Have you ever eaten a bug?

[cubinator]

17 hours ago, Nuke said:

thing is by the end of the day there were no muffins left, i even went back for a couple more myself. they tasted like any other blueberry muffin. this tends to make one wonder whether thats because all the other muffins have grubs too, and that a grubless muffin might actually not be as good. 

As long as they're from an area you know hasn't been sprayed with pesticides, grubs are just as good to eat as the berries. My faculty advisor has apparently eaten grubs right out of the ground doing field work. I'm sure the extra protein in your muffins wasn't a detriment.

I see little insects (springtails maybe?) crawling around my blackberries all the time.

Today I had some cricket flour at lunch, which I got from a local farm I visited yesterday. I made the flour the way we make "farofa" in Brazil, with a mixture of cricket and cassava flour.

[Misguided Kerbal]

I've eaten a few bugs, but not willingly. Not that flies taste good or anything, but I'd be willing to try some insect foods.

[adsii1970]

On 7/9/2020 at 5:14 AM, p1t1o said:

I had some of those chocolate covered giant ants. 

They werent very nice. Not in a gross way, just it was like eating a small ball of those shards of popcorn-kernel-skin that get stuck in your teeth, that tasted like soil.

That's why you have to wash them before you cover them in chocolate!

11 hours ago, razark said:

I've had that before.  Or something like it.  Not sure exactly what sort of insect was involved.

There was one time when the wife had made dinner, and while I was cleaning up afterwards, I noticed that some of the rice in the container was crawling around...

Yeah, we had that happen with a bag of Great Value (from Wal-Mart) brown rice. Yeah, rice isn't supposed to move.

[razark]

This thread is now making me paranoid about my pantry.

[StrandedonEarth]

47 minutes ago, razark said:

This thread is now making me paranoid about my pantry.

Yeah, we tossed a lot of food from our pantry when we discovered pantry moths. A lot of fine webbing in the rice and flour bins....Lots of scrubbing that day...

We also had a bag of potatoes go bad in there. It took forever to get the smell out.

Spoiler

 

[cubinator]

12 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Yeah, we tossed a lot of food from our pantry when we discovered pantry moths. A lot of fine webbing in the rice and flour bins....Lots of scrubbing that day...

We also had a bag of potatoes go bad in there. It took forever to get the smell out.

  Hide contents

 

You know, there are actually other insects that will eat only the decaying matter...I won't say anything about using them on your people food, but they're quite good for keeping other insects' pens clean.

[Nuke]

3 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

That's why you have to wash them before you cover them in chocolate!

Yeah, we had that happen with a bag of Great Value (from Wal-Mart) brown rice. Yeah, rice isn't supposed to move.

i find the biggest source of weevils was a case of kraft macaroni and cheese that sat in our pantry for a year or two. the tell tale sign is little tinny holes in the cheese packet. im not sure whether they come with the cheese or the noodles. but ive found them in flour, bisquick, sugar (that was the fastest weevil ive ever seen, and this may have been cross contamination since i only found one), buttermilk powder (produced some of the largest and most numerous), and various pastas, but i have never seen one in rice. with non-tube pasta you can usually just ignore them and they float to the top and can be skimmed off with ease. with things like flour any live weevils get ground up in the milling, but the eggs can survive, the use by date usually correlates to when they hatch. to store it long term you need freeze it and transfer it to a clean sealable container after a few days, never put new flour on top of old flour. many drystuffs come in paper packaging, which wont stop cross contamination so be sure it gets stored asap. 

because of the pandemic we have received so much extra money that our pantry is overflowing, and a lot of it is going to get contaminated before we can use it. so i have been rotating it through what little freezer space we have. also when living in a humid environment, freezing sugar seems to cause it to clump up into solid blocks that need breaking up. you can tape a couple silica gel packets to the inside of the lid to keep it from re-clumping. we usually arent so concerned about sugar though as we rotate through it pretty quickly.

Edited July 11, 2020 by Nuke

[Nuke]

5 hours ago, cubinator said:

As long as they're from an area you know hasn't been sprayed with pesticides, grubs are just as good to eat as the berries. My faculty advisor has apparently eaten grubs right out of the ground doing field work. I'm sure the extra protein in your muffins wasn't a detriment.

I see little insects (springtails maybe?) crawling around my blackberries all the time.

Today I had some cricket flour at lunch, which I got from a local farm I visited yesterday. I made the flour the way we make "farofa" in Brazil, with a mixture of cricket and cassava flour.

they are from a park near a small beach not far from the end of the airport runway (not really a great place for plane watching as we only get a few a day, a couple alaska airlines flights a cargo plane and maybe a medivac if you are lucky, you are better off at the floatplane dock for that). judging by the number of grubs we found they were not using any pesticides at all. up here in se alaska we get a large number of berry species. most neumerous are blueberries and salmon berries (sort of like a raspberry and come in several different colors, we also havew watermellon berries, elderberries, strawberries (usually the deer eat them before they ripen) , and a few others, but not as numerous). by everywhere i mean everywhere, lots of kids like to chew up the salmon berries and spit them out along the roads and trails so that more berry bushes show up next year, even had one pop up under our deck once. they usually dont have bugs though, or none that ive found. 

Edited July 11, 2020 by Nuke

[Lewie]

Once. I accidentally ate a bug in second grade. I ate half of a raspberry, and I felt a crunch. When I looked in the other half of the berry, there was half of some sort of bug flopping around 

If I were to count all the bugs I accidentally ate at a Boy Scout camp, it’d be close to a hundred. It was gnat season, and they were everywhere.

Edited July 11, 2020 by Lewie