this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
15 points (100.0% liked)
Food and Cooking
6420 readers
4 users here now
All things culinary and cooking related. Share food! Share recipes! Share stuff about food, etc.
Subcommunity of Humanities.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, I foresee this angering people a lot more than plant-based food would.
Eating plants is normal, and even meat-eaters eat plenty of plants. Most of the ingredients of a conventional burger—the bun, the lettuce, etc—are plant-based. No surprise, then, that veggie burgers have gained some traction in the market.
Eating bugs is another story entirely. There are very few cultures in which that is considered anything but a desperate last resort when literally no other food is available. Tell most people to eat something made out of bugs, and they'll take it as an insult; that you're insinuating that they're too poor to afford literally anything else.
I thought there were quite a few cultures that eat bugs.
There are. Ignoring, for the moment, that lobster and shrimp are sea-bugs that billions of people eat without complaint, there are plenty of North American cultures that readily incorporated bugs into their daily diets. Here's a scholarly article on the topic (pdf warning)
I was even lucky enough to meet an Oneida man who gave me a recipe for cooking may/june beetles at a bonfire. They taste a lot like shrimp.
(The recipe: Catch a few beetles, shake them up in your hand to stun them, then toss them onto one of the rocks at the edge of the fire. Wait until they make a popcorn-like "pop" noise. If you like them less crunchy, you can peel off the wings before you eat them.)