Now this week, because I can’t help myself, I’m going to give commentary as we read this article, rather than at the end, and I’ll try to make it clear when it’s me giving commentary and when it’s the article giving the article. But I hope it’ll all make sense. Anyways, away we go:
Bugs Instead of Turkey? Why Insects Make a Perfect Thanksgiving Dish and How to Cook Them
OK, so right now we can tell that this is either clickbait or if it’s not clickbait then I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. Anyways…
BY KASTALIA MEDRANO for Newsweek
About 80 percent of the world already eats insects,
Well, this was a statistic that they supported with a hyperlink to an NPR article. The NPR article does not say or insinuate that 80 percent of the world eats bugs. It states that bugs are eaten in 80 percent of the countries in the world. Conflating the two is preposterous; and anybody who has a career in journalism who makes a mistake like that needs to find other work because she’s either stupid or a liar. Think about it like this and you’ll see why this is such a whopper. What if I said, 100% of the world commits incest. Yeah, you don’t like that do you. But if by that I mean that incest is committed in 100% of the countries in the world you might understand my claim but you would say that I’m still wrong and dumb and need to learn how words work—or that I’m lying to you. Moving on…
which are a fantastic source of protein. As Americans prepare for this year's Thanksgiving meal, perhaps it's time to consider the many merits of a bugcentric holiday feast.
No it isn’t.
Insects are a food source in many places in the world for good reason.
Yep. Poverty.
Fried grasshoppers, as The New Yorker has reported, are excellent sources of iron and zinc, and contain three times as much protein as an equivalent serving of beef. In West Africa, they're an invaluable staple for warding off a dangerous protein deficiency known as kwashiorkor.
Also, in West Africa people are poor. In West Africa there are 407M people living in 15 countries with a GDP per capita average of $1,783. The GDP per capita for 8 of those countries is less than $1k! So, let’s be frank, if people in West Africa are eating grasshoppers to ward of protein deficiency diseases they probably are doing so because they can’t afford beef, pork, fish, or poultry. Moving on.
According to PBS, a single 6-ounce serving of crickets has less than half the saturated fat as the same amount of ground beef (plus twice the vitamin B12).
Half the saturated fat and 0% of the dignity.
There are the holdouts who prefer honey-baked ham, but turkey is pretty unquestionably the reigning Thanksgiving centerpiece. Aside from the fact that people like the taste, turkey is a popular meat in the country because it seems both healthy and environmentally friendly.
I honestly don’t know what she means by country, if she means amongst rural folk, or if it was a typo and was meant to be “this country.” Either way, no. People like turkey because it’s tasty and it’s traditional. Most normal people are not thinking about the environmental friendliness of their once per year Thanksgiving meal. Moving on.
Those things are true, sure, but really only in the context of comparing turkey to beef. Cows use at least 11 times more water than turkey and nearly 30 times more land. Add in the sheer volume of methane gas produced by our country's cattle (grass-fed or not) and the fact that red meat is also very bad news for your heart and yes, turkey is a great choice.
But the benefits of turkey still don't stack up to the benefits of bugs. In future Thanksgivings, you might be persuaded to swap out turkey for crickets,
YOU might. Luke won’t be.
which is also what you will be met with after suggesting this to your loved ones.
"I do realize that insects do have a bad rap," California Academy of Sciences entomologist Brian Fisher told PBS. "Most people see insects are pests or as dangerous. But it's just the opposite. Insects are less dangerous and less of a problem for humans in terms of disease."
I mean except for lice that carried the black plague and mosquitos that have killed up to a quarter of all humans who ever lived by some estimates. I mean except for those two examples…stop knit-picking, Luke, gosh…
Insects are also environmentally friendly, broadly accessible, and affordable. Cricket farming produces 100 times less greenhouse gas and requires 22,000 times less water than beef farming, and this is to yield an equal volume of product.
Don’t care.
Insect protein also can be powdered, and no more resembles the original bug than a burger resembles a cow.
Yeah, but you know don’t ya. You’ll still know. You’ll ALWAYS know.
According to one curious taster, most kinds have a mild, slightly earthy taste, sort of like nuts.
Or like bugs.
To get you in the Thanksgiving spirit, here's a recipe for a bug-based main dish and another for a side. (If you're allergic to shellfish you might be allergic to some bug species, so consult your doctor first.)
Yes. Yes, indeed, consult your family physician for her to run the old bug-edibility tests on you if you’re shellfish intolerant. And of course she ends the article with the word “Enjoy” and gives us a recipe.
So, it’s hard for me to count the ways I hate this article. I mean, it’s not the math part, I mastered counting months ago. It’s the actually being able to articulate all the ways that I actually hate this article. But I think I’ve come up with the most hateful thing about this article and something that has been gnawing at me for a few years and for which I’ve been trying to find ways to talk and preach about.
You see, we have a problem in our culture and society and that problem is that we are riddled with self-loathing narcissism. And it’s given birth to one of the most hilarious phenomena in the history of stupidity. It’s called “acknowledging your privilege.” Here’s what it looks like:
A 20-something college educated white kid with fancy hair and fancy coffee in a paper-cup that has a fancy label, begins to speak about a social issue. Now, Trevvor (with two “v”s) or Meaghanne (spelled exactly how it sounds if you failed English) gives a caveat or preamble to whatever him/ her or she/ they are going to say about said social issue. It sounds something like this.
Trevvor/ Meaghanne: OK, so, first of all, I want to acknowledge my privilege and say that as a cis-hetero, white, middle class, American, my views on this topic aren’t shaped by the lived experiences of the LGBTQ+-BIPOC community…
And then they go ahead and tell us their opinion anyways. I mean, if you’re going to undermine your own argument, there are less smug ways to go about it, but different strokes, ya know.
But they aren’t really undermining their argument. It’s just us fundy rubes who think that undermining your argument undermines your argument. Because in MANY places, “acknowledging your privilege” is not a way to tell people that they can safely stop listening to you, it’s a way to demand that others do. You see, it’s kinda like using the magic words—not Avada Kadavra, they’ll send you to Azkaban for that!—no the magic words, like “please.” You see, in the intellectual world that we’re building normal white kids who didn’t grow up in destitution are being taught that they don’t have a right to speak because people of color need that space and their white, cis-hetero, whiteness is offensive. So, if you’re white and you want to talk you need to acknowledge that you don’t have the right to talk. It’s kind of like a Catch-22 or a Kafka-trap. But it’s not really those things. It’s more like the Kobayashi Maru.
Now, for those of you who went on dates in school, the Kobayashi Maru is an unsolvable test given to potential spaceship captains in the Star Trek universe. The point of the test is that it is unsolvable. It’s an exercise that is supposed to teach prospective captains that sometimes there is no way to win.
HOWEVER, as legend would have it, James T. Kirk, apparently reprogrammed it and beat it, becoming the only cadet to ever defeat the test. So, when people say that they Kobayashi Marued something it means they found a way to make the unwinnable situation work against itself and give you a win.
And that’s what our fresh-faced lily-white youngsters are up to. They are engaged in an intellectual world where their race, sex, creed, or orientation precludes them from having opinions. BUT if they acknowledge their privilege they turn the whole thing on their heads and now they have control.
Now, if you ask me, “Ummm, Luke, how does that work, that shouldn’t work?” I’ll agree, it shouldn’t work—but nobody every claimed that racism was internally logically consistent, either, so let’s move on. Because the point is that privilege has become a bad word. It’s not actually bad. It’s not something that people are actually giving up. But they are SAYING it’s bad. And that’s almost like being intellectually honest, so there’s that.
And yet, you can only play these games so long before you stop playing and you’re just living your life. And at a certain point all this self-loathing begins to add up. At a certain point all this talk about how privilege is bad actually affects people and shapes their thinking. It’s one thing to lie about privilege being bad and make a woke pantomime. Because, as I’ve said before, all Wokeism is performative Wokeism. It’s one thing to be disingenuous and just use it as a way to keep people like me out of conversations but to give yourself a backdoor into them. It’s wholly another thing to hear your whole life that privilege is bad and shameful and then to eschew it.
And that’s what we’re seeing. As younger generations of people and older people who oughta know better but don’t are inculcated into this cultic nonsense that privilege is bad they believe it. They seek to eschew privilege by chewing on bugs.
Allow me to quote me, but not the right now me, but the me from back in April:
I think the reason why our culture (either in truth or pretense) is trying to shed the unwanted privilege is because our material blessings are making us miserable. And they’re making us miserable, not because they’re bad – but because good blessings to the thankless become burdens.
For every blessing God gives us, we have an obligation to give thanks. The longer we go in thanklessness the more of a moral debt we create. And as that debt grows, so does the moral and spiritual weight of owing that debt. Refusing to thank God is like being the Little Dutch Boy – all the gratitude is fit to shatter the dyke of our pride, but we have to sit there keeping our fingers stuck in the holes. But it’s worse than that – the boy kept his finger in the dyke because he loved Haarlem and wanted to save something good and beautiful and innocent. Our latter day Niederländer hate the homely houses and detest them because the quiet and calm happiness of average people in average homes, like all blessings, can only be enjoyed when we give thanks to the giver of all good gifts. We don’t want to save Haarlem, we’re trying to blow-up the dyke and destroy it because it’s a constant reminder that we’re neither special nor the creators of our own existence. Material blessing from God: prosperity; privilege; call it what you will, these blessings accrue and the longer we put off the reckoning the more in debt we are – and so we try to sell the assets even though we’re underwater.
You see, friends, it comes down to this, good blessings to the thankless become burdens. Lemme say it again, because this is crucial to understanding our culture: good blessings to the thankless become burdens. And these burdens, they grow ever greater and greater, until they set us to weeping. And we, like Christian in the City of Destruction cry out that the burden on our backs will sink us lower than Tophet. But there’s no Evangelist to lead us to the Wicket-Gate. Instead, our young people are getting Leftist Legalism. They are told to do their penance. They need to acknowledge their privilege and eat their bugs.
Friends, the bugs aren’t about protein and they aren’t about the planet. It’s about degradation. Bugs are gross. Everyone knows they are. That’s the point. Humiliation is the point. They don’t want you to be convinced that they aren’t gross. They want you to know that they’re disgusting and eat them anyways.
And humiliation has always been the tyrant’s way, from Easter Emperors making people kowtow, to Roman crucifixion, and on. The Soviets perfected humiliation. Everything about their secret police state terror organization was about inflicting humiliation on people. And our police state does it to. That’s why the FBI brings more guns than necessary to rifle through your underwear drawer at 4 in the morning when they could just request the documents. It’s about humiliation.
The bugs are about humiliation so that those in power and have more power over you. End of story.
But people are eating bugs because on their side of the ledger this is their religious penance.
You see, without Christ, you have nobody else to take your sin, so you have to deal with it all by your lonesome. And the problem with that is that you can’t. So, if you can’t take away your sin you inflict misery upon yourself to make up for the pleasures of indulgence. And that’s what the bugs are.
The bugs are a godless nation’s way of doing penance. People are so ashamed of their privilege that they have to do penance. They’re so sorry that they were born into wealth and prosperity that they need to chomp on crickets.
But why? Why be sorry for being born into wealth and prosperity? Because they refuse to give thanks for God for it. Remember the key to understanding all this is: good blessings to the thankless become burdens.
But that shall not be our fate. No. We shall eat the fat, drink the sweet, and rejoice for the joy of the Lord is our strength! Brothers and sisters, this thanksgiving, this Christmas, this New Years, this Feast of the Epiphany, eat too much turkey, have too much cake, have an extra glass of wine or a few extra beers, sing some Christmas carols to make your husband annoyed, and then have some more turkey and some more pie and just fall asleep on the couch and stay there. Have a party. Feast. Rejoice with everything in you and do it to the glory of God. Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His love endures forever. Give thanks to God and you’ll never be guilted into bugs. Give thanks to God and rejoice in His good blessings with joyful hearts.