Eating Earth Worms On Course In 2015

here is a video of myself and some other students on course eating earth worms

 

I could not tell if these guys are eating raw or cooked earthworms... but just in case you think it is ok to eat them raw: DON'T!

Raw earthworms can transmit parasites that are harmful to humans.

Here is just one example:

https://www.businessinsider.com/pro-tip-dont-eat-live-geckos-or-earthworms-2012-8


Cooked earthworms are highly nutritious and can be tasty, especially if you purge them before cooking. One way is to let them eat moist cornmeal for a day or two before cooking.

No cornmeal? Put them in a container with damp grass for a day or two. Replace the grass with fresh damp grass if needed.

 

That makes two of us. I prefer to recycle them via fishbait, lol

 

That's three of us - I would need to be really desperate for that one.

 

Antonyraison did you pay good money and get feed worms ? Wow I need to give a course like that , I can see a good profit margine if I can get away with charging people money and feeding them worms .

 

One of the unfortunate things that people are going to have to deal with in the event of some sort of survival situation where you are forced to live a more primitive lifestyle is that things won't always be clean or totally safe and sterile. I suspect that many are going to starve to death with a rich bounty of eatable things around them because they either won't be aware of or willing to eat what is there.

ANYTHING that you eat that isn't cooked thoroughly can give you a problem. That is just as true now as it will be if things go down the tubes. If you worry about everything that you put in your mouth you have a problem that is hard to overcome. NEVER eat a hamburger from anyplace except at home. First off if the meat isn't cooked thoroughly you could have a problem and even more troublesome the raw vegetables are all susceptible to carrying salmonella and other possible problem infections. I assure you that the kid in the back cooking and prepping the stuff is NOT a trained chef and mostly not usually a future rocket scientist. If you had seen and heard the things that I have in my 30 years working in the kitchens of restaurants and such you wouldn't EVER eat in a restaurant again!

The purpose behind eating a worm or other things along that line is to both show AND prove to yourself that if you had to you could move down and eat at the bottom of the food chain. Yes, there are risks but honestly the risks are no greater than the risk you take any time you eat food prepared by any stranger. I've eaten worms, bugs, raw meat of several sorts, raw fish whole fish and eaten everything that I grow in the garden without washing it off first. I drink from water hoses and fresh puddles. I will even eat a dirt clod to check if it is sweet or acidic.

I do it to keep my system adapted to things that I might HAVE to deal with someday if something happens. I'm 65 and have only had a problem once and that was from a Pizza Hut and I NEVER ate at one of those again. Their manager wasn't trained in proper food handling so his staff wasn't encouraged to follow proper methods. YUUUUK! It got me. If I had worked there before this I would have known better than to even drink water from a glass there!

The natural food pyramid is big at the bottom and little at the top. this means that in any given environment there is more small eatable things than there are big eatable things. I'm not talking numbers, I am talking about the biomass. The insects of the world outweigh the mammals of the world. If you are hungry the farther down the food chain you go the more there is there to eat. It won't probably taste as good. And it won't be as nutritious but there is a lot of it. Your sense of taste and sense of smell are your built in laboratory analysis devices to lead you to the most nutritious and calorie laden things to eat. They also tell what not to eat.

What people now don't understand is that because something tastes or smells unfamiliar does not mean that it tastes or is bad. We, especially in the west are dietary bigots. That bigotry is far more dangerous in a survival situation than the concern of getting various parasitic or bacterial infections. Millions of people through out history have starved because they refused to eat unfamiliar foods.

 

True, dat! As a 7th generation New Orleanian/Baratarian I agree with most of what you said because where I am from we eat just about anything that don't eat us first, and we know how to make anything taste wonderful.

However, for the most part, we are living longer lives than our ancestors did 200 years ago for a reason: we are aware of which diseases can kill you and how to avoid them. That, and some pharmaceuticals.

It is true that some things we can become acclimated to, but there are some now-prevalent disease organisms that were not in America until recently, along with the regular native bugs that were known killers of our ancestors.

In a true SHTF situation, we may not have access to life-saving medicines and procedures to counteract the effects of pathogens that would otherwise drop you like a rock.

It is easy to avoid an agonizing death: just cook your food, if at all possible.

I have a recipe for cricket gumbo, and I'm not afraid to use it, lol. (Bonus: all my friends and family know this and won't be pounding on my door, come SHTF-time. Heh heh heh <---insert evil old woman cackling sounds here.)



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Here's some info that might surprise you:

This was excerpted from #7 in the Mother Earth News article: https://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/edible-bugs-zebz1305znsp


Eating Maggots

Yes, not only are maggots edible, they are a traditional superfood....

Traditionally, many cultures have relished maggots, leaving fish or meat out to become saturated with them and then eating the maggots. There is logic to this: a diet of exclusively lean meat causes severe health problems, eventually leading to kidney failure and death. This condition has traditionally been called “rabbit starvation.” White trappers living in the north would often be afflicted as they attempted to live entirely off lean meat like rabbit, easily trapped in the northern forests, without sufficient fat or carbohydrates to balance the protein. They would get a kind of protein poisoning, diarrhea and malnutrition would ensue, and despite eating as much lean meat as possible, they would “starve” to death.

What does this have to do with maggots? They are capable of transforming lean meat into fat. Maggots are extremely fatty and a rich source of essential amino acids, making them nutritionally far more valuable than lean meat.

They don’t have internal digestive systems of their own, so they secrete gastric juices directly onto meat, causing it to degrade or spoil (or “predigest” if you have a taste for it). That is why there is so much hysteria around maggots on meat, not because they make it unsafe to consume, but because they alter its flavor, texture and palatable shelf life.

Maggots will taste different depending on their food source. I have harvested them from meat that was left hanging for a bit too long, thrown them in a pan and fried them up. If they were on a rotting carcass with the guts and all still intact, they would have a stronger flavor. In any case, they are an acquired taste probably well worth acquiring. Their ability to transform lean meat into essential fats is both magical and potentially life-saving under certain conditions.

Someone once told me their grandfather, during the Depression of the 1930s, would take maggots that grew on a hunk of meat he kept in the cellar and spread them on toast like butter.

(more info at the link)


On the other hand...don't be like this dude:



via Imgflip Meme Generator

 

Well that was probably a whole lot more info than I needed, but good to know. I'm hoping as a last resort. You are an unbelievable wealth of knowledge Griz. Glad you are here, and thanks for sharing.

 

I dunno about the wealth of knowledge... I think because I am such an odd duck, and my interests fall so far out of the range of most normal people's interests that it just "appears" that way, lol.

Oh, and my Google-Fu hat comes in handy, too.


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Earthworms can also be dried and stored, when they're ground up they are unrecognisable and can form a great super high protein base for soups and stews.
It's possible to purge them simply by leaving them on a plate or tray until they've passed most of the soil in their gut. As GA stated earlier in the thread, all Arthropoda and gastropods can pass on listeria, lung worm and other parasitic diseases.
Maggots are just grubs and I don't know of any grubs that are not edible (do not confuse grubs with caterpillars though, plenty of them are toxic or irritant)

 

Just as you can use any meat to make gumbo the same is true of boudin. We actually eat a lot of boudin here and I was raised in Beaumont where eating Cajun is about as common as Mexican food. Boudin is a sort of rice and meat sausage. It is very good and eaten on crackers with a nice splash of Louisiana hot-sauce. Another form of boudin is made much the same with blood added to the mix. Like it or not blood is nutritious and is a common food all over the world. If you like liver and onions you would probably love blood boudin.

Basically most of the family type of Cajun food is all about how to feed a family when you don't have a lot of meat available. Cajun, Mexican and Chinese cooking all are about making do with what you have available and all do an amazing job of it. Chinese and Cajun food does a lot of it with rice and fish while the Mexican dishes do lots of things with pork corn and beans. Every nation has their own way that the poor managed to made do with dietary limitations.

I am a culinary adventurer and love nearly all of the various ethnic foods. Texas is a lot like a miniature United States with people from all over. We have a lot of mixed cultural foods here and it is a growing thing to intentionally borrow things from other cultures and incorporate parts of it into a different sort of food. I never turn down trying something new.

 

Known as Black Pudding over here, usually eaten with a fried breakfast. Delicious!

 

Pity I can't find an emoji for drooling, I may have to go out shooting early tomorrow and get a fried breakfast on the way home. There is a place in town that does good breakfasts including black pudding, unlimited refills of coffee...simple pleasures.

 

Blood is an often overlooked food source in most areas. In many places the cattle are not generally eaten that often as meat. They are instead bled , The blood is mixed with the milk and made into a high protean food source that is easy to make. The cattle are then your larder and there is no need to try and store the meat in hot places.

 

No thanks.
But I did rescue 30 +/- red wrigglers of varying sizes last week (that was fun) and they are in my house, currently as guests. I will relocate them out there somewhere. Rescue, you ask? Yes, from a mess of decaying leaves on pavement, they would not have fared well otherwise.
So we have to cook them first? I'm not in the place where I need to experiment with that right now.
I read they get sold by the pound but I used to see them in 7 eleven in a Styrofoam cup, 12 for $3. Do they still do that?

 

thats not food thats what food eats....lol...set up a maggot bucket in chicken coop to feed chickens and also one over water to feed the fish. nightcrawlers and such produce castings to make the garden mire fertile.

 

heres my trolley system across pond.i have to deal with bear daily so its got to be bear proof. i use commercial fish food in a spreader/slinger. to change it i would use a bucket with holes drilled it it so maggots can fall out to feed fish. just trolly it it in ever so often and drop in whatever varmint ya got ...groundhog,rats etc. recycle homestead vermin into food.fill it on the bank then trolley it out over water.