Crickets as food

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Antoinette_W

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Is it a sin to eat roasted crickets?
Apparently they are an excellent source of protein.
 
I ate ant larvae (escamoles) in Mexico. It is a delicacy there. Tastes like butter 🙂
 
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John the Baptist ate locusts. Some authors say that, at that time, it was customary in Judea to let the locusts dry out, then grind them to a powder which was sprinkled over the food. They are said to taste like shrimps, but I never sampled them myself. Ants neither. Never tried spiders, never tried scorpions, and I feel no urge to fill in that gap in my education.
 
In Brazil, queen ants are a popular snack that come fried or dipped in chocolate.
 
Did you try them? For me, as I said, I’m quite happy to leave that gap in my education unfilled.
 
As we have to become ever more careful in our use of the planet’s resources, eating insects will apparently an increasingly important source of human food. There is certainly nothing sinful about eating them. Even some schools of Jewish scholarship believe that crickets are kosher (not that that is relevant to Catholics as we are not bound by the dietary laws). If there is any sin attached to eating certain foods it would be eating foods in a way that is unsustainable. For example, beef and palm oil are causes of concern for me, although it gets more complicated because there are alternatives to palm oil that are actually more even more damaging to the environment than palm oil is. And with regard to beef, I’m not saying that eating beef is a sin, but we do have to look at how much we are eating and where it is sourced from. In fact, we have to think more carefully about most of the foods that we eat. Somebody was telling me recently that it is now possible to buy Egyptian strawberries in the UK. There is simply no need for us to fly strawberries over from Egypt when they grow in our own countryside. That may mean eating strawberries seasonally, but there is no need to eat strawberries all year round. Anyway, that is my long answer to the question of whether eating crickets is a sin.
 
Antoinette_W said:
Is it a sin to eat roasted crickets?
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Saint Peter had a dream, documented in Acts of the Apostles, where the Lord appeared to him, presenting a great smorgasbord, with foods prepared from every living animal. Jesus told Peter to “Take, eat”, thus abolishing any dietary restrictions in the New Covenant.
 
Crickets are useful bugs, though, and can make good pets. That’s why a lot of people think it’s bad luck or even sinful to kill a cricket, without need.

But if people are hungry enough to eat crickets, obviously there’s a need.

Btw, locusts are technically an aggressive form of the grasshopper, not a normal grasshopper. If times are bad, baby grasshoppers have various genetic switches turned on and off, and they grow up into swarming locusts instead of grasshoppers. At that point, they are determined to eat everything, so it’s more than fair to eat as many of them as you can.

(When bad times are over, the genetic switches turn off and on again, and new locust babies grow into peaceful, solitary grasshoppers.)
 
I remember eating them as a kid at school. They didn’t taste like much but they definitely had a zing.
 
I would have nothing against eating insects, but I can’t get past the, ahem, consumption of the digestive system and those things associated with it. I assume they are eaten whole, and not “gutted”.

I once tried shrimp that had not been deveined, and I had some gastric issues after partaking. I was sleeping in a camper without air conditioning, and was keeping a kind of irregular meal schedule at the time, so that might have been it, no way to know. As the saying goes, correlation does not imply causation (the logical fallacy of “post hoc ergo propter hoc”).
 
Sin? that seems an odd question.

Personally I would not consider it a sin. Somewhat gross, but then I have eaten escargot; add enough butter and garlic and down they go. And I have a liking to oysters, especially on the half shell.

Now, eating snake… I am not sure if that is not tied up with the unpardonable sin.
 
Just make sure your bugs are well-cooked. Some bugs harbor deadly parasites and infectious things like bacteria and protozoans.
 
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