Eating Bugs: Is it ethical?

[Yoyti]

We all know that some people eat bugs. I'm sure some of us on this forum do too. I'm also sure some of us don't. I've eaten crickets once, and they weren't half bad. Anyways, I was listening to a radio broadcast yesterday, and it talked about bug eating. Once you push past the "gross" factor, you'd realize that they're really just like any other food we eat. Now here's the catch.

Would you rather eat bugs which had been prepared for eating? Those that had been raised on a bug farm like cattle is raised for slaughter? Or would you rather eat those filthy bugs. The ones that get in your mouth without you realizing it?

And bugs to a lot in the environment. Is it ethical to purposely eat bugs from the wild? If you're a vegetarian, would you eat bugs? Or are they considered meat just as much as cattle? Would a vegan eat honey? An animal product of bees?

Personally, I would elect not to eat wild bugs unless I had to. They're filthy and probably not that good for you. I would, however, eat bugs raised as food. It's like onions. I would rather eat an onion from a farm than one from the wild.

[Abigail]

Well, as long as they're clean I would eat one. They use bugs in red food dyes anyway. XD

[Breakingchains]

Well, last I heard, bugs themselves lack the ability to feel pain, so you aren't really causing them undue suffering. And if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say they're probably incapable of genuine emotion. They're basically just kinda little crunchy automatons. I've always thought that killing a bug was no more cruel than, say, breaking a robot - except that the robot happens to breed in mass numbers, spread disease, and cause general misery to most.

I'm not sure if it's common to all vegans or not, but I know that at least some of them will not eat honey. I admit I find this a little odd, since the bees aren't being eaten themselves or being mistreated the way certain livestock are, etc. - they're basically just doing what bees do. And if you've seen a beekeeping operation, you know they seem pretty happy, assuming normal herp-a-derp bee behavior is some indication of happiness. So I don't really understand the moral issue with that.

While I don't think I'd eat a bug either farmed or wild (unless I was in danger of starvation) I don't see much ethical issue with it.

[Komori]

This topic title made me lol. I'm pretty sure if you're okay eating meats that come from warm-blooded, furred animals, I don't really think you're going to be stuck in any sort of ethical quandary when it comes to killing and eating an insect. XD

And, talking from a business standpoint, if anyone were to mass market bugs for consumption, they would almost certainly be farmed. They already farm maggots for fishbait and crickets for pet food. It's just easier to grow bugs than to catch them (and sort them).

Aug 17, 2011 10:58:26 GMT -5 Breakingchains said:

I'm not sure if it's common to all vegans or not, but I know that at least some of them will not eat honey. I admit I find this a little odd, since the bees aren't being eaten themselves or being mistreated the way certain livestock are, etc. - they're basically just doing what bees do.

Here you go:
planetgreen.discovery.com/food-health/reason-vegans-honey.html

But I agree it's somewhat odd to me too. :3

[Dju]

It's survival, sounds okay to me...

[Killix]

We consume more insects and insect parts daily than you might think. ._.

[Breakingchains]

^ Yes. Yes we do. Let's all go back to pretending like we don't. =D

Aug 17, 2011 11:02:42 GMT -5 Komori said:

Here you go:
planetgreen.discovery.com/food-health/reason-vegans-honey.html

But I agree it's somewhat odd to me too. :3

Ah, that did explain a lot about the viewpoint. Thanks, Komo.

[Jo]

They actually have this company in London, you see it in the fancy department stores sometimes, that does like... Bug and worms in lollipops and candy XD it seems pretty gross to me, but apparently they don't really taste of anything, they're just crunchy. Maybe I'd try it once to say I'd done it, but overall I prefer my sweets insect-free XD they also did scorpions in toffee, which I think I'd actually be scared to eat .__.

[M is for Morphine]

How funny! I just attended a demonstration on this very topic two days ago. An entomologist/bug chef named Zack Lemann cooked a number of bug meals (cajun crickets, battered dragonflies, wax worms with red beans) and answered a lot of questions.

On of the things he talked about was wild caught vs. farm raised. He usually has to deal with bulk quantities (15,000 crickets for a 2 day event, I think he said) so catching his own is rarely a good use of his time. Though he does catch his own dragonflies.

He had a lot of advice for wild catching: if the bug is alive, you probably don't have to worry about pesticides. but you do have to worry if they ate something that will make them unpalatable. The solution is to keep them for a few days and feed them fruit, cereal, or some other tasty thing (specifics depending on the bug and it's diet). They metabolize food pretty quickly and they'll have passed anything unpleasant by the time you get around to eating them.

His friend, who wrote the eat-a-bug cookbook, had a cute mnemonic to figure if a bug was ok to eat or not: "Green or brown, toss it down. Red or yellow, avoid that fellow". ie, don't eat bugs with warning colors. They're warning you for a reason. Brown and green bugs are trying to hide because they know they're tasty. XD

As for eating them as a concept, I don't think it's any more or less ethical than eating any other living creature. The bugs I've had have ranged from unremarkable to genuinely tasty. I haven't had any that were straight up gross.

[Deleted]

I haven't had any bugs, and since I'm a vegetarian I don't plan to. However, it's pretty much the same thing to me as eating chicken. I don't do it due to personal beliefs, but people are different, so I let them eat chicken. If YOU think it's okay to eat bugs, then it's just fine.

[Nimras]

Bugs are often much healthier for you than "regular" meat. I'd like to see them become a more common food source here in the US (about 80% of the world eats bugs as a staple food source).

*grin* Yes, I realize that it sounds like an odd thing for a vegetarian to say.

[Gelquie]

I've eaten bugs before. I've had crickets in cookies and I've had the candy kind. (It also completely grossed out my little sister. xD But that's a different thing.) There are also other countries that can live on bugs and make some delicacies out of them. I've never had them, but if I was in that country and I was offered some, I'd probably at least give it a try.

They're just another food source. I don't think it's unethical to eat them. We all depend on the destruction of some other thing for survival when it comes to food (be it for meat or even just plants). Insects are not exceptions to this rule. When it comes to food sources, I put them in the same category as animals. And probably more huntable as bugs are so very abundant. So it'd be more-or-less just as ethical as killing animals for meat.

Mind, I'm also not a vegetarian. xD Although I tend to not eat something if I know it's from something poisonous or something, just to be safe. If bugs were to become a more common delicacy, I'd probably do the research first to find out how edible a bug is. Especially if I were about to go out in the wild; if I'm there long enough and am running short on supplies, I might get desperate enough to settle for bugs. But I'd like to know what they are first. (So no centipedes for me, for instance. xD If they smell like almonds, let it go.)

But yeah, in short, I put it along the same lines as hunting animals.

[Deleted]

Aug 17, 2011 16:28:19 GMT -5 Gelquie said:

We all depend on the destruction of some other thing for survival when it comes to food (be it for meat or even just plants).

Interesting to note - I've heard of people who are fruitarians, i.e. only eat things that don't involve killing anything else. So they only eat fruits and spore vegetables. They don't eat potatoes or carrots because when you pull a root vegetable up it dies. So I'm not sure that statement is quite correct, since, though I don't do it myself, I don't see any harm in eating only plant parts that were pulled off a plant without causing the plant's death (fruits, spore vegetables, edible flowers, rosehips, edible leaves etc.).

[Pacmanite]

I watched a program about how, in certain parts of South-East Asia, bug-eating and the bug food market is becoming increasingly popular as a roadside snack. But it makes me worried seeing how the bugs are caught - there's this cricket species which lives in burrows underground, and you catch it by digging through the hard soil with a farming hoe. Most of the time the bug dies because it gets chopped in half or squished or something, so the guy who found it can't sell it on the market because the market only takes live bugs. He has to kill a lot of bugs before he can get some he can actually sell.

Granted, all the bugs he killed will be cooked up for his family to eat on the same day, so the food is not wasted, but it begs the question of whether we need so much of these bugs that the guy who also owns a farm and can feed his family through farming should go out of his way to kill tons of wild bugs which would also probably benefit the soil culture of his farm. The wild populations of these crickets have gone down quite significantly as a result of market demand and good prices. And I think it's good that the farmers have another way of getting more cash flow for their household. But... the only problem I have with this practice is whether, in the long run, it will be detrimental to the soils of the farms. Whether it will degrade the environment and harm the farm's ability to sustainably produce food.

[Deleted]

Aug 17, 2011 11:25:54 GMT -5 Dju said:

It's survival, sounds okay to me...

If we were still cavemen I might agree with you, but the human palette has expanded to the point where we eat what we want to eat because we want to eat it. Our diet is no longer a matter of life or death, but cost and convenience. I'm not at all against eating bugs, nor am I a vegetarian, but I felt compelled to point out that we're not eating bugs and meat because we would starve if we didn't, we're eating it because it's just one of the many options we have available to us, and we cannot therefore justify our choice of diet by this logic.

Personally, I still find it a little gross. I tried snails once and found them to be quite tasteless and chewy, but not overly unpleasant. I just couldn't get over the fact that I was eating a snail. I'd like to be able to try new foods, and hopefully I will when I have the money to do so. ^^