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

by David Waltner-Toews

  This is not to say that Stewart is unusual in her mixed messaging. Even when the content of the message is, “they’re not so bad,” or even “they are useful,” when it comes to insects, the marketing headlines often undermine the substance. In his book Living Things We Love to Hate, which in its content is trying to rehabilitate the public image of these animals, Des Kennedy nevertheless uses chapter titles such as “Flies — Awful Fecundity” and “Wasps — The Social Terrorists.”

  The pestiferous, disease-bearing bugs, which are but a tiny fraction of all those millions and millions out there, have given all insects a bad name. They instill fear and cause us to whimper. Can we bear to eat them? Given the intimacy between food and bodies, is this not a kind of satanic communion? That bad name now hinders our ability to see them as they are, in themselves. This is not unusual for people; we all, scientists as much as religious fanatics, see the world according to our preconceptions. As I write this book, rumors of one Syrian terrorist suddenly cast suspicion on all Syrians. One Christian ideologue, one Muslim terrorist, one atheist scientific bully, and suddenly all members of that group are branded with the same sizzling iron. If we can learn one good thing from considering insects as food, it should be the ability to pay attention, to see the category-transcendent and subtle beauties and terrors of the world as it exists; in the words of George Harrison, life is flowing on within you and without you.

  It will not be enough, however, to change the images in our heads. Our views of pestiferous insects have influenced how we respond to them in very practical ways. These cultural images, reinforced by certain scientific and economic narratives, have shaped how we practice agriculture and fight diseases. And it is our agricultural and public health practices that now stand in the way of a global shift to entomophagy. Just what are those practices? And — if the (m)admen can engineer a mind-shift in our attitudes toward insects — are there alternatives?

  RUN FOR YOUR LIFE

  The War Against Insects and Its Consequences

  The way things are going,

  they’re going to pesticide me.

  “Millions of people owe their lives to Fred Soper. Why isn’t he a hero?” So begins Malcolm Gladwell’s 2001 New Yorker essay titled “The Mosquito Killer.” In this essay, Gladwell recounts Soper’s Global Malaria Eradication Programme, a post–World War II war on malaria based on what were seen to be the miraculous insecticidal effects of DDT. Soper was convinced that by spraying DDT in people’s homes, malaria could be eradicated. Gladwell repeats the assertion that, according to some estimates,58 DDT saved more lives between 1945 and 1965 “than any other man-made drug or chemical before or since.” Paul Mueller, the Swiss chemist who discovered DDT’s insecticidal effects in the late 1930s, received the Nobel Prize in 1948. By 1967, when Rachel Carson carefully documented the unintended consequences of profligate pesticide use, resistant strains of the mosquito were already emerging, selected for by the ways in which DDT was used.

  The battles over pesticides run like a fault line through the entomophagy debates. These arguments often pit public health advocates working in tropical countries against environmental scientists in more temperate climates. It is the kind of thought-wrenching quandary one envisions being carried on in the lawless cage matches that pit climate change, environmental conservation, economic development, agriculture, and food security against each other.

  In their 2013 review of the new entomophagy movement, “How Then Shall We Eat? Insect-Eating Attitudes and Sustainable Foodways,” Heather Looy and her colleagues recount the story of Sanambele, a village in Mali. Here, children once foraged for grasshoppers as part of a diet that included millet, sorghum, maize, peanuts, and fish. When Malian farmers switched to growing water-hungry and pesticide-dependent cotton, they made more money, but at the cost of increased protein-energy malnutrition. Similarly, in Madagascar in 2012, the locust plague pitted those who wanted to eat locusts against those who wanted to defeat and kill them with pesticides because they were destroying familiar, staple food sources. It is a conundrum that ripples through all the fissures in the debates about eating insects and could, if not handled well, bring down the whole entomophagical edifice.

  Because arguments about pesticides strongly intersect with entomophagy, it is worth examining the issues more closely. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution and what President Eisenhower of the United States called the military–industrial complex, the weapons used to kill insects, like those used to wage war against other people, have increased in their lethality and the extent of their indiscriminate collateral damage. Just as aerial bombardment rains destruction on soldiers with missile launchers and shopkeepers selling zucchini alike, so DDT does not distinguish between edible crickets and deadly assassin bugs, between bees bearing honey and mosquitoes carrying Plasmodium falciparum. At the same time, the justifications for these wars have become treated as common-sense knowledge. Implicit in the twentieth-century use of pesticide sprays and flea bombs has been the assumption that of course we need to destroy them — or they will destroy us. Whatever we think of the religious superstitions of previous centuries, people in those times seem to have at least considered the possibility of other perspectives.

  Within the non-bug-eating traditions of Europe, visitations of insect pests were often framed as moral problems. Locust swarms might be seen as attacks from Satan, or as armies sent by God to punish his wayward people. The latter seems to have been the Islamic view, but the Christian view could go either way. If a locust plague was God’s punishment, then one would be called upon to suffer, repent, and change one’s ways. This view aligned with the Greek tradition, which held that improperly expiated murder would lead the furies to send pestilence. In medieval Europe, the Church merely substituted demons for furies. This is the question that Father Paneloux struggles with in Camus’s novel The Plague. If disease and pestilence are God’s punishment for bad behavior, then is medical treatment a fight against God?59 If insect plagues were the devil’s handiwork, then this would create a more complicated, Manichean good–bad theology — why would an all-powerful God allow this suffering? — but an easier practical solution. One could fight back with whatever weapons one had at hand.

  In 880 CE, Pope Stephen VI provided holy water to exorcise a swarm of locusts in the area around Rome. More often than a direct papal decree, however, the decision as to the proper response to killer bee and locust infestations was decided by ecclesiastical courts with lawyers appointed to represent each side. Elaborate legal cases were initiated, with lawyerly machinations and florid speeches that could have been lifted from the O.J. Simpson trial.60 These legal wranglings were not much different from class action suits and political debates over pesticide use in the current century. It’s just that now, when we argue about whether such products foster or destroy sustainable food security, we talk about whether they are working with or against “nature” — a modern, ambiguous stand-in for the notion of a god.

  The advent of industrially produced pesticides did not change this framing of the war against insects, which remained embedded in concepts of good (what is “natural,” or, alternatively, what enables us to produce more food) and evil (wild nature, forces that destroy humans and human food, anti-technology Luddites). But the way these forces have been interpreted, especially in the debates around overpopulation and overconsumption of earth’s resources, is sometimes flipped. In the 1990s, I was a member of an online discussion group about sustainability. We were all scholars or professional scientists of one sort or another. I was somewhat taken aback, then, when one member of our group, on learning that I was an epidemiologist, announced that “my people” were the problem. Epidemiologists had found and implemented too many ways to keep too many people alive! I was used to environmental issues being characterized as battles between good and evil, but I was disconcerted to discover that I was seen by some as being on the side of evil.

  What changed with ind
ustrialization, and with the invention of DDT in particular, was the power and reach of our weaponry. During World War II, DDT dusting, bombing, and spraying averted catastrophic typhus epidemics of the sort that brought Napoleon’s army to its knees, and enabled beachheads to be gained and battles to be won. The initiatives to control or eradicate malaria are often described in terms of discipline, battle, and war.

  According to Gladwell, Fred Soper “was a fascist — a disease fascist — because he believed a malaria warrior had to be.” He concludes his New Yorker essay this way: “There is something to admire in that attitude; it is hard to look at the devastation wrought by H.I.V. and malaria and countless other diseases in the Third World and not conclude that what we need, more than anything, is someone who will marshal the troops, send them house to house, monitor their every movement, direct their every success, and, should a day of indifference leave their shirts unsullied, send them packing.”

  On the one hand, using war metaphors in relation to how we treat disease offers some useful analogies for emergency medical care — quick and effective interventions based on knowledge, expertise, and skills. On the other hand, the use of such metaphors lumps together two very different kinds of activities and creates confusion that, in the complex web of eco-social life, can have profoundly detrimental outcomes.61 This is especially so if the metaphors are confused with reality. The association of insecticides with modern warfare is even more tightly bound than that of medicine and war. Indeed, the marriage of war and pesticides has been sanctified in both metaphor and practice. PDB (paradichlorobenzene), a by-product of the manufacturing of explosives in World War I, was later used in pesticides and mothballs. Without World War II, it is doubtful that DDT would have so quickly gone from the lab to the field. Various formulations of arsenicals, organophosphates, hydrogen cyanide, and chloropicrin have likewise been used as weapons of war against people and insects.

  Some would argue that we really do have wars against disease, with a medical armamentarium, just as we really do battle against insect pests. Airplanes and the internet are also technologies of military origin; and do we not value these products? War is where the money is. Why not take the products of war and put them to good peaceful uses, beating swords into ploughshares, bombs into power plants? I will not engage here in the more general debate on where technological inventions come from and how they are used. My concern is with how we frame our relationships to insects in general and the impacts this framing has on our desire to eat some of them. I’ll not even try to make a case for saving parasite-bearing mosquitoes as a food source for bats, fish, and birds. Those cases represent unresolved, and probably unresolvable, questions among ethicists, ecologists, entomologists, and public health activists.

  Insects, as a class and even as individuals, are a mixed bag, and, like people, the impacts of their behaviors can be seen as both good (they are sources of food for other species on which our food system depends, for instance) and bad (they are consumers of foods we would like to eat, and disease carriers). In the complex world we inhabit, it is often difficult to disentangle the two. Unfortunately, the battle against insect pests is predicated on the myth that we can do just that.

  Heptachlor is an environmentally persistent organochlorine insecticide.62 First registered for use in the United States in 1952, it was used against termites and several other insects that agriculturalists deemed to be pests. In 1976, in the wake of Rachel Carson’s work as well as laboratory testing showing that heptachlor was toxic to the liver and reproductive tract in humans, as well as being carcinogenic, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned all uses of heptachlor — except for use on seed corn to protect the grains during storage and for control of ants on pineapple plants. Ants, it seems, were protecting mealybugs because the mealybugs, like some other scale insects, including those that Yahweh offered the Israelites in the desert as manna, produced a sweet exudate that the ants valued. The mealybugs fed on pineapple plants. (Interestingly, since pineapples are Bromeliaceae, some of which are carnivorous and eat insects, this could be seen — not by Dole and Del Monte to be sure, but by some, perhaps — as poetic justice.) Heptachlor residues were not detected in the fruit of the pineapple plant, so this arrangement functioned without major hiccups for half a dozen years. Then, in 1982, health department chemists in Hawaii began detecting heptachlor in milk samples. Were these results correct? How could heptachlor get into milk? There followed the usual rounds of denials and retests and ambiguous statements suggesting that even if the pesticide was there, it did not appear to constitute an “unreasonable hazard.” What happened was that pineapple growers, in trying to promote ecological efficiency, had devised a system whereby the pineapple plants were fed to cows as part of a nutritious diet. The growers were supposed to wait a certain amount of time between spraying the plants and feeding them to the cows, but neither cows nor farmers always follow written schedules.

  Aldicarb is a pesticide that is effective against thrips, aphids, leaf miners, fleahoppers, and spider mites (which are not insects, but arachnids). On potato crops, it was used to kill soil nematodes. The active chemical in aldicarb inhibits the breakdown of cholinesterase, which is the chemical that normally deactivates acetylcholine at neuromuscular junctions after a message has been delivered from the nerve ending to the muscle. If acetylcholine is not broken down, you get convulsions. And sometimes respiratory failure. And death. In 1985, in California and Oregon, an outbreak of neurological disease (nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, blurred vision, muscle twitching, slurred speech) was associated with consumption of striped watermelons. The symptoms were traced to aldicarb in the watermelons. The aldicarb had been (legally) sprayed on non-watermelon crops grown in nearby fields, or in the same fields the previous year. In 2010, the EPA announced an agreement with Bayer (the primary aldicarb producer) to phase out its production and use, stating that “aldicarb no longer meets our rigorous food safety standards and may pose unacceptable dietary risks, especially to infants and young children.” According to the US EPA website, “Bayer has agreed to first end aldicarb use on citrus and potatoes, and will adopt risk mitigation measures for other uses to protect groundwater resources. The company will voluntarily phase out production of aldicarb by December 31, 2014. All remaining aldicarb uses will end no later than August 2018.”63

  At the same time, in 2011 AgLogic Chemical received EPA approval for Meymik 15G, another aldicarb-based pesticide, for use on cotton, dry beans, peanuts, soybeans, sugar beets, and sweet potatoes. The company’s website says it is planning to “reintroduce aldicarb to the market for the 2016 growing season.”64 A 2015 study of 225 wild and domestic animal deaths in the Canary Islands reported that 117 died of deliberate poisoning, more than three-quarters of these cases involving two pesticides — aldicarb and carbofuran, also a carbamate — banned in the European Union and Canada and restricted in the United States. The wheels on the bus, as my grandchildren used to sing, go round and round.

  After all the bad public relations surrounding persistent organochlorines, many pesticide companies and producers shifted to fast-acting but less environmentally stable organophosphate pesticides. What this means is that there are fewer residues in the food, and hence fewer complaints from urban consumers, but much higher risks to poor farm workers.

  Insecticides were created to kill insects: that’s what the suffix -cide means, as in suicide, and patricide, and fungicide. Those who market pesticides would sometimes like to give the impression that they are being forced to shift among pesticides and to create new ones — all of which costs a lot of money — simply in response to the actions of irresponsible “environmentalists” who care more for a few insects or birds than they do for human health and food security. These environmentalists are never called scientists, which most of them are, even as their corporate challengers are paraded out as scientific experts — although where their expertise resides, exactly, is not always clear. The fact is,
however, that reckless use of these powerful chemicals has selected for insecticide resistance in many species. This increased resistance to the drugs could have been predicted using basic evolutionary theory (apparently the pesticide producers only believe in science selectively). Whether the causes are greed or wishful thinking, we now have what we have. The question is, how do we respond?

  For the companies who helped create the problem, the solution is easy: invent new and different, and more expensive, pesticides. As usual, each new class of chemical is paraded out as if it is a miracle. Neonicotinoids are a case in point. Somewhat cavalierly called neonics (nee-oh-nicks), even by their enemies, these chemicals are neuroactive in a manner similar to nicotine. Introduced in the 1990s to treat sucking, chewing, and soil-dwelling insects, they have rapidly become the most widely used pesticides worldwide, which would seem to contradict the notion that they represent a kind of miracle. Miracles, from what I understand, are unusual and rare. Neonics have been applied to most economically important agricultural crops, such as corn, canola, cotton, sorghum, sugar beets, rice, and soybeans, as well as to fruits and vegetables such as apples, cherries, peaches, oranges, berries, leafy greens, tomatoes, and potatoes.

  Not many insecticides have been studied for their specific impacts on edible insects or insect products used as food. Recent studies of neonics on bees are an exception. These have been heavily researched because of their temporal and spatial association with the catastrophic decline of honey bee populations in many parts of the world, and more specifically with the emergence of colony collapse disorder (CCD). CCD is a syndrome in which all the adult bees simply abscond, leaving behind a queen, some honey, and a few immature bees. There are no dead bodies.