War Cicada pizza, tacos and sushi are being gobbled up. Why Americans are finally eating bugs. - Remember: The last person to eat the bugs got strangled to death with unbreakable toilet paper via Gentleman Tarzan.


Newsflash, America: Almost everybody eats bugs but us.

Differences in food cultures have often been used to reinforce cultural identity and stereotype the people and cultures in warmer climates.

It may have surprised you to read about how the large Brood X cicadas, emerging after 17 yearsunderground, make for a delicious meal. But in fact, insects are a staple of diets around the world, and we’re just catching up.


Cicadas for dinner? It’s about time!
Other cultures have known how enjoyable insects are for millennia. Today, 2,000 species are eaten by more than 2 billion people. In every corner of the world, people are dining on bugs like sakondry, mopane, grasshoppers and, of course, cicadas. Many cultures even consider them a delicacy — because they are.
We’re just now starting to truly understand the positive impact that deliciousness can have on the planet, because many insects are both more nutritious (rich in digestible proteins, key amino-acids and micronutrients) and far better for the environment than livestock, which can require a lot of land, water and feed.

And most of the edible bugs you’ll encounter actually taste really good. I promise. Cicadas have a nutty, pork-like flavor — if you prepare them a certain way, they can even resemble a giant meaty sunflower seed. Sakondry are known as “the bacon bug” because they actually do taste like bacon. Chapulines (grasshoppers) have the flavor of a sweet, smoky tender jerky with a crispy chicken skin exterior. Green ants have a zesty quality.
There’s also none of that squishy stuff you might associate with eating an insect. Their texture is like other meats when cooked, and their legs and wings crisp up in the heat like chicken skin. It’s just meat; an often-overlooked meat that’s one of the keys to creating a sustainable food system. So, if they’re good for the environment, good for you, and taste great, why haven’t they caught on in America until now?
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Unfortunately, until now, for many people in this country eating bugs was gross. While shows like “Fear Factor,” and even the classic playground dare, sensationalized America’s aversion to eating bugs, our alienation of insects as food — and fear and disgust toward insects in general — has far deeper roots.
While eating insects is common along the earth’s equator, it has likely always been rare in northern latitudes. The cold climates of Northern Europe don’t support the same ample, biodiverse, year-round insect populations that are common farther south, and many insects found within our warm(er) homes have been seen as pests or signs of rot in foods we stored throughout the winter.
These differences in food cultures have often been used to reinforce cultural identity and stereotype the people and cultures in warmer climates. Even though 80 percent of all animal species on earthare insects, we try not to think about them at all, and when we do, we generally reduce their incredible diversity to “bugs,” even when those insects aren’t bugs (such as butterflies), or even insects (say, spiders). These biases and blindspots have not only limited our own experience of insects as food but have also undervalued insects as an agricultural resource to combat food insecurity and biodiversity loss.


I’ll admit it, I was once hesitant to eat insects, too. But after I was served a plate of sakondry halfway across the planet a decade ago, I’m now toasting, frying and whipping up insect sushi and fondue like anyone else on the global block. I’ve met very few people who don’t eat cicadas again after trying them. It’s usually nothing more than the mental hurdles that prevent us from reaping the benefits (unless, of course, you have a shellfish allergy).

Those hurdles are coming down right now, in large part due to Covid-19 vaccines beginning to slow the pandemic within the U.S. We are, like these cicadas, shedding our skins — i.e. masks — and beginning to venture out into the world. After more than a year full of loss and a lack of choices, we are now seizing them. People are trying new things — and one of them just happens to be chowing down on cicada tacos.
But it’s bigger than Brood X just being trendy or people feeling like they’ve crossed a bold new frontier; people actually want to learn about why we should eat insects, and all of the benefits that come with doing so. In every interview I’ve donefor my cicada dishes, which have traveled around the country, I’ve been asked almost immediately about the sustainability benefits, and how insect eating can be a step towards solving some of the issues our planet is facing.

That is a seismic shift, and leaves me with little doubt that, at least on this front, we are turning the corner. It won’t be long before you’re seeing frozen insects in your local supermarket and munching on a bowl of bugs at your local bar. Or, if you’re like me, packing a bag of cicadas in your kids’ lunchboxes.


Our recognition of the interconnectedness between our health and that of the planet is increasing. And where we once might have used novel foods to distance ourselves from “others,” our food culture is now defined by the very diversity that makes this country great. So we are turning to bugs to improve our diets in ways that help us and the planet — bugs that reinforce our wonder in the world and our eagerness to get outside to share a fun meal with friends and family. We all need a change for our collective good right now, and this one comes pan-fried.

Cortni Borgerson
Cortni Borgerson is a professor of anthropology at Montclair State University and a National Geographic Explorer. When she isn’t making cicada tacos with her kids in New Jersey, she’s ameliorating food insecurity and reducing the unsustainable hunting of endangered species in Madagascar through the farming of traditional insects.
 
Now that I think about it, the only way you could really get a caloric, and I can't stress enough caloric net positive result over standard farming would probably be...

to use sewage to feed cockroaches, then use those cockroaches-fed-sewage as a way to quickly recycle human shit into edible protein.
And you'd only succeed at *possibly* feeding one kind of bug. That'll do wonders for people's diets.
 
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And I don't even like seafood but I'll sure as hell eat lobster or crab before a fucking cricket.
At least those bastards taste good. (Lobsters idk about crab I’ve never eaten it.)
Americans are also mutilating their genitals, burning down their neighbor’s buildings over the deaths of a few criminals at the hands of people designed to prevent criminal activity, dying of stress and obssity, and drinking coffee from Starbucks. And if Americans jumped off a bridge, I wouldn’t do that either.

Not in a boat, not on a tree,
not in a lake, oh you know me.
I will not eat them here or there,
I will not eat them anywhere.
I will not eat those nasty plates,
so stop your fuckery, Billy Gates.
:winner:
 
And you'd only succeed at *possibly* feeding one kind of bug. That'll do wonders for people's diets.
Think about it though: you can still afford veggies, and maybe occasional (once a week, maybe once bi-weekly) a bit of actual meat, but most of the time you'd get a protein bar of sorts made of the fucking things, ground up, like the stuff right out of Snowpiercer as your "animal protein supplement". There's be enough calories in that cycle to avoid having the net calories in the cycle between human-shit-fed-cockroaches and the people being fed them. Could even make jobs for people working for newly built "protein supplement" factories and spin it as an environment-friendly, job-creating innovation.

If the above happens they'll probably have the same thing happen that did at the end of Snowpiercer, too. Once people find out what's going on anyway, if they even somehow get to that point.
 
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Can't wait for this bullshit to cause an ecological collapse and inadvertently destroy a shitload of crops somehow.
You just know it will. The economic collapse of forcibly caging the meat industry to shove bugs down people's mouths alone will be bad, but when locusts, roaches, and whatever else they try to farm break out in swarms it will just fuck shit up. I am betting the wood eating bugs will become a second Gypy Moth invasion.
You can just grow them.
View attachment 2282617
They're way more efficient since they take up almost no space compared to the amount of food they produce.
Ok Chang. You also need to heat something like 8,000 bugs to have the proper caloric intake a person requires for daily activites. This is excluding more energy intensive activities and jobs as well. It isn't replacement food by any metric.
 
At least those bastards taste good. (Lobsters idk about crab I’ve never eaten it.)
Lobster is VASTLY overrated for its price. Crab is cheaper, but in general, you're not missing much. Crawfish sort of has a mild unami taste. I know it's not technically bland, but I have an underwhelming reaction to the flavor.
 
Lobster is VASTLY overrated for its price. Crab is cheaper, but in general, you're not missing much. Crawfish sort of has a mild unami taste. I know it's not technically bland, but I have an underwhelming reaction to the flavor.
Crawfish is helped majorly by being cooked in classic gumbo style.
 
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I tried bugs, namely mealworms and crickets. Properly prepared, the taste and texture is decent. I used to be ok with them as a potential additional protein source. Not a full meat replacement, but, y'know, another source, used like tofu or various cheeses. However, it seems that the environmental and nutritional advantages are vastly overrated, and the medial push to get people to eat bugs despite that is extremely off-putting.

As for whorenalists promoting this, here's what happens when the typical Vice-presstitute actually tries to practice what they preach:
 
I tried bugs, namely mealworms and crickets. Properly prepared, the taste and texture is decent. I used to be ok with them as a potential additional protein source.
The closest to mainstream bug eating I see in Arizona are these novelty scorpion lollipops meant for tourists. I can see the appeal as a novelty or as some addition in a hipster restaurant, but I can’t ever see it being a street food like they have in China, but even then, the Chinese don’t eat mainly bugs either.

I’m truly too much of a texture sperg to really get behind eating bugs myself though because the crunchiness weirds me out. I’d maybe eat ants because they’re tiny or crickets if made into flour, but eating a whole cicada seems very gross to me.
 
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The closest to mainstream bug eating I see in Arizona are these novelty scorpion lollipops meant for tourists. I can see the appeal as a novelty or as some addition in a hipster restaurant, but I can’t ever see it being a street food like they have in China, but even then, the Chinese don’t eat mainly bugs either.

I’m truly too much of a texture sperg to really get behind eating bugs myself though because the crunchiness weirds me out. I’d maybe eat ants because they’re tiny or crickets if made into flour, but eating a whole cicada seems very gross to me.
I'm a texture sperg myself, but it's more the slimyness that would bother me with larger bugs. Crickets and mealworms are small enough that they're just crispy and dry when fried, not a weird texture at all.
 
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It'd probably be better turned into a delicious smoothie.


Retards don't realize that cicadas are a once every 17 years phenomenon and are not even a sustainable source of food.


Sounds like Marxism in practice, all right.
A generation of Cicadas are on a 17 year cycle. There’s more than just one cycle of Cicadas. Some cycles are greater, some lesser. I’m sick of people ooking at a rather benign bug. They don’t come “once every 17 years”, they’re fucking annual.
 
A generation of Cicadas are on a 17 year cycle. There’s more than just one cycle of Cicadas. Some cycles are greater, some lesser. I’m sick of people ooking at a rather benign bug. They don’t come “once every 17 years”, they’re fucking annual.
Yeah but they still only come out once a year then each batch has to spend 17 years underground developing. If you start hunting them during this vital mating season their numbers will inevitably decrease, especially since you can hunt down males by their call. We'll end up killing them off like we've killed off bird species before.
 
I tried bugs, namely mealworms and crickets. Properly prepared, the taste and texture is decent. I used to be ok with them as a potential additional protein source. Not a full meat replacement, but, y'know, another source, used like tofu or various cheeses. However, it seems that the environmental and nutritional advantages are vastly overrated, and the medial push to get people to eat bugs despite that is extremely off-putting.

As for whorenalists promoting this, here's what happens when the typical Vice-presstitute actually tries to practice what they preach:
VICE Pressitute said:
I also got paranoid about getting a leg stuck in my teeth and then went to bed feeling like a failure. [...] Zarbos told me that they originally served the crickets as a main ingredient in one of their salads, but they made it a side because it wasn’t selling. Apparently customers would say they’d come back and try it, but never did. Weirdly, Zarbos noticed that kids under the age of 12 took a real shining to the crickets. “We found that kids are really open to it, maybe because bugs haven’t been drummed into their heads as being a bad thing,” he said. [...]
All of [my roommates] eat meat on the regular, but they were disgusted by tarantulas. Why?

Floss bitch! Also, kids were eating bugs on a dare like Dale. That's why we make fun of people for eating bugs.

 
No thanks to bugs, I'll go vegan because honestly why not. Just load me up with shrooms and vegetables and I'll be good.
 
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Yeah but they still only come out once a year then each batch has to spend 17 years underground developing. If you start hunting them during this vital mating season their numbers will inevitably decrease, especially since you can hunt down males by their call. We'll end up killing them off like we've killed off bird species before.
They come out every year but there are specific broods across most the US and Canada that only come out in large numbers every dozen years or so. The cicadas you see in a normal summer are miniscule to the swarms under your feet currently.
 
They come out every year but there are specific broods across most the US and Canada that only come out in large numbers every dozen years or so. The cicadas you see in a normal summer are miniscule to the swarms under your feet currently.
Yes, but those broods cycle between the times they come out so, essentially there are ones coming out every year or two. But if people start eating the hell out of any wild cicadas in numbers over just those of festival goers, they are screwed. The impact of this would be extreme. There are wasps that are totally dedicated just to killing and eating cicadas. Who knows what else depends on them.
 
Yes, but those broods cycle between the times they come out so, essentially there are ones coming out every year or two. But if people start eating the hell out of any wild cicadas in numbers over just those of festival goers, they are screwed. The impact of this would be extreme. There are wasps that are totally dedicated just to killing and eating cicadas. Who knows what else depends on them.
The minor broods make this eat the bugs shit even worse. Journoscum will confidently ignore the cycling sizes of broods, popscience types will say it's ok to mass hunt cicadas because science says so, and articles will shill killing them instead of simply letting them have sex and die so they finally shut up.

It's like that old Midwest locust swarm that happened every decade or so until it suddenly stopped because some forest or plains they lived in got turned into a farm.
 
It's because certain parts of the country that contain quite a few of the educated elite hipster asshole types have been literally covered in cicadas for about a month. Deep down inside, they are fucking sick of them. And they see everything else eating them. The cicada taco is their revenge. Writing smarmy articles about how bug eating will save the world, and how other people do it is just their pathetic cope.
Y'know if these chucklefucks would just say "we're eating these buzzing assholes out of hate and spite" I would honestly have a little more respect for them. Seriously just rebrand with FUCK BUGS! SHOW THEM HOW IT FEELS TO BE BITTEN AND HARRASSED! MAKE THEM FEAR YOU! Would be something I could get on board with.
 
The minor broods make this eat the bugs shit even worse. Journoscum will confidently ignore the cycling sizes of broods, popscience types will say it's ok to mass hunt cicadas because science says so, and articles will shill killing them instead of simply letting them have sex and die so they finally shut up.

It's like that old Midwest locust swarm that happened every decade or so until it suddenly stopped because some forest or plains they lived in got turned into a farm.
It's crazy just how much of the entire landmass in the US is farmland. We're using so much of our flatter land for farms that the deserts are being turned into farms. And yet we wonder why we have water problems now, and way less of pretty much every animal in the country.
 
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