Everyone already does!
When farmers harvest crops, they also harvest the insects that were sitting on the crops. They then get ground up into flour or whatever the crop is being turned into. Then we eat it. Half a pound of insects a year is one estimate of how much humans eat.
Honey is just bee shit anyway.
I don’t know about that. If I had to guess I’d figure I’m probably more closely related to a fish than a lobster is to an insect or arachnid. Any biology dopers want to comment on that?
And you can decorate entomopatty dishes with Morpho wings :smack:
I do think that in the future we will have to adopt the use of protein from insects to deal with the growing population and shortages.
I’m not sure that it matters. The reason people are comfortable eating sea-roaches but not land-roaches is mostly a marketing issue.
Have a look at the Gordon book I cite above – he does use wings and bodies as garnishes on his insect dishes, just so you won’t forget what you’re eating.
I’ve always said “if shrimp were land animals, we wouldn’t eat them.”
But really, it’s even more ecologically sound to go on a vegan diet and eschew animals completely – and it’s easy, and considerably less gross. So why start a movement to kill something else? Just go vegan and solve all the issues with the bonus appeal that you don’t have to start eating bugs.
Dave Barry said that when he first saw live shrimp, they looked like Insects From Mars, with Too Many Legs.
Dave’s on record for not liking Lobster, either, precisely because it looks like a giant insect.
That’s Okay. More for the rest of us. Or there would be, if my gout would let me eat lobster and shrimp.
As this thread deals with insects’ gastronomic merits, I’m moving it to Cafe Society.
Except, of course, for the little detail that the only natural source of B12 is animals and failure to consume sufficient amounts result in permanent neurological damage or even death.
Oh, and some people can’t safely consume things like legumes. In my case, some members of the legume family could kill me in minutes, and the last time I inadvertently ate some I spent 10 hours in Chicago’s Northwestern Hospital emergency room which they tried to pull me out of shock and restore my breathing to normal.
So while I’m happy a vegan diet works out fine for you (you ARE getting sufficient B12 supplements, right?) please to do not impose it on those of us for whom it could be fatal.
I hear lobster and shrimp are high in cholesterol, so I mainly avoid them for that reason. I wonder if the cholesterol content of insects has been studied.
I don’t eat insects primarily because they are not kosher. The oral tradition going along with the Torah passage has been lost. We don’t know just what “kind” it refers to.
Locusts are kosher. Four varieties are, anyway.
Heck, John the Baptist ate them. (Some people think that when the NT says “locust” it means the pods of the tree we call “locust”, but it doesn’t translate that way – John ate bugs.)
Insects are reportedly high in fat, so there’s an excuse not to eat them. If you need one.
Well … to be fair, Sailboat wasn’t talking about imposing a vegan diet on anyone, but rather suggesting that it provides many of the stated ecological advantages of a bug-replete diet. Just as some persons could not survive on a bug diet for medical reasons, some could not survive on a vegan diet, either would be a movement that excluded someone.
One advantage to a bug-containing diet is that bugs can convert some things that aren’t food for us (like cellulose) into a form we can eat (termites, as an example).
So can cows, via their intestinal flora.
True, but as pointed out, not as efficiently.
That cite agrees with me. Unless you follow the Yemeni tradition, it’s held that the four kinds are unknown.
There is much recent research that suggests that the effects of dietary cholesterol on blood cholesterol are, at the very least, overstated. One cite.