My house is already filled with roaches so I think I’m all set. 😋
/s (I hate my life, somebody please commit arson on my house so I can claim insurance)
I ride my bicycle to work, so on average I eat at least one decent sized bug each week.
Land Crab? Sure, why not.
Happily
I’ve eaten insects plenty of times
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.
Shellfish are bugs of the ocean. Pass us another lobster please.
I’m thinking of house cockroaches.
I dunno. If there were no meat at all - over time I’d probably think about it. Turned into some insect flour, then compressed into something between meat and mushrooms, then roasted.
But right now no.
I went to a bug farm last week and ate a bug burger. I was not good.
No animals should suffer for my pleasure.
Absolutely. If this doesn’t look low key tasty to you then idk what to tell you.
Hakuna Matata!
You get me closer to God
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
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’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.
Pretty sure shellfish are pretty meaty in comparison. They are also often not very fussy over what you feed them.
I think larvae are usually pretty meaty
but yeah, there’s a reason why shrimp and lobster are so much more popular than insects.
I’d rather switch to the beans.
Insect farming is still worse in terms of Greenhouse gases than just eating the plants directly. While it is more efficient than traditional farming it also isn’t necessary for a healthy diet. I haven’t found a reliable study that examines how many tons of greenhouse gases could be saved by switching to an insect diet but I think it’s best to just directly switch to a plant based diet. Just as a remain reminder: 14 % of global greenhouse gases are produced by meat production according to a UN study.
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
If it’s tasty I would eat insects regardless. I really just care about the taste. I don’t give two rats’ asses where it came from.
(Ok, I’m lying a bit. I’m not gonna eat human meat, even if it tastes good. Unless I’m like, on the verge of death.)
