If you've got cleaned, cooked seafood that smells like fish shit, you're at a shitty restaurant. My only takeaway from this is that we should really see if we can make terrestrial insects taste as delicious as we make aquatic insects taste.
For me its mostly the legs/heads. I dont fuck with heads on anything and legs need to be way bigger for me to be interested. I'd try one of those fly/mosquito burgers tho.
The bottom ones have delectable white meat inside. The top ones are all brown guts and crispy, musty shell. Nobody is shelling crickets for a worthwhile piece of meat inside like you do a shrimp or a lobster.
They look similar to bugs, sure. But let's not pretend it's the same thing.
Well the latter have more "meat" on them, whereas bugs are mostly just "shells" once they die. You aren't eating the shells of crustaceans, you're eating the innards
Bottom line is that while there are things that we're hard-wired to reject, the rest is more about what social groups teach us at a young age. Also, we can overcome the hard-wired aspects to an extent, again through social reinforcement.
I live in a fishing town, and I used to love crab, until I was adult and it was my turn to prep them. The first time I turned a crab over and saw the bottom, where all its freaky little legs connect, I had a real "oh god this is either a bug or a space alien" moment. I can't stand crab anymore, just the thought of it makes me feel nauseated. Lobster too. Somehow shrimps are okay, though.
It's gross sure but i never understood how that would make someone stop eating it. For me no matter how gross something is the taste is the only thing that matters.
Other examples, rabbit's brain, black pudding, or in general how we kill most animals to make steak... It's always creepy, gross or a bit disturbing, but it never changed my taste for it.
Of note, insects diverged from the arthropod line that would become crabs, lobsters, etc in the beginning of the Carboniferous or late Devonian, a solid 350-400 million years ago. This means crabs and grasshoppers are more distantly related to each other than humans and frogs.
Stamets, do you want me to catch the 4 inch cockroach that I've been raising free-range in my apartment and send it to you to find out? It's on a non-GMO diet.
It's all about presentation. I can prep crickets in a way that almost anyone will eat them. Feed them oatmeal for a few days, then slow roast, powder in a blender, combine with sesame oil, salt, and spices, stuff it into wonton wrappers and steam. If nobody knows what's in them they disappear. But if I do fried crickets like the ones the Korean street vendors sell, very few non-Asians would touch them.
A lot of insects can be prepared using familiar presentations and the unsuspecting will devour them. I found ant cookies delicious - like a molasses cookie. And ground rolly-pollies (sowbug/pillbug/armadillium) could be used to make shrimp shumai and nobody would be the wiser.
So they're really popular if you pulverize them so they're totally unrecognizable and then trick people into eating them without respect for bodily autonomy‽
Like this person is saying all this and coming across as quite smug about getting people to eat something by deception that they wouldn't choose to eat...and acting like it's something to be proud of.
I can't imagine it'd be getting a similar positive reaction if it were about sneaking animal products into a vegans meal.
Real question: if you somehow fed those crickets seaweed, do you think they'd taste a little more... fishy or shimpy?
And ground rolly-pollies (sowbug/pillbug/armadillium) could be used to make shrimp shumai and nobody would be the wiser.
I'm honestly waiting for someone to breed these big enough to use whole, somehow. Terrestrial cultivation of shrimp-like food has got to be a better way to go than actual shrimp.