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

by David Waltner-Toews

  In the years following the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin suffered from lassitude, palpitations, extreme fatigue, flatulence, and general gut problems. At least forty different diagnoses have been proposed (ah, to be an armchair physician!). Among those, several authors speculated that he had picked up trypanosomiasis, and Zakaria Erzinçlioglu has even wondered if Darwin would have written The Origin of the Species if he hadn’t been chronically sick, having to stay home to write instead of being out and about with his naturalist pals. Having once suggested that Gaudí might not have designed the Sagrada Família if he hadn’t suffered from chronic brucellosis acquired by drinking goats’ milk (as a natural health food), I have some warm feelings, but no evidence, for this theory. When I am sick at home, I don’t do much writing. But maybe that’s just me.

  Other researchers suggested that it was a mutation in his mitochondria that made Darwin sick, which would make it his mother’s fault, since mitochondria are inherited through maternal lines. Of course! It’s always the mother’s fault!

  Not all of our battles with insects are the consequences of direct attacks on human populations. In many cases, our anger, fear, and disgust are the result of attacks on foods that we love. Among the mythologies that have shaped European, African, and American relationships with the natural world, few are more powerful than the tales of the locust plagues visited upon Egypt. The plague described in that founding myth for the Jewish people, gathered from oral traditions during their Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, has retained its power because of the frequency with which humanity has reexperienced and recounted its devastation.

  Locusts are the Darth Vaders of the insect world, the good guys gone bad. Unlike the majority of grasshoppers, locusts have two phases, one suited for a solitary, albeit crowded, life, and one designed for swarming. During years of high productivity, locusts in the solitary phase reproduce even better than rabbits. The population explosion that results, aggravated by droughts and declining food supplies, causes chemicals to be released in their frass and increased disturbance of their leg hairs as they crowd. Under these conditions, females lay eggs that are biochemically primed to grow up into nymphs that, under endocrine changes stimulated by continuous crowding, grow longer wings and actually seek to aggregate. Like the European explorers of the Age of Empires, and the refugees from overcrowded hovels in medieval Europe, they are anxious, pumped, and primed to swarm. Better to leave home, the endocrines say, than to stay and starve. During a swarm, locusts abandon their vegan lifestyles in favor of voracious, omnivorous feeding frenzies.

  In the nineteenth century, immense and catastrophic locust plagues seemed to come out of nowhere, in no predictable pattern, roiling in dark feeding frenzies across the American Midwest. Politicians, religious leaders, and scientists described these plagues in language that resonated with the weight of religious tradition and the fearful fury of the mysterious wilderness. Then, suddenly, at the end of the century, they disappeared. No more plagues.

  Would they ever come back? Without knowing where the swarms had come from, where they lived between plagues, and why they had disappeared, Midwestern American farmers and settlers might forever be scanning the horizon for another approaching catastrophe.

  Before the work of Jeffrey Lockwood and his colleagues in the 1990s, entomologists had been searching for causes of locust extinction commensurate with the size of the plagues: massive changes in landscape, disappearance of the bison, widespread planting of alfalfa, climate change. One day, after years of painstaking and fruitless research, Lockwood was talking with a colleague about monarch butterflies. Monarchs migrate thousands of miles down the length of North America to overwinter in one small stand of trees in Mexico; the adults feed only on milkweed. They are vulnerable at various stages of their complicated lives, and much has been made of reducing pesticide use and promoting milkweed growth on their flight paths. This is all well and good, but monarchs are probably most vulnerable to extinction while in their tiny Mexican sanctuary. That’s where the babies are born. That’s their only nursery. If those trees go, then the monarchs disappear, regardless of reduced pesticide use and butterfly gardens. Lockwood started wondering: what if swarming locusts were, like monarchs, reliant on some small, unknown sanctuary? He decided to pursue this possibility further.

  In his entomological thriller Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect That Shaped the American Frontier, Lockwood reported that the locusts had retreated, century after century, to river basins in the northern Rocky Mountains to regroup. Then, the fur trade took away the beavers, and the locust sanctuaries were increasingly subjected to spring flooding. In the late 1800s, prospectors and miners headed into those mountains after gold and silver. The miners needed food, and farmers followed them into the fertile valleys with sheep, cattle, and alfalfa crops. The disappearance and extinction of the plague locusts was an unintended consequence of a combination of land-clearing and intensive farming practices in support of mining communities. More to the point, it wasn’t simply the result of changes all across their range, but also — probably mostly — because of a direct but inadvertent attack on their nurseries.

  While many of us have grown up with some awareness of locust plague stories, few of us are aware of the many insect plagues that attack the foods we love. The plant pest grape phylloxera (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae) is a prime example of such a pestilential attack.

  In his 2005 New York Times review of Christy Campbell’s compelling tale The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World, reviewer William Grimes declared: “What the Black Death was to humans, the phylloxera epidemic was to grapevines: a mysterious, unstoppable killer that ravaged not only France but nearly all the wine-growing world.”57

  The nineteenth century was an exciting time for European and American explorers and natural scientists, people who actually went out into the world and paid attention. These were the heady days when the amateur naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were pulling together disparate travel tales about their observations of birds, barnacles, and beetles. The microbe hunters Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur probed the Lilliputian world of bacteria, yeasts, and fungi. Even as these heroes of modern science and medicine were reimagining the world we lived in, entomologists, botanists, and entrepreneurs, driven by a desire to make profits as well as by public concerns about locust plagues and pest outbreaks in agriculture, were digging more deeply into the world of applied, problem-solving sciences related to agriculture. These were years when no one thought much about killing specimens to study them, or carrying plants and animals back and forth across oceans to stimulate and improve agricultural and food supplies. Some of the plants that made their way across the Atlantic from America to France were grapevines. Although the vines themselves seemed hardy, disease resistant, and productive, the wine produced was considered repugnant. Nobody, at first, noticed the tiny aphid stowaways that arrived in the mid-1850s.

  Over the decades from the 1850s to the 1870s, however, wine growers in France could not help but notice the shrivelled leaves and blackened, rotten roots of their grapevines. Businesses were going belly-up. Wine was big business in France, but politicians were busy liberalizing the economy, and traditional viticulteurs were distressed and bewildered. Between 1875 and 1889, annual wine production plunged from 84.5 million hectoliters to 23.4 million hectoliters. Two-thirds to nine-tenths of all European vineyards were destroyed. Intensive investigative work by French botanist Jules Émile Planchon and American entomologist Charles Valentine Riley identified phylloxera as the cause of the blight, and they began piecing together its complex life cycle. But what to do about it? Desperate interventions, like burying a live toad under each vine, did not seem to help. After much grumbling, French wine growers went along with a suggestion from two of their own that they could graft European vines onto American roots. This maintained the European quality of the wine, but took advantage of t
he disease resistance of the American roots. Gradually, the French wine industry recovered. Nevertheless, the political, cultural, and scientific squabbles continued. In California, phylloxera made a resurgence, perhaps evolving (as all insects will) to adapt to the American roots. Some vineyards in Europe had not succumbed to the blight, and those were nurtured and studied for new answers. Even the once reviled American hybrids have been resurrected in France. According to Campbell, Mémoire de la Vigne is an association that commemorates the times when the only wine available to the peasants was American. Some have declared this to be “the wine of resistance, the wine of the anarchists, the wine that drives you mad,” which, translated into Canadian English, means (I think) that they liked it.

  Insects have thus injected us with parasites, chewed their way into our skin and muscle, and almost destroyed some of our greatest food comforts in troubled times. No wonder we have waged such battles against them. They remind us of our animal selves and our mortality. These pestiferous insects are significant because of the ways in which they have shaped many of our attitudes and insect-related narratives more generally — narratives infused with fears and anxieties that now impede reasonable uses of insects for food and medicine.

  Vincent M. Holt, in his 1885 pamphlet “Why Not Eat Insects?” replies “Why not, indeed! What are the objections that can be brought forward to insects as food?” He imagines the reply of his Victorian readers to be “Ugh! I would not touch the loathsome things, much less eat one!” Yet, he argues, eating insects is scientifically rational and socially reasonable, practiced all over the world for good reason. “What a pleasant change,” he writes, “from the labourer’s unvarying meal of bread, lard, and bacon, or bread and lard without bacon, or bread without lard or bacon, would be a good dish of fried cockchafers or grasshoppers.” For some reason, Victorians were not immediately attracted to his menus, which included woodlouse sauce, curried cockchafers, and moths on toast.

  Sixty-six years later, the entomologist F.S. Bodenheimer’s comprehensive scholarly treatise titled Insects as Human Food: A Chapter of the Ecology of Man fared no better. Despite his having enlisted the support of Aristotle, Pliny, and Immanuel Kant to his cause, Bodenheimer’s scientific and scholarly colleagues and students pretty much ignored his advice to eat bugs. The picture that opens the book — of a naked Australian Aboriginal woman carrying a baby, allegedly out looking for insects — may have titillated postwar National Geographic readers, but Bodenheimer’s assertions that “primitive peoples” and “natives” had no qualms about eating insects did not convince a postwar European population hungry for meat, milk, eggs, potatoes, and gefilte fish. The book’s colonial, condescending, patriarchal language is an unfortunate barrier to twenty-first-century readers; Bodenheimer was a professional entomologist with broad historical and practical interests, and, once one gets past the language, his book is replete with interesting anecdotal and scholarly information.

  As Holt, Bodenheimer, and many since have discovered, one of the consistent responses of non-insect-eaters to insects on the menu is disgust, a word that has its etymological roots in Old French and Latin, dis meaning “the opposite of” and gust meaning “taste” (as in gusto and gustatory). The related term revulsion is rooted in the Latin for “pulling or tearing away,” which would be the action we most often take when we are disgusted with something. Disgust and revulsion are visceral responses with evolutionary roots; they prevent us from eating rotten or disease-infested foods. Still, the fact that certain foul-smelling, rotten, worm-infested cheeses or rotten fish are considered delicacies shows that such foods can be an acquired taste; we learn that they will not make us sick. We trust those who prepare them.

  In the emerging, eclectic, global culture of the twenty-first century, science and imagination converge and reinforce each other in unexpected ways. A tasty garnish of black ants on fresh salmon may unexpectedly evoke the 1977 film Empire of the Ants, or Stephen King’s The Mist. Large-sized insects, of the griffenfly kind that went extinct a few hundred million years ago, are especially terrifying. Thus the bugs on my plate at le Festin Nu evoke the human-sized cockroaches in Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch, David Cronenburg’s The Fly (as well as the 1958 version), and The Deadly Mantis, a 1957 movie in which a giant, prehistoric praying mantis is freed from the polar ice and attacks humanity. In the twenty-first century, The Deadly Mantis might be viewed either as parody or as a morality play about the freeing of methane from Arctic bogs because of global warming. Seen as a product of its time, however, the film does not encourage philosophical reflection or public enthusiasm for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

  If you browse the internet for bugs — not unlike a goat browsing in an abandoned farmyard — you will come across websites and headlines that are grounded in personal or cultural disgust and designed to attract attention. Some of them are news stories of tiny bedbugs crawling into people’s most private sanctuaries and sharing bodily fluids. Others have titles such as “10 Horrifying Insects That Will Make You Reconsider Ever Visiting Japan” and “Real Monstrosities.” Still others mix the language of information with that of elevated anxiety, such as “Insect Swarms Plague Many Canadians Right Now. Here’s Why,” which was recently flagged on a weather site.

  Sometimes the stories are not, in the first instance, told to create horror, yet the language used tends to promote fear. In 2014, the Guardian newspaper posted a link to close-ups of insect heads by Indonesian wildlife photographer Yudy Sauw. The images are colorful and strange, but rather than invite us to explore the unsettling and curious world of these tiny animals, the caption reads, “Face your fears: extreme creepy-crawly close-ups.” Why was it framed this way, rather than as a photographic exploration of the micro-world, a curiosity?

  Anne Raver’s New York Times review of Amy Stewart’s Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army and Other Diabolical Insects appeared in the Home & Garden section of the paper. This placement speaks to how subtly cultural images inadvertently reinforce each other. Raver is interested in the invasive Asian stink bugs that are eating her tomatoes even as Stewart insists that she is only interested in bugs that altered the course of human history.

  Stewart’s catalogue of “wickedness” includes stories of the death and devastation created by black flies. They are reported to have killed twenty-two thousand cattle along the banks of the Danube in the 1920s. In the tropics, they carry a larval form of Onchocerca volvulus, a parasite that causes river blindness, which affects tens of millions of people annually; one of these flies, in Africa, bears the no-nonsense name Simulium damnosum. She also recounts the tale of the Formosan subterranean termites and their relationship to the failing of the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. According to Stewart, “Gregg Henderson, the termite guy, raised the alarm about the fact that they were nibbling away at the seams of the flood walls [in the years before Hurricane Katrina]. But entomologists have a hard time in convincing other people that little creepy creatures can be so powerful.”

  F.S. Bodenheimer, in his comprehensive 1951 review, asserts that eating lice is “almost cosmopolitan.” Human body lice evolved from human head lice a mere 100,000 years ago, although pubic lice (papillons d’amour, if you are French) appear to have been acquired — how, one wonders — from gorillas. In our post–gorilla intimacy urban societies, with our public health programs and emphasis on the links between godliness and cleanliness, we are less attracted to louse-nibbling behaviors, however cosmopolitan they may once have been. We are more comfortable with Stewart’s brief, titillating history of the typhus-bearing body lice that brought Napoleon’s army to its proverbial knees in Russia than we are with a history of humans actually eating the things.

  Despite her disclaimer about focusing on bugs that changed history, Stewart devotes several pages to the historically marginal praying mantids and golden orb-spiders, whose females sometimes eat the males after (or during) mating — although she is quick
to point out that “no bug is truly wicked. It is just eating.” As May Berenbaum asserts, even “people who can’t keep straight in their minds the concept that spiders aren’t insects seem comfortably fluent with the notion that praying mantids are unreconstructed sexual cannibals.” Berenbaum notes that sexual cannibalism has been reported, at least occasionally, in a wide variety of insect species ranging from crickets and grasshoppers to antlions and ground beetles. Despite their pride of place, only a handful of the 180 species of mantids have been reported to engage in the practice, and even then only sometimes, in some situations, and often under artificial laboratory conditions. The original description that launched the reputation of the predatory mantid was a 500-word story, in 1886, based on a single male and a single female kept as pets in a jar by a friend of the author. Berenbaum’s take on the public fascination with this practice is that people “hate to let go of things sick and twisted,” which can also be said for stories of human cannibalism. It is of course usually those in power, who feel their power threatened, or the invading, colonizing armies, who have accused their enemies (Caribes, Native Americans, Jews, Scots, Picts, most Africans, the Chinese) of cannibalism. When cannibalism was reported in Hannover, Germany, or Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or when a plane full of rugby players resorted to the practice after they had crashed in the Andes, no one suggested that all rugby players, or Germans, or Americans, were cannibals. Any inference made from these accounts that all humans might be secretly eating each other (Soylent Green notwithstanding) would be treated as a twisted, Monty Pythonesque joke.