8/17/2006: Insect snacks
 

http://cellar.org/2006/larvae.jpg

If we're gonna joke about eatin' 'em all the time, we should be able to stomach this item, in which those larvae beasties are for sale as snacks. I believe this one came from a Japanese item about China, or maybe it was a Chinese item about Japan -- can't remember.

The next question is, how much money to eat one o' those kebabs?

I don't think I'd pay anything to eat one. They don't look terribly appetizing to me. ;)

They pay you to take them off their hands.

the pupae maybe -- only if a very large cold beer was in my other hand; the seahorses -- only if I'd already had six+ beers prior.

I'd rather be boiled in oil.

I've been thinking about this, and we eat lobsters and crabs. I wonder what these bugs would taste like?

I don't eat those, either! :)

I tried an oil-fried larve once(not nearly as big as those honkers though) and the only improvement the cooking imparted was that they were relatively solid instead of oozy squirt-into-your-mouth-as-you-bite-down juicy. They tasted like a fried mixture of strong cheese and stale milk.

I saw a show once on PBS, probably, where natives in the Amazon were eating huge spiders. They were like tarantulas. Real hairy with fat meaty legs. They roasted them over hot coals on sticks. The roasting burned off the hair. The 'host' of the show tried some of the spiders and said the meat in the legs tasted just like crab meat. He liked them.

I bet cicada pupae taste different though. Like the bodies of a crab or lobster instead of the meaty legs. If you ever got some of those crab or lobster guts in your mouth, you know they are kind of bitter tasting.

Looks yucky to me.

We may all be surprised to know what we would eat if forced into the survival mode. After a few days of fasting, these guys could be pretty enticing. Especially cooked.

The pupae?......have at it.
But the Seahorses make me sad. Not because they're cute and have a warm and fuzzy name. Actually the little suckers are pretty interesting beasties but badly overfished. :(

I like chicken eggs. Sometimes I feel strange eating them. I reckon it's best not to ponder.......

But seahorses are fish, not insects. I wonder if they taste like fish?

On another note, I think the males seahorses hold the eggs and give 'birth' to the baby seahorses.

http://somethingpositive.net/arch/sp12282003.jpg

My sister's favorite food is fried scorpion on a stick. I see things like this every day. Doesn't phase me anymore. I lived just up the hill from the Wan Chai Meat Market in Hong Kong.

If the Seahorses were preserved as a sort of souvenier one could put in one's pencil cup, I'd have one. But not as a snack.

I think it comes down to not eating things that we antropomorphize. Or, in the case of the buggies, look really icky. I am not living in the middle of the Kalahari. When all the McDonalds are gone, I'll consider cannibalism before eating cockroaches on a stick.

One of my friends won't eat pork since she saw Babe. I didn't think the movie was much more than charming, so I don't have any problems eating ham.

For me it just depends on what it tastes like, nothing more.
Sitting in my local cigar shop yesterday and a guy got grossed-out when I told him that all cigars had tobacco beetle larvae in them. People are weird.

The seahorses make me very sad. Are they not endangered now?

There are several kinds of seahorses.

There's about 35 species of Seahorses, but they all live in that fragile zone where the ocean meets the shore. :cool:

I'm with rkzenrage on this one - I'll try most things and judge on the taste. The exception being anything endangered.

I like pigs more because they taste so good. I mean they are so versatile, you can use their skin, eat almost every part of them, race them, ride them tattoo them - surely evidence that that God is a Christian :)

Jules Winnfield: Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.
Vincent Vega: Yeah but bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.
Jules Winnfield: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I'd never know 'cause I wouldn't eat the filthy mother-fu**ers. Pigs sleep and root in sh**. That's a filthy animal. I ain't eating nothing that ain't got sense enough to disregard his own feces.
Vincent Vega: How 'bout a dog? Dog eats his own feces.
Jules Winnfield: I don't eat dog either.
Vincent Vega: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules Winnfield: I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy, but they definitely are dirty. But, dog's got personality; personality goes a long way.
Vincent Vega: Ahh, so by that rational, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules Winnfield: Well, we'd have to be talking one charming mother-fu**ing pig. He'd have to be 10 times more charming than that Arnold on Green Acres.
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:)

If it tastes good and it isn't disgusting feeling in the mouth, why not? I'd eat it if it were Kosher

Welcome The 42!

I can't imagine insects would be kosher - think how long it would take to kill them all properly!

:smack:

Just realised that you probably meant you wouldn't eat the insects, but only because they're not kosher...

Welcome The 42. I see that you are a beadweaver. We probably need to talk. A lot.

...and Good Shabbos!

I don't think those are real sea horses. I believe they are just decorative handles on the skewers. I might be wrong.

My wife grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution (i.e., famine). She tells me they used to dig around the roots of trees to find cicada larvae to fry up. Remember Crocodile Dundee? "Tastes like shit, but it'll keep you alive."

If they were decorations on the stick, they would all look the same. But their tales are all curved differently.

Hi, The 42. Special Ed?.....you should chat with Griff too. Welcome. :D

Welcome, 42.
Pass the goddam insect nuggets.

pssstttt.... they taste like chicken. :eyebrow:

I think it's funny that this entire thread is on eating insects, and whenever an IOTD is about animals, the topic of eating them always comes up, but for some reason, the food discussion was completely absent in this thread.

They were still in their packaging, that's why.

Locusts are Kosher.

What about wild honey?

It's the only food that will not spoil (except Tootsie Rolls), so how can it not be good? :D

What about Twinkies? :p
psst, never mind: http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/twinkies.htm