Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects

by David Waltner-Toews

  Beyond sight, sound, taste, and touch, some insects use magnetoreception, which is the ability to use magnetic fields for orientation in the landscape and navigation to new areas. This ability is well documented in ants, termites, and honey bees.

  For insects, as for people, sensing the world is necessary but insufficient. How those sensory inputs are integrated and used determines sustenance and survival. Insects live in a world with a very different sense of space and time than our own. Even if we set aside the senses we can describe but hardly imagine, such as those related to magnetism or the response to gradations of polarized light, the colors and motions are only a small part of the picture. As your friendly neighborhood neuroscientist can tell you, seeing something is not the same as perceiving it. What, exactly, is it that we’re seeing? The process of perception involves integrating and assessing multiple sources of information to make decisions: is this food? An enemy? Not relevant? Bees have evolved ways of integrating all these perceptual sources and have used them to create a language that rivals ours in complexity. They integrate complex dance moves with scents and orientations to the sun to communicate among themselves, describe location and quality of nectar and pollen sources, and negotiate among several possible new homes for a swarm.

  In insects, we attribute process to some kind of neurophysiological or neuroanatomical algorithm. In people, the same kind of data are used to demonstrate abstract reasoning and are evidence that we have minds.

  What should be clear by now is that insects live in a world we struggle to understand. Just as the entanglements of our social world are a legacy of the stories and battles among our proto-Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, and Sino-Tibetan human ancestors, so the complex natural world we inhabit is the cooperative legacy of conversations among the “millions and millions” of worldviews and languages of insects. They conceive of the world in terms of color (within a range different from ours), sound (within a range different from ours), scent (within a range different from ours), and, more closely related to human senses, taste (sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami) and touch (pressure, pain, temperature). Insects have all these senses and more, including some, like magnetoreception, which we can scarcely imagine. They experience and understand the world in different ways — qualitatively and profoundly different ways — than humans.

  Hugh Raffles, summarizing the work of twentieth-century biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll, says that “All beings live in their own time worlds and space worlds . . . distinct worlds in which both time and space are subjectively experienced through sense organs that differ radically among beings and produce radically different experiences.”53

  If, in the new green world of entomophagy, we aspire to avoid the excesses of industrialized livestock agriculture and the ecological impacts of overforaging, we will need to pay attention to the languages and conversations among insects and their worlds. At a technical level, these conversations are important for the management of pests and grub. For me, this goes beyond the merely technical. As we think about bringing insects more fully into that circle of ecological intimacy we call eating, I am in awe of these insect multiverses.

  PART III.

  I ONCE HAD A BUG: HOW PEOPLE CREATED INSECTS

  Insects and people have been warring against each other for aeons. Our stories have prepared us to be on alert, battle-ready, when we see them, or, failing that, to run for our lives. How do insects fit into our cultural imagination? Have we cast them all as monsters and aliens so that we can more easily, and without compunction, kill them? Let us explore the dark narratives that have driven our agriculture, food, and disease control policies and have brought us into the battle-scarred landscapes of the twenty-first century.

  I’M CHEWING THROUGH YOU

  Insects as Destroyers and Monsters

  I once had a bug, or should I say,

  she once had me?

  The conflicting ways in which humans have imagined the insect world have led to equally conflicting responses to it. Until the late twentieth century, the dominant global narrative, driven by a narrow European view of science and technology, was of insects as evil — pests to be killed in a take-no-prisoners war. For those who continue to think this way, “eating bugs” is viewed as disgusting at worst, and problematic at best — since it is not usually considered good manners to spray insects with poisons and then offer them as food.

  For most of us, insects are strange, not human, other; uncontrollable, reproducing by the millions, they can invade our homes and even our bodies, bringing disease and destruction, evading us with their deft skittering and slithering movements. And then when we see them on the plate, how quickly, unconsciously, and irrationally these fears and anxieties, borne of a history of pandemics and pests, can morph into the more visceral feeling of disgust. For the new entomophagists, this is where the biological rubber hits the cultural road, where gut-level personal experience tangles with abstract information. We are all into being green and ecologically friendly. We all want to feed the world sustainably. But with worms and grasshoppers? Really?

  Imagine this: there is a terrible churning in one’s abdomen, then pressure as the belly distends, and then extreme pain as the muscles are ripped open and a newborn animal appears. If, as in the Alien movie franchise, that newborn is insect-like, we are, even beyond imagining the extreme discomfort of a large animal bursting out from one’s abdomen, horrified, disgusted, even fearful. A wide-eyed loris emerging under similar conditions might evoke more mixed feelings — OMG how cute! —alongside the discomfort. And if the emergent life looked like E.T. from the eponymous movie, we would be certain that we had entered the realm of goofy farce.

  In non-insect-eating cultures, the ones that through violence and commerce have sought to impose their ways of life on the planet, large-scale insectiform beings are invariably used in film and literature to evoke horror.54

  If J.B.S. Haldane’s scientific mind saw the Creator as having had an inordinate fondness for beetles, then the vivid insect scenes in novelist Malcolm Lowry’s dark, disorienting tale of an alcoholic’s tragic descent into hell, Under the Volcano, would seem to invoke the Hindu creator god’s other half, Kali the Destructor. Lowry’s Consul watches “helplessly” as the “mosquito-stained” walls around him swarm with insects, as though “the whole insect world had somehow moved nearer and now was closing, rushing in upon him.” According to Spanish film director Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali suffered delusions of parasitosis that led to self-mutilation. From Men in Black and Aliens to Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a cockroach-like animal in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, insect-like invaders and transformations are, in non-bug-eating cultures, invariably bad news.

  Large groups of locusts, ants, or beetles, unlike large groups of cattle, do not bring to mind pastoral scenes from the Great Plains or biblical references to cattle on a thousand hills. Large groups of insects swarm. They invade. They infest. As long as they respectfully keep their place in nature, some insects might be revered, as were the Egyptian scarabs, or held up as paragons of virtues such as hard work, as with the ants in Aesop’s fables or the proverbs of Solomon and honey bees in Christendom. Most often, though, bugs send shivers down our spines.

  The stories that have created this unsettling quiver come at us from all angles and reflect the complexity of nature and our multiple roles in it. More information merely compounds the problem of what we should do. For every story of ants cleaning garbage off the streets of New York, there are stories of armies of Argentinian fire ants eating baby caimans. The implied, unstated question is: would they do that to us? And who among us could forget the swarming red ants in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the scene in which “all the ants in the world” are dragging the dead baby to their holes?

  Nature writer David Quammen argues that our desire to see insects as horrible is deeply rooted in the human psyche. His book
Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind is a moving lament for the terrible predators that have throughout history stalked and devoured us like just another fresh-meat meal. These animals — the lions and tigers, crocodiles, bears and wolves — still occasionally steal children and strike fear into isolated populations living near wilderness areas around the world. Even as we drive them to extinction, they remain within us, lurking in the dark jungles of our psychological ecology. In the last chapter of the book, Quammen reflects on the insect-like Alien created by the late H.R. Giger for the eponymous movie: “I believe that the success of the Alien series, like the durability of Beowulf and Gilgamesh, reflects not just our fear of homicidal monsters but also our need and desire for them. Such creatures enliven our fondest nightmares. They thrill us horribly. They challenge us to transcendent fits of courage. . . . The only thing more dreadful than arriving on LV-426 and finding a nest of Aliens, I suspect, would be to arrive there, and on the next unexplored planet, and on the next after that, and find nothing.”55

  Some think that science, by demystifying nature, can save us from this need for monsters, that in the face of our incredible technology and domination of the planet, we will see these monsters as figments of our feverish imaginations. But the human mind is not so easily compartmentalized, and the roots of the non-insect-eater’s revulsion for insects has its roots in science as well as the imagination. Scientific reports and nightmarish monsters reinforce each other.

  Stepping outside the movie theatre where we have seen the imaginary Alien, for instance, we encounter insects that eat the flesh of living animals. Miasis is a condition in which flies lay eggs on the skin of animals, and the maggots feed on the living flesh. Flies that engage in this unwelcome behavior are called botflies or blowflies. These flies are tiny, but what if (our movie-fed imaginations now grown hyperactive) they were huge?

  Bot derives from a Gaelic word for maggot, and, according to the late British forensic entomologist Zakaria Erzinçlioglu, the word blow historically meant a mass of fly eggs. Hundreds of years BCE, Homer wrote about “the blows of flies,” and in the early 1600s Shakespeare wrote in Love’s Labour’s Lost that “These summer flies have blown me full of maggot ostentation” and, in Antony and Cleopatra, “Lay me stark naked and let the water flies / Blow me into abhorring.” This gives the more recent expression “blow job” a somewhat different slant than what adolescents think it means. Thankfully, encounters with fly maggots that eat living human flesh are a rare occurrence. More commonly — and in many ways more devastatingly — we are surrounded by those that drink our blood.

  In 2007, I was part of a mission sponsored by the World Organisation for Animal Health, also known as the OIE.56 Three of us — all of European descent — were to assess the animal health capacities in Cambodia. In less than a week, we drove between flat fields of rice in the south, pondered the flocks of ducks bobbing around in rickety enclosures that extended from the fields into one of the many tributaries of the Mekong, and nosed through offices from the Vietnamese–Cambodian border in the south to the north end of Tonlé Sap, a thriving lake that occupies much of the center of the country. From pre-dawn to after dark, we visited Spartan government and lush private laboratories, hole-in-the-wall pharmacies, makeshift autopsy rooms, research centers, colleges and universities still struggling to reinvent themselves after the Pol Pot regime all but destroyed them with its brutal anti-intellectualism, outdoor slaughtering “slabs” where Brahman cattle could die breathing the sun-filled air, and half-hidden slaughterhouses where little boys in torn, bloodied shorts scrambled with plastic buckets after gushes of pigs’ blood, gut-splatters, and bits of discarded flesh. We saw chickens, ducks, pigs, and cattle, free-range and caged, from scruffy to fat to dead and hung up on hooks. On the road trip between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap I saw something else — and yet, in some Douglas Adams, if-it-doesn’t-make-sense-it’s-invisible, sort of way, I didn’t see it.

  Scattered across the green rice paddies and along gray, water-filled ditches and ponds were structures from which flapped sheets of translucent plastic. Below each sail was a rectangular “boat” constructed of the same materials. In the daylight they were usually rolled up, but at night the sails were unfurled into vertical rectangles. More intriguing to me, they were lit up at night, like ghostly square-faced scarecrows rattling and flapping in the wind and rain. When I asked about these, our guide smiled. At the next roadside market, he showed me large baskets heaped full of walnut-sized water bugs. The beetles, attracted to the light, flew into the sheets, and then dropped into the containers below. They were food. For people.

  At the time, I thought this a slightly unsettling curiosity and recalled how, in 1968, lugging a heavy, frameless, green canvas backpack through the same region, the back of my shirt so soaked with sweat it would later peel off in shredded pieces, I had declined to nosh on the beetle “shish ke-bugs” proffered up to my open window by eager boys at Thai bus stops. Now, again, I found the very idea of biting into these cockroach-like bugs revolting.

  I did not know, in 1968, or in 2007, that giant water bugs were grilled or fried in Thailand, Lao PDR, and Cambodia, or that the Thais ate so many that they were importing them from neighboring countries, that wild populations were declining because of habitat change and pollution, that prices were going up and that they were difficult to farm because the bugs started eating each other when they were crowded. It had never crossed my mind that caring for these bugs might be part of my veterinary job, or that the OIE and the Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture should be interested in this. Or even that these insects might hold one of the diverse keys to local food security around the world.

  Why did these things never cross my mind? I suspect it was because I was distracted by an immediate concern for the well-being of my own species.

  What I did see were the effects of people being food for insects. I saw a motorbike, man in front, woman behind, infant in between. This is not an unusual sight in Southeast Asia. Often you can see two or three children along with their parents and full shopping bags on a tiny motorbike. The difference here, in Phnom Penh, in 2007, was that the woman was holding up a bag of intravenous fluid, and the thin tube from that bag was inserted into the arm of the infant. Cambodia was in the throes of an epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue fever that, in 2007, sickened 40,000 people and killed more than 400, many of them children. Dengue fever viruses — like those that cause Zika and yellow fever — are spread by mosquitoes. The female mosquitoes are the ones that feed on mammalian blood, and hence the ones that transfer the virus from one bloody lunch buffet to the next. Ironically (if one can see past the obvious species barriers), the female mosquitoes are drinking human blood in order to ensure that their own offspring live. Mosquitoes are manifesting that fierce mothering instinct that has enabled many species to survive these many centuries in the face of the incalculable odds against them. They are not “out to get us.” Like the Maasai who drink the blood of cattle, and the French who eat blood sausage, the mosquitoes, lice, and ticks that use our blood are simply nourishing themselves and their babies.

  Mosquitoes are not the only blood-feeders. Triatomine (a.k.a. assassin) bugs are one of about seven thousand species in the Reduviidae, a Hemipteran (true bug) family of predators and bloodsuckers. Although there are reports of some Aboriginal people eating Reduviidae in central Australia, we have more often thought of these bloodsuckers as eating us. The triatomines feed on people and other animals, having probably evolved from insect-eating ancestors more than 175 million years ago. Triatomines can be infected with Trypanosoma cruzi, a wavy, willow leaf–like flagellated hemoparasite. The trypanosomes, which cause various forms of mammalian and marsupial sleeping sickness in Africa, Australia, and South America, appear to have evolved from parasites that first made their homes in insects. Although the great continent of Pangaea started breaking up about 200 million years ago, it wasn’t until a few tens of m
illions of years later that Africa and South America went their separate ways and the parasites followed, wagging their tails behind them.

  Emerging at night from dark crevices in mud walls, these triatomines wander down walls and hammock ropes. Finding a sleeping person, they look for a good place to get some blood, usually an area of exposed mucous membrane such as next to the eye or lips. This gives them their other popular name, kissing bugs. So as not to disturb the person’s sleep, they start by injecting a little anaesthetic. Then they suck blood from, say, the medial canthus of the eye, take a crap, and wander back home. The person wakes up, rubs his itchy eye, and, in so doing, rubs the parasite (which is in the poop) into it.

  A few people get an allergic reaction at the site of the bite. Most people carry the parasite without getting sick. About 10 percent develop a chronic disease that can result in a weak and flabby heart and/or a dilated, flabby intestine and esophagus. These symptoms may take decades to develop. As you can imagine, folks with the chronic disease lack energy and just generally feel miserable.

  Even Darwin, in the midst of his celebration of science and “objective” observation, could not suppress or disguise his disgust at bloodsucking insects. In The Voyage of the Beagle, he wrote: “We crossed the Luxan, which is a river of considerable size, though its course towards the sea-coast is very imperfectly known. It is even doubtful whether, in passing over the plains, it is evaporated, or whether it forms a tributary of the Sauce or Colorado. We slept in the village, which is a small place surrounded by gardens, and forms the most southern part, that is cultivated, of the province of Mendoza; it is five leagues south of the capital. At night I experienced an attack (for it deserves no less a name) of the Benchuca (a species of Reduvius) the great black bug of the Pampas. It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one’s body. Before sucking they are quite thin, but afterwards they become round and bloated with blood, and in this state are easily crushed.”