[wonderbore]

> Ask yourself why humans refrained from eating them

Plenty of humans don't eat plenty of meats and sea animals either. Traditions don't necessarily contain good wisdom.

I think seeing a bug feast on feces and then having it sneak up on your food stashes might trigger an obvious reaction (similar to pigs and the reason why some don't eat them)

[krona]

> Traditions don't necessarily contain good wisdom.

What is the bad wisdom here, that eating insects, rats, various other disease harbouring vertebrates is actually misplaced medieval health & safety?

[wonderbore]

Correct. All of our food contains parasites, pathogens, and deadly chemicals, even those we eat the most like pork, salmon and cassava. The difference is that we learned how to deal with those risks. Literally water can be fatal sometimes, this issue is not specific to bugs.

The study at hand specifically mentions that further research is required in order to reach the same level of safety for bugs as well.

I don’t think there’s an exact correlation between safety and “what we eat,” which is rather more a consequence of availability and customs. Lots of countries don’t eat horse meat or snakes. Neither one is particularly unsafe.

[vincnetas]

Eating pigs are much more likely to transfer parasites/diseases if prepared improperly. So in this case traditions do contain good wisdom.

[_0w8t]

Compared with cows or sheep pigs eat what humans can eat, so growing pigs means wasting a lot of food that could be fed to people. Many historians argue that this was the primary reason why pork was banned in Islam and Judaism, not because pigs were considered unclean.

[MichaelCollins]

> growing pigs means wasting a lot of food that could be fed to people [...] not because pigs were considered unclean.

Heh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sty#/media/File:Green_glazed_t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet

[t-3]

I've always heard it was because they'll happily eat human corpses (and other carrion). Especially back in the day, livestock were rarely penned, but rather let loose to forage. So pigs would be seen at battlefields eating corpses.