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.