Question about giant fantasy spiders

[crantz]

Hello, I'm just going to put this behind a cut because googling this has made me wish I could put my research behind a cut in my own brain.



In this fantasy world, spiders can be the size of horses and you can harvest the ones you kill for food. I tried searching what the inside of a tarantula's leg looks like and... it wasn't really working.

So my question is: what would the 'meat' of a spider look like? Would it be crablike? Does anyone know what a tarantula looks like on the inside?

Thank you for your time.

I need to know this for a comic I'm drawing.

Comments

[melannen]

I'd be careful about *actually* eating grasshoppers from your lawn because they apparently can concentrate pesticides used on plants, but in theory they are supposed to be delicious and meaty.

Unfortunately I enjoy entomophagy mainly in theory because I can't digest crab/shrimp/lobster, and while insects are *probably* okay I have only tried them in very small quantities. (Mealworms are delicious though it's true.)

[redsixwing]

A good caution to observe, thanks - I don't use pesticides myself, but I live near people who probably do, and grasshoppers move around.

And that's another good consideration: allergy to arthropods of one type may mean sensitivity to others.

If I use hemolymph as an ingredient in some fantasy cuisine, that's to think about there too.

[melannen]

I don't actually know if a crustacean allergy makes you that much more likely to be allergic to eating insects or arachnids - it doesn't come up on a lot of medical guidelines, for some reason! - but in a country where avoiding them isn't a hardship it seems safest.

[tabaqui]

I could not help myself.
"As Dr. Zachary Rubin, pediatric allergist, wrote to me, "The majority of people allergic to shellfish are allergic to a protein called tropomyosin, which is also found in many insects, so it's not usually a good idea to consume insect-containing foods if you have a shellfish allergy." "

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-and-nutrition/edible-insect-revolution-not-those-shellfish-allergies

[adafrog]

That's really interesting. Thanks.

[tabaqui]

Welcome! Really not something I would have considered.