Whenever someone says to me "Eww, bugs? I'm not going to eat that!" I reply with "Do you like shrimp?"
Moreso than other proteins, I think you'll also often get a NO with shellfish. Shrimp isn't a great example, though, because most people only come across it once it's been de-shelled, deveined, and cooked. Show it to people in it's pure, raw form and you'll get a lot of
It still speaks to how strong our cultural conditioning can be, though. Back in the day lobster, for instance, was considered something you'd feed to lower-classed people. Once it was marketed as a delicacy people started to love it. I believe the same type of thing has happened with shrimp.
I've had to date: traditional meats, horsemeat, ostrich, deer meat, shellfish and would totally consider roasted or fried insects if it were ever sold in my neck of the woods or where I happen to travel, if I ever get to do it again. The only things I'll not even try are live foods, the still beating hearts of snakes or other animals, or any food that I happen to know was tortured horrendously first, like what Koreans and Japanese will still do to dogs they harvest for food. I'd eat dog, especially if I was hungry enough, just not if it came from a torture "farm".
Dr. Temple Grandin something or other built a bunch of contraptions to move cattle the way cattle naturally move right up to where they go their vaccines, pesticide dips, and even right up to the bolt gunner, calm and placid, simply so we weren't torturing them as much as we used to, by and large. And she works out of Texas, one of the most conservative, 'humans are way better than animals so let's string 'em up like pinatas and beat 'em till they bleed cuz fuck it' states there is, and yet half the cattle farmers in her state first year she was in operation with her devices practically lined up to get ahold of her services to treat their animals better than they were, without as much in the way of dogs, horses, whips and guns to scare and abuse their future food as possible for now.
One thing I can categorically say I'd rather starve while being tortured the whole way than eat, no matter what, is human flesh. It's the whole visceral thing with they look lie us, move like us, are the same species as us, can't do it under any circumstances thing. I've seen other animals cannibalize each other when they were starving or in immense danger, gulls, owls, jaguars, even regular plant eaters like deer will do it if really necessary. I've even seen it with progeny, when a family of owls ate the littlest runt right after it passed away from hunger and probably being too small to ever rally get by as it was a runt t begin with they split it up between the other young ones. A mama jaguar ate it's own baby after getting it from the jaws of a constrictor type snake, and I've seen horses kill foals that could not stand a few minutes after birth, one cuz it was likely paralyzed in its hind quarters and another got attacked regularly by the whole herd because it likely suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen. The lady who owned the second foal rescued it before the herd could kill it and had to turn it over to a sanctuary farm where it went further mad, as in nuts, on account of not understanding how to be a horse from lack of oxygen and lack of contact with the others during the crucial growth period.
The lay honestly thought she saved it by protecting it from the rest, who likely would have tried eating it if they had no way of moving beyond the carcass, to preserve the herd. Maybe that could have happened of she had contacted experts on horse behavior and care long before the foal had reached adulthood, but I digress.
People get their notions from all sorts of areas, and food notions are no different. I heartily expect there's at least a few vegans in this place just itching to try and convince me to go vegan rather than bothering to as why I still eat meat and would even consider certain animals to not be off limits under certain circumstances.
My grandparents knew a family who ate their own dogs during WWII. An uncle of mine refused doctor's orders to fast for a round of tests because he spent time in Korea during that war, and was in The Netherlands during WWII, to a point that they had to devise a semi-close version of some of the same tests that they could do, and nix the rest, while he ate every day.
You're right about lobster and shrimp, both once considered only for low class, or impoverished or other races/ethnicities of people than European/American. In the 1950s housewives were pitched a marketing campaign regarding shrimp, lobster, an oysters, and began buying it in bulk as it was then quite cheap, on account of lower economic classes still buying it in droves. It took off, and they started raking up the price so the rich housewives were the only ones left for a while.
Religion soaks in too, here and there, with any observant orthodox jew/christian/muslim who values the food commandments refraining from pigs, shellfish, a boiled in its own mothers milk baby goat, or the eating I think of sparrows an certain other birds and snakes. But in Eastern cultures, largely due to their faiths not really commanding much of anything regarding types of food, will eat practically anything, alive or dead, even lauding live foods as "healthier" because it brings more vitality/virility.
People are forever weird and warped, lolz.
