Submitted by Don Doman.
It’s a fact: Americans swallow eight spiders each year. They enter your mouth while you sleep. Last week there was a dead spider in the water glass I keep by my bed.
When some of my friends send me outrageous claims about almost anything, I search on Snopes for the truth. I forget where I saw the statistics on this spider claim. My worrying about spiders saved me from drinking a dead spider, however . . . but still . . . I did a Snopes search: snopes.com/fact-check/spiders-inside-her/
It’s not true! Well, the dead spider in my glass was true, but the rest was false. “So how did this claim arise? In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of ‘facts’ that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous ‘facts,’ among which was the statistic cited above about the average person’s swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst’s propagation of this false ‘fact’ has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.”
The next time someone sends you an email or a Facebook post that sounds too good to be true, or so weird, please run it through a fact check. You will most likely find out that Obama is a U.S. citizen, Trump is not a horned demi-god, and the letter telling you about a long lost relative with a bank account that must be disposed of if you will just pay the existing charges is just someone trying to scam you out of your money.
Mostly spiders are our friends and we don’t swallow them, but still . . . I almost did.
Don – When I saw the headline “swallowing spiders” I assumed it would be another restaurant review. Glad I was wrong.
Colin
Colin,
I’m sorry . . . the restaurant review is a follow-up piece scheduled for next week.
Thanks for reading and for commenting.
Don
Some cultures eat spiders, other insects, and snakes. Wouldn’t be my choice to eat spiders and grubs, but I have had Rattlesnake before, and it’s not bad. I do end up with the odd dead fruit fly once in a while in my coffee pot, if I have any left over from the day before. Have to be careful when nuking a cup that I don’t have any floaters.
Janice,
Thank you for reading and for writing.
I understand that grubs when roasted taste kinda like prawns . . . yeah . . . Last summer Peg and I had crickets in a Mexican dish at a restaurant in Seattle. I would try them again. Evidently insects have lots of protein.
Thanks, again for your comments . . . I got a morning chuckle with your morning coffee.
Don
I used to pride myself as being a bit on the adventurous side where eating is concerned. I love a wide variety. I even like Kimchee. Still can’t bring myself to sample snails or Rocky Mountain Oysters though.
Snails mostly because when I was a little girl, our nightly assignment was to go outside on the front lawn ( Dichondra ) and pick up snails, put them in little pails, and then take them across the street to the field to release them. ( so they wouldn’t eat the Dichondra ). I can’t bring myself to eat one.
As for Rocky Mountain Oysters….I can’t come up with a good reason to eat one.
Was reading in health news that eating crickets, or adding dried powdered crickets was beneficial to gut health.
Not too surprising though. Ancient hominids were more or less omnivores.