false advertising. bad

[redthedragon]

petition to make people quit calling things "world's most dangerous" when what they mean is "world's squickiest" especially if there is no data that literally anyone on earth has been harmed by it

this is about casu marzu cheese

(don't go looking that one up if you're not cool with bugs)

Comments

[palominocorn]

Wait, is that the one with maggots?

To me specifically, that's dangerous because I have a bug allergy. I solve this by not eating bugs because I'm an adult and fully understand that not everything I see needs to go in my mouth lmao.

[redthedragon]

Yeah, it is. And that's entirely reasonable.

I really like??? i know what clickbait is but i don't GET it wouldn't it be better to do clickbait by going "larva in your cheese? on purpose?" or something? like at least then you wouldn't be lying about what you're saying.

[palominocorn]

Yeah like I can think of a lot of foods that are way more dangerous than OMG BUGS. (I... have a whole rant about how anti-bug eating is a European imperialist stance that's done a lot of damage.)

Improperly cooked meat! Poisonous animals that need to be prepared just so to remove the poisons! Handpicked mushrooms, since the toxic ones don't look deadly at a glance!

If I had to guess at the most dangerous food, I'd say alcohol. How many drunk driving incidents happen every year? How many assaults happen because someone got drunk and picked a fight? But I guess a bottle of vodka doesn't evoke the disgust response like eeewwww, bugs.

[redthedragon]

Yeah, the way I found out about marzu casu existing was because I was talking about... poorly regulated pre-1920s sausages with someone.

Like, I think in this case alcohol is a much better example. I pointed out moonshine as something similar but actually potentially harmful and my conversation partner just, like, up and dropped it entirely to talk about how bugs are gross though. Alright. but either defend your position or say I was right, what's this. Admit you lost.

Also, like, not for nothing I eat raw fish on a near-weekly basis (they sell sushi at my school). I drink raw eggs. i am realizing now that I just don't like to cook my food and that's a little strange but the POINT is, the point is, sushi is not seen as a "most dangerous fish product" and i'm pretty sure "raw eggs" aren't seen as a "most dangerous animal byproduct" or something. They're just considered normal.
And. like. eating bugs is NOT that weird. they sell mealworm lollipops and cheeto crickets at my school. As it turns out the lollipops, for one reason or another, make me phenomenally itchy if I try to eat them so I probably won't be consuming large quantities of bugs any time soon but... i... I don't know, I'm pretty sure I eat worse regularly.

If I personally had to pick an actual "most dangerous food" I have genuinely no idea what it would be. It all seems to depend on how it's prepared. But, like, at the end of the day I think calling any properly prepared foodstuff "the most dangerous" is going to be disingenuous, because generally people like to not be poisoned, so unless you make something wrong you will generally not be eating (significantly dangerous) food. So in that case I think you're right about alcohol, with a close followup being specifically psychoactive mushrooms, but I also don't know if substances intended to alter one's mind really qualify as like, food consumed for sustenance purposes, you know? Like, I don't even think I'd consider a bottle of wine over dinner to be in the same category as a glass of wine for kicks while out with the friendgroup, you know?

Actually that last paragraph was just a phenomenal example of me thinking myself into a knot. No one should ever call anything the "most dangerous" because it'll always be hyperbolic nonsense. How does anything get rated against something significantly dangerous? If two things can kill you in completely different ways that you have to avoid using totally different methods and both methods are equally difficult which one is the "most" dangerous? is it a tie? how do you even verify these things?

[palominocorn]

For the lollipop thing, if you have a shellfish allergy it might also apply to bugs. You could also have a reaction of some sort to a binding agent or dye in the lollipop.

That gets into a debate on what counts as food and honestly, IDK what the distinction between food and drug is. Like..
if you get both calories and a high from hallucinogenic mushrooms, what's that? What if you have a weird body that gets slightly high off certain fruits? Etc.

Back to the actual discussion, a lot of people have ideas about safety and morality that are based not on any sort of actual thought but on their disgust mechanism. Bugs make them feel gross, ergo bugs bad, ergo eating bugs unsafe. That's really all it comes down to. And like... I wish people would think these through, because disgust reactions tend to be rooted in deep seated bigotry, but IDK how to reach them.

[redthedragon]

I'm pretty sure it was the candy, rather than the actual bug.

Yeah, for me I usually just make the distinction intent. Are you eating it to eat food or are you eating it to engage in mind altering substances? But of course that gets wibbly- what if I'm drinking a red cup of vodka because I like the flavor? That's still definitely overindulging. So it's not a great measure.

Absolutely agreed. I think a very important part of reaching them is just modeling the behaviors you'd like to see- reasonable levelheadedness, respect for others, not making snap judgements without proof- but this is, unfortunately, not profitable.

[sexytronians]

Because of this I have now learned there is a black market for cheese. Not sure I would eat it but that's not because I'm squeamish about eating insects it's just I've got a weird thing about maggots/worms particularly.

I actually really love dried locusts. They kind of taste like banana but smoky barbecue flavor.

But back to the topic at hand. I find it funny how this cheese is so aggressively regulated as dangerous when there's plenty of other foods or drinks that can be potentially worse for you and harder to make an informed decision about that are unrestricted. I say funny it's probably xenophobia.

[redthedragon]

Ooh, I'm going to have to get my hands on dried locusts sometime then. That sounds fascinating.

Yeah, agreed, especially because when I went looking there were zero known cases of anyone actually getting parasites from the cheese. It's hypothetical.

[yvannairie]

I had to check b/c the name rang a bell and oh! It's the forbidden Sardinian cheese I couldn't have at L'Artigiano. I don't even see what the problem is since if you don't want to eat live maggots there's a method to eat it without them, and maggots are good protein.

As with all ethnic minority food, people just wanna make a big deal out of things. Everyone everywhere eats things that are gross, tbh.

[redthedragon]

Genuinely.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Today I learned there's a wikicheese (link leads to the homepage, not the bug cheese).

Eating bugs is great! Fried cicadas are freaking delicious (and somehow got labeled "white people shit" during the last brood, which...... HOW?). A food truck at my college sells cricket tacos. Bugs are crunchy and full of protein.

I think the "alive" part probably factors heavily into the squickness, just as much as "bugs" does, so it's like super extra squicky, even for people who already cope with stuff like cricket flour. While I can see the logic that eating living larvae results in parasitic disorders, I agree that there are by far way more dangerous foods.

When comparing to things like sushi and raw eggs, I feel like there's some additional bias at work along the lines of... racism? imperialism? anti-primitivism? industrialism? Raw fish in sushi isn't considered gross because the fish is "high quality and well-preserved," whereas cheese that's just left outside to naturally develop larvae from wild flies probably seems primitive and scary.

[redthedragon]

I honestly think a decent bit of it is exposure. Everyone's seen or at least heard of sushi; everyone talking about marzu casu is like "look at this WEIRD HORRIBLE GROSS CHEESE with these WEIRD HORRIBLE GROSS BUGS!" as though that's any way to talk about anyone's fucking food. You get the same thing with like, people talking about frying tarantulas or whatever; the reporting on it is almost always going to be unnecessarily sensationalized and like "oooohhhh, look how GROSS!!!!"
Like, I see that with crickets too. Or people talking about eating beetles. If we could just treat it like another food, I don't think it'd be seen any different from like, crawfish.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

That is also very true--anything sufficiently far enough out of an existing schema takes getting used to, and at the end of the day people who can't separate out their disgust from value judgments are going to say all kinds of really unnecessary and hyperbolic things.