryland Locust Cakes?_I guess I’d probably be able to consume them.
Minilivestock is an interesting prospect; raising grasshoppers, crickets, beetles, slugs, frogs, rodents and so on for personal consumption, livestock feed, compost, etc. I’ve read even those living in an apartment can get something going.
I’ll have to check out Gordon’s book and others…
Cow doesn’t taste too good unprepared either, I’m sure cooking method is as important with insects as any other meat flavor-wise. As for texture, incorporating the smaller less meaty arthropods into traditional meals such as salads could offer a solution, or they could act as condiments or appetizers I’m sure.
Lack of easy availability coupled with lack of opportunity to try different dishes. Buying live insects is not particularly cheap, and most of the widely available canned ones are rather distasteful to me. It’s not as if I can go to a bug buffet and try lots of different things.
My husband had a roasted grasshopper taco at Oyamel restaurant in DC (one of Jose Andres’ restaurants); the menu description said it’s an Oaxacan specialty. He really loved it.
Too little. You need a bunch to make a decent meal.
Ever year NJI gets invaded by little brown ants that smell like bananas when I crush them. I image about a million of them would make a good meringue pie.
It might be better to ask why some cultures eat insects and others don’t, because the answer to “why not eat insects?” is that in many countries, people do.
Yeah and I’d be tasked with the slaughter of my own food if I raised them myself. Takes too much time. If there was a restaurant that served bugmeat-burgers, I’d probably try them and like them well enough.
Also are you supposed to eat the whole thing? Wings and legbones and eyes, or whatever? Or are you supposed to separate the meat from the rest? Sounds like sitting and shelling peanuts as you eat them, except then you need to cook them. Way too big a pain in the ass.
