Man eating bugs
Explores the consumption of spiders, crickets, grubs, scorpions, and dragonflies in thirteen different countries, including Australia, Japan, China, Venezuela, and the United States.
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What Hacker News says
- Why wait until after a world apocalypse? Insects are plentiful and nutritious and we should be eating more of them now.
There's plenty of evidence that insects are high quality protein with low fat. In many traditional societies around the world, termites, grubs, grasshoppers, and other creepy crawly things play an important nutritional role.
Years ago, my wife and I read a beautifully illustrated travelogue "Man Eating Bugs" written by a husband-and-wife team who traveled the world to see (and sample) insect cuisine in many cultures. Fascinating stuff.
It's a generally well supported view among paleontologists that primitive humans ate lots of bugs. We were opportunistic foragers from way back. It's only in recent centuries, in "civilized" places, that we have regarded bugs as a repulsive thing to eat.
I would imagine that in and after a nuclear winter, animal and vegetable life would dwindle to a tiny population that would take hundreds if not thousands of years to replenish. Probably we should be caching genetic material, sperm, and seeds of every species in some safe, underground arkology, so that two hundred years after the meltdown, whoever's left can restore some biodiversity.
- My wife and I read a book a few years ago: "Man Eating Bugs", a travelogue of insect cuisine in many different lands.
It was quite fascinating. Children in Mexico would pick up a stink bug and eat it raw, a sour-crunchy snack. In Southeast Asia there's a large beetle about the size of a Snickers bar that in fact tastes like a Snickers bar. In Africa some folks like to eat large termites, a high protein food source. In Australia, there's a type of grub that lives in the roots of certain bushes that aborigines will cut open and eat. In Japan there are some "interesting" dishes.
I've tried grasshoppers, sold in tiny packets, salted and spiced to the point where you only taste the spice and salt. Bear Ghrylls demonstrated eating ants as a survival technique (remove the head first).
Insects are superior to meat in many ways--low fat, high quality protein and other nutrients, low on the food chain so they contain fewer toxins which tend to accumulate in herbivores and even more in carnivores.
You can harvest grasshoppers in the wild using nets. Just be careful that they haven't been chewing on poison ivy or other toxic plants which may do you harm.
I've long had it in mind to start an insect food business and this article was rather inspiring. This guy just started a cockroach farm and is making money.
It may sound disgusting to us squeamish Westerners, yet think about the notion of eating a pig or a cow, higher mammals which are fairly intelligent, creatures who exhibit emotions, who dream, who are evolutionarily our second cousins when compared to insects.
Just don't eat dragonflies (a popular skewered dish in a part of Indonesia). They keep down the mosquito population.
- For the curious, a coffee-table book, a cookbook, and a memoir:
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Eating-Bugs-Science-Insects/dp/098...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Eat-Bug-Cookbook-Revised/dp/160774...
http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Adventure-Eating-Insects-Planet...
