Eating insects, would you?

[tzijlstra]

Would you? I would! I don't quite understand why it isn't more common yet. Apparently in February the first Insect restaurant opened in Wales, would you try one in Sheffield?

[Guest sibon]

I have a copy of this book.

 

It is a good read, but I'm still not convinced.

[Nagel]

Would you? I would! I don't quite understand why it isn't more common yet. Apparently in February the first Insect restaurant opened in Wales, would you try one in Sheffield?

 

Which particular insect do you look at and think 'yum, yum, I want some of that'?

 

I would never eat insects unless I was starving and had no choice. I'll eat crustaceans happily, which logically are little different, but culturally I was brought up to avoid insects as food and see no reason to get over that.

[Alcoblog]

I swallowed a wasp once.

[blake]

I have eaten insects, in Thailand. It seemed churlish to refuse when somebody passes you a bag of grasshoppers the same way as somebody might offer you to a bag of sweets, or potato crisps here. But I never made the big jump of buying any insects myself in markets. I do have a bit of a hangup about insects as food, like most westerners, and the Thais know this too. So insects are one of the very few, if not the only thing, that foreigners can pay less for than locals do. Like Thais will pay 30 baht for a bag of grasshoppers, but vendors in markets, knowing that farangs or foreigners need to overcome their phobia about insects, might sell them for only 25.

 

insects are supposed to be a good nutritional food source, and there is nothing wrong with eating them at all.

 

'exotic' foods can definitely be too exotic though. I tried balut, or duck's foetus once in the Philippines too, that is a great delicacy of theirs as well - however once, was enough. I ate dog once too, but that was by accident and I only subsequently discovered that it was dog.

[tzijlstra]

I have tried it once as well, when I did my undergrad degree the local hotelschool had an insect-fair on and I had a mealworm rosti (basically a rosti with some mealworms in it) and grasshopper too. I will eat almost anything though, except, like blake, dog and really weird bird-dishes like deep-fried sparrows... the duck foetus sounds even more disgusting!

 

I don't know if I'd make it part of my regular diet though, there was nothing wrong with the mealworm rosti, but I remember distinctly the 'crunchiness' of the grasshopper putting me off. I wonder how long it will be until it becomes part of our increasingly diverse diet.

[blake]

I can't see Entomophagy taking off in a big way here.

 

the segments where selling insects as food might be viable is where there are a lot of insect-eating immigrants, i.e. like Africans and Asians which basically means London and not too many other places, and also where there are a lot of sandal-wearing hippies which is why they probably opened the place up in Wales (it could have been Hebden Bridge).