44 points

If land bugs were as meaty and tasty I’d be eating them too.

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26 points

Some are and I do.

Hoppers roasted, grilled, and fried are pretty damn good.

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15 points

Dried grasshopper does really taste like prawn crackers.

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3 points

Not sure whether this is about seafood or racism against District 9 residents.

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7 points

Well… They are

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5 points

Feed meal worms oranges and then cook them up. Tasty!

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0 points

No.

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-2 points

Nah, they have parasites

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2 points

Perhaps, but you are aware that shrimp, lobster, crab and fish in general all have parasites too right? People get sick from seafood pretty often

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1 point

Those are sea parasites which cannot live in a human body for long. Land parasites are a different story.

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1 point

I assume you mean they can have parasites, not they do. In which case, so can most things. People are fine with eating cows even though they can have parasites. I have never actually heard of any significant issue with eating insects. I’ve only heard of them being great protein options that require much fewer resources to produce.

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41 points

A family member has bit, hook, line and sinker. Om the great reset conspiracy theory. He says Bill Gates wants to force us to eat bugs. I respond “You love shrimp?”. He states its different I don’t see the difference…

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21 points

Bill Gates came to my house last night with a gun and a plate of cockroaches.

He told me if I didn’t eat it he would shoot my family and shoot me last.

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7 points

Listen, he should’ve at least offered to kill you first. That’s the problem with billionaires these days; no honor.

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4 points

Crustaceans aren’t insects, for starters

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-10 points

The difference is that shrimp are delicious? Last time you got a bug in your mouth what was your instinctive response?

The great reset is bogus but there’s definitely a “conspiracy” to get us to eat bugs… A boring, capitalist conspiracy. Just the next step in the race to the bottom, another cheap and low quality food that the unwashed masses can afford to keep them alive and trudging off to work.

I will eat bugs when I see the billionaires have them on their plates.

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21 points

Fuck billionaires, if eating bugs is delicious and cuts emissions from factory farming, I’m in. The environment doesn’t fit into some dick measuring contest with the rich and they don’t decide my moral position.

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-13 points

That’s the problem, it isn’t delicious. That’s why they keep coming up with schemes to use them as a protein additive, like “cricket flour”.

I raise lamb free range on pasture, no inputs other than grass, and that’s what I’ll be eating for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you, that’s delicious.

I would encourage anyone else concerned about factory farming to find a small producer, most of us will gladly even give you a tour and let you see our herds, we love to show off healthy animals on green grass. And we’re often cheaper than the supermarket these days, no greedy middlemen to mark it up.

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5 points
*

I’ve never had a raw shrimp randomly fly into my mouth out of nowhere. I’m certain my response would be disgust. I don’t like it when bugs do that, but I can’t say it’s ever been an issue because of the flavor. I can’t say what the flavor even is.

There’s no “conspiracy” to eat bugs, but there is a movement, which I agree with, promoting insects as a low resource cost protein alternative to meat. If you are flour made from grasshoppers you likely wouldn’t even know unless told. I’m certain you don’t actually know what they taste like, so how can you say they taste bad?

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1 point
*

Valid point. When I grew up fishing for shrimp as a kid I was quite terrified of them until I was taught how to eat them.

I can assume they taste bad, because otherwise we would all be eating them already. Humans eat just about everything on the planet if it’s tasty, even if it’s really weird. Example: shrimp, lol.

Personally I don’t see the need for it when we have plenty of plant sources of protein like pulses, and we can raise ruminants on otherwise useless land (like my hilly, rocky farm).

It seems to me just an excuse to continue overpopulating the planet. Sure, we could develop new protein sources to feed 10 billion - but if we had kept our population to the 4 billion it was in the 1970s we could all be eating thick beef steaks and salmon without worrying about straining the carrying capacity of the planet.

Maybe we should focus on getting our population down to a sustainable level before we worry about new and exotic foods.

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2 points
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39 points

Fun lobster fact: They used to feed lobster to prisoners in Massachusetts because they were considered unclean animals since they crawled along the ocean floor and nobody else would eat them.

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63 points

Fun fact about that fun fact. They ground them up shell and all before serving them to the prisoners so yeah it was still garbage food.

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14 points

crunch

Mmmm, gourmet

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2 points

This is some serious gourmet shit

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31 points

Recently, we were in the canteen at work and a colleague, who moved here a few years ago, told that she never had rhubarb before.

Then she asked me, probably just for vocab reasons: Rhubarb is a vegetable?

Uhh…

I had never thought about it. I mean, what the heck is this:

Could be a salad, a leafy green. It’s kind of similar to celery, but is celery even a vegetable? Well, and of course, rhubarb is often used like a fruit, so uh…

Well, I looked it up, and scientifically, it does count as a vegetable, but colloquially, it’s often considered a fruit.

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30 points

Like today’s computer scientists, early biologists sucked at inventing new words, and simply reused existing ones. “Berry” in common language is a small, usually sweet and edible, fruit. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries are all berries.

Then biologists came along and decided, actually, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are out, but watermelon and bananas are in, because the size of the fruit doesn’t matter, only the placement of the seeds decides whether something is a proper, scientific berry.

A similar thing has happened with “fruit” and “vegetable”, where scientific fruits include cucumbers, eggplants, and pumpkins. Luckily, all three of these are also berries.

I say we ignore them, and use words to mean sensible things.

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19 points

Or we move on with our lives and accept that fruit don’t have to be sweet and vegetables don’t have to be savory. Life is beautiful and nature constantly challenges expectations.

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8 points

🅱️erries

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4 points
*

If a new berry was invented, computer scientists will probably call them “βerries”, next one “ϐerries” (cursive beta)

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5 points

i prefer to classify all of what you said as simply “food”

simple yet accurate. I’m a scientist now.

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2 points

simple yet accurate

this describes engineers more in my experience. science embraces the chaos of discovery. engineers just want to make fruit salad.

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Rhubarb is pretty weird, especially for people who grew up where it’s not a thing.

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2 points

I’ve never had rhubarb. I’ve heard it’s sweet (people make pies out of it), but it looks like celery, which is one of my most hated foods. What does it actually taste like? Is it palatable raw?

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3 points

The best jam I ever had was raspberry rhubarb

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2 points

Rhubarb is actually really sour. As in, if you eat too much of it, your teeth will start feeling as if they’re covered in fur, because it genuinely fucks with your enamel. (Rhubarb contains oxalic acid, which is also used in some tooth whitening products).

But it’s basically never eaten without adding a boatload of sugar to it. So, you can kind of imagine it like those sour sweets, but stronger, and of course, it’s a plant, so the taste is somewhat richer (although still not very rich for a plant).

As for eating it raw, well, then you can’t really add sugar to it, so basically not palatable. I mean, you can do it, but unless you really like sour, it’s just not good.

And it’s only really similar to celery in terms of its texture and crunch. The taste is completely different.

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11 points

Bugs is good

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10 points

Not all, shrimp is kinda gross TBH. But I’m excited to try new cicada recipes this summer.

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