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Comment by luminen | Hacker News Reader

I looked too closely into a bag of frozen spinach I had been using for smoothies and discovered it was about 10% small green caterpillars... I threw it out and never bought it again.

Morally, could I tell you why, like the author of this post tries to do? Absolutely not. I eat birds and mammals. I had a decade-long stint of vegetarianism and often thought about my moral responsibility as a conscious creature towards the other creatures on this Earth. But tossing the insects wasn't even a choice, and in retrospect, I don't think I could convince myself to eat them (even if the macros are good.)

I wonder how much of this aversion is learned/cultural, and if future generations will laugh at how squeamish we are today.

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Very cultural - plenty of cultures roast and eat certain insects, and Western culture's prized crustaceans (shrimp, crab, and lobster) make me ill pretty quickly after eating them (even when I didn't know about them being in a sauce) - and many of them look like big insects. I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that Malaysian Muslims have no aversion to shrimp and happily include them in sauces; I'd always figured that halal food was pretty close to kosher, and there was at least one category of restaurant in Singapore I could let my guard down at.

There are two kinds of animal food aversions: disgust because the creature itself is considered disgusting, and horror because the creature is more often considered a companion animal or otherwise special. Anglo-Americans generally have a strong aversion to eating both mice and guinea pigs (horses, dogs), but for those very different reasons.

There were several cheese types in Britain that were traditionally full of maggots, and eaten that way. Modern food production techniques and refrigeration has allowed us the luxury of strong insect aversions.

In parts of Colonial America, prisoners and slaves were fed lobster, and free servants' contracts often stipulated that they wouldn't be fed it more than a certain number of times per week, because people with a choice didn't want to eat them. Cultures change! Now lobster is a luxury food everywhere in the US other than the areas they're caught in, where it's a cultural pride food.

> I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that Malaysian Muslims have no aversion to shrimp and happily include them in sauces

Seafood is considered haram by the hanafis only. The Malaysians are shafi’is so they can eat shrimp.

Except that Bangladesh (hanafi) is a big exporter of shrimp, go figure.

Thank you for that! The only major division I was aware of among Muslims was Sunni and Shia, but I guess that's a bit like someone being startled by cultural and religious differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants - they all acknowledged the same religious authorities until about 1500 or so, have the same holy book and their worship services are pretty similar (there are more differences among Protestants than there are between some of the Protestants' and the Roman Catholics' services)

> Except that Bangladesh (hanafi) is a big exporter of shrimp, go figure.

And India exports beef in quantities comparable to the US and Australia.

Unlike shrimp, locusts are kosher, at least according to the bible.

Personally I think of food taboos as a cultural thing that depends on where you grew up, but because food is such an important part of life, food taboos have a rather heavy weight. No problem in being squeamish: different cultures have different taboos.

It's probably mostly learned behavior; many westerners have the same reaction to eating things like chicken heart or fish eyes, which other cultures eat without hesitation. That being said, usually insects being in your food is probably a bad sign (e.g. maggots in rotting meat), so there could be some innate skepticism perhaps?

Don't forget that it was unexpected and not identified as a specific species.

which also brings back the old insight that harvesting greens kills a lot more animals than producing steak does. Though I guess with symbiotic species living inside organisms, that may become debatable? In any case, there is no food consumption without death involved.

Though ultimately, that's not even the point. The larger point is that individual consumer choice does not actually shift the food industry structure, which, again, is neatly exemplified by this entire debate that kicked off these threads: humans don't -choose- bugs. This is a system change. Though of course the change involves better mass production capability and higher rates of profit on the industry side, not "care for nature". Industry doesn't care for anything but profit.

> harvesting greens kills a lot more animals than producing steak does

How is this possible? Cows must feed and they eat plants (inefficiently too)

I find this a bit dubious, particularly that a large part of the agricultural industry is dedicated to _feed_ for livestock.

There are Jains who believe so strongly in doing no harm to nature, that they go to great lengths to avoid killing insects. They wear gauze masks so as not to inhale gnats and such. They carry a broom to sweep away any crawling bugs before they can be stomped upon. They practice a fruitarian diet and thus they even try not to kill any plant in the process of harvesting food. Now that is certainly dedication! Time to eat my t-bone steak.

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