That's simply not true. The UN FAO estimates that 2B people worldwide consume terrestrial insects regularly in their diets. Add in aquatic insects like shrimp or lobster and that number increases drastically.
2B people intentionally consume terrestrial insects.
99+% of humans incidentally consume terrestrial insects. Food processing is imperfect and insect contaminants are common.
"But the FDA allows up to 225 insect fragments per 225 grams of macaroni (yes, that's one piece of bug per gram) and 4.5 rodent hairs per 225 grams. Per 100 grams, the FDA allows either 10 fly eggs, five fly eggs and one maggot, or two maggots in most tomato products."
There's a strong cultural component when it comes to disgust. People in many parts of the world eat insects regularly as a part of their standard diets. In the US, most people don't think of honey or lobster (aquatic arthropod) or carmine (red food coloring) as "insect food" but these items most definitely fit in that category and are commonly consumed.
In the past, people in the west found yogurt, sushi, and lobsters absolutely disgusting. Now many will happily eat those foods, and even consider them delicacies.
Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.
> Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.
Curious if you've got a source for that, because I've lived with 3 infants and every one of them was delighted by the squishiness of poop and needed to be taught that disgust response.
The greyness of your comment possibly indicates it has been deemed bigoted. It's relevant regardless. The subject of human parasitology certainly shows geographic and cultural distributions. One example is a strange case of neurocysticercosis, perhaps the most common cause of epilepsy and result of taenia solium or pork tapeworm. The case I recall involved a Jewish family, all infected and symptomatic. Doctors had difficulty discovering the source due to both assumed rarity of the disease and the preclusion of pork in a kosher diet. The eureka was the servant, who did not practice a kosher diet. Because this worm can lay 80k eggs per day, all of which are small and sticky, they tend to accumulate under fingernails, presumably as a result of grooming and outlier of hygiene. There are numerous parasites that are either or both geographically and culturally concentrated. In the US, neurocysticercosis is most common in California. According to sources not my own, this is due to the larger population of individuals who come from areas where swine handling is more common, along with certain mitigation practices or lack thereof. The French have a higher rate of toxoplasmosis, possibly due to, eg steak tartare. There are many examples.
> Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.
Others are learned by experience. I used to like peppermint a lot, until one day in uni I poisoned myself by drinking half a bottle of peppermint schnapps. Ever since then, for many years, the smell of peppermint makes me dry heave and physically gag uncontrollably. I cannot tolerate peppermint at all, something in my brain 'learned' that peppermint is a poison and won't tolerate it.
This rendering of the data is neat, but there's no clear way for anyone to provide a different rendering or access the underlying data (it's embedded somewhere in a script) to scrape or mash up with anything else. It's also not a progressive enhancement over a static version of the svg; it's just blank unless you're willing to run that js.
Good thoughts. There's a lot to be added and improved upon - this is just the beginning. We're planning to incorporate all of the above, so this feedback helps.
