“The Vegans are coming, the vegans are coming!”
~AFFotD Office Sentries
Hi. This might seem like an extreme non-sequitur, but vegans kind of hate us, largely because we loathe vegans. We say “meat is the best part of living, ergo, vegans are zombies, and we must destroy their brains” and they flock to our site to say “You are a total ignoramus! Feel sorry for you! Enjoy your rectal cancer ugly people” because that’s an actual comment left on this website by someone who was mad at us making fun of vegan diets and apparently 95% of America’s vegan population doesn’t have a sense of humor. The other 5% are no longer vegan because they just succumbed to their base urges, and started eating someone’s brains (because they’re fucking zombies) (but brains aren’t vegan) (so they’re not vegan anymore) (just zombies).
This will all make sense in a little bit, but first, let’s talk about eating bugs.
A surprising amount of cultures include insects as part of their basic diets. This is called Entomophagy, which is Latin for “eww gross, ha ha, it’s all crawly, hee hee.” It’s common in developing nations, but lately, taboos about eating bugs are being challenged in first world countries like America by nutritionists pointing out that insects are high in protein, efficient to produce for consumption, and aren’t that gross just grow the fuck up, you haven’t even tried it, okay, just take one bite and if you don’t like it we’ll let you have some chicken.
Our stance on the issue might be surprising to those of you expecting us to demand that the world eat a diet of only bacon and steak (which, admittedly, not a bad call) but we’re totally for people eating bugs. Some of our writers have actually done so (not in the “eating worms on the playground to make friends because they were lonely children” way…well, not exclusively that way) and they said they were delicious. People think of eating bugs as digging into worming live messes, which is gross, but it’s also gross trying to bite into a chicken’s thigh as it runs for its life. Cooked and prepared insects can be surprisingly good—crickets taste like shrimp, most larvae are kind of mushroomy, crickets are deep fried so they taste like everything that’s deep fried (delicious), and some other insects even taste like bacon. All of these are good things! We guess some people like the “sustainability” of the food source, but we don’t care—we’ll always welcome an added excuse to try to eat something that once lived on this Earth and has been killed specifically to address the fact that we’ve been drinking since 4PM and man, we should probably get some food in there before going out to the bars.
So to bring our two points together.
Our friends at the Mother Nature Network (sarcasm) posted an article a few months back by their blogger, “Starre Vartan,” entitled, “Eating insects is better than eating meat, but is it any more ethical?” So we’re going to spend quite some time bashing our head into a wall for a while, and writing down whatever curse words come to mind in the process. Enjoy.
Wherein AFFotD Screams “Are You Fucking Kidding Me, They’re BUGS” With Righteous Frustration Towards the Fiends at the Mother Nature Network
So, in order to summarize the article in question, because we’re just stalling here while writing a piece that’s longer than the one we’re criticizing, the author, who shows a picture of her hypocritical face eating grasshoppers at the top of the article, starts things off by talking about honey’s role in a vegan diet. “Not all vegans refuse to eat honey, but many do” she says as our eyes roll so hard our retinas explode and now we’re blingdj whters thee keyhbord?
We’ve actively addressed why we find this to be stupid and funny. Vegans see honey as an “animal product” because “bees are animals” because “animals have faces” and “there have to be bigger issues in the world to focus your angst on than the plight of fucking bees.” It’s stupid, and bees aren’t people too, and frankly, fuck bees. Bees are assholes. Bees don’t care about ruining your picnics, so why shouldn’t we return the favor by raiding their homes and taking some magic sugar juice from them? Honey rules. Fuck bees.
Come at us, you punk ass bitch, what you got?
This of course frames the question of eating bugs. A lot of the information is what you’d find in normal articles that talk about eating bugs that have enough of a healthy perspective to not spend their time wringing their hands about the moral quandary of eating insects—namely, you can get about a pound of edible “meat” from two pounds of insect feed, while cows require about four times that amount. This is where we’re contractually obligated to say, “But, steak is delicious!” but hey, we get it, eating bugs is efficient.
Then of course, the author asks about ethics, because factually, and this is facts to any potential naysayers, we can back it up with self-edited Wikipedia pages, factually in order to become a vegan you have to make yourself insufferable to talk to at cocktail parties.
“After all,” Vartan asserts, “insects build monumental structures, have complex societies and, according to at least one Hollywood insect trainer, can definitely be trained.” We don’t know about you, but to us, this is the most unintentionally hilarious statement we’ve ever encountered, but that’s probably because we’ve realized that statement could be used to describe haircuts and still make just as much sense.
But yeah, no, the fact that there is someone whose job it is to trick you into thinking that he can train bugs says that he can train bugs, yeah, that basically makes bugs the same as puppies.
Oh God fucking dammit, Internet…
The article then delves into the author’s personal preference to not kill insects, especially spiders, which she lets “live in my home because they end up eating the more annoying bugs” which honestly mirrors a sentiment of “I don’t believe in killing serial killers, but I like to keep Dexter Morgan around because he ends up dismembering the really bad serial killers” much more than she would be willing to admit. She says she ate chipolines in Mexico (fried cricket tacos, basically) and liked them, but worries that if people start eating bugs they won’t use it to cut any meat out of their diet, they’ll just eat it on top of the normal meat they already eat.
And she’s damn right! If we developed a taste for fried crickets as a snack, we’d eat that shit while watching TV, and some marketing company would probably come up with a slogan like “crickets—the infinite snack” or some shit. And that’s great! Like, hey, we get it, the idea of eating bugs is gross, but if we were to embrace it, you know we’d find a way to make that shit so impressively unhealthy that every “green” and “health” publication that demanded we add insects to our diet would probably be screaming “what have we done? Now that everyone’s eating caterpillar and macadamia nut cookies with every meal, our diabetes rates are through the roof!”
Meanwhile, after addressing that the “grossness” of eating bugs is stupid (valid point) she pauses.
Reflectively.
To say:
“After thinking about it, I won’t be eating insects again. Ethnically, it doesn’t work for me. I’m already a vegetarian. If I bother to take beetles outside…”
And then we just started punching ourselves in our faces.
We’re being completely serious when we say that directing your sense of ethics to the plight of bred-for-food bugs is quite possibly the biggest waste of concern you can ever have. Fuck bugs! Bugs are gross, fucking everywhere, and in nature are responsible for God-and-evolution’s-most-horrendous-sins-brought-forth-on-this-planet. Bugs are tiny monsters, and we have to eat them before they learn to become giant and destroy us all. Keep in mind that the Earth’s population of ants, and only ants, outweighs our human population. No, not that there are more ants than humans—all of the ants in the world, combined weigh more than all the humans on the planet. How many ants does it take to weigh as much as a human? A million (maybe). So that means, whatever number a Google is, that’s probably how many ants we have. And that’s just one kind of bug.
No.
War on bugs. War on ants. Take them out before they take us out. Fuck you and your vegetarianism, this is for the greater good.
Unless you want the last thing you see on this world to be…
Only it won’t be a carrot next time. Fellas.
#Banbugs #Eatbugs
America Fun Fact of the Day 
You’re so agitated over this author arguing about the incorporation of insects into one’s diet, that you neglected to sufficiently underscore the idiocy of her assertion that, “ethnically,…” eating insects isn’t a fit for her. Awesome. I’m a university professor so I’m well acquainted with grossly obvious incorrect word choice, but this is one of the better confused words choices I’ve come across. My favorite came from a student who gave a five minute presentation on “congenial” birth defects. It was fun listening to her talk about “amicable, friendly” defects with which infants are born.
Alright, full disclosure- that was a typo on our end. Let this be a cautionary tale to all the young people who think writing while drinking is cool. It absolutely is, but makes you look quite the fool on occasion.
That said, lol at congenial birth defects.
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