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Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

They probably contain toxins that can't be cooked away either. Ask yourself why humans refrained from eating them unless near starvation and death for the recorded history of humanity.

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People eat them, not out of desperation, now and in history.

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

I'm going to say you probably haven't traveled much to be drawing such conclusions. Eating bugs is a big tourist shtick in Mexico for example. And you can go to markets with heaps of them on display.

The last hunter gatherers in Africa have lived that way for as far as we can tell for thousands of years. Part of their diet is raw bee larvae. There's a photo of a man eating it accompanying this news story about a study in Science. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/24/5456315...

> Ask yourself why humans refrained from eating them

Plenty of humans don't eat plenty of meats and sea animals either. Traditions don't necessarily contain good wisdom.

I think seeing a bug feast on feces and then having it sneak up on your food stashes might trigger an obvious reaction (similar to pigs and the reason why some don't eat them)

> Traditions don't necessarily contain good wisdom.

What is the bad wisdom here, that eating insects, rats, various other disease harbouring vertebrates is actually misplaced medieval health & safety?

Correct. All of our food contains parasites, pathogens, and deadly chemicals, even those we eat the most like pork, salmon and cassava. The difference is that we learned how to deal with those risks. Literally water can be fatal sometimes, this issue is not specific to bugs.

The study at hand specifically mentions that further research is required in order to reach the same level of safety for bugs as well.

I don’t think there’s an exact correlation between safety and “what we eat,” which is rather more a consequence of availability and customs. Lots of countries don’t eat horse meat or snakes. Neither one is particularly unsafe.

Eating pigs are much more likely to transfer parasites/diseases if prepared improperly. So in this case traditions do contain good wisdom.

Compared with cows or sheep pigs eat what humans can eat, so growing pigs means wasting a lot of food that could be fed to people. Many historians argue that this was the primary reason why pork was banned in Islam and Judaism, not because pigs were considered unclean.

I've always heard it was because they'll happily eat human corpses (and other carrion). Especially back in the day, livestock were rarely penned, but rather let loose to forage. So pigs would be seen at battlefields eating corpses.

> growing pigs means wasting a lot of food that could be fed to people [...] not because pigs were considered unclean.

Heh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sty#/media/File:Green_glazed_t...

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

They didn't. Many insects are even literally kosher. It's just that farming them didn't make much sense until recently. Plants and mushrooms, having far more different biology from us than insects, are probably a worse concern when it comes to toxins that can't be cooked away. And yet humans managed to cultivate food with plenty of those, like cassava.

If by many you mean just locusts. When a bunch of bugs eat all you food and the only thing left to eat is those bugs, then I think locusts being kosher has more to do with survival than actually being kosher.

At least several types of locusts as I recall. It's been widely speculated that the dietary restrictions were really about parasites and other food safety concerns, but what's also famous is that they were quite legalistic about it. So if it was only permissible as desperation food, they would have said so... at length.

Either way, Jews and other middle eastern groups with picky dietary rules, do have a long tradition for eating it in non-desperate times too.

It's icky for us not used to it, but there's no reason to think parasites is a bigger issue with insects than with animals far more similar to us, which we do eat.

Remember this article is about pet food insects, often fed to pets raw (if not alive), and it notes some extremely unsanitary practices in pet shops that farm them, such as feeding them on the excrement of the type of creature they're fed to. It's not particularly relevant for insects considered for human consumption.

> Ask yourself why humans refrained from eating them unless near starvation and death for the recorded history of humanity.

This is very wrong. Did you forget to ask outside your gated community?

We've not eaten half the things we regularly eat for most of recorded history either. That's not an argument.

Could just be because they're hard to catch in bulk compared to other prey

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