It's not surprising... I mean look at them. There is an evolutionary reason why insects look disgusting to us. Same reason why feces look disgusting - We're not supposed to eat that.
Faeces look disgusting as you learned that it was disgusting from your parents when you were young. Its unrelated to your own evolution but is instead a memetic idea passed on from one generation to the next
I don't think it can all be reduced down to memetics because there are things which I find disgusting which my parents don't find disgusting. Like oysters for example. Though I think obviously some people are more influenced by memetics than others.
Chicken is less dangerous than pork. I am not going to get involved in a religious argument, but I didn't mention it was the only reason, I said it was one of the reasons.
This simply isn’t true. From a health as well as safety standpoint, chicken correlates with worth health outcomes and definitely leads to more illnesses.
It's wild to me to see such an anti-insect eating tirade on HN. Just observe the comments here: almost every highly upvoted comment is anti-insect, and the comments that express any positive sentiment towards eating insect is flooded with angry responses. Bizarre.
My modest goal these days is to set myself and my descendants up so that none of us ever has to eat bugs. I don't care what it costs. Life isn't worth living if you can't happily chomp a steak, suck down a martini and light a cigarette at the table. It's not to piss people off. It's for enjoyment. Fuck people who can't enjoy life and want to make everything a disgusting misery for other people. If eating cockroaches…
I’ll pick the salad over the steak any day, though. Above all I’d love to see better technology and attention for food safety, though. It’s stunning to see how many people suffer from food born illness today — something I’d thought was far more under control up until my mid 30s. It’s better under many circumstances and I’m not going to pretend it’s anything like it has been in the past. However, we could do much, muc…
> stunning to see how many people suffer from food born illness today The way I see people handle food, I'm not surprised at all. People leave lunch meat out of the fridge for sometimes hours, cut the fungus off things and eat the rest (which is ok sometimes, but often isn't), rinse chicken breast in the sink, use the same tools and cutting boards to handle uncooked and cooked food... And I can keep going. So many pe…
My girlfriend never washed her fruits and veggies. I had to put the kibosh on that, however I am probably not 100% safe with my meat handling strategies, often just rinsing tools before using them on the next substance, justifying it to myself that as long as I cook everything that "meat germs" could have touched before eating, it should be safe, but like, that ain't perfect I'm sure. I also am willing to cook and eat food much older than most people.
Possibly like any other food source, then? Boils down to how they're grown, handled, prepared. Arguably, the wet markets in Wuhan wouldn't have been such a disease nightmare if the cages of live animals weren't kept one atop the other, dripping feces and other fluids between species and breaking the inter-species barrier.
> Boils down to how they're ... prepared. Indeed, boiling down for a half hour or so would probably help.
At something the size of an insect, isn't a dead (and thus rendered safe I think) parasite just more protein?
>> if something can't be eaten raw - it should be avoid in any form. Some foods are changed by cooking. For example, kidney beans must never be eaten raw, but are tasy and nutritious cooked.
It's probably best to avoid all beans altogether. The only exceptions are: coffee beans for espresso and cocoa beans for dark chocolate ;)
Beans and legumes are some of the healthiest foods you can eat, being high in both fiber and a range of beneficial phytonutrients. There is no high-quality evidence that lectins in properly prepared beans cause any health problems.
Anything to do with eating any meat can be dangerous. We don't know why religions banned certain meat. Anthropologists etc give us post facto rationalisations, and, to my mind, even the holy books might be retrospective excuses.
There are two main reasons why religious books of law ban certain behaviors: - to encode social and higienic rules as understood at the time - to signal heressy, prohibiting a common practice carried out by heretics (double points if it is a practice central to those heretical beliefs). For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiti…
> For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled
Is pork any more prone to spoilage, or spoilage-related health risks, than other meats?
My understanding is that the health risks from pork relate mainly to the transmission of disease and parasites in undercooked pork, not spoilage.
exponential has come into popular usage to mean “really high”, i.e. not exponential. I frequently see it used to refer to single values that aren’t even in a time series, or in comparison to one single previous value (“exponentially higher”) when that is, of course, a mathematical impossibility. It’s similar to how unconscious is now commonly used to mean subconscious (i.e. not unconscious) and literally is commonly…
> It troubles me that our specific words are getting watered down by pop usage This is not a new phenomenon; I think we've been able to cope in the past by either clarifying precision by context or adopting new words with the precision we need until they get watered down as well. > literally is commonly used to mean not literally I realize at least one dictionary disagrees with me, but I think that's a mistaken analy…
Also the "literally" one is way older than people realize, being from at least the 19th century
Larger animals can be inspected individually to find pathogens or diseases. Insects are so small that it's practically impossible to inspect each individual organism. You can do sampling of the batch, but the odds of missing bad ones are still high. Same with the fruits and vegetables, some are easy to inspect, others are almost impossible, or impossible to clean. There are kosher (insect-free) versions of lettuce an…
Not that I want to eat them but you could irradiate the insects to kill anything like they do with spices.