Why are eggs (chicken to fish roe) such an accepted part of our diets when the male counterpart is almost taboo?

@asmonet i know, its hard to take seriously, but thats the whole point. why cant we take a question like this with a straight face?

I find it neither amusing or serious.

I find it to be a waste of time, on everyone’s part.

For one thing, we find pretty much everything the human body excretes disgusting. Poop, pee, snot, spit, sweat, blood, pus. Only tears might be an exception.
For another, sperm passes through the urethra. As does pee. Not a very appetising thought either.
Finally, there are certain ethical implications of cannibalism to it…

With that said, I have at some point come across a cook book with sperm-based recipes. Which actually got published. And presumably sold.

that’s just gross

The focus really, was not on the assumption that i’m refering to human sperm. It is our acceptance of eggs in our diet. Chicken eggs on toast and a standard. Perhaps i should’ve stated i was refering to chicken sperm in the initial question.

the same line of logic goes with caviar, etc.

Which makes no sense.

@jackfright: That might have been a good idea. I didn’t make that connection yet.

By the way, if anyone happens to be looking for a good example of ironic coincidence…

Ew, Fluther. Ew.

There was actually a bit of a dust up on the blogosphere and in the general media about this book on cooking with semen a few months ago. It came out right after the Testicle Cookbook that got waaaay more mainstream media attention.

To answer the Q, I don’t know why eggs are such an ingrained part of our diet while semen and testicles are not beyond the obvious—that eggs are much easier to harvest and prepare.

this is making me gag. salty!

I think @EmpressPixie got it spot on. Eggs are easily harvested. Also, the biological use for eggs is to be consumed. Semen’s biological use is for impregnation and impregnation only.

@jackfright. Would you eat chicken sperm on your toast? I know, I sure as hell would not.

I always thought I was strange due to all of the weird stuff that comes into my head. But I am so thankful I found Fluther because I have come to realize that my head is really serene, tranquil and almost bland relatively speaking.

Thank you one and all.

By the way, and I hesitate to ask this, but how would one go about harvesting chicken sperm commercially for a mass market?

What about ” Rocky Mountain Oysters ”? Surely those count, yes?

@lukiarobecheck no, i definitely wouldn’t eat any sperm of any kind.
@rooeytoo i have absolutely no idea to be honest. i suspect it would be similar to the process of extracting fish roe, on a potentially microscopic scale. what @empresspixie says makes sense, but it doesn’t explain our natural gag reflex at the idea.
bad pun? sorry

Also, we may not eat it for nutrition like eggs, but I’m sure that I’m not the only person around her who will admit to having ingesting sperm at one point or another.

::blushes::

The egg cell is much larger than a sperm cell.

Interesting question!

I think the main reason is simply energy versus effort. Chicken eggs are easily produced and provide a great amount of energy per unit. It’s pretty much set it and forget it – feed the chicken, give it a good home, and it’ll produce eggs for you regularly. Can you imagine any attempt to harvest the same quantity of chicken semen? Pardon my course language, but you’d have to spend all day beating off hundreds of roosters, if you even can beat off a rooster, to get one egg worth of semen. The energy to effort simply favours eggs over semen.

As for fish eggs, again they are more easily harvested than fish semen. But furthermore, caviar was itself more a sign of prestige. There is no similar prestige with fish semen, because it’s hard to collect (again, if you even CAN collect it).

I don’t think there’s a taboo about eating semen though. After all, there are those prairie oysters linked by Tits. I also don’t have a natural gag reflex against the thought of eating semen, although I will admit that I don’t like the feeling of human semen in my mouth (it’s gritty and pasty and weird).

One last thought, I would consider it animal abuse to forcefully harvest mass amounts of semen for human consumption. So perhaps this contributes to the negative desire to consume it.

I think the main reason is, Why on earth would you? Eggs are incredibly nutrient dense, as one of the main functions of the white is to provide food for the embryo and chick, they have chemical and physical properties that allow them to serve as a foundation for innumerable recipes, and they are conveniently transportable, among many other advantages. Semen isn’t. Eating the one does not have any relationship to the other; one does not eat an egg because it is part of the reproductive system, but this would be essentially the only reason to eat semen. That is also why it would not be socially acceptable to eat semen, because there is nothing weird about wanting to consume an effective food source, but there is something weird about wanting to indiscriminately consume the reproductive of chickens.

I always assumed that sperm was kind of yucky, but over the last couple of years or so, I met a number of women who said they liked the taste of it. (Aren’t online question forums wonderful?) Some even had “recipes” to make the sperm taste better. Apparently pineapple is a good thing. It makes it sweeter.

Some sperm is pretty salty, so it seems to me that if you were going to use it in cooking (and I hear the sound of gagging all over the place), you’d use it like soy sauce of fish sauce, as a kind of liquid salt. I can just imagine it. A spray bottle of sperm sitting in the dairy section, with a “sell by” date. Hmmm. Wouldn’t that be something interesting to have on “Candid Camera?”

i think this is an interesting question. obviously i’m not like “oooh, maybe sperm and toast would be a delicacy!”, but i’ve never ever ever seen or thought of this before, and it makes sense to me. we readily accept one thing, but not the other, without much thought of why. even if someone can come up with an answer besides “um, because it’s gross! why would i?!”, it’s still something to think about. GQ.

Guess that means the dads would be getting the kids breakfast toast ready for a change. Omg, that mental image is going to be a difficult (I almost said hard but changed my mind) one to erase.

@tiffyandthewall you got the essence of the question :) i should’ve phrased it the way you did.