mbarker | How do you react?

That's amusing. When I got home, my wife was upset because the rice had bugs in it. See, we have a kitchen rice dispenser, and buy 5 or 10 kilos at a shot, and pour it in. Then press the little dispenser keys to get one, two, or three servings. But there were little clots of rice in it this evening, and when I mashed one, sure enough, there's a larval something or other (probably the moths we've been noticing recently).

So my wife wants me to clean out the whole X kilos, and she's griping about having just recently filled it, and there's lots of little clots in the rice.

So I joked that maybe we should just go ahead and cook it up, and consider it protein-enriched.

My wife's jaw drops, and I thought for a moment she was going to vomit on me. "WHAT! We can't do that. It's BUGS! That's disgusting."

I went ahead with cleaning out the rice, and agreed that we are probably not going to be able to put rice in the dispenser for a while during the summer heat and humidity, and was very quiet about ideas like just eating the bugs.

I think she's still suspicious. I wonder if I'll hear again that such an idea is just disgusting.

We've eaten pickled grasshoppers (a delicacy in the right part of Japan), I've had chocolate covered bees (which I believe are actually larvae), and Mitsuko happily eats various things which I don't like the taste or texture of, but even the notion of eating rice bugs is disgusting?

Where do we learn these things?

And why do I have this odd mental image of a . . . nun? female teacher, at least . . . smiling and saying that the reason she knows what an ant tastes like is that she tried it?