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openly_gray t1_jdbc9au wrote

What you refer to as meat is mostly muscle tissue, so yes bugs have meat on the inside of their exoskeleton. If you ever had crab or lobster you had “bug meat”( crustaceans and insects are in the same phylum, arthropods)

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chcampb t1_jdbjnc2 wrote

The issue with people eating bugs (Not that it's really an issue just a cultural thing) isn't because they don't have meat, but because it's not really possible to separate the meat from everything else. So generally, if you eat the thing, you eat the whole thing, shell and organs and all.

Compared to say, lobster or shrimp, which are... is butchered still the right term?... Prepared?...

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Best_Call_2267 t1_jdcqss9 wrote

I don't think about ant guts when chewing on chocolate covered giant ants.

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simple_mech t1_jddeczm wrote

Umm… where do you get these from?

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Best_Call_2267 t1_jddesrw wrote

In the UK you can buy them in Selfridges food court. There's one in London and Brum.

You can buy scorpion lollies and meal worn snacks too. 😃

You may find some online outside the UK.

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HiHoJufro t1_jdhkbzp wrote

>In the UK you can buy them in Selfridges food court.

Oh man, I just got back from London and didn't notice this when I checked out Selfridge's! Totally would have done that.

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LongLastingStick t1_jdciidr wrote

Is something like a grub then technically all meat?

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Crusty_Nostrils t1_jdgyh17 wrote

No, it has the guts, legs, and head on one end and then a sausage of muscle through which runs the alimentary tract. If you pull off the head and legs and carefully extract the guts you'll be left with the meaty part

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[deleted] t1_jdbourk wrote

[removed]

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goneinsane6 t1_jdbs1pa wrote

Afaik we do the same with small shrimp eaten whole (and also with some bigger shrimp/prawns(?))

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Abyss_Bringer t1_jdbukth wrote

very small shrimp sure, but larger shrimp and prawn are oftentimes "deveined" which means removing the intestines. It's not totally necessary (it can change the texture sometimes to not devein larger shrimp/prawn). That said, cooking things kills bacteria, so you're not at risk for not deveining.

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ChemicalRain5513 t1_jdbz5bo wrote

>That said, cooking things kills bacteria, so you're not at risk for not deveining.

Then why are slaughterhouses so under scrutiny to prevent fecal contamination?

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know-your-onions t1_jdc1hb1 wrote

Because a lot of people like to eat steak rare.

But chicken carcasses for instance, are processed in a way that pretty much guarantees faecal contamination, which is where the salmonella risk comes from. But you can process chickens more carefully and eat the meat rare if you like - it would just make chicken much more expensive in the western world.

Cooking certainly isn’t a failsafe way to render any and all food safe to eat though. If it were, we wouldn’t need to worry about a bunch of other food safety stuff either.

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Teledildonic t1_jdcufl8 wrote

The structure of red meat makes it very difficult for bacteria to penetrate below the surface, which is why you can eat a steak rare as long as the outside gets cooked.

I dont believe poultry meat has the same "impenetrable" properties, so I don't think you can process it in a way that could be safe rare.

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adx442 t1_jdcbiz7 wrote

Not a food scientist, but the explanation I've heard is that some bacteria produce toxins as metabolic byproducts that aren't destroyed by cooking. You can have a hamburger that had a colony of E. coli living in it that's cooked well done and become sick from the toxins left behind.

Also, undercooking can leave some bacteria alive. If a piece of meat has a small amount of bacteria right before cooking, this will probably be fine. If it was heavily contaminated at the source and packed with bacteria by the time it's cooked, 10% remaining of a huge amount is enough to colonize you and make you sick.

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ChemicalRain5513 t1_jdclik6 wrote

What I also don't understand is that E. coli can make you sick if it already lives in your guts. It seems counterintuitive to me that eating your own faeces can make you ill. Even though that's an image I don't want to have on my mind.

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adx442 t1_jdcojmh wrote

It lives in a very specific part of your intestines where other microbiota keep its growth in check and under control. Other places, like the small intestine, don't have that protection. If your large intestine gets perforated and the bacteria can escape directly into your bloodstream, you can develop sepsis and die pretty quickly.

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No_Constant8644 t1_jdd4p1j wrote

There are different strains of E. Coli. The strain in your gut is suited to that location and is kept in homeostasis within your body.

A different strain would not necessarily be kept in check by normal body processes and your immune system would likely see it as an illness thus causing the immune response (a.k.a. Symptoms of illness)

The same thing happens with yeast infections (e.g. thrush) yeast naturally lives on us, but when something causes our body’s to get out of balance it can allow for the yeast to multiply and take over where it normally would not.

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PyroSAJ t1_jdc34mb wrote

The major difference with insects is that the muscle is inside the "bone".

Scaling that up you'd have something like a crab. Scale it up more and you definitely enough meat to have steak.

The size makes it hard to separate the meat from everything else. Can still make a nutrient-rich meal of it, and given how fast they breed and mature it's quite efficient to farm. Processing it in to something people would readily consume is the hard part.

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[deleted] t1_jdclivl wrote

I tried cricket chips growing up. Just roasted crickets with seasoning on them. They honestly tasted good but the wings could get stuck in your teeth really easily. Many cultures do eat insects and some companies are attempting to introduce insects to western Europe and the USA through processed goods like powders. As you already stated, they truly are an efficient source of nutrients. Cows take 6 times as much feed for the same return as crickets.

https://www.fao.org/edible-insects/en/#:~:text=Edible%20insects%20contain%20high%20quality,the%20same%20amount%20of%20protein.

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ndraiay t1_jdd1tf9 wrote

A friend offered me fried silk worms. Tasted like a cross between a peanut and a potato chip. It is one of those things that most people would like if they didn't know it was a silk worm.

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PyroSAJ t1_jdd3dzx wrote

Fried is fine. I was offered mopanie worms a few times in Africa.

I'm still scarred from the ones where the inside is "squishy".

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AlmightyMustard t1_jde9lz1 wrote

Actually because of the fact that you have to eat the insect whole you have to feed them human safe food. On a whole they end up being no more efficient than chicken.

If fed on food waste however they end up being considerably more efficient than other protein sources but unfit for human consumption.

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No_Constant8644 t1_jdd5228 wrote

The “bone” is actually chitin, which is the same thing the flesh of mushrooms are made of so it is actually edible just not great in larger amounts.

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[deleted] t1_jdbx5t4 wrote

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BobbyP27 t1_jdc1j5l wrote

They are not literally insects, they are decapod crustaceans, but both crustaceans and insects are both arthropods. Taxonomically, within the phylum of arthropods, there is the subphylum of crustaceans, and within that the class Malacostraca (soft shell), which contains the order decapods, where crabs, lobsters and shrimp are found. Separately, within the phylum of arthropods is subphylum hexapods, within which the class insects exists. Insects and decapod crustaceans are relatively similar, but not the same.

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Ameisen t1_jdfvy3h wrote

Insects are actually a clade of the crustaceans. Their closest relatives are the remipedes.

That is to say that phylogenetically, all insects are crustaceans.

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acaciovsk t1_jdbzbw2 wrote

There are differences between insects and crustaceans, even though they belong to the same major group within arthropods, the pancrustaceans. Insects are thought to have originated from crustaceans, so technically they're landlubbin crabs

Spiders are a different beast altogether, not an insect at all. They're Chelicerates. We also don't eat marine Chelicerates, like horseshoe crabs and such

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