I don't get it and I'm from a fishing family

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.

oh there's some tasty bugs out there already. people are just too squeamish about it.
- 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.
- I believe you, but I'm gonna need some examples...
Or you could, y'know, just eat beans instead.
- Deveining is a part of preparation

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.

Sounds to me that the common preparation is to just blend them into a powder at which point they're just a non descript protein rich powder
- Still no tasty meat.
- I mean, at that point just use soy beans.

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

You got a point, but the kind of bugs eaten in some parts of the world are usually the fatty kind .
- See, at a glance, that thing looks disgusting. I have an instinctive revulsion to the thought of eating it.
  I guess some people would say the same for whole live shrimp though, and I grew up fishing them out of the sea and boiling them up in a pot.

Oh I can explain it easily! One of them tastes good and the other one tastes bad. That's pretty much it... Not sure how it's so confusing though

Have you ever tried insects? Those who have have said that they taste good. They said it tastes like shrimp.
- Yes. Do not recommend. It is okay to say no to drunk dares, ugh so gross.
I dunno I feel like most bugs would be pretty decent fried in Gaelic butter with salt.
- That could be said for just about anything.
- I've tried crickets and ants before and they were decent with a ton of seasoning but it sure as hell wasn't as good as lobster.

TL;DR: disgust is learned.

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.

Shrimps is bugs

Show the tattoo

In case your serious that you don’t get it. The bottom pic is all crustaceans that are more closely related to insects than fish.

Op is saying they don't get why many ppl frown upon eating terrestrial insects but do eat aquatic ones.
- 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.
...That's the point they're making....
They don't get how we like to eat water arthropods but not land ones...

If all the meat on earth disappeared tomorrow, I would become a vegetarian before ever knowingly consuming a bug.

What if they were raised in a hermetically sealed environment, dried out, ground into a fine powder, then added to batter to make pancakes?
- I don't think I could eat whole bugs, but bug flour? Easy.
- so just regular flour?
- Lol this is something I do from time to time. Cricket flour is available where I live and it makes great breakfast pancakes!
- No thanks

I've had crispy dried grasshoppers that were chill once, and some BANGIN cricket tacos in NYC.

They're actually pretty great for protein.

I'll eat as many bugs as a billionare eats.

But aren't billionaires completely sick in the head? I'd be careful with a claim like that

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.

Nah fam you can keep the sea bugs, too.

More for the rest of us!

Most people are definitely quite squeamish about eating unshelled shrimp. This feels like a strawman.

Sea roaches

All you need is salt to make them taste like sea bugs.

If that is actually the case, I wonder if Horseshoe Crabs taste different today, than when they evolved? The oceans were much more salty back then.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018206002483?via%3Dihub

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‽
- Right?
  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.
- It doesn't sound like a trick, it sounds like a simple offer that people take up without bothering to ask what's in them.
Chocolate covered giant ants are lovely! Sold in Selfridges (UK).
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.