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

by David Waltner-Toews

  After more than a decade of intensive research, the general scientific consensus is that CCD is the result of interactions among land use changes, industrial honey bee management practices, multiple pesticides, certain species of varroa mites, bacteria (foul brood), fungal infections, viruses, and the immune systems and behavior of bees. Neonics loom large because of their ubiquity and, one might say, profligate application. As well, there is direct evidence of decreased sperm counts in drones exposed to neonics. Neonics are not alone among pesticides in being a problem; a survey of beehives in Canada and the United States, published in 2010, found evidence of 121 different pesticides and their metabolites in wax, pollen, and bees.

  The decline and disappearance of our most celebrated and valued insect companions can be reasonably attributed to the interactions between the human war on insects and the industrialized systems we have designed to promote food production and security. According to Ernesto Guzman, a professor at the University of Guelph who has spent his career studying bees, “What’s killing bees are modern practices of beekeeping and agriculture.”65

  As other non-bee insects move from being a local, indigenous food choice to being a commodity in the global trading system, can we evade the trappings and traps of industrial agriculture? Can eight or nine billion people live on this planet and eat in ways that will enable us to achieve food security in the larger context of all those elusive, ethically grounded global efforts we have set for ourselves: Sustainable Development, Sustainable Livelihoods, One Health, EcoHealth, Health-for-All, and Social-Ecological Resilience? Can we manage the conundrum we face when we want to impede the bugs that eat our food and inject us with parasites while at the same time promoting those we wish to eat? Is there a possible road to peace in this endless, self-defeating war on bugs?

  PART IV.

  BLACK FLY SINGING: REIMAGINING INSECTS

  Of course, we know that insects are not only our enemies and destroyers. We have alternative stories. Who are the good insects in the stories we’ve told ourselves, and what can they teach us? Do they suggest options for more convivial policies? Can we do some kind of feminist narrative therapy on the human race that helps us find health and redemption? Let us explore the alternatives to our perpetual war on bugs.

  MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME

  Insects as Creators and Bodhisattvas

  We’re in love and it’s a buggy day.

  Good nutrition. Ecological sustainability. Fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Are those black flies singing? Is this a fantasy?

  In the United States, Black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving, is a frenzied, greed-driven, chaotic shopping day. In 2012, Doug Currie, Vice-President, Department of Natural History and Senior Curator of Entomology at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, launched Black Fly Day as an antidote to the toxic commercialism of the day. Currie’s 1988 Ph.D. dissertation was on black flies, and he has done extensive research into the diversity and biogeography of northern Holarctic black flies. His book on the Simuliidae (black flies) of North America, co-authored with Peter Adler and D. Monty Wood, won the 2004 Association of American Publishers Award for Best Single-Volume Reference in the Sciences. So the proposal for a Black Fly Day was not necessarily a frivolous pun. But still, one might ask: why would one want to celebrate such a terrible pest?

  Black flies are infamous in many parts of the world, mostly because of a few blood-sucking, death-dealing, river blindness–bearing black sheep (if black flies may indeed be said to have black sheep) in the family. But some of them can be seen from a more ambiguous perspective. Globally, humans have been rapidly blundering into and destroying many of the earth’s most important and stunningly complex ecosystems. Who has protected the few remaining natural refuges from the depredations of humans? In the Arctic, in those few weeks that aren’t butt-freezing cold, those great eco-warriors have been black flies.

  In North America, home to slightly more than a tenth of the approximately 1,800 species of black flies, they are mostly nuisances with benefits. The larvae are fastidious and only live in fresh, flowing, oxygenated, pollution-free water; so if you see them when you go swimming, it’s a good sign. The males drink nectar and pollinate flowers; they are the Ferdinands — the flower-smelling non-fighting bulls — of the bug world. Four species of male black flies have given up sex altogether, and the females reproduce parthenogenetically. In those species where the females have a taste for mammalian blood, they prefer nonhumans. Females from eight of the nine species restricted to the Canadian tundra don’t even have the necessary blood-feeding mouthparts.

  In 1979, our family drove from my first veterinary job in northern Alberta to my second job in what Albertans called the Banana Belt, 110 kilometers (about 70 miles) north of Toronto. When we stopped, after several hours of driving through endless boreal forests, for an idyllic view of Lake Superior, my two-and-a-half-year-old son came back to the car covered in blood. He hadn’t even felt the bites. I guess there were a lot of hungry females out there unable to find nonhuman mammalian alternatives. On the plus side, the bites indicated that the lake water was fresh and clean. Some have even suggested that black flies were instrumental in “guiding” caribou along certain paths through the landscape, facilitating what we now call food security for indigenous people. Certainly, these insects are an important feed ingredient in the food chain, linking micro-algae to fish, birds, and thin-hided wandering primates.

  The alternative narratives to war without end have existed, often quietly, alongside and often interwoven with the stories of bugs as pests and disease carriers. These alternative narratives provide opportunities to reimagine our relationships with bugs, and to invent or reinforce responses to six-legged afflictions, pests, and plagues that are more compatible with entomophagy.

  We can begin by noting that for every online description of “real monstrosities” or entreaty to “face your fears,” there are websites with more endearing titles, such as The Unexpected Beauty of Bugs and Beautiful Bugs of Belize. To counter Alien, we could mention Wall-E, in which the world-saving robot kept a cockroach as a pet. Others might recall the adventuresome grasshopper, centipede, earthworm, spider, ladybug, silkworm, and glow-worm who are James’s traveling companions in Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. Although honey bees are almost universally praised, ants are not without their cultural champions either. From the wisdom of Solomon in the Book of Proverbs to the movies A Bug’s Life and Antz, Formicidae are raised up as exemplars of cooperation and hard work. Occasionally, as in the 2015 Marvel superhero film Ant Man, they are even heroic. The hero of the children’s book The Cricket in Times Square is an endearing little fellow, and although the talking cricket in Pinocchio is annoying, he’s really not a bad guy, and he probably didn’t deserve to have his head smashed in by a thrown mallet in Collodi’s original tale.

  How do we begin to make sense of these conflicting cultural images and the scientific and cultural entanglements from which they have emerged? How do we emotionally and intellectually create a mash-up of Alien and Antz, malaria and edible beetles, river blindness, black flies, and clean water? How can we begin to cope with our emotional ambivalence about digging into a bowl of live termites, or outright revulsion at watching Star Trek’s Klingons dip into a writhing bowl of Gagh?

  A first step would be to recognize the biases in our own narratives and not just the flaws in others. Despite the brilliant and Herculean efforts of that great Swedish naturalist and polymath Carl Linnaeus to standardize our descriptions of living things, even the most hard-core of hard scientists still fall back on culturally based metaphors and stories, if not to describe the things themselves, then at least to talk about their roles in nature. These metaphors and stories influence how we think about living things and, in turn, whether we wish to eat them or not. Do assassin bugs, as the name implies, kill important leaders for political or religious reasons? Or are they merely insects that kill and eat other i
nsects? Is the large female insect — the one who carries the eggs and determines the genetic makeup of the beehive or ant colony — a queen? Surely not one that Elizabeth of England or even Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen would recognize as such. Similarly, the use of the terms workers and soldiers for ants, termites, and bees reflects political and social histories in England and India.

  Social insects such as ants, bees, and wasps are particularly susceptible to having had colonial imaginations imposed on them. During World War II, ethologist Karl von Frisch, whose maternal grandmother was Jewish, was allowed by the Nazis to continue his work on honey bees despite other researchers classified as mischling, or mixed-blood, having been forced out of their jobs. Ernst Bergdolt, editor of Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenshaft (“Journal for the Entire Natural Sciences”), tried to get Frisch removed from his post at the Institute of Zoology in Munich. Bergdolt did not believe that Frisch was sufficiently cognizant of the ways in which bee society, so systemic and well-organized, could be seen as a model for a Nazi utopia. For Frisch, the bees were simply his friends, a refuge from the violent chaos around him, evoking awe and a sense of reverence for nonhuman life. In 1973, Frisch received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the complex communications and decision-making practices of bees. Does that make Frisch’s loosely organic notion of the hive the correct one? Or, perhaps, as apiarist and Buddhist monk Michael Thiele has asserted, “honey bees are bodhisattvas,” who “mirror our own struggles to live in the world” and, in their instinctual wisdom, inspire us to “new ways of living.”

  Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, in their book The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies, write that decision-making in a beehive “is a highly distributed process of friendly competition among the scout bees that identifies the best site. It is, in effect, a democracy.”66 Ah, so now we know. But is it a parliamentary democracy, with a queen? Or the republican form more familiar to those American authors?

  Not content with imposing their metaphors on European science, colonial empire-builders exported their beliefs to many countries around the world, so that in adopting the “scientific method,” African, Latin American, Vietnamese, and Japanese scientists have been contaminated by the linguistic mindsets of nineteenth-century colonial, Royal Society Europeans.

  For those who are promoting entomophagy, the cultural baggage carried by insect names are more than curiosities for cultural critics and anthropologists. They create some quandaries. Bees are excellent protein sources if eaten directly — as good as or better than crickets and mealworms. Yet while Westerners may be quick to adopt crickets and mealworms, and harbor no moral qualms about eating hornets and wasps, they may balk at a curry in which baby honey bees are the main ingredient. Is it because we secretly believe in bee bodhisattvas, or extol the virtuous lessons of governance and democratic socialism the hive offers? Do not ants, termites, and hornets offer similar lessons? Is it because bees seem “cuddlier,” more like pandas than grizzlies? Or is it because bees are now deemed a critical component in industrialized monocultures? It is, I am guessing, a complex, confusing mix of these things.

  Some alternative narratives weave together strains from insect-eating and non-insect-eating cultures, drawing on the best of both, and suggesting new pathways.

  The songs of insects have been one area where such cross-cultural conversations about the mixed blessing of insects have been rich and relevant to the study of edible insects. Hungarian composer and entomologist Béla Bartók mimicked cricket sounds in his 1926 suite Out of Doors. Bartók apparently felt that collecting insects, like collecting folk melodies, was a responsibility for contemporary composers. In 1979, American artist Jasper Johns created Cicada, a cross-hatched screenprint that evokes the complex, colorful, surround-sound song of the cicada. Inspired by Jasper Johns, South African composer Kevin Volans composed Cicada, a minimalist piece for two pianos. Poet Andrew Hudgens, in a poem, also titled simply Cicada, calls the insects an “oracle of our mortal summers” and a “song above our heads / in our hot corporeal evenings.”

  Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise is a celebration of insect singing by philosopher and jazz musician David Rothenberg. In both poetry and hard-core musicology — involving the creation of music notation and technology suitable to recreate the sounds they make — Rothenberg explores the strange, beautiful, and mysterious music of cicadas, crickets, and throat-singing katydids. Meanwhile, on the website of Mr. Fung’s Cricket Orchestra, Swedish cricket musicologist Lars Fredriksson — also known as Fung Liao, the composer and conductor of the cricket orchestra — introduces the “Chinese Cricket Rosary Ensemble,” which “usually consists of 108 outstanding singing crickets of species like Bamboo Bells, Purple Bamboo Bells, Heavenly Bells, Golden Bells, Small and Large Yellow Bells.” Fredriksson describes performances by his orchestra as having “a slight resemblance of the Wiennese heurigen, the Oktoberfest around München, and the testing of the Beaujoulais noveu [sic].”67

  One American blog has gathered dozens of musical pieces and pop songs written about insects, including pieces about ladybugs, moths, butterflies, cockroaches, dung beetles, black flies, dragonflies, and crickets. They are not all, to be sure, celebrations, but they are not puke-inducing, scary songs. In popular culture there have been Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Iron Butterfly, and Alien Ant Farm — as well as, of course, the Beatles.

  Taking things one step further into the territory of entomophagy, the Anderson Design Group in Nashville, Tennessee, has a web page devoted to cicadas that explicitly brings together some of these strains of food, fear, and insect music.68 The website’s title is the alarming Cicada Invasion, but the banner below is a more inviting “Sing. Fly. Mate. Die.” The page itself includes recipes (sixty-six, the last I counted), videos, stories, and pictures. The site poignantly declares that we “often forget that the life cycle of the cicada is both beautiful and tragic and just focus on the noise.”

  Attitudes toward insects in Europe have more often been rooted in religion, pornography, entertainment, and poetry rather than entomophagy. However, even here one might find possibilities for reframing the cultural imagination, linking them in our minds to love and entertainment.

  Fleas aren’t merely annoyances to pets and people, who also transmit the plague bacillus. John Donne’s erotic metaphysical poem “The Flea” takes the form of a seductive plea to a female listener, describing the travels of a flea, first sucking blood from him and then wandering over to suck from her, thus mingling the pair’s bodily fluids inside it. Blogger Bridget Lowe, under the title “Fleas Are for Lovers,” suggests that readers “keep in mind here that the printed ‘S’ at the time Donne wrote his poetry looked more like an ‘F’ — allowing the poet to play a bit and still claim total innocence.”69 Donne’s sensual poem was a sublime example of a less-than-exalted tradition of what some have called insect pornography, in which male poetasters commented more explicitly about the skitterings of insects into fleshy cleavages and under skirts.

  Flea circuses, once reported to be extinct, have in fact been kept alive by Colombian-born artist María Fernanda Cardoso. Her Cardoso Flea Circus, which is now part of the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery in London, includes cat fleas trained to escape (Harry Fleadini), lift cotton balls (Samson and Delilah), walk tightropes (Teeny and Tiny), and pull a toy locomotive (Brutus).

  The mixed reputations of insects cut a wide swath across the domestication spectrum. Silkworms are fully domesticated, completely dependent on human care. While they are brought together into teeming masses, they are not self-organizing the way bees are; we have used their cocoons for clothing and their larvae for food. Crickets are not domesticated, but have been prized as food and for their fighting, singing, and — if Walt Disney and George Selden (the author of The Cricket in Times Square) are to be believed — storytelling skills. Locusts are not domesticated at all; they are wild animals that have peri
odically visited plagues of biblical proportions upon evil enemies and offered spiritual blessings to hungry prophets in the desert. Bees are the semi-feral cats of the insect kingdom. From the Egyptians to the Mayans, from Minoan-Mycenaean goddess worship to Hinduism and Catholicism, Apis species have held an honored place in the mythologies of humanity. This tradition has continued well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Novels such as Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s A Recipe for Bees (1998), Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2002), and Laline Paull’s The Bees (2014); movies such as Bee Movie (2007); and popular science and naturalist books such as Candace Savage’s Bees: Nature’s Little Wonders (2008) and Mark Winston’s Bee Time (2014) are ample evidence of the special place bees hold in our cultural imagination.

  It is one thing to raise up and magnify positive images of insects in science and culture. The great challenge for those wishing to invent a sustainable food supply that includes insects will be to find ways to acknowledge the bad along with the good, and to dance cleverly with the tensions that emerge. Indeed, unadulterated cute and good stories about insects might discourage entomophagy as much as those that characterize them as unrepentant and evil marauders.

  “Run for Your Life” and “I’ve Just Seen a Face” are both acoustically accompanied songs from the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album. “Run for Your Life,” a possessive, jealous fit of male rage, was Lennon’s least favorite song, one that he regretted having written. “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” with its forward-propelling “I have never known / The like of this / I’ve been alone / And I have missed” is the acoustic Beatles at their best. Taken together, they encapsulate the ambivalent relationship between people and insects. If we can’t control you, we will kill you, on the one hand, and OMG you are so uncontrollably, wildly beautiful on the other.