XKCD 1268 by Randall Munroe (CC BY-NC 2.5).
Transcription:
Imagine you were transported to an alternate universe just like your own, except people occasionally ate spiders. You can’t convince anyone this is weird. [[Two figures stand. A woman is holding a big spider. The other figure looks shocked. There is another spider on the floor.]] Woman: Mmm… Figure: No! What are you doing!? This is how I feel about lobster.
{{Title text: As best as I can tell, I was transported here from Earth Prime sometime in the late 1990s. Your universe is identical in every way, except for the lobster thing and the thing where some of you occasionally change your clocks for some reason.}}
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I don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.
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It wouldn’t be weird to land bugs if they had that tasty meat crustaceans do. I’m big for alternative sources of protein like bugs, but the fact is they taste like shit.
chinese proverb: everything is tasty if you fry it enough.
Ate fried bugs. Can confirm they aren’t tasty at all.
You weren’t supposed to use motor oil
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What else am I supposed to use? I only have motor oil and piss in my pantry usually
I don’t know, I love fried crickets! Great beer snack!
Tequila and roasted garlic crickets
Mmm, that works too!
Did too, theres not much taste. Or flesh at all.
I thought that was a Texan proverb.
Made up proverb: if you’re starving to death, even dogs become food.
Everything is tasty with some salt/the right spice.
If there were 2lb spiders that taste like lobster roaming around on land I would sure as fuck be out in the woods with a net every weekend.
Surely you mean a flamethrower.
Interesting. So, what bugs have you eaten?
I have it on pretty good authority of the film Snowpiercer that bug bars are delicious.
I tried a mealworm chocolate bar once. Can NOT confirm.
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Nah, taste is fine. It’s the texture that’s weird
agreed. ive had crickets at a local restaurant and once when i went to ecuador i had these giant roasted termites. both were well prepared and tasted good, but they also both (the termites in particular) had a bad texture and had pieces that just didn’t want to get swallowed. like if popcorn had 200% more kernel.
well obviously wet bugs are cleaner since they’re surrounded by water all the time
And presalted lol.
Sea bugs are delicious and have more meat than land bugs, I’ve eat crickets before and it’s 80% bones/ definitely not meat and 20% actual meat
You’ve eaten interesting crickets. Those that I know have no bones.
Exoskeleton is still a form of bone, I use bone because it’s shorter
It’s not though. Bone is a fundamentally different material.
We knew what you meant, mind.
The bones of my house are also fundamentally different material to human bones. Not really sure what point I’m trying to make here but there you go
Is your house a 15th century gothic chapel?
Not really… but yeah there was no question that’s what tou meant, in my mind at least.
You’re thinking of in bones. Crickets have out bones.
Snail is a “bug” and it’s 100% meat.
And you have escargot for just that. Guess I’m missing your point.
Snails are more in the same category as squids and octopuses, and I know people who won’t eat those because they’re ‘gross’
Agreed. I’ve had chocolate covered crickets and candy bugs and stuff because I travel (military; not rich) and like eating new and interesting things. The best you can do is cover up the taste and texture. Neither are palatable.
Shrimps is bugs
Yep, I ate fried grasshopper once and it tasted exactly like shrimp.
Ugh, I cannot tell if this makes me more or less interested, and I love shrimp.
When I think too much about it, eating any meat really does gross me out. I still do but occasionally get tempted to try going vegetarian or something. I’m just too damn lazy
You don’t have to do it religiously. You can eat meat in one occasion, and avoid it in another. Especially these days the meat-supplements are getting pretty good. I would opt for them more often if they weren’t more expensive than real meat.
I myself find all those industrial meat alternatives pretty disgusting, especially considering what stuff they put in it to make it taste and feel like the real thing.
I’d rather mix my faux-meat myself, even while I’m not completely vegetarian, just almost.
Care to share your recipe?
Soy proteine, boiling water, some wheat flour, eggs and whatever spices you like. Makes for great burger patties. Don’t have the exact ratio of ingredients in my head right now, though.
Really just gets easier over time, until it’s just a habit
I can relate to this so I’ll just add that aligning my diet with my values was the best decision I’ve ever made. Being able to eat without feeling guilty/confused/complicated was life-changing. I didn’t do it all at once, or torture myself.
And we live at this amazing time when you can be lazy AND get amazing not-morally-horrible food! Typing this as I munch on an entire package of addictive store bought animal-free chocolate chip cookies :P
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I wonder if that guy knew his post would explode into a meme
Even before I went vegan I never understood seafood. Who wants to tear a crab leg apart for a tiny bit of meat?
I absolutely love both the flavor of the meat and the feeling of ripping it apart with my hands.
Having had lobster exactly once, I really don’t understand. The meat tastes like nothing, exactly like 99% of all meat. The only exception is a good beef cut, and that still has to be prepared correctly. Everything else is just about the butter, salt, spices.
The manual part I can kind of understand, honestly. There’s something rewarding about working for your food. Though I did feel like I’m using more energy to get the food than I end up consuming. It’s like a lick-mat for dogs.
The meat is that good.
Me!
Agree. That’s why I go king crab!
I feel the same about lobster and crayfish. A lot of work for a lot of money and very little gain.
It’s part of the experience. Same thing can be said for something like chicken wings or un-shelled nuts
So fucking gross, I’ll literally never be able to wrap my head around it. Also what’s worh seafood lover’s obsessions with eating things alive yo that’s psychopath shit
I love seafood, and eat all manner of seafood, and have not once, in my entire life, seen anyone eat LIVE seafood.
Who the fuck are you hanging out with?
Oysters on the half shell, raw, are alive not dead. I love seafood too, and eat raw sashimi grade fish all the time but yeah I’ve never eaten a raw alibe oyster either.
you just have to channel your inner frog and swallow the living animal whole
(i have never eaten raw oyster)
You gotta try it bruh, on the half shell with cocktail sauce and horseradish 🤤
It’s a relatively common practice. Oysters especially.
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I literally can not even be around people eating seafood, like if younwere the most fantastic person and I were madly in love with you and you asked me to meet at a sushi bar or go home, I’d be on my way home.
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Ok. Doesn’t change my reality or statement so
What if I promise to bring you Chicken fingers and french fries?
I would appreciate the intent, and attempt to meet me part way, but I really can’t eat around seafood tbh. It makes me nauseous to smell it even. No idea how so many other people go through life without this curse.
Like a shrimp is basically a rectum.
All animals are basically digestive tubes with add-on parts to help move it and keep it alive.
Fuck yes, people freak out about eating crickets or shit but then proceed to eat a huge spiderlike creature that’s mushy inside (crabs)
To be fair, I had ice cream with crickets all over them, and honestly it had a kind of woody / pukey aftertaste that I couldn’t get through. I wondered if part of the problem is you can’t de-vein the little things. Aren’t you basically eating their shit?
I can de-vein a shrimp, and I only care for lobster tail.
That vein is their digestive tract : )
It’s not a vein.
I actually wanna try those crickets I heard they sell at a baseball stadium somewhere in the Eastern side the states. Apparently, they are the most popular concession there and they come in a variety of flavors like sour cream & onion.
Crickets actually aren’t bad on their own. We did a “Fear Factor” themed fundraiser for Katrina relief back in high school. We made cricket sugar cookies, cricket-covered chocolate strawberries, flavored mealworms, things like that. Things weren’t selling as well as we would have wanted, so, being the weird kid with an extra bag of crickets, I stated that I would eat a live cricket for every $20 that was pledged. That ended up raising an old extra $140, and I ate 7 crickets in front of my classmates. They were relatively tasteless, and, since I found that it didn’t gross me out, years later, when I was an educator at our local aquarium, I would use, “Wanna see me eat a live bug?” strategically to bribe my summer camp kids into staying calm. If they were well behaved for an hour after lunch, I would pop one of the feeder crickets into my mouth. It brought much joy and disgust to the 10 year olds.
Crickets when fried are basically like chips, but with more texture (crunchier)
Definately a level 1 level of trying insects.
That kinda makes me want to try them
You can buy them online if you just wanna try them. This seller has a YouTube channel too.
Grilled crickets taste like chicken with walnut imo
They are decently popular in Mexico. From what I have heard it tastes like the fry batter and seasoning so basically delicious.
Meanwhile I don’t like crustaceans, but if you made a hamburger out of crickets I would be fine with it.
Almost like they have actual meat on them?
Trying to gaslight into “eat the bugs” isn’t going to work
They’re pretty much all meat? Bugs aren’t empty. Chill out man
I’m not trying to convince anyone, I do think the double standards are pretty stupid. I never ate a tarantula but I’m sure its pretty meaty.
Also everyone uses gas lighting in different contexts so I think the word should be banned. I don’t have a clue anymore what it is supposed to mean.
When I was in Cambodia, I saw street vendors frying up tarantulas, with lots of locals gathering around for snacks.
I’m not sure I’m ready to eat that, but they seemed to like it.
Meaty?
The gas lighting is real
Okay, insecty then whatever you want to call it
Gaslighting is when I like something that you don’t
Claiming bugs have meat
Ah, so you’re treating your intuition like it’s universal fact and then claiming to be the victim of gaslighting when someone disagrees. Have a great life!
Because they aren’t meaty at all lol
tell it to the frogs
They have more meat than an insect tho
Well how are you defining meat? Terrestrial insect meat and crab or lobster meat is structurally pretty much the same. It’s all muscle fibers.
The big difference is that you can’t really extract the insect meat like you would with a crab, so you’re stuck eating the whole thing, meat and everything else, which is probably where a lot of the apprehension comes from. And to be fair I think that’s a pretty big difference. A lot of cultures try to avoid eating “everything else” up and down the food chain.
Wet bugs are very distantly related to earth bugs.
Won’t you eat chicken just because pidgeons are disgusting? (yet also eaten sometimes)
Pigeons are delicious though
yeah look up the passenger pigeon. Used to be delicious
My uncle had an old silo with a broken roof and he and my dad would sit at the bottom and shoot the pigeons for dinner. I still remember my grandmother sitting outside the house plucking feathers all day. The 90s were fun in my family.
Pigeons literally exist in the us because they were imported for food iirc
Crustaceans are the closest relatives of insects.
For a foreigner: shouldn’t it be “distantly related” instead?
Yeah that or distant relatives
Oh, I’m no native speaker either
No problem with pigeon if it’s been raised for food, or had a life in nature. I’m just not eating the ones in urban centres that have been eating trash all their lives.
I should’ve come up with a better analogy…
Depends on the pigeon, some are absolute Chads
That thing is an abomination that won’t survive in the wild, let alone cross the bering strait
Oh yeah, no question. People photoshopped the poor bird before there were photos, something like that shouldn’t exist.
Well, wet bug meat are actually tasty, those land bugs are mostly chitin shells and not much protein, also the taste is not good.
Chocolate covered crickets, at least, are a regional delicacy. I’m sure some culture has figured out how to prepare large beetles and centipedes as well.
They eat giant silk worms in China. Apparently they’re pretty good.
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People eat bugs all over the planet.
2 billion insects eaters over 7 billion humans worldwide to be exact
Fun fact… lobster and crayfish were so disdained once that it was literally only used to feed prisoners.
*Preserved crawfish and lobster, which tastes like shit because it’s been transported in a barrel for many days.
Most of what we eat today is either fresh or frozen, not mushy decomposing meat.
The practice was to grind the whole thing up into a paste, but yes it’s all about perception and preparation.
That said I’d be drawing my vegetarian card if someone offered me Beetle Bisque
What about Beetle Juice?
Beetle juice?
Beetle juice.
We don’t eat the crunchy bits of our wet bugs. And their flesh is delicious.
Soft shell lobster, though, right? Granted, I’d think it’s less crunchy, but still…
I do sincerely worry about insects being added as filler materials as time goes on. I have a shellfish allergy, and the same allergens that exist in the shells of shellfish also exist in most insects.
Would proper labelling ameliorate this worry for you?
Proper labelling would seem to be a requirement anyways if they aggravate shellfish allergies, I think the concern is more “if this starts getting used in more foods my choices for food will shrink and I may no longer be able to eat the foods I like now”.
It’s definitely both. A lot of folks don’t understand that insects and shellfish are similar, and I’ve yet to see “product may contain insect meal / aggravate shellfish allergies” on things that have crickets or are processed in facilities that handle insect meal. So, the FDA likely needs to catch up. But, it’s also a cheap filler protein that’s easily grown, and companies are cheap bastards, so it’s going to slowly find its way in and push out more expensive protein options.
vegetarians
Aka [Eating bugs without knowing you’re eating bugs]
Top right image just needs more Old Bay
