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Post by Fraze on Aug 18, 2011 3:52:54 GMT -5
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.  This. From what I understand, bugs are basically pure protein and fat. They're far more nutritionally dense than meat, and raising bugs requires far fewer resources than raising livestock. We could go a long way toward improving the environment if first world countries ate more bugs and less meat. Unfortunately, I doubt that'd fly, pun not intended. As for myself, hey, I'm an adventurous eater. I'd be happy to try insects prepared as food, though I'd feel safer eating farm-raised ones than wild ones. 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. ^^ I tried snails once. They were cooked in butter and garlic, and they tasted like...butter and garlic. Though they weren't very chewy, as I recall. |
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Post by Gelquie on Aug 18, 2011 5:08:01 GMT -5
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.). Ah, true, I forgot about fruit. Fun thing about fruit is that it's what it is to encourage animals to eat it. That way the seeds are released from their shell. Some are spat out, some are returned to the ground through some other various means. And then the plant propagate that way. (Biology can be very very clever.) Though it still involves removal of part of the plant, so that could still count for something. ...But then again, I could argue to obscene lengths about destruction of any part of anything edible until a corrected diet would be completely unreasonable. I may do that for fun somewhere else, but not here. xD Besides, I'm getting off-topic. I'm just saying that it can be really hard to define ethics for this sort of thing. |
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Post by Pacmanite on Aug 18, 2011 7:20:45 GMT -5
Ehh... I thought more about this. If the bugs could be farmed responsibly in large quantities, I think that's all a good idea. Because otherwise eating wild-caught bugs runs the same sort of ethics risk as eating non-farmed fish when the ocean is getting more and more overfished.
That said, I love eating fish, especially tuna, so I'd be a hypocrite to say I wouldn't eat wild caught bugs for the ethical reasons.
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Post by Killix on Aug 18, 2011 9:59:00 GMT -5
I wouldn't be able to eat bugs if they were still... visibly bugs with heads and legs and bleeh.
Just the thought of crunching through their exosketelons and getting their gross insect legs stuck between my teeth squicks me out.
If they were ground down and made into something like cricket bread I probably wouldn't have any objections to eating it.
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Post by Komori on Aug 18, 2011 12:37:12 GMT -5
I wouldn't be able to eat bugs if they were still... visibly bugs with heads and legs and bleeh. Just the throught of crunching through their exosketelons and getting their gross insect legs stuck between my teeth squicks me out. If they were ground down and made into something like cricket bread I probably wouldn't have any objections to eating it. Yeah, I think I'm with Killix here. I could possibly eat a small one on a dare, but I'm pretty texture-squeamish. I tried eating one of those bite-size baby octopus before, and nearly barfed from the texture. ^^;;;; (It was this combination of chewing on a rubber balloon, yet still crunching through gristly sandy bits... gyehhhh) |
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Post by Strife on Aug 18, 2011 13:02:34 GMT -5
I wouldn't be able to eat bugs if they were still... visibly bugs with heads and legs and bleeh. Just the throught of crunching through their exosketelons and getting their gross insect legs stuck between my teeth squicks me out. If they were ground down and made into something like cricket bread I probably wouldn't have any objections to eating it. Yeah, I think I'm with Killix here. I could possibly eat a small one on a dare, but I'm pretty texture-squeamish. I tried eating one of those bite-size baby octopus before, and nearly barfed from the texture. ^^;;;; (It was this combination of chewing on a rubber balloon, yet still crunching through gristly sandy bits... gyehhhh) I must echo this as well. I love tuna fish, but I'd have a hard time actually biting down on a whole tuna, as opposed to the prepared meat. Also, one time I was having a salad with cold shrimp in it, and we had to rip off the shrimps' heads and legs on our own. I'll admit I was a little squicked out by that, especially since a few of the shrimps were pregnant before they died and had hundreds of little beads in their stomachs that looked like caviar. xD; Sooo, as long as they cut off the head and limbs before serving, then I'm golden. :3 |
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Post by Pacmanite on Aug 19, 2011 7:31:51 GMT -5
Come to think of it, ants are bugs, and I've eaten ants before. It was on a school trip of some sort. The ants were of an Australian native species, pretty big in size, and you squish their head with your thumb and bite off their abdomen. It tastes lemony and very sharply sweet. Like a hit of concentrated candy. According to our Aboriginal guide, if you eat too much of them it'll rot your teeth.  They were actually quite nice, but probably not much healthier for you than eating candy. The ant bums were basically just sugar and um... ant-acid.  Australian Sugar Ant. Not the Honeypot Ant, which is more commonly on TV, and has the huge grapesized swollen abdomens. Although, those ones are probably pretty sweet and tasty too. I think they're even a pest ant species, because they're always swarming around my Grandma's house in the countryside. But when the ants are near peoples' homes, I think it's unsafe to eat them just in case they've ingested some of the slow-action antbaits that people use to kill colonies. |
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Post by Crystal on Aug 19, 2011 8:37:17 GMT -5
I wouldn't be able to eat bugs if they were still... visibly bugs with heads and legs and bleeh. Just the throught of crunching through their exosketelons and getting their gross insect legs stuck between my teeth squicks me out. If they were ground down and made into something like cricket bread I probably wouldn't have any objections to eating it. I'm with Killix here. >>; I've eaten bugs before on accident... but the concept of voluntarily doing it is kinda squicky. If I were raised on bug-eating, though, I probably would. I eat all kinds of odd things I was raised to eat. |
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Post by Komori on Aug 19, 2011 9:26:42 GMT -5
I think shrimp's sort of different, because you're not actually eating the legs or the head, even if you have to peel them off. You're still just eating a big chunk of meat.
((I've never actually been bothered peeling shrimp, either, but I've always lived in coastal areas with fresh shrimp.))
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Post by insanepurpleone on Aug 19, 2011 23:16:11 GMT -5
(The whole shrimp-eating process totally grosses me out. But so does pretty much everything about shrimp. ) I'm in the "bug eating is just as ethical as animal eating" camp. I've only ever eaten crickets, which tasted terrible, but ethically I have no issue with it, especially so long as they're raised and/or gathered in a way that's not gonna harm the ecosystem. |
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