This is a big thing that some progressives are doing back East in the Acela corridor while the rest of us are grilling out on Memorial Day. I saw it on CNN this morning.
“Can you think of a good reason not to try a cicada, other than “ew”? I’ve posed this question to numerous friends and family, even my partner’s extended relatives, now that Brood X is swarming parts of the United States. Eating cicadas just makes sense, even for someone like me, who’s been a stalwart vegetarian since basically the last time they appeared, in 2004. They’re a bountiful and easy-to-forage protein source, they very likely won’t make you sick, and they’ve made appearances on some Native American and Chinese dinner tables for centuries. (Even Aristotle ate them.) Plenty of evidence suggests that they don’t feel pain the way other creatures do, if that kind of thing is important to you. I watched Fear Factor back when Joe Rogan was cool, I’d remind everyone. “Ew” alone cannot stop me.
Except maybe it can! a tiny voice burbled in my head as I pulled into the packed driveway at Cicadafest last Saturday afternoon. The event at the Green Farmacy Garden, a medicinal-plant sanctuary and educational garden in Fulton, Maryland, promised live music, cicada-inspired art, and yes, a cicada tasting menu. Throughout the garden, I could see maybe 30 people, a mix of couples and families, milling around. Volunteers, some barefoot, were running platters of cicadas in and out of the building. Among them was Veri Tas, the garden’s events and communications manager, a vegan who swore off industrial meat and dairy a decade ago and who was inspired to host Cicadafest partly as a way to try insect protein. You could easily have mistaken the event for a neighborhood barbecue hosted by someone’s environmentalist aunt, were it not for the conspicuous collection of folding tables holding our snacks. I approached them hesitantly, trying to ignore the beady red eyes and disapproving screeches of their cousins from the nearby bushes. …”
Apparently, the cicadas are crunchy and they gush when you eat them raw, which is what you would expect by looking at them. Brood X is the Great Eastern Brood.
We also have Brood XIX cicadas here in the Alabama Black Belt. I’ve never heard of anyone around here catching and eating our cicadas though. They last emerged in 2011 and will emerge again in 2024 when Joe Biden loses the election without any of us rednecks bothering them!
I’m totally fine with dedicated vegetarians and vegans eating the bugs and Jew Yorkers living in the pod. You go girrrrl! It’d make a nice meme to make a Gadsden flag with a big, fat burger and “From my cold dead hands” on it.
If insect meals are your thing, why stick to cicadas, when we have so many ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes,and fleas?
In Dixie it really would be easy to arrange a nice bug soup, bug souffle, or bug stew for you…
Good point
Hey, Thais eat cockroaches.
What better way to urban cleanup, the new ghetto delicacy.
Don’t call them “chiggers.” The woke, PC term these days is “Insect-Americans.”
Cockroaches soon to be on the menu……Mr. Renfield…here are freshly caught cockroaches you requested…tuck up, old fellow….we are all peckish for cockroaches these days…
These “anchor women” will do anything for their liberal causes.
To keep a job.
They’re sick of working the counter at Nordstroms, for min wage.
“These “anchor women” will do anything for their liberal causes.”
Whatever producer goldstein puts in the script.
It goes to show how easily Americans can be manipulated and fooled by the talking head to think that eating bugs is good for you.
I don’t know about anyone else here, but when I sense a mosquito biting me, I slap and then eat it, if I’m lucky enough to “get” it. They’re so small that they don’t even register as a taste. I figure it’s justice: the vampire was eating me, why not give it its own medicine? Never got sick from it, must have eaten barrels full of em by my middle-aged existence now. Stop being squeamish, people, EAT YOUR ENEMIES!
Will we have to pay the kosher tax for the privilege of eating those bugs?
This doesn’t make me want to save the worlds environment/climate makes me want to destroy it Is climate change even real how about all the fracking thats being done or other big businesses destroying environments and natural habitats. I feel like these eat bug articles take the pressure off big oil
Gangweeders and honkpillers be like we live a society!
“Can you think of a good reason not to try a cicada, other than “ew”?
It’s hard for me to imagine being so braindead you could write that line and not see how stupid/meaningless of a thing it is to say.
Piss & Shit were evolved to have an ew factor to stop people like this moron from eating poop, but apparently she isn’t taking no for answer.
It’s like when people say “it’s natural” when trying to handwave away the dangers of their favorite drug
Plenty of poisons are natural. It’s a meaningless statement to make in relation to safety. And plenty of things have an ew factor to keep us away from it