Several species of flatworm have made a home in metropolitan France | Hacker News Reader

Several species of flatworm have made a home in metropolitan France

washingtonpost.com

77 pointswglb58 comments

'A colleague once tried to put a flatworm in his mouth, Justine recounted. The man still describes it as “one of the worst experiences of his life.”'

...why would you do this?

At some point someone must experiment in eating something unknown, perhaps several times in different ways, in order to determine if there's potential for it to be palatable for a mass audience. If you discover something truly remarkable and capitalize on it, you can become very rich very quickly.

It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which a humanity's response to new life is either: "Can I eat it?" or "How do I kill it?".

Not that surprising when food and safety are two of the most basic human needs.

It actually makes a lot of sense from a survival of the fittest standpoint.

You forgot the classic third option, “Can I have sex with this?”

Probably the first option in fact.

And that's why you're here, now

do we live in the same century ?

Can you propose a more current way of checking whether a thing tastes good?

Finding someone else to eat it?

Recursion doesn't mean that you get to ignore the base case!

However the responsibility has to fall on anyone on that chain of delegates.

Well we eat snails and frog legs so maybe he thought there was a business opportunity...

I know of someone who put a garden slug in his mouth as a drunken party dare.

He contracted meningitis and encephalitis and damn near died. It was years before he was even reasonably healthy again.

One of William Buckland's ambitions was to taste every animal, and he made a good attempt at it. He reckoned moles and bluebottles were the most revolting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckland

This guy's Wikipedia page has a "Known eccentricities" section. Worth reading.

> 'I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before', and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever." The heart in question is said to have been that of Louis XIV.

The heart of Louis XIV has also been said to have been used for the ochre colour[0] of a painting by Drölling, Intérieur d'une cuisine.

It is also on display at the Saint-Denis basilica[1] and doesn't really look like something that could be eaten at all, much less "gobbled up".

In reality though, it has more likely been destroyed altogether in 1793.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

[1]https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fa/ac/a1/faaca139521085b6fe5f...

Non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckland

For science. How else would we know what they taste like?

We’re humans. We’ll try ANYTHING

Only in France...

... or SE China. ;)

Clearly a frenchman. And it tastes bad, too, so it's a perfect match for French Fine Cuisine.

I know you're trying to make a joke, but once you get past the snail&frog stereotypes (which really aren't that bad), French cuisine is some of the best in the world.

Regarding French gastronomy, and specially comparing to the Spanish which I know the most about, I heard a French acquaintance saying that it's pretty bimodal, with lots of so-so places to eat and many amazing but expensive spots, leaving little place for the middle of the road reasonably good and inexpensive places. Could someone confirm that?

I'm biased because I'm french :) But french food, like every other food, is average in most places.

There's certain things we do really well, which somehow nobody else does. Bread for example. If you're into meat, there's excellent paté both in the north (Bretagne) and south (Corsica and PACA), and some of the world's finest beef in central france (Limousin). Corsica also has amazing Saucisson. We also do really good pastries. One French specialty is called the Calisson, you can find loads of it in/near Aix-en-Provence (Calissons d'Aix).

These things are all very commonplace and not expensive if you live there. And as long as you stay out of big restaurant chains, fast food, etc it's very easy to eat healthy and delicious food in France.

I miss my country.

And some very good cheese like the Beaufort or Comté (smellier than the cheddar but not that much) and many more varieties than you can eat as a starter, before dessert or as a main course like the cheese fondue or raclette. And wine, etc. the list goes on.

Sadly, nowadays, many of the restaurants in the 10 to 30 Euros a meal price range just serve dishes coming from big industrial food suppliers like Metro. There are fewer home-made dishes being served in restaurants in France, especially in touristic areas. Also many of the "boulangeries" just bake industrial bread and sell patisseries, viennoiseries coming from industrial suppliers.

> Bread for example.

I must disagree on this one. I find German bread on average better than what I managed to get over in France. Although only very, very few bakeries do their own bread and bread rolls from scratch these days, the quality is quite good and even across bakeries.

Between that and Thüringer Mett I'm practically certain I wouldn't move anywhere I can't get both of these in the morning (1st stop: butcher, 2nd stop: bakery).

French bread has a lot more varieties to it in general -- if there's a kind of bread you like, you might find it in France under a different name (eg Campagnard). What kind of german bread are you thinking about? Most of the german rye breads are absolutely appalling to my palate. But you know what they say about taste :)

When it comes to loafs of bread, my favourite is proper grey bread (which seems to be a lot less popular in the east and is somehow different, less sour in the south), a mixture between white and rye bread.

For bread rolls, I usually go with plain white or white with poppy or white with white-sesame. I'm a simple man.

Unfortunately it has become very hard to buy a good sour-dough bread in Germany, even in rural areas. I resorted to baking my own which is far superior to the ones one can commonly buy.

Strangely, even small bakeries (outside super-markets) tend to make poor industrial-like bread (with some exemptions).

Frog legs quite literally taste like chicken. Less fatty, best when fried, and you can eat the bones.

Escargot is a little earthy, but definitely edible-- especially with garlic butter. They remind me of mushrooms.

That's odd. I've always found frog leg to taste more like buffalo wings than like chicken

I think this was a joke. I laughed.

;-)

>you can eat the bones

Wow, I had no idea. Frog tastes great but I've always been put off ordering it at French & Chinese places because the tiny bones were such a pain.

I'm well aware.

I'm always surprised by how little we understand the soil under our feet.

For example, Glomalin is a soil protein produced by fungi which can constitute more than 10% of soil by weight (as is strongly correlated with 'tilth'/high quality soil). It was only discovered in 1996!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomalin

the first joking thought was that French cuisine will get a new dish ... after reading the article i see that it is only half a joke as there has already been a tasting attempts. So there is only a technical issue of finding a good way of cooking them - like for some other foods which are unpleasant/toxic in uncooked state. May be these worms is what going to save our future overpopulated Earth from hunger?

You would need to disable the toxin-producing part, or prepare them in a way that removed or neutralized the poison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrodotoxin

Overpopulation is a myth

Citation? I'm unfamiliar with the views on this, but considering the amount of starvation in the world, this seems suspect, especially considering an increasing population.

One way of quantifying it really roughly is to estimate the total caloric value of worldwide food production and divide by the population, to get a global estimate of calories-per-person. According to one estimate, anyway, that's been steadily rising and is now around 2900 kcal/person/day [1]. There still is hunger in some parts of the world, which suggests that the problem is distribution not happening correctly, whether due to logistical or economic or political issues. This seems to be true even if you do the averaging per-continent: the continent with the lowest per-capita production, Africa, still produces 2600 kcal/person/day, which should be plenty to avoid starvation.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-supply-by-region-in-...

Yeah, population isn't the issue. As others have pointed out, we grow more than enough food to feed the world. And to address the other side of the equation - the growth side - it seems to be the case that when a country reaches a certain state of development, reproduction naturally levels out or starts falling.

The rate of baby production in most developed countries is near or below the replacement rate. The growth rate of these countries is almost entirely from migration. It seems to be the case that when you educate people (in particular, women), give them access to birth control, and opportunities to live interesting and fulfilling lives, enough people will choose to forgo children to make up for all the people who want children.

So population isn't the problem: equitable distribution of the resources we have is.

To put it most succinctly, if only we could just get out of our scarcity mindset and achieve a reasonably fair distribution of our resources -- then those resources are more than enough to sustain everyone, and population growth isn't an issue.

Population increase is a response to increased resource availability, not a cause of shortage (at least, until you reach chaotic breakdown states). If the primary resource limitation is food (as in many poor countries), when the food supply grows, population grows. In wealthy countries, where the primary resource problem is money, population stays flat or even shrinks - children are expensive!

Food supplies have grown tremendously post-WWII, thanks to Green Revolution agriculture. Earth's population has doubled in the past 50 years, but food is actually cheaper than it was 50 years ago.

There is plenty of food being produced to feed everyone at present. The problem of starvation is one of distribution and not one of production.

> Citation?

It's a sad state of affairs when the onus of proof is placed on disproving a myth instead of proving it.

> I'm unfamiliar with the views on this, but considering the amount of starvation in the world, this seems suspect, especially considering an increasing population.

IIRC, all recent (i.e., in the last century) starvation cases were caused by disruptive events that caused systemic failures in the food supply. For example, all recent famines in Africa are triggered by civil wars.

It seems to me that overpopulation is presently a reality. As far as I can tell there are way too many humans given our level of consumption. At the rate we kill off other species, destroy ecosystems, pollute, and generally make large portions of the planet toxic I think it's clear there are too many people.

This is generally what people in major cities and heavily urban areas like California, east coast of China, northern Europe think when they look around them, but then when you actually go look around the world, you suddenly discover that the earth is mostly vast, unpopulated tracts of land. Just traveling around can give a vastly different view of things. Do humans put out toxins and eliminate species? Sure they do, but in terms of consumption, the carrying capacity of the earth has grown dramatically over the last 200 years because of innovation and research driven by population growth, and there is still plenty of room *(https://www.quora.com/If-the-entire-world-had-the-population...). The more people you have, the more minds and resources you can throw at a problem.

There's also the interesting fact that my parents raised 7 children on the same amount of resources that most people raised 2; we were _way_ more efficient per capita than most households. Oddly enough, we were raised to be more resource efficient than most people. We knew resources were scarce, so we tried to be more efficient. Maybe the solution is to have more children, not less, then teach them to find solutions to any problems encountered. Heck, mine the moon if you need more resources, invest in hydroponics for food if you run out of space, don't start getting rid of the poor people. Then you'd just end up with a bunch of rich folk sitting in panda refuges.

EDIT: I only bring up the last sentence because the question always encountered when someone says "There are too many people." is "Who do you think we should get rid of, how and when?"

EDIT 2: I do agree that we should do better with taking care of the environment and avoid catastrophic issues from bad decisions, and I agree with the post below about both being able to be right. :D

Yes there is lots of room. There is plenty of food. But what kind of place will the planet be in 100 years on our current trajectory? Pollution is being done on a grand scale. Deforestation too. What good is it to have all that land when it's polluted? As the world gets richer and people consume more it seems clear to me that the present path is not sustainable.

In my short lifetime I've seen drastic changes. I've been to many countries and to many national parks. I've seen the degradation and I know it constitutes anecdotal evidence. In the 70s things were not so bad. Now, it's terrible. Trash a much more common sight in the ocean and in reefs. Micro plastics everywhere. Deforestation. We have room, we have food but soon we won't have a decent place to live in. It'll be too polluted

I'm not smart enough and don't have enough moral insight to be able to determine who should be gotten rid of as you put it. That's too great a power for me to responsibly wield. I don't think anyone should be gotten rid of. I think people should breed less. But even though I haven't enough insight to say how to get to the desired outcome, less people, I know that it's the outcome we need.

There are several definitions of overpopulation, making you both right.

The first definition refers to a population so large that resources get depleted so much that the population crashes. The canonical example is lemmings.

Another definition refers to a population so large that it causes widespread harm to the ecosystem.

So it's a myth by the first definition and a reality by the second.

Try getting a seat at a Starbucks in Manhattan on a Saturday.

Try finding a person in Wyoming

Change "metropolitan France" by "most temperate Europe and USA" and you will have a more accurate picture. I have those hammerhead worms in my garden and you could probably find them in your closest local garden center too. The "scientists just noticed then now" claim is false, of course. Very curious creatures.

Funding idea: ask homeland security to pay for flora and fauna surveys.

I suppose that CDC already does that for virus and bacteria ...

article is behind paywall

Try opening it in private browsing? It might be that you've read too many of their articles (should be stated on the paywall).

I say this out of general experience, the article was not pay walled for me.

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