Get ready, kittehs. We’re taking the bus off-(topic)-road.
The question today: Is eating eating insects vegetarian?
- What if you’re spiritually opposed to eating meat, does eating a cockroach count as “meat”? (I know, I know. Trolling question. But … does it?)
- Or, if you don’t eat meat because of environmental impact, would you eat bugs but maintain vegetarian status? Rather than a long winded explanation that you don’t eat meat, except for little insects?
- And lastly, if you don’t eat meat for healthy reasons … does eating bugs affect your health negatively? Have you tried and compared?
This and more, in today’s musings ….
You might know about my blood test news already, if you’re (one of the seven people) following me on the endmyopia Facebook.
This:
Image is a link to the FB thread. Comment at will.
There’s a much longer story behind this, going back a few years.
Short version, I went on a little excursion to find out the relationship between blood sugar and eyesight. This is a rather huge subject, about which there is a lot to be said. A lot that isn’t being said. Retinopathy, a recent example I briefly covered. A major cause of adult blindness, even if you aren’t diabetic you’re at risk, affects millions of people. Nobody. talks. about. it.
There are a lot of dots worth connecting for those in particular who are at risk for diabetes.
When I started with the sugar eye connection research, I was in Budapest for the summer. I went for the first, baseline blood test. That’s when things go off the rails a bit. It turns out that there are other things that need attention. Off the charts TSH (Thyroid stuff), bilirubin numbers with enough digits to resemble a winning lottery ticket. Adventurous levels of cholesterol. Apparently, I’m a mess.
I was a little shocked, to say the least. And then, off to research all those topics.
It turns out that my little corner of the world, myopia, is pretty much exactly the same as any of those other health topics. Available information is divided up into:
- Mainstream medicine (aka. how do we make the most possible profit by managing a symptom). Arrogance paired with lots of prescription sales. Yay. Alternative to them?
- Coo-coo for cocopuffs pseudoscience Internet hippies. They are the first thing I find once digging past the mainstream. We know these guys already. They who also turn off people to eyesight health talk, by being just … their hippie selves. Then the
- Buy-my-ebook, health-back-in-a-weekend sites. *sigh* These range from accurate and helpful, to well intentioned but nuts (Ray Peat diet, anyone?), to just utter nonsense. And lastly,
- Science minded alt-health explorers, professionally trained or otherwise. Those always seem the hardest to find. Why is that?
The science eventually lead to some usable tools, and I manage to fix the TSH problem. Interesting adventure that, including fun details like ending up in some subway station in Bangkok, buying bottles of pig Thyroid hormone pills from some random guy I found online. Ten bucks for a thousand pills of pig Thyroid, who can beat that?! (Also, wow. That stuff *works*.)
The various findings and experiments did eventually fix my TSH issue (at least till recently, but that’s another topic).
My approach as always, is to figure out which is the top level problem, and focus on troubleshooting just that, first. Once you get that under control, you can start looking at the other issues, if they remain despite fixing the first issue.
Right now, long story short, I’m on to the triglycerides and cholesterol questions. And yes, I know. I’ve been reading all of the things online. One interesting troubleshooting option, the one I’m exploring right now, is eating vegetarian for a while.
If this does the trick, I already have the next question lined up.
What about eating insects?
For one and just for fun, for those who are vegetarian, out of concern for the environment or the animals (rather than health reasons). Is the principal based opposition to meat eating also opposed to eating insects? In other words, can you be a hippie-type vegetarian, and eat crunchy grasshoppers?
One might reason that if a hippie-vegetarian-vegan uses insect sprays and kills ants and cockroaches, eating them wouldn’t seem to pose any additional contradictions to belief premises.
Yes? No?
And for two, it’s worth exploring whether any possible cholesterol penalty created by questionably raised and fed animals also applies to insect critters. For those like me, who aren’t spiritually opposed to eating the moo-cow, but may benefit from not eating it anyway.
Check out this crickets protein bar article, from Yahoo:
Bugs are the leanest, meanest, and most eco-friendly protein source out there, and they’re arriving in the mainstream kitchen — much sooner, even, than the early adopters of insect-laced foods could have anticipated.
It’s no secret that in many cultures around the world, bugs have been, and continue to be, a diet staple. Here in the U.S., it’s starting to become common knowledge that crickets pack a mega-protein punch (ounce by ounce, double that of beef, studies show) and have a complete amino acid profile. They’re also rich in magnesium, iron, and vitamin B12, and are perfectly balanced in terms of omega-3s and -6s.
“Eating insects can add protein, unsaturated fat and minerals, plus B vitamins and iron to your diet,” New York-based nutritionist Kerry Anne Bajaj confirms to Yahoo Health.
And so, we have entered the era of the cricket protein-based energy bar.
Pat Crowley, the founder of Chapul, is one of the pioneers in this food field. With TED talks, participation in a European Union food innovation summit, and a prestigious NEXTY award all under his belt, Crowley is getting ready for a mass distribution of his company’s cricket flour — the main ingredient in its energy bars — in retail stores across the country in June.
“The ‘yuck’ factor was two years ago,” he tells Yahoo Health. “Anyway, that only lasts the first, and maybe second, time someone tries cricket flour, and then it goes away.”
Cricket flour — which is simply made by slow-roasting the bugs and then grinding them into a fine powder — is particularly mild and blends smoothly into just about anything. “You wouldn’t even know it’s there in a blind test,” Crowley says. “The only way you’d feel it is that you’d be healthier.”
Being a complete protein, cricket flour is particularly valuable for people who don’t eat meat like chicken and beef — many of whom may find it challenging to get enough protein for optimal health. But really, cricket flour is a versatile and healthy option for everyone (except, perhaps, for the stricter vegetarians and vegans), and in addition to rolling it out en masse (“we are in 500 stores now and we expect to be in 5,000 by the end of the year,” Crowley says), Crowley and his team continue to experiment in their kitchens with different recipes.
“You can use
[cricket flour] as an all-purpose flour to make muffins, pancakes and cookies, but the day when you’ll go to your neighborhood grocery store and pick up pre-packaged foods like pasta made with cricket flour is right around the corner,” he says.Figuring out new ways to mix cricket flour into food is a main area of focus right now for Kyle Connaughton, head of research and development for cricket bar company Exo.
So far, Connaughton — who formerly worked at England’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant The Fat Duck and was the former culinary director of Chipotle — has used cricket flour in pizza dough and cakes, and he’s even whipped it up into coffee-blended drinks.
There are lots of insect food carts here in Bangkok. It won’t be difficult to see what happens whenever I might add some cockroaches to the vegetarian diet.
Never. I’ve never eating a single one of these.
I’m curious what you think about all this.
Can you be a spiritual vegan hippie vegetarian, and eat bugs? Am I just totally stepping in it, besides referring to them as hippies, posing the insect question? What’s your take on the offensiveness level on that one?
And then otherwise, health and bugs eating? Clearly the environment would benefit … right?
Tell me in the comments below, or on the thread in Facebook. (Or Endmyopia’s Twitter but honestly I haven’t quite made sense yet of how that whole Twitter thing functions). Conversation does interesting things, and I know you, my audience. You’re the quiet observer. But … come on, let me know what you think!
Cheers,
-Jake
