IT’S FOR YOU
This book is dedicated to my grandchildren,
Ira, Annabel, Wendell, and Nikolas.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CRICKET TO RIDE: An Introduction
PART I. MEET THE BEETLES!
I CALL YOUR NAME
HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE:
The Problem of Numbers
SHE SOMETIMES GIVES ME HER PROTEIN:
Insects as Nutrition
OB-LA-DI, OB-LA-DA:
The Last Green Hope?
PART II. YESTERDAY AND TODAY: INSECTS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN WORLD
I AM THE COCKROACH:
How Insects Created the World
WILD HONEY PIE:
How Insects Created People
MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR:
How Insects Sustain the World
PART III. I ONCE HAD A BUG: HOW PEOPLE CREATED INSECTS
I’M CHEWING THROUGH YOU:
Insects as Destroyers and Monsters
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE:
The War Against Insects and Its Consequences
PART IV. BLACK FLY SINGING: REIMAGINING INSECTS
MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME:
Insects as Creators and Bodhisattvas
CAN’T BUY ME BUGS:
A New Age of Negotiation
PART V. GOT TO GET YOU INTO MY LIFE
LEAVING THE WEST BEHIND?:
Entomophagy in Transition in Non-Western Cultures
SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE KITCHEN WINDOW:
Culinary Renewal from the Margins
SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE CHICKEN WINDOW:
Insects as Feed in Non-Insect-Eating Cultures
A COOK WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES:
Insects on the Menu
PART VI. REVOLUTION 1
IT’S SO HARD (LOVING YOU):
Ethics and Insects
A LITTLE HELP:
Regulating Entomophagy
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE?:
Renegotiating the Human–Insect Contract
WE WERE TALKING:
Where Is This Going?
PART VII. REVOLUTION 9
IMAGINE:
Beetles, Entomophagy, and the Meaning of Life
IN MY LIFE:
Acknowledgments
LETTING HER UNDER YOUR SKIN:
Restaurants, Businesses, and Recipes
BUG, BUG ME DO:
Selected Bibliography
ENDNOTES
YOU MIGHT SEE ME:
Index
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
CRICKET TO RIDE
An Introduction
Have you seen the little chiggers?
My legs were aching and my head was still dazed from the trans-oceanic Toronto-to-Paris flight. Like many before me, I had come to the City of Light for the cuisine. Unlike many others, I came in search of grubs.
I walked along boulevard des Batignolles and then up the slopes of rue Caulaincourt, a curved street on Montmartre, near the Sacré-Cœur Basilica and its attendant nightclub district, appropriately situated near a place of confession. After asking directions at several shops in my Canadian franglais, I was waved farther up the hill and then down a flight of stairs, across rue Lamarck, then down another set of stairs, across rue Darwin, and down the cobbled slope of rue de la Fontaine-du-But. If there was some significance to my passing the ghosts of two greats of nineteenth-century evolutionary biology, I missed it. I was busy looking for a pub named after William S. Burroughs’s hallucinatory novel Naked Lunch.
Le Festin Nu had been described by Business Insider in 2013 as “a trendy establishment in the 18th arrondissement of Paris,” and the first restaurant in Paris to include insects on the menu. About the same time, the restaurant was featured on the website Fine Dining Lovers, which described eating insects as France’s “rising trend” in fine dining, and in a BBC report on the insects that were appearing on the menus of “upscale French restaurants.” Still, weird food fads and drug-induced novels notwithstanding, why would a normal-looking, sort of sane guy fly to Paris to eat bugs in a pub?
In 2013 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security. According to that UN report, “insects form part of the traditional diets of at least 2 billion people. More than 1,900 species have reportedly been used as food.” 1 I didn’t pay much attention. Yes, some people eat insects, I thought. In a world roiling with multiple ecological and political catastrophes, why should I care about this culinary curiosity? Then, in March 2014, Veterinarians without Borders/Vétérinaires sans Frontières-Canada (VWB/VSF), under a larger program of “Improving Livelihoods and Food Security in Laos and Cambodia,” initiated a project on small-scale cricket farming. I was skeptical; were crickets sufficiently “animal” to qualify as subjects of veterinary interest? Weren’t insects mostly pests and disease carriers? When I stepped out of my comfort zone to investigate, I was swept away in a chaotic deluge of reports, blogs, videos, books, and papers: 2014, it appeared, was a global tipping point for entomophagy, which is what enthusiasts were now calling insect-eating.
In May of 2014, the lead author of the FAO report, Arnold van Huis, organized the first world conference on whether insects could feed the burgeoning world population. Across the Atlantic in America, Daniella Martin, bug-eating enthusiast, blogger, and host of an insect/travel show called Girl Meets Bug, published Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet. On her website, Martin announced that she had eaten “bees, crickets, cockroaches, fly pupae, wax worms, mealworms, silkworms, hornworms, bamboo worms, grasshoppers, walking sticks, katydids, scorpions, tailless whip scorpion, snails, stink bugs, tarantulas, cicadas, leaf-cutter ants, ant pupae, dung beetles, termites, wasps and wasp brood, 2 butterfly caterpillars, dragonflies, and water bugs.” Wow, I thought, my hand pressed to my heart. Really? What did she not eat?
A tornado of amazing claims swept across the usually staid landscapes of agriculture and food. Insects are higher in protein than other livestock, I was informed, contain more unsaturated (good) fats, and often are rich in “blood-building” minerals such as iron and zinc. Their production is associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions, and they need less land and less water, and in general use fewer resources — some even thriving on food waste — than other livestock. They require minimal physical infrastructure to grow, and provide both increased income and improved nutrition for subsistence-farming households in poor parts of the world. Women in rural areas of the tropics, announced a writer in that venerable magazine The Economist, could reap particular benefits, related to both personal health (from increased consumption of iron and calcium) and economic well-being. 3
Furthermore, I discovered, this was not just another “let’s help poor people” boondoggle. In May of 2015, in Langley, British Columbia, I watched as trucks dumped vegetable waste at Enterra Farms, where it was fed to fly larvae, thus turning waste into protein concentrates for farmed salmon and chickens — displacing the conventionally used fishmeal and soybean powder, both of which are associated with serious negative environmental impacts. 4 In the rolling countryside outside Peterborough, Ontario, Entomo Farms 5 had transformed a chicken barn into an environmentally conscious family-owned farm producing roasted crickets and mealworms, as well as protein powder (ground-up crickets) for
human consumption. Standing next to the stainless steel bake ovens, I sampled their roasted, Moroccan-spiced crickets.
At the other end of the technological spectrum, in France, was Antoine Hubert, winner of a 2015 MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 award, president of the European Association of Insect Producers, and CEO of a company called Ynsect. Hubert was championing biotechnological approaches to using insects as sources of quality bioactive and nutritional products; in his view, this high-tech use of insects is a “disruptive technology” that will transform global agriculture. Coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, the term disruptive technology is defined as a “technology that can fundamentally change not only established technologies but also the rules and business models of a given market, and often business and society overall.” 6
Where was all this leading?
In an interview that serves as part of the introduction to The Insect Cookbook: Food for a Sustainable Planet, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan envisions a world in which insects as food are traded globally, providing economically important and environmentally sustainable nutrition and food security for communities around the world.
So, even before I’d sampled the bar snacks at le Festin Nu, my head was in turmoil. All around me, bugs were changing everything I thought I knew about food, feed, and agriculture. How could I have missed this?
The Festin Nu bar was a room just a few meters wide, clad in dark, weathered wood with handwritten notices taped on the plate glass windows framing a darkened doorway. On a couple of low stools out on the sidewalk, a man and a woman were leaning against the glass, sipping beer, and chatting quietly in the warm, late afternoon haze of the day. The stores on either side had metal shutters pulled down. Inside, a reverse-J-shaped bar took up the far end of the small room. Beyond that, through a dimly lit doorway, a dozen or so people were sitting on church basement chairs, drinking beer and watching Romancing the Stone with French subtitles: how young Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner looked! (Danny DeVito never changes.)
The bartender, Alex Cabrol, with his wry almost-smile, dark, wavy hair, and ragged straw fedora with a hole in it, reminded me of a 1967-vintage “Motorcycle Song” Arlo Guthrie. When I asked for insects, he waved at the menu board and asked which ones.
“All of them,” I said, hoping I did not sound too much like a bug-eating version of Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote. “We could go two ways with insect-eating,” le Festin Nu’s chef, Elie Daviron, said in that BBC report. “The agro-industry would just churn them into protein flour. I want to keep the notion that the insects are real, whole animals.” Real, whole animals. I tried to imagine them and then decided that would be a bad strategy. Brace yourself, order, and eat, I told myself. It’s just food.
August being vacation season for many Parisians, Cabrol explained, Daviron was unavailable, and the kitchen was not fully stocked. Of the six insects listed on the menu, only five were available. They didn’t have any of the giant water bugs left in stock. He poured me one of the craft beers for which they are known, and I sipped it, wondering if I would be able to convince my brain that eating worms and crickets was okay.
I asked Alex where the bugs came from. He said that some came from Southeast Asia — he was leaving the next day for Cambodia to check out new possibilities — but they also sourced crickets and mealworms from a French breeder and distributor called Dimini Cricket. My first thought was that the name was a too-cute reference to Jiminy Cricket, the talking insect in Disney’s Pinocchio. I recalled that in Carlo Collodi’s original story, the young, wooden-brained vandal, in a fit of annoyance, had killed the cricket by throwing a mallet at him. In Disney’s version, the cricket was a funny, wise, tag-along, apparently insufficiently annoying to incite murder. But would you eat him? In Disney’s moral universe, I wondered, would it be as bad to eat crickets as to eat Bambi? I later discovered that the name of the breeder was based on the surname of one of the farm’s founders, which is a cautionary tale about the perils of cross-cultural branding.
After about twenty minutes, Alex brought out five small plates, presented like tapas. The insects were artfully arranged, each species accompanied by figs, sun-dried tomatoes, raisins, and chopped, dried tropical fruits. I quaffed my beer and considered the fare before me: buffalo worms, crickets, large grasshoppers, small black ants, and fat grubs with beaks, which I later identified as palm weevil larvae.
I called for another beer, and then, bite by mindful, methodical bite, I ate them all. The crickets and grasshoppers were crunchy, with no strong flavor, the ants sour, tangy. The palm weevil larvae were a bit chewy, like dried figs. In the manner of pub food the world around, the dishes were on the greasy side. I guessed that with a couple of pitchers of craft beer, and a group of friends, these bugs would be just fine. But were they the future of global food security?
Later, strolling the packed alleys and streets among the tourists in and around Montmartre, I was chuffed that I’d passed my Paris pub bug challenge without having suffered any hallucinatory visions of giant cockroaches. Ever since I’d heard the name of this pub, I couldn’t get out of my head images of those human-sized insects from David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch. I wondered why I thought of eating insects as strange, even revolting. What made eating bugs in a pub any different than eating deep-fried chicken wings? Was this mix of beer, dare, and disgust the future of eating insects? Or would eating insects morph from the queasy adventures of “bug-eating” into the more neutral, sanitized cuisine of entomophagy, the term used for insect-eating by many of its proponents?
Less than a week after my visit to le Festin Nu, I was in Vientiane, capital of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, having a relaxing evening with Thomas Weigel, manager of the VWB/VSF cricket-farming project. We sipped mugs of Beer Lao and shared a large plate of crickets, fried up with garlic and kaffir lime. Sitting just inside the pub, I watched the Laotians at the tables sprawled across the grooves of the wide sliding doors and onto a concrete patio toward the street. Thai singers belted out unstable melodies from a television set above the cashier’s counter, the words dancing across the screen. Several groups of people in their twenties, happily half-drunk, were singing lustily along, wildly off key, about heartbreak and lost love. No one thought it strange that Thomas and I were noshing on fried crickets. This was not a challenge; there was no disgust to hurdle over. In Vientiane, this was normal. But on a world scale?
During my research, which over the course of 2015–16 included foraging in Japan; visits to insect farms, pubs, and restaurants in British Columbia, Ontario, France, England, Laos, Japan, and Australia; and reading many hundreds of books, scientific papers, and news reports, I was beginning to wonder if we were entering a “new normal” — and, if so, what that would look like. Would there be — as Kofi Annan imagined — a fair-trade network linking family farmers and foragers in North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa? Would some of us opportunistically gorge on locusts, or cicadas, while others foraged seasonally on termites, hornets, bees, or grasshoppers? Would I be able to walk into the local grocery store and, next to the 100 varieties of potato and corn chips, find bags of barbecue-flavored crickets? Were there insects that were off-limits? If so, then why? How would insects in the food system be managed? Loosely, like honey bees, 7 or intensively, like silkworms and crickets? Would most insects be ground up and used as energy and protein ingredients in animal feeds and energy bars for fitness enthusiasts?
As I discovered on my journeys, the world of insects in food and feed was more complex, exciting, and unsettling than a garnish of bugs on a dinner plate. To paraphrase a saying by renowned biologist J.B.S. Haldane, insect-eating is not only more complex and strange than we imagine; it is more complex and strange than we can imagine. 8
In his farewell address as Professor of Tropical Entomology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Arnold van Huis concluded
that the “benefits of using insects as food and feed over conventional meat are numerous. Insects have high potential of becoming a new sector in agriculture and the food and feed industry.” 9 Listening to van Huis and his colleagues, one might be led to believe that the biggest challenges to humans eating insects are a combination of intransigently conservative European and North American consumers and outdated or missing regulatory frameworks and trade agreements. These are, indeed, important considerations, but a more careful reading of the situation should give us reason to reconsider this framing of the story. The executive summary of that 2013 FAO report asserts that “the huge potential” of entomophagy cannot be achieved without more research and better documentation of the nutritional value of insects as well as their environmental impacts relative to other sources of protein. Van Huis has noted that “clarification and augmentation of the socio-economic benefits that insect gathering and farming can offer is needed, in particular to enhance the food security of the poorest of society.” 10
For those who have grown up in non-insect-eating cultures, much of the entomophagical energy in the past few decades has focused on the fork end of the farm-to-fork food chain. Repeatedly, advocates return to the question: why don’t people eat insects? By which they mean: why don’t people of European descent eat insects? Digging up and destroying the cultural roots of disgust about bugs as food and persuading people to make insects part of their daily meal plan becomes, in this perspective, a public relations exercise — one that could play out as a mix of research into consumer attitudes and glossy promotional advertisements, some of them bordering on a sort of moral blackmail, implying a lack of ecological caring among those who don’t eat insects.
Another side of this complex problem is what has been called supply-side sustainability: how much food can the planet produce in a sustainable fashion? This raises different questions. Are the insects intended for human food or for use as animal feeds? Are they foraged or farmed? If foraged in the wild, does human foraging put at risk the functions of these insects in natural systems? Most of the eco-arguments, particularly in Europe and North America, rest on the assumption that we will be farming them. Will these farms be computer-regulated high-tech laboratories, such as Ynsect is developing in France, or more conventional family farms, like Entomo in Canada? As we have discovered over the past century, not all ways of farming are equally eco-friendly and sustainable.
Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects Page 1
