Reply #31: scattered thoughts on eating insects [View All]

[existentialist]

1) I've done it. Specifically I have eaten grasshoppers and ants. About the only things that grasshoppers have to recommend them is that they are kosher, and that that are high protein--which, knowing that, is why I tried one. It tasted awful. Later I found out that grasshoppers can carry tapeworms, so if you are going to eat them perhaps they should be cooked.

2) Ants, on the other hand, and least the species that I have tried, taste pretty good--sort of like raisins. I understand that the US armed forces survival manual recommends them. There are so many species of ants, however, that it has to be dangerous to overgeneralize, and of course, some species bite back themselves in rather nasty ways--some also sting.

3) I also remember reading Claude Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques, wherein he relates his experience with some South American tribes, and where in his research he found himself needing to keep a promise and eat some of the beetle larvae that the tribe cultivated by placing a cut in a certain type of tree, and then coming back a few weeks later to harvest the larvae that they knew would be there by then. He reported them to be delectable--like lobster dipped in melted butter. I've never had the opportunity to try them myself, but given the opportunity how could one turn it down after such a recommendation?