I was curious and started researching but it doesn’t really add up in my head
In: Biology
It’s the other way around, kinda. You should not be eating raw ants – some of them exude formic acid, for example, and may carry bacterial diseases – but you can generally eat things that ants have eaten. The ants themselves don’t poison or pollute your food.
Eating ants or any insect will often require some kind of cooking or processing if you eat a western diet and your gut biome is accustomed to modern “clean” food. Ants themselves, like all living things, carry their own biomes and some of those microorganisms that don’t hurt the ants can make us sick. It’s the ants spreading these same microorganisms to our food that makes food ants have eaten “unsafe.” Like an ant crawling up your porch may well be literally crawling over dog poop, so there’s poop on its feet, which gets into your food, even if you can’t see it – and so also eating that ant would make you sick, too.
Sterile ants would be safe to eat, of course, and you could eat the food that they start to munch on too without ill effect. All the ants are doing when they crawl on food to “eat it” is basically to regurgitate up some digestive fluids – that’s the formic acid, if I remember right – which breaks some of whatever their food choice is into a more palatable mush for them, or make it so they can cut it apart to carry back to their colony, but it doesn’t poison the food itself. You could also eat it just fine. What makes the food “unsafe” is mostly the same as what make eating raw ants unsafe – ants are “dirty” and spread microorganisms that we can’t tolerate and contaminate things.
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