I always find this question bewildering. There are so many vegan protein sources, some of which are really close to meat in taste/texture or which taste great on their own.
With insects, we’d need to invest lots of work to come up with recipes, to build farms and we’d ultimately need to grow plants to feed them, too, meaning they would generally be more expensive.Is it just the assumption that because it’s a dead animal, that this makes it ‘better’ somehow? Otherwise, I don’t understand why we’re even considering insects.
I’m not able to go vegan. Crickets are a pretty low impact animal protein product, and I don’t find it any harder to work cricket flour into recipes than I did trying to make things vegan. I actually like cricket stew, crackers, and cookies.
Could be good for pets, too, if obligate carnivores/omnivores can get the same nutrition from more environmentally friendly sources.
For background, I was vegetarian for about a year before both a doctor and a nutritionist confirmed it was why I felt sick, tired, and in a fog most of the time.
So sorry to hear you had both a shit doctor and a shit nutritionist 😔
Interesting perspective. Care to elaborate?
Mostly its a concern about the DIAAS of the protein source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino_Acid_Score There is a reference of published DIAAS for different sources here https://www.diaas-calculator.com/
Basically a function of how much usable protein a human gets from different sources. i.e. Liberg’s Barrel of Amino Acids https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Liebig-barrel-illustrates-the-limitation-of-protein-synthesis-due-to-the-lack-of-an_fig20_333729916
PBF Protein sources come attached to plant byproducts that some people can’t tolerate very well, lectins, oxalates, etc https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/natural-toxins-in-food
In addition much of the human Plant based food supply has problems with agricultural contaminants being ingested by humans, such as glyphosates which some people are intolerant of.
The thing with DIAAS is that it’s hardly relevant and I feel like it’s played up by misinformation from the meat industry.
Let’s say you only eat red lentils for your proteins, which according to that DIAAS calculator has only 59% of the SAA compared to the amino acid distribution that your body needs. Then the solution is simply to eat twice as many red lentils to get to 118% SAA. Your body needs a certain amount of each amino acid, but if you give it more, it can work with that perfectly fine.
DIAAS is only relevant, if you eat close to the minimum amount of protein that your body needs in general, which is hard to do. For example, in the US, the Recommended Dietary Allowance is at 0.8 grams protein per kilogram of body weight. Which is a one-size-fits-all number they chose to cover the necessary intake even for athletic and pregnant folks. The majority of people need less protein than that. And yet, according to this site the average American eats 1.6 times as much.
What’s the ruling on cheese? If I’m not allowed cheese I’m starting a revolution.
Jokes aside if I tried to I don’t expect it would take much to overcome the mental barrier against eating them, provided they taste good and are not weird to chew.
I expect that synthetic cheese based on actual casein (but made with bacteria etc. instead of mammals) will be fully market-ready and relatively affordable long before we get relatively affordable synthetic meat (the kind that’s the based on cow/pig/etc. cells). It’s mostly a homogenous mass, after all, which is a much smaller issue than getting the texture of steak right. IDK how affordable ‘relatively affordable’ is going to be, though.
Gonna inform the cadre that we must steal all the cheese
Of course. I’ve been meaning to try them, and I have friends who eat earthworms and more
I hate to tell you this, but your friends are birds.
Eh, I ate beef fed leeches before and they are just another annelid so I can’t imagine it being much different other than what they were fed before preparation.
I have. They didn’t taste like much.
I would eat insects right now if they were cooked by a chef who knew what they were doing.
I once went to a museum and they had a chef preparing some insects. I asked him for how long he’d been cooking insects, and he kind of glanced sideways and said he had no fucking clue of what he was doing. He just got the gig to cook the insects for museum visitors and just rolled with it. They were good though, there were crickets, ants and mealworms.
Protein is protein right? I’m sure any half decent chef could figure out how to make insects tasty with a little trial and error.
Probably, but the funny thing was that this was presented as something established when in reality he was just winging it.
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I would eat insects right now if they were cooked by an amateur. But that’s just me personally and I’m built different.
Depends on if it came with a side of meats?
I would eat well cooked insects even if mammal meat is not banned. Even more so if the environmental benefit is demonstrated.
Bro, I had BBQ flavored cricket snacks one time just for the novelty. They were actually really good, of not loaded up on salt. But it was this random candy store in a dying mall and haven’t found them since. Also got a scorpion lollipop one time, also really good, but was more sugar than scorpion.
I would absolutely eat the fuck out some cricket balls with parsley, onion, and garlic!
No, I’d hunt deer on the reservation. Fuck you very much for thinking tribal living is unsustainable.
How do you even answer this? Yes, in the absolutely insane authoritarian hell scape where the consumption of all meat has been made illegal and for real for real illegal, not just like turn a blind eye to it, yes, sure, I’d try bugs. But that’s such a fucking insane timeline I don’t think it’s worth discussing.
“If you had to live underwater with scuba gear instead of in a home, would you try swimming laps for exercise?”
“If an EMP wiped out all light sources, would you consider taking up astronomy?”
I love shrimp and lobster, man.
^ If the price of lobster espically got cheaper , I’d be a happy camper.
The only reason it’s expensive now is because the rich people of long ago thought it was rather trendy to eat the bugs that the poor people of New England were forced to eat.
I’ve known this for a long time and it still pisses me off. Rich people ruin everything!
Damn, I didn’t even consider that these might be considered ‘bugs’! I’m on board now.
They’re not “considered” bugs. The are bugs. They’re just aquatic bugs.
Our bodies may think they’re similar enough. People with a seafood allergy are likely to have a reaction to bugs as well.
They are crustaceans I think. They form the anthropod group with insects but aren’t insects themselves. Doesn’t count.
*arthropod
‘anthropod’ sounds like a furry’s mp3-player.
I thought that was VLC
Well the problem is that “bug” is not a scientific term right? Or even if it is, colloquially I think it could easily refer to either insects specifically or arthropods more generally.
Certainly a lot of people refer to spiders as bugs despite them not being insects.
“Bug” is a scientific word that refers to members of the sub-order Heteroptera. See assassin bugs, leaf-footed bugs, etc.
But yeah language is fluid and most people call any old arthropod a bug.
I would side with you if it wasn’t for the parent thread using the word “insect”. It is definitely some form of nit picking though on my part.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bug aquatic crustaceans are only bugs if you use a very broad and uncommon definition of ‘bug’.
shrimps is bugs
Good argument.
And I live by the sea, they are free if I catch them myself
If you fry them with enough butter and garlic, even bugs taste like food.
I would burn the fucking world down
I’d just go and eat people. If it’s illegal anyway, you might as well.
Hell friggen no. I’m also not going to let a government dictate what I eat. Screw the law
Does that include food safety regulations?
Regulations that ensure my food is safe to eat and a government preventing me from eating a type of food even if it is safe to eat are two entirely different things and I’m pretty sure you knew that before trying to make a witty false equivalence
Would you eat endangered species if available?
That’s a government regulation that controls what you can consume that has nothing to do with food safety.
Person 1: “Honey, we can’t eat chicken, beef or pork, we’ve only got crickets since the government banned all meat except for crickets”
Person 2: “Damnit, I wish the government stopped dictating what we eat even if the food we want to eat is safe for us to eat”
Person 3: “SO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME YOU’D EAT AN ENDANGERED SPECIES?”
OK now you’re just arguing in bad faith. You said the other guys example wasn’t equitable because it’s conflating banning a material with controlling quality. So I asked you the same concept but with a proper example and instead of responding with a coherent argument, you went with ridicule. Go play in traffic.
You were deliberately missing the point.
Go play in traffic.
Reported. Have a nice day
The point being? That it’s fine to set government regulation to protect species from being wiped out and that somehow doesn’t transfer to it being fine to regulate beef or other meats as we see them negatively affecting a vast swath of ecosystems including many of those endangered species? The harm has to be to the species being regulated and not from the species?
Are endangered species not also safe to eat generally?
That’s not dictating what he chooses to eat you nimrod, that’s dictating what the manufacturers are allowed to put into food
If you can’t see the difference in that you have no business trying these infantile zingers in a public forum
More shrimp and lobster for me.
Shrimp and lobsters are crustaceans, not insects. It’s like saying a whale is a fish
Shrimp and lobsters are decapods which belong in the arthropod group right alongside all of our insects. They are water insects by definition.
It’s not at all like saying a whale is a fish because while they are both vertebrates, they split much sooner than arthropods do, and they do not share as many similar characteristics.
It would be like saying a shark is a fish (which it is).
Also insects are hexapods which belong to the class insecta and appeared roughly 411 million years ago. Shrimp and lobsters are decapods which predate insects. I don’t know who started this meme about shrimp and lobsters being insects but it is factually incorrect. They’re not the same thing just because they belong in the same massive phylum
They’re all crustaceans.
That’s like saying whales are giraffes because they’re in the order artiodactyla
Well whales and giraffes are both mammals, and since they’re classed together due to a common ancestor it’s fair to say they’re related and you could group them together.
Just like how decapods and insects are classed with hexapods under crustacea, effectively making them related due to a common ancestor.
So you could say giraffes (or artiodactylans) are proto whales (or cetaceans) much like you could say crustaceans are proto insects. Or insects of the sea.
Insects are normal food in my neck of the woods. You can buy them off the street deep fried, with dipping sauce.
Good source of protein
from three days ago when out on a walk
hopefully we start breeding meatier bugs because the insects I’ve eaten have been like 90% shell
I’ve had crickets. As a snack, they’re not bad honestly with the crunch. Mine had a BBQ flavor added
I’ve tried them without flavoring just fried and they resemble a lot that crispy layer of connective tissue that you get on ribs. So BBQ is probably a great pairing with that.
At that point just eat popcorn, you’re mostly eating it as a delivery device for the added sauces/spices.
Could say that about a lot of things. Rice is a delivery device for soy sauce
I think larvae are usually pretty meaty
but yeah, there’s a reason why shrimp and lobster are so much more popular than insects.
Pretty sure shellfish are pretty meaty in comparison. They are also often not very fussy over what you feed them.
