# Why not eat Insects?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [April 29, 2011, 9:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139 "2011-04-29T09:57:46Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Serameun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Serameun)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 9:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/1 "2011-04-29T09:57:46Z")
Or more Arthropods in general?
Ted Video: [Why not eat Insects?](http://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects.html)
\*\*General benefits: \*\*
> [@](#):
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> _Insects can be a good source of not only protein, but also vitamins, minerals, and fats. For example, crickets are high in calcium, and termites are rich in iron. One hundred grams of giant silkworm moth larvae provide 100 percent of the daily requirements for copper, zinc, iron, thiamin, and riboflavin. Ants can also contain protein depending on the size of the insect. Grubs of the sago palm weevil (a staple in Papua New Guinea) are laden with unsaturated fat. Many insects contain abundant stores of lysine, an amino acid deficient in the diets of many people who depend heavily on grain._
> [@](#):
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> Insects generally have a higher food conversion efficiency than more traditional meats, measured as efficiency of conversion of ingested food, or ECI. While many insects can have an energy input to protein output ratio of around 4:1, raised livestock has a ratio closer to 54:1. This is partially due to the fact that feed first needs to be grown for most traditional livestock. Additionally endothermic (warm-blooded) vertebrates need to use a significantly greater amount of energy just to stay warm whereas ectothermic (cold blooded) plants or insects do not. Only 10% of ingested food is converted to body substance by beef cattle, versus 19–31% by silkworms and 44% by German cockroaches. Studies concerning the house cricket (Acheta domesticus) provide further evidence for the efficiency of insects as a food source.
> [@](#):
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> Insects reproduce at a faster rate than beef animals. A female cricket can lay from 1,200 to 1,500 eggs in three to four weeks, while for beef the ratio is four breeding animals for each market animal produced. This gives house crickets a true food conversion efficiency almost 20 times higher than beef. For this reason and because of the essential amino acids content of insects, some people, on ecological grounds, propose the development of entomophagy to provide a major source of protein in human nutrition. Protein production for human consumption would be more effective and consume fewer resources than vertebrate protein. This makes insect meat more ecological than vertebrate meat.
## ~[Entomophagy - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy)
> **[Insects could be the key to meeting food needs of growing global population](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/01/insects-food-emissions)**
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> The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is taking seriously the farming of creepy-crawlies as nutritious food
**Insects could be the key to meeting food needs of growing global population**
> [@](#):
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> The advantages of this diet include insects’ high levels of protein, vitamin and mineral content. – Being cold-blooded, insects convert plant matter into protein extremely efficiently, Van Huis says. In addition, he argues, the health risks are lower.
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> Breeding commonly eaten insects such as locusts, crickets and meal worms, emits 10 times less methane than livestock. The insects also produce 300 times less nitrous oxide, also a warming gas, and much less ammonia, a pollutant produced by pig and poultry farming
Additional Links.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra4WmE-joMQ&playnext=1&list=PLECD09CCF1217EA07](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra4WmE-joMQ&playnext=1&list=PLECD09CCF1217EA07) _(Amazon children hunting spiders for dinner)_
[http://www.insectsarefood.com/index.php](http://www.insectsarefood.com/index.php) _(video at bottom)_
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0416\_040416\_eatingcicadas.html](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0416_040416_eatingcicadas.html) _(2004 Nat-Geo Article)_
> **[How Entomophagy Works](https://people.howstuffworks.com/entomophagy.htm)**
>
> Would you eat fried worms? While eating bugs is culturally taboo in the Western world, plenty of people around the globe enjoy a nutritious insect snack.
## [http://bugsandbeasts.com/whynoteatinsects/](http://bugsandbeasts.com/whynoteatinsects/) _(book advocating entomophagy in 1885)_
Is entomophagy the forgotten tradition and imperative future of sustenance intake?
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### Author:  [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/2 "2011-04-29T10:08:41Z")
Because the appearance is generally off-putting. Face it, the vast majority of insects are fucking UGLY.
And it’s different compared to other animal foods because rarely are we buying an entire intact animal. A steak doesn’t look like a cow, after all.
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### Author:  [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 10:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/3 "2011-04-29T10:29:16Z")
Because ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
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### Author:  [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 10:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/4 "2011-04-29T10:36:20Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 11:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/5 "2011-04-29T11:00:45Z")
Gross me out, gag me with a spoon
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### Author:  [@Serameun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Serameun)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 11:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/6 "2011-04-29T11:09:55Z")
> [@jz78817](#):
>
> And it’s different compared to other animal foods because rarely are we buying an entire intact animal. A steak doesn’t look like a cow, after all.
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. 😃
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 11:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/7 "2011-04-29T11:26:27Z")
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:
> **[The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook, Revised: 40 Ways to Cook Crickets, Grasshoppers, Ants,...](https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Bug-Cookbook-Revised-Grasshoppers/dp/1607744368)**
>
> Buy The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook, Revised: 40 Ways to Cook Crickets, Grasshoppers, Ants, Water Bugs, Spiders, Centipedes, and Their Kin on Amazon.com ✓ FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders
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?
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### Author:  [@Ostrya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ostrya)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 11:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/8 "2011-04-29T11:48:36Z")
It’s not just that they don’t taste good. But the texture is just not there either.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 11:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/9 "2011-04-29T11:59:16Z")
> [@](#):
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> It’s not just that they don’t taste good. But the texture is just not there either.
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.
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### Author:  [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/10 "2011-04-29T12:13:44Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Serameun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Serameun)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/11 "2011-04-29T12:16:21Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#):
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> Insects require less acreage to raise
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.
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> The intentional cultivation of arthropods for human food, referred to as minilivestock, is now emerging in animal husbandry as an ecologically sound concept. Minilivestocking suggests that a wide variety of small animals, including arthropods, be reared as nutritious food, the major advantage being that they do not have to be fed on grains thus saving many crop species for human consumption. It is also considered to be much more ecologically friendly than traditional livestocking. ~[Entomophagy - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy#Minilivestock)
## I’ll have to check out Gordon’s book and others…
> [@the lone cashew](#):
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> It’s not just that they don’t taste good. But the texture is just not there either.
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.
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### Author:  [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/12 "2011-04-29T12:25:42Z")
> [@Scumpup](#):
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> 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, .
a crab has multiple assholes?
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### Author:  [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 12:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/13 "2011-04-29T12:29:08Z")
> [@jz78817](#):
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> a crab has multiple assholes?
No, but where I get the sandwiches (Wholey’s in Pittsburgh) they put several smallish crabs on a hoagie bun. Hence, multiple assholes.
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### Author:  [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/14 "2011-04-29T13:05:30Z")
Mmm, rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub.
Er, grubs.
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### Author:  [@Acid\_Lamp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acid_Lamp)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/15 "2011-04-29T13:13:59Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 1:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/16 "2011-04-29T13:15:09Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/17 "2011-04-29T13:43:26Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/18 "2011-04-29T13:47:27Z")
A friend once offered me dry roasted crickets. She said that they tasted just like popcorn.
I figured why not just make popcorn?
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### Author:  [@Old\_Eel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Old_Eel)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/19 "2011-04-29T15:09:12Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Rachellelogram](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rachellelogram)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2011, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-not-eat-insects/580139/20 "2011-04-29T15:55:11Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#):
>
> Too little. You need a bunch to make a decent meal.
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.
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