Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects
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To put these questions into context, some reflection on other sorts of livestock farming might be useful.
We inherited from our ancestors the idea that cows and chickens and pigs were the proper animals to provide us with food; these animals were the neighbors down the street, the families we knew. Henry IV of France declared, in about 1600, that he aspired to put a chicken in the pot of every peasant every Sunday. Since then, European and North American chicken (and pig, and cow) rearing practices have focused single-mindedly on the goal of getting low-cost meat into every pot, preferably every day. At first glance, this goal seems not so different from the entomophagists’ dream of enhancing global food security. But a hundred years ago, when we were designing our farming and food systems, we didn’t understand much about ecological and social complexity, energy and nutrient feedback loops, and the unintended consequences of focusing on one goal at a time. In retrospect, our way of getting a chicken, cow, or pig into every pot has been reckless, without any consideration of the cost in environmental destruction, climate change, disease, and inequalities based on money, gender, ethnic background, and political power. Our agri-food systems have strengthened traditional patriarchal power — and this is more than a metaphor — using science and technology not as ways to open our minds and learn new things, but as ways to secure the walls of the agro-industrial fort. It’s not called “biosecurity” for nothing.
The way we have organized our cattle rearing has led to massive shifts of water and nutrients out of some ecosystems, and created great piles of water-contaminating dung in others. The toxin-producing strains of E. coli that cause severe diarrhea and kidney disease were first identified in hamburger but now turn up everywhere in our agri-food system. Toxic nitrogen leaks into waterways and down into aquifers, so that in many places where intensive agriculture is practiced, potable water is scarce. The way we have raised chickens has led to worldwide pandemics of foodborne bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter. In the United Kingdom, levels of Campylobacter contamination of poultry carcasses have been so high that in 2015 the UK Food Standards Agency recommended consumers not wash raw chicken, but cook it thoroughly in its unwashed state. The concern was that washing would only spread the bacteria around the kitchen. And then of course there are avian influenza (bird flu) and seasonal influenza pandemics, which affect hundreds of thousands of people annually, and which are the result of viruses migrating from waterfowl to pigs, chickens, and people. These are unintended consequences of well-intentioned systemic changes we have made in how we grow and distribute food.
Until recently few questioned the choices of our evolutionary and historical forebears. What happened, happened. What is, is. Now, for the first time ever, we can make a deliberate, informed choice about which, if any, six-legged mini-livestock (another name sometimes used for farmed insects) we want on our dinner plates. As we consider putting bugs on the menu, we have an unprecedented opportunity to learn from our history. We can choose whether we want to hunt them or farm them, and if we do farm them, we can choose how, and where. Unlike our forebears, who stumbled ad hoc into a world-changing agricultural revolution, we have in hand the benefit of a century of intense scientific, economic, and cultural investigation. Not all farms have to be big. Not all foods have to be globally distributed, in abundance, or universally loved.
Eating is, in a sense, the human–environment equivalent of sex. The environment — in the form of animal, vegetable, and mineral foods — slips into our bodies and reconfigures itself as our flesh and blood. What we eat becomes who we are. So before we skip eagerly into the kitchen and get cozy, we should get to know these bugs a little better. Who are they? What were they doing before they showed up at our door? Did they travel far? Were they raised humanely? If our immediate response is disgust, why is that? Is it a deep evolutionary reaction to possibly poisonous foods, a by-product of scarcity in certain ecosystems, or maybe only a way to demarcate the insiders and outsiders of social groups? And if it is learned, is it because industrial agricultural CEOs want to protect their power and money, to prevent competition, or are there deeper ethical issues at play?
Some of the questions surrounding entomophagy are technical and scientific. Some are cultural, ethical, and what some would call spiritual. Still others — perhaps the most challenging ones — are organizational, legal, and administrative. In the early 1980s, I worked with 100 dairy farmers across Ontario. Some of them wanted to market their milk as organic. Consumers, they said, wanted it, and the farmers could produce high volumes of milk using organic methods, but, just as governments today seem unsure of how to regulate insects as food and feed, no one was quite sure how to fit organic products into an already- established structure designed for large-scale standardization rather than diversity. The farmers needed a legally recognized certification process. They needed processing plants dedicated to organic milk producers. If grocery stores were going to sell the products, they wanted a steady supply. Was this going to be just another case of “get big or get out?” Eventually the Ontario producers solved the economy-of-scale problem by creating a cooperative of family farms, working with other dairy farmers and governments to develop a regulatory framework and with processors to create mechanisms to get their products from the cows to the consumers. Now I can walk into any grocery store in the province and buy their milk and cheese as I would any other food. Would something similar happen with insect producers as they moved from the ambiguous margins to the mainstream of our food system?
In this book I shall raise all of these questions, and many more. As we ponder the crickets and mealworms on our plates, I hope that we see them as something more than a sustainable source of protein. I hope that we are also shocked, dismayed, and amazed; that we question who we are, and what entitlements and biological and social contracts we are heirs to. I hope that the bugs on our plates help us feel both uncomfortable and more at home.
If Daniella Martin’s book Edible is your speed-dating guide to entomophagy, think of this book as Dad’s cautionary dating manual. Think of me as Mr. Applegate from that ’90s movie Meet the Applegates: the praying mantis pretending to be a normal suburban dad, waiting at the door, asking, “So, who is this guy you want to marry?”
With entomophagy, we have a chance to ask questions, to do better things rather than just doing the same old stuff more efficiently. It would be a shame to blow that chance.
PART I.
MEET THE BEETLES!
So, we are going to eat insects, are we? Which ones? What are their names? How many are there, and why are there so many of them? Are they really as good for us to eat, nutritionally, as some people say? Is entomophagy good for the planet? Is eating insects our last, best flight out of dystopia to the paradise of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da? Let us begin our exploration.
I Call Your Name
For if I ever saw you/
I didn’t catch your name
Alan Yen and I were enjoying a pleasant summer-evening drink on a friend’s deck in Melbourne, Australia. Alan is an Australian biologist who has spent decades studying insects and human–insect relationships. When I told him about the book I was writing, he asked me why I had titled it Eat the Beetles. Was I only going to write about edible beetles? What about all those other insects?
Indeed, why beetles? It began, I confess, as a bit of a lark, all those puns involving the Beatles being too much fun for me to resist. It was good marketing. In my own mind, I could even come up with a convoluted rationalization. The Beatles were the Cambrian explosion of popular music. From a rocky start in a dark place, their music evolved over just a few years, invoking Lady Madonna and Ukrainian girls, liberation theology and humanism and atheism, Catholicism, Hinduism, communism, and entrepreneurialism. They brought us a mix of rock, blues, folk, classical, plugged and unplugged; movies that were like a collage of rock videos well before rock videos existed; big orchestras, intimate quintets; electronic music, piano,
strings; biting, stinging, sweet, and sentimental; and all the other musical organisms one might expect from an enthusiastic band of Coleoptera. So this book would be a paperback version of the 1982 movie The Compleat Beatles, a tale of kicking back and feeling at home, perhaps while indulging oneself on insect snacks during a weekly celebration of Entomo-Tuesday. (Sir Paul, are you listening?)
All that was post-hoc rationalization, however, and this is a science book. How could I justify the title not just in punny marketing terms, but as a shorthand way to describe the explorations in this text?
The 1,900 known-to-be-edible insect species documented in the 2013 FAO report are but the crust on the crème brûlée of possible entomophagical options. Given the multitudinous diversity of insects out there, the possibilities for culinary experimentation would seem to be almost infinite. Which raises a number of questions: How many different species of insects are there? What are their names? And what is the total population of insects of all species on this planet?
If we are going to eat them, we should know who they are, where they live, and what they do for a living when not being eaten. Not to “name names” when looking at entomophagical options would be like saying we can eat mammals, which would include rhinos, pandas, tigers, orangutans, dogs, cats, mice, human babies, and monkeys, as well as cows, sheep, and pigs. Of course we can, but we also have important reasons for not eating some of them that have little to do with their nutrient content or our food preferences. The same is true for insects and, as we shall see, this has important implications for the future of entomophagy.
The names people attach to the world around them reflect the way they see the world. Economists divide the world into “haves” and “have-nots.” During the Cold War, the world was divided politically into the First World (Europe, United States, and their allies), the Second World (USSR, China, and their allies) and the Third World (non-aligned countries, often from the global South). Another way to divide up the world is into those cultures that have a tradition of eating insects (the insect-eaters) and those that don’t (the non-insect-eaters). This way of dividing up the world does not always coincide with political and economic boundaries, but is useful for understanding some of the major challenges facing twenty-first-century entomophagy promoters. In general, most insect-eaters live in tropical or subtropical parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and most non-insect-eaters are from temperate zones, such as Europe, Russia, and northern parts of North America.
How indigenous people, urban consumers, farmers, and scientists classify natural entities is a reflection of how each group recognizes and relates to the world around them. Insects may be grouped as pests, food, or medicine, for instance, with subgroups within those. These classifications are not inherent in the bugs, but in the roles we see them playing in our lives. The details — which are where, we are told, the devil lives — are relevant to defining an entomophagy that is both culturally and ecologically resilient. The details are also overwhelming (at least to me), but that may be because, unlike Mick Jagger and John Milton, I have never had much sympathy for the devil.
One might suggest that insect-eaters are the experts in identifying and classifying edible species, or stages of species (larvae versus adults, for instance), and appropriately preparing insect dishes from potentially toxic species. Insect-eaters’ knowledge and classification systems do bring with them important information. But they also bring their own problems.
Some insects poke and suck, some bite and chew, some fly, some only crawl or hop. Some species undergo incomplete metamorphosis, where the babies look like little adults (think of crickets), while others, like butterflies and moths, undergo complete metamorphosis, where the baby caterpillars grow up to look like a different species. Thus, in some parts of the world, people may be able to identify an edible grub by name, but not its adult counterpart. In southern Africa, the fat, sausage-like larvae of emperor moths (Gonimbrasia belina), called mopane caterpillars or mopane worms because they feed on mopane trees (Colophospermum mopane), look nothing at all like the adult moths. Alan Yen has documented that Australian Aboriginal languages sometimes have different names for the same species, and that these names are not consistently translated into English the same way. Non-insect-eater scientists recognize one species of witjuti grub (Endoxyla leucomochla), the larva of a cossid moth that lives in the roots of Acacia kempeana (or the witjuti bush). At least two Aboriginal groups use a different binomial name for grubs, the first name referring to the fact that it is edible, and the second name being the plant on which the grub usually feeds. Conversely, Yen writes, “indigenous people in central Australia recognize at least 24 different types of edible caterpillars from plants, and it is likely that most of these will be distinct scientific species.”11
By contrast, non-insect-eaters tend not to identify insects according to whether or not they are edible. Mealworms, for instance, are so named not because someone thought they made a good meal, but because they have a long history of living in — and eating — the ground seeds and grains (a.k.a. meal) that people wish to keep for themselves.
For non-insect-eaters, differences in naming reflect both scientific rules and different subcultures within the scientific community. Thus, the terms population, assemblage, community, guild, and swarm have all been used to describe a large group of grasshoppers or locusts. Entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood has suggested that there is no absolutely correct term. But this doesn’t mean that anything goes. “A term is correct,” he argues, “if it accurately reflects the conceptual framework of the investigator and effectively communicates this perspective to others.”12
He is no doubt right, but this inconsistency creates some dilemmas for those promoting entomophagy. Do we use the non-insect-eater scientific names or the insect-eater names? We would like to be able to quickly pick out the edible ones, but the scientific names might give greater opportunities for identifying new ones and for communicating across cultural boundaries.
What many people now think of as science emerged from non-insect-eaters in Europe in the seventeenth century. Biologists, who are part of this tradition, categorize life according to Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.13
Arthropods (a phylum) are members of the kingdom Animalia, in the domain (a.k.a. empire) of the Eukaryotes. With their tough, chitinous external skeletons, segmented bodies, jointed feet, and open circulatory systems, arthropods are the most numerous and diverse animals on the planet. They were probably the first multicellular organisms to make landfall, preparing the way for plants. Insects — members of the class Insecta — are arthropods, but not all arthropods are insects. Besides the Hexapoda, the subphylum to which insects and a couple of smaller groups belong, arthropods include Crustacea (shrimps, crabs, lobsters), Chelicerata (spiders and scorpions), and Myriapoda (millipedes, centipedes, symphylans). People have eaten all of these, but this book is about insects, and I will refer to these other relatives only when they are important to the entomophagical narrative.
So a house cricket (Acheta domesticus) would be:
Domain Eukarya (having a membrane-bound nucleus)
Kingdom Animalia (animals)
Phylum Arthropoda (arthropods)
Subphylum Hexapoda (hexapods)
Class Insecta (insects)
Order Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets, katydids)(Suborder Ensifera [long-horned Orthoptera])
(Infraorder Gryllidea [crickets])
Family Gryllidae (true crickets)(Subfamily Gryllinae [field crickets])
Genus Acheta
Species domesticus (house cricket)
For the house cricket, this looks easy, even with the extra sub- and infra- groupings, but in general terms, the questions of naming and counting insects — activities which are closely related, since it’s hard to count things if you can’t identify them — turn out to be a lot more complicated tha
n they look, even for scientists. In some classifications, for some insects, there are superfamilies somewhere above families, and new genetic studies are changing the way bugs are classified. Scientific naming, then, is imperfect, but it’s a place to start.
The terms arthropod and insect predate European non-insect-eater sciences. Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century of this current era, was a Roman naturalist and army commander, who, in the ambitious manner of a military leader, sought to describe all living things. He made a great many statements about the natural world, some of which turned out to be right, and some quite wrong (such as the observation that caterpillars originated from dew on radish leaves). Among his legacies, he left us the word insectum, meaning “with a notched or divided body” or “cut into sections.” Pliny’s word was actually his translation from the Greek of entomon, which Aristotle, a few hundred years before, had used to classify our little segmented relatives, and from which we derive entomology and, more recently, entomophagy.
All of us are, in various ways, segmented, often both in mind and body, but in arthropods the sections (head, thorax, abdomen) are more obvious and more obviously specialized than in most other animal types. The non-extinct arthropods — the largest phylum in the animal kingdom — encompass arachnids (spiders, ticks, mites), myriapods (millipedes, centipedes, symphylans), and crustaceans (crabs, crayfish, barnacles, krill), as well as insects. All arthropods have external skeletons (exoskeletons) and jointed appendages, not all of which are legs. But one who is fascinated by legs could do worse than spend a few summer months standing on the corner watching all the bugs fly by.