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Lobsters are closely related to Spiders... yet are considered a delicacy. I even think to my self as I eat lobster, "spider, spider, spider" yet I never get grossed out at eating it. On the other hand I can barely hold a spider much less eat one...

> ... yet are considered a delicacy.

But they haven't _always_ been considered a delicacy: http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-06/heres-how-low-rent-lob...

Lobsters are, once you get inside them, just chunks of very uniform "meat" that has very little trace of where it originated. If we could find two-pound spiders, boil them, and serve their cracked-open legs on a plate, people would probably be just fine with eating those.

Calling Phnom Penh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_spider

I just threw up a little. That's pretty much my nightmare.

Really? I think it looks delicious.

Depends on the part of the spider. While you may not recognize where the meat comes from, if it's the abdomen of the spider then you probably would not enjoy it at all.

>For some reason shrimp which are essentially bugs are no problem because (I think) they come from the ocean, so there's an obvious mental line that can dissassociate them from other bugs.

Generally, we eat the innards, not the exoskeleton.

At a Japanese noodle place in NYC, my wife and I were served shrimp with our miso ramen, with the exoskeleton still in place (you were meant to peel and eat it yourself).

My wife wanted no part of it, although she likes shrimp with the eyeballs and antenna and stuff already removed. Go figure.

If properly deep-fried, the entire shrimp is edible, head and all.

If you ever watched Fear Factor, you might remember that pretty much anything is edible, including blended raw cow eyeballs and such :) It's always a matter of whether it's enjoyable.

Michelle Lotito air an aircraft and several bicycles.

Ha, interesting - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito

I (and many others) eat school prawns shell/head/tail and all. It's common in Greece. Here's an example recipe:

http://www.gourmettraveller.com.au/recipes/recipe-search/fea...

When a prawn tail has been shelled (but tail left on for presentation) and in tempura, I will eat the tail also.

Cannibal!

I've eaten whole prawns on several occasions with no complaints. If they're prepared properly (fried in a batter) then they're quite tasty.

> "Maybe processing the grubs/flies into something less recognizable would help, but at some point you read the ingredients and you're back at square one."

How many of the ingredients do you currently understand? Just use the latin name of the insect and no-one would notice. Given the yield, I can imagine that we'll be eating a lot of insects in the future and in many parts of the world larvae/insects are not a problem at all.

"Processed protein meal" "Amino acid complex (source: ${latin name here})" "Debuggified bugs"

Lots of potential naming zaniness here. Pretty sure food scientists and marketers have this down to a...science?

In fact, insect byproducts are already used in food production. Carmine is a red food dye made from the scales of a particular bug: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine

These guys are working on cricket bars as a protein source:

https://www.exoprotein.com/

(No affiliation, they were a few desks over at a coworking space)

Chapulines[1], a form of fried grasshopper, are already a popular dish in Oaxaca. I've had them, they're tasty, a bit like salty, earthy, not very meaty crab I guess. In fact, there's already a cricket bar based off of this dish[2]. Americans in general are pretty squeamish about their food, but this is not true in many other parts of the world. See tripe, chocolate meat (dinuguan), balut, etc.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapulines 2 http://chapul.com/

Ok, having seen balut, I'd starve before I ate that.

That is a great idea... I've never tried eating bugs, and while I'd like to think that I could get over the stigma and try it, I know that I would have no problem eating them after they have been ground up into a meal, and worked into something tasty.

That said, I was about to buy a box just to check them out, when I saw their crustacean allergy warning... I hadn't even thought of that, and I am most certainly allergic to all of the crustaceans that Americans normally eat, so I might well be allergic to other arthropods.

I used to go out and catch some crickets just for snacks when I was little back in my hometown. I don't think they're that bad. A little much can make you dizzy though (dunno why).

Where did you grow up?

I ordered a box recently and they're not bad, as energy bars go. A little too sweet for my taste.

For the record, a soldier fly is about as closely related to a shrimp as you are to a Cod. Same phylum, different class.

Hmm. multiple legs, exoskeleton, antenna. To the uninitiated person they share a lot more in common than I do to a Cod. We're not talking science here but perception.

These are my thoughts exactly. While I love the idea and think it may be great for some things, I just don't see many people making the switch to eating bugs anytime soon.

Mealworm powder is catching on in health circles. I think the essential difference is that you never have to see the legs, shells, compound eyes, etc. that scream "Insect!". Grind these up, mix them into sauce or a stew, and I doubt I'd care, even if I knew the origin, just like I can see the inside of a slaughterhouse and can still eat ground meat.

A lot of what we eat (steaks, chicken nuggetts, hamburger, bacon) is dissasociated with the source form of the meat. This should probably be the inroad. If people get used to the idea that they're ingesting insects anyhow, then maybe the rest gets easier?

I dunno..

What is the point of eating insects, though? Why not just eat lentils?

An excellent question, I hope someone weighs in.

I think the proposed value here is in the quality and quantity of protein provided

Boiled Lentils are around 9% protein - http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/4783?qlookup=16070&ma...

Where according to this thesis project presentation grubs are 42% protein.

I was puzzling over how 25% protein could turn into 9% protein, but then I realised: that boiled number is including 70% water. Obviously there is no protein in water.

If you ignore the water, it's 29% protein. Alternatively, 25g/100kcal.

And have my teeth rot from all the phytic acid?

Umm what?

You're supposed to cook lentils. Also, turns out lentils don't even contain that much phytic acid from the start.

Finally, your teeth rot? How? I suppose if you didn't cook the lentils, you might want to chew and ruminate them in your mouth for a few hours (tip: no, you don't), which might be long enough for the acid to have some effect on your teeth. But if you consume them like normal, and apply some basic dental hygiene, you're going to have to explain to me how this could really affect your teeth worse than most other foods (which are usually also slightly acidic).

Lentils don't agree with a lot of people due to taste, texture and/or flatulence.

However, the people who don't eat lentils probably wouldn't touch ground insect meat either.

Aside from the other points made here, many bugs are ecologically cheaper to produce per unit of nutrition. A quick google brings up a (probably biased) article:

http://www.rainbowmealworms.net/blog/why-we-need-to-eat-bugs...

I used to have some other references that were a bit more scientific, but I can't seem to track those down.

I disagree about processing them into something less recognizable would prevent people from having them. No one actually cares reading about contents products especially if you can have in something like medicine.

Lobsters too. Can you imagine steaming and eating a two-pound cockroach? But that's basically what a lobster is.

I predict that techniques will be found to make good plant-based meat substitutes or other artificial meat before anyone figures out how to make us happy with eating insects.

> Can you imagine steaming and eating a two-pound cockroach? But that's basically what a lobster is.

Cockroaches are insects. Lobsters are not. There is a huge difference there.

They meet up much closer in the evolutionary tree than things like pigs or cows. What exactly is the huge difference? They seem fairly similar overall, aside from size and where they live.

But not as different as, say, lobsters and cows. Lobsters and Cockroaches are both nocturnal, omnivorous, scavenging, arthropods.

This is an absurd comparison in the context of food. When it comes to eating animals, we (Westerners) are used to eating muscle tissue. Cows and lobsters have large, edible muscles that can be separated from the rest of the body for consumption, cockroaches do not.

Not even if scaled up to the size of a lobster?

I have no idea about the cockroach's muscle:body ratio relative to commonly eaten animals. But again, this is following an absurdist line of argument.

Our culture will produce many food science innovations before we get around to engineering lobster sized cockroaches. (And even if we did, you are likely back to square 1 in terms of eating large, environmentally inefficient animals for protein.)

Insects are more closely related to lobsters and shrimp than they are to spiders and millipedes, and genetic studies suggest that insects evolved from crustaceans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod#Classification

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

Mycoprotien

I have great difficulty eating shrimp and have zero desire to eat lobster or crab, precisely because of the insect-like association.