The many flavors of edible ants | Hacker News Reader

The many flavors of edible ants

acs.org

57 pointsgeox51 comments

Hah I remember as a 4 year old I discovered a tree crawling with ants, back where I was growing up in the middle of russia. I distinctly remember trying to eat them, as any self respecting 4 year old would, and discovered they were surprisingly tasty - sour-y, salty kinda taste.

Now this discovery was not totally random, I had heard “stories” that you can poke a branch into an anthill the ants attack it to defend their hive and after a while if you get the stick out and lick it, it would taste sour. Maybe someone was just messing with me as a kid.

Anyway I ran off to my parents to show them my new discovery and was immediately scolded and instructed not to do it again.

But it still stuck with me - ants in that part of the world have flavor, and it’s actually tasty.

I discovered the taste a bit later, while drinking some cola where an ant had fallen in and accidentally biting the ant - tasted very sour, despite the sugary drink...

A few select high end restaurants use ants for their sour taste. Why specifically ants? No clue. I do know that such restaurants like to switch it up and be a bit unconventional.

There is a set of techniques refined and published by noma that have been really influential in high end cooking the last decade. They use koji (the catalyst for miso and soy sauce, among other things) to break down protein and/or starch into sources of deep umami or complex sweetness.

The liquid forms of this are being called garum, though it's not a continuity of the ancient food by that name. The original book published a grasshopper garum, but recently I have seen much better ones based on bee brood, and a chicatana ant garum is one of the best things I've ever tasted. They are very complex and unique flavors, nothing is quite like them.

Isn’t garum a “fish dissolved in its own gut enzymes” kinda thing?

By the at measure - dissolving other organic stuff sort of makes sense as names go.

Yeah I think it's a good name for it. In the past when this has come up I've seen people be disappointed or hostile to it simply because there isn't an unbroken continuous european food tradition between roman garum and this. Which it may sort of imply, I guess. But I think it's a fun repurposing of a good word that was going unused.

Formic acid for the sourness I guess.

Chicatana ants are so incredible. They're a seasonal delicacy in Mexico and have a great nutty, proteiny, chocolately flavor.

I ate some in Oaxaca. Mine were fine, but nearly lost it from the intense flavor. Still don’t know if hers were actually different or just our tongues. Strangest thing.

The grasshoppers were fairly good, though only in moderation.

Who is her?

The (missing word) person who 'nearly lost it due to the intense flavour'.

There is a distillery in Cambridge UK that makes a gin flavoured with formic acid from ants: https://cambridgedistillery.co.uk/products/anty-gin

It's expensive, but the taste isn't really distinctive (unlike their truffle gin, which is very unusual).

Every time I get ants around my desk I notice their strong, unpleasant smell (probably formic acid, but maybe some alkanes?). If I even brush a surface they've walked across, I can smell it. It's quite unpleasant and I can't imagine wanting to use it in cooking.

The article is partially about dealing with this issue.

Hard pass. Happy to leave edible bugs to the globalists, I'll keep my steak, thanks.

what does this even mean, the globalists? anyways more ants for me!

I almost want to leave peoples' minds closed about this kind of thing to avoid an increase in demand. I don't want my Sal de Gusano doubling in price either.

Me too, but eventually you just get so excited about eating the bugs that you can't help but to run around enthusiastically telling everybody you know about how great it is. I can't help raving about them even though I'm like you and tried my best not to blab. It's the secret that we're not supposed to let out!

It is published World Economic Forum propaganda to move the global population away from eating meat, to eating bugs, for 'sustainability' reasons. Similar to 'you will own nothing, and be happy'. Kinda interesting to see who dismisses it as a conspiracy theory when it's published on the WEF website:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/good-grub-why-we-migh...

You seem to believe that the 'sustainability' argument is a bogus smokescreen. Why do you think the WEF is actually publishing this article? Please explain the conspiracy I'm missing.

I do think sustainability (and the global warming concern in general) is a bogus smokescreen. I am of the opinion it is propaganda put forth by America's (and "The West's") economic adversaries to weaken our position on the global stage and make us a less capable, less successful/prosperous, nation. Articles like the original one starting this conversation thread strike me less as an organic "Hey, look how cool/new/tasty this is!" and more as a targeted "lets move the population's Overton window over to 'this is acceptable, please work past your natural revulsion to this and eat our bugs'".

As far as I understand it the people trying to push insect protein as a meat substitute are US entrepreneurs, the same kind of people trying to sell fake meat burgers with beetroot heme and the like. I think you got your sights on the wrong target. The people who are trying to sell you trendy liberal causes to take your money and the people who are worried about the environment are completely different groups of people with entirely disjoint priorities.

I'm very critical of globalist institutions like the UN, WHO et al myself, but I don't see how eating insects weakens America / the west.

If anything, you'd expect 'globalists' would be, at least passively, on the anti-ant side; globalisation has tended to diminish regional cultural practices.

(As far as I can see, though, most people who use the term 'globalists' (vs globalisation) are actually using it to mean essentially a reheated version of Nazi conspiracy theories, so, well, who knows.)

It's a far right conspiracy theory about jews, of course. It always gets mentioned in this context because the other part of it is a fantasy about there being a plot to enslave people and force them to eat bugs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalism#Right-wing_usage

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1166649732/conspiracy-theory-...

Bloomberg even wrote about this particular conspiracy theory this March [0]. Wait, no, I meant the previous March, here is the right link: [1].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-05/the-bu...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-26/eating-in...

They are researching the use of certain ants as flavor enhancers. Mexicans know a thing or two about making food delicious, and Chicatana ants are used in Oaxacan cuisine to add complexity to sauces. Rest assured, this is entirely based on merit of the price-to-flavor ratio and not a conspiracy to replace your steak.

As if the World isn't complicated enough already, some people feel the need to add complexity to their sauces.

Digging out Honeyants to eat in recess during primary school is more a local thing than a globalist thing .. it's not even woke, it's just free candy.

Honeypot ants are particularly edible:

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

We have a lot of green ants around our house (otherwise known as a weaver ant, mentioned in the article). They're a little aggressive but fascinating creatures all round and great for a nibble, tho I tend to only eat the bum ... tart but satisfying.

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

I've eaten some Amazonian ant in Brazil which tasted very similar to lemongrass, was surprised how tasty they actually were.

My toddler was amazed when I introduced him to edible bugs (grasshoppers in our case, but we have a jar of ants around as well).

His eyes lit up, it was like a toddler dream come true! Bugs he could eat!

Related, recently I accidentally ordered some blood soup at a restaurant[1], and when he asked what it was I was about to say "blood, icky" but I remembered to not let my cultural biases predetermine what he ate, so I let him try some instead.

tl;dr Toddlers love eating ants.

[1] The menu listed it as shrimp cake soup, blood was a major ingredient that was not mentioned. Given every soup above it did list blood cubes, I should have asked.

As a toddler my wife was known for lifting up rocks and just picking and eating all the crawling things.

It’s our culture that removes these tendencies :). We still have the occasional good laugh about this story.

Cultures in most parts are rational when it comes not to eating specific things, when it comes to animals/insects it's mostly about parasites.

That reminds me of the story of Sam Ballard, who ate a slug due to a dare and fell into a coma, woke up paralyzed, and later died.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/05/health/man-dies-after-eat...

It is at least noteworthy that this was in down under… :) (Deadly fauna, deadly fauna everywhere)

Doesn't cooking get rid of most parasites?

One of my earliest memories is of eating a bug.

The many flavors of people...

Almost like Adam Ant joined The Cannibals?

No idea why you got downvoted. Unusual, yes, but not a bad thing.

When I was a kid, I once diluted some dark raspberry syrup in a glass of water. After mixing I discovered there were tons of ants in there. I drank it anyway and the ants were really sour like lemon pulp when you bit on them. I think them steeping in the syrup helped. It was really tasty!

Turns out you can find some of these on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Yerbero-Chicatana-Chicatanas-Guacamol...

I don't recall the bread, but ones in childhood my cousin brother had me eat ant eggs. It's sour-n-sweet in taste. No yuk memories though.

My only quibble with eating corpses whole: Are they clean?

i.e. what happens to the poop inside their bodies? See with shrimp you "devein" them to remove the intestines before consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp_and_prawn_as_food#Prepa...

as Wikipedia notes, this is just for aesthetic reasons. It's neither poisonous nor tasting intensively

with ants

We're already talking about how great it's going to be to eat the bugs? That wasn't supposed to happen for years. Which one of you morons leaked the script?

This is so heckin' cool, I love science.

Go vegan

Reply on news.ycombinator.com