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from the fraternities-everywhere-rejoice dept.
When potato chips and cheese doodles lose their luster, celery and carrots don't pack enough punch, and nostalgia for SERE School grips you:
Welcome to the exciting world of entomophagy! Below you will find a list of North American companies producing edible insects in various forms - from snack bites to protein powder to roasted whole. Start wherever you're comfortable.
Are you ready to eat some insects? The facts are out and it's hard to argue with them – insects are the perfect answer to people's desire for protein without the environmental costs that go along with animal agriculture. Raising insects for human consumption uses far less water, land, and food than livestock, and insects emit almost no greenhouse gases.
From the Entomo Farms website: "These insects contain 70% protein, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach, and almost 20 times the amount of B12 as beef."
Also, overcoming antipathy toward eating insects is a useful post-SHTF (S* Hits The Fan) skill...
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday September 12 2016, @12:29AM
It's mostly a matter of social norms. It's common to think that eating slugs and snails is weird, but the people who think that often have no problem eating things like scallops and oysters that are relatively closely related. Then there's shrimp which have a rather striking resemblance to many of the bugs and arachnids you see on dry land and won't eat.
Things like pork are unclean for a reason, it's not that they can't be prepared safely now, it's that prior to the invention of glazed pottery eating pork was much more likely to lead to serious infection as the juices would get into the pottery and contiminate it into the future.
Personally, I've had spider, scorpion, silk worm pupa and a few others and it's well worth opening your mind a bit and giving them a taste. I found scorpion and spider to be particularly tasty, but silk worm pupa to be rather disgusting.
That's before considering the environmental benefits to eating various creepy crawlies.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday September 12 2016, @01:36AM
Heh, social norms. Social norms deprive people of delicious garden burgers (avoiding the one that try to be meat because those suck), which aren't particularly healthy vs. meat but imo delicious. I was mostly thinking of the fact that bugs tend to carry disease as would the foods proscribed by the Old Testament, but I imagine that raising them in a clean environment and roasting them to 160°F would eliminate the problem.
Where did you eat scorpion? That does sound interesting.
I'm not really interested in the environmental benefits, but perhaps given California's water problems they might want to consider exporting bugs instead of almonds. Really, I'm just a Person Eating Tasty Animals™!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 12 2016, @11:35AM
I was mostly thinking of the fact that bugs tend to carry disease
I was envisioning the technology for bug-as-livestock not being terribly advanced in 2000 BC therefore the primary way to raise a crop would be to turn your farm into a pigsty and let nature take its course, which is fine for the dude trying to harvest bugs but horrific for the 8 plots of land surrounding who are trying to do the grain thing and are now being swarmed with escaping bugs, not to mention the likely stink. Without modern technology of mass produced plastics, I am guessing raising bugs for food would be fairly anti-social.
As an analogy imagine ancient Romans trying to raise penicillin molds without modern glassware and trying to do it all "bucket chemistry" with wine barrels. That would be a similar disaster.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday September 13 2016, @04:17AM
I was in China at the time and they still eat some primitive stuff as it was a necessity until recently due to regular famines.
As long as the insects are raised for consumption, they're usually safe. Just like how poultry or pork may or may not be safe depending upon how it was raised.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @03:12PM
I've always heard that pork has been considered unclean because pigs are carrion eaters and in particular because they have no aversion to eating humans. In the old days people pretty much let their pigs run free so they would run around eating all the dead rotting things and get filled with parasites, and they would also eat the bodies on battlefields.