Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher whose 1927 book Being and Time is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century. He was also, at least until the mid-1930s, a Nazi. Similarly, Ezra Pound, one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, was a fascist. Karl Marx, that great champion of a future egalitarian society, lived a less-than-exemplary domestic life and is said to have abused his housekeeper. One might be tempted (as I have been) to separate the ideology from the philosophy and poetry. When I posed this dilemma to philosopher Karen Houle, she urged me to think about such people as complex and contradictory human beings, as we all are. This became, for me, a moment of awareness as to how we might imagine people and insects in more complex ways.
The idea that insects, bacteria, and people are either good or bad is one of our most dangerous illusions. What used to be called our logical left brain tells us insects are incredibly useful and mostly good for us. Let’s eat them! Our intuitive right brain imagines that insects are monsters. Let’s kill them! A bug observing this conflict might suggest that, as far as her fate is concerned, the right brain–left brain argument is moot. She will die in either case. Besides which, Roger Sperry’s theorization of right brain–left brain split is now considered to be an oversimplification of a kernel of truth. People function best if the different parts of the brain work together; the corpus callosum, that bundle of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, is what makes us complexly, fully human. As in ecology, the conversations among parts are as important as the stuff communicating. In promoting entomophagy, we forget these complex relationships at our peril.
Locusts are a deadly plague. They could also be part of a healthy diet. They are both, and their contradictory nature, like those of Heidegger, Pound, and Marx, is central to who they are. In “Penny Wiseguys,” the 513th episode of the long-running television show The Simpsons, Lisa takes up eating locusts to combat an iron deficiency attributed to her vegetarian diet. Later, taunted by bugs in her dreams, she changes her mind, and, after a few misadventures she releases them — whereupon they immediately raze a corn maze.
From the possibly mythical folk storyteller Aesop (sixth century BCE) to modern variations of the ant and the grasshopper tale in movies such as A Bug’s Life, grasshoppers have been characterized as lazy and ants as hard workers. In the original tale, and for several centuries after “The Ant and the Grasshopper” entered popular literature, the grasshopper was actually a cicada, which, given its propensity to sing, makes sense. Over the centuries, perspectives on the ant and the grasshopper flip-flopped. In Somerset Maugham’s short story “The Ant and the Grasshopper” (1924), the layabout brother marries a rich widow. John Ciardi’s adaptation of the tale, John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan (1963) — in which Fiddler Dan marries an unconventional ant — celebrates poetry over fanatical work, and John Updike’s wastrel Brother Grasshopper leaves his hardworking but lonely brother a rich trove of memories.
Chinua Achebe, in his great novel Things Fall Apart, describes a scene in which “quite suddenly a shadow fell on the world, and the sun seemed hidden behind a thick cloud. Okonkwo looked up from his work and wondered if it was going to rain. . . . But almost immediately a shout of joy broke out in all directions. . . . ‘Locusts are descending,’ was joyfully chanted everywhere. . . . For although locusts had not visited Umuofia for many years, everybody knew by instinct that they were very good to eat.” Later in the novel, the locusts become a symbol of the destructive swarms of white men coming into the country.
In Japan, often heralded as a leader in entomophagy, insects are pests, poets, and pets. From the song “Hotaru no Hikari,” about a fourth-century Chinese scholar studying by the light of fireflies, to the anime “bugmaster” Mushishi, from Edogawa Ranpo, a writer who used insects to invoke horror in his stories, to Kawasaki Mitsuya, who aspires to heal familial relationships through having parents and children connect in new ways by caring for, and thinking about, stag beetles,70 insects may be portrayed as both good and bad, but they are certainly woven into the cultural fabric.
In John Vernon Lord and Janet Burroway’s children’s story The Giant Jam Sandwich, the town of Itching Down (which is not “a waspish sort of town”) is plagued by a swarm of four million wasps. The townspeople try all the usual spray-and-swat killer responses, none of which work. Finally, Bap the Baker rallies the townspeople into a great community project: to create a giant jam sandwich in which to trap the wasps. In the end, the townspeople prevail. At the end of the story, the giant jam-and-wasp sandwich provides a feast for birds “for a hundred weeks.”
An updated version might have the townspeople feasting on the sandwich themselves, but feeding the birds seems less selfish and more ecologically appropriate. In any case, the key to Itching Down’s solution to the wasp problem is that it targets only the ones that are pestering the town and uses natural animal behaviors to get rid of the pests. No nerve-gas weapons of war involved.
The Giant Jam Sandwich got me thinking about how we might celebrate Black Fly Day. I see it as a general celebration of insects, a day to give thanks for the pure water that black flies alert us to, for the crickety biscuits in the oven, and for the awesome and awful locusts in the wild. What if we had a grand celebratory feast and invited Aboriginal Australians, indigenous people from Africa and Amazonia, China and Southeast Asia, as well as farmers from Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Nebraska? What if we asked each of them to prepare a meal that included insects or insect products, or products that depended on insects, for instance, for pollination? What if we explored the dark side of bugs, the crop pests and the malaria mosquitoes, even as we ate crickets or mopane worms or palm weevil larvae, pollinated nuts, cereals and fruits, bread with honey? I suspect we would not all agree, and that not everyone would be comfortable eating bugs; but that, in my view, is not the point. Perhaps we can begin to modify the cultural narratives and foods we use to define ourselves. The point is to begin to understand ourselves, and the world we inhabit, in its rich diversity, just a little better.
CAN’T BUY ME BUGS
A New Age of Negotiation
The ladybug beetle is a pretty fine bug
(and she really has a lot to say)
No amount of money can compensate for millions of dead insect species. Money can’t buy me love, pollination, or complex, dynamic relationships among insects, plants, soil, and greenhouse gases. When insect species disappear, the magical mystery Magicicada musical will be silenced, and the trees, turtles, fish, and birds will suffer as they lose that periodic extravagance of fertilizer and feed. The insectivorous birds will disappear. Flowers will bloom once and then wrinkle and waste away. Once honey bees — or monarch butterflies, or dung beetles — are gone, shareholder profits will not bring them back. In the pesticide and fertilizer whorehouses, money can buy a one-night stand, a few seasons of corn or soy or canola. Pesticides provide temporary, short-term, transitional satisfaction for managing our culinary desires.
In a 2011 scholarly review titled “Energy-Efficient Food Production to Reduce Global Warming and Ecodegradation: The Use of Edible Insects,” environmental engineer M. Premalatha wrote, “The supreme irony is that all over the world monies worth billions of rupees are spent every year to save crops that contain no more than 14% of plant protein by killing another food source (insects) that may contain up to 75% of high quality animal protein.” The global agri-food system, however — like the economy in general — does not run on irony.
How can we begin to reconcile, not just in our heads and hearts but in practice, our conflicting experience with, and mixed feelings about, bugs?
At first glance, it may seem that one strategy to control insect pests without using insecticides would be to eat them; after all, people already eat locusts. It is a crude strategy, and it has been tried. With a few exceptions, eating insect pests has not been very successful in controlling them. Still, in a search fo
r nontoxic strategies to manage human–insect–food relationships, it is worth looking at those exceptions.
In Thailand, in the 1970s, the Bombay locust (Patanga succincta) — normally a forest-dweller — was becoming a serious pest in maize fields planted in forest clearings.71 When aerial spraying of insecticide failed, the government promoted eating the locusts and even promulgated recipes. Today, deep-fried patanga is a popular snack, and the species isn’t considered a serious pest. There are even farmers now who grow maize to feed the locusts, which bring a better price. So, are they food? Are they pests? Yes. And yes. And most assuredly, fifty years of exposure to eating locusts is better for one’s health than fifty years of exposure to pesticides, no matter how low the residues.
About eighty species of grasshoppers and locusts are eaten worldwide. Although there is a lot of variation in their nutrient content, most locusts, with about 60 percent protein and 13 percent fat (dry weight), are right up there with cows and cockroaches as excellent sources of human nutrition. They are not, for many people, a “novel” food source. There is a long history of humans around the world eating locusts and grasshoppers. Studies of human feces at Lakeside Cave in Utah indicate that, at various times going back 4,500 years, hunter-gatherers near the Great Salt Lake sometimes ate locusts and grasshoppers. Millions of grasshoppers and/or locusts periodically crash-landed into the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Washed up on the shore, naturally salted and sun-dried, they became a grand buffet. More recent ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies reveal that grasshoppers and crickets were part of the diets of some indigenous people in the area well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
So when I read of the locust plagues that devastated large parts of Madagascar in 2012 and for several years following, my mind drifted to the possibilities of fall-season soups and mock-raisin breads. I wondered whether people could have just eaten the locusts. Why not? Well, they could have, but it wasn’t as simple as that. The voracious locust swarms destroyed rice fields and pastures, causing hunger and threatening the food security of thirteen million people. Making a bad situation even worse, the plague hit the news just before Passover, and hence, in the Judeo-Christian imagination of Western societies, resonated with biblical implications. It was both a devastating plague and a public relations nightmare.
International and government agencies sprayed insecticides to manage the hungry pests, thereby contaminating a possible alternative food supply. Some children, though, were catching them by hand or in mosquito nets, drowning them, and roasting or frying them. Other farmers explained that the locusts might be a good source of food, but they did not keep as well in storage as rice. They rotted. There was no generic, one-size-fits-all response to the locusts. To adequately address the problem would have required facing the challenge of stopping the plague and, at the same time, developing new ways to harvest, store, and preserve the locusts for food. Given the cultural dynamics of postcolonial societies, and the sense of embarrassment that may accompany eating “bugs” in front of Europeans, such an approach would require a lot of courage and engagement with people where they lived, talking to farmers, elders, cooks, and children — and some major rethinking of strategies and appropriate, innovative technologies.
In Lockwood’s description of the American locust plagues, he notes that some farmers were initially happy that their poultry were stuffing themselves on locusts. This happiness disappeared when their chickens and turkeys gorged themselves to death. The farmers tried to manage this lethal feasting by giving the birds a bit of grain before turning them loose on the locusts. But still, there were so many! Too many! More problematically, the farmers later reported that the flesh and eggs of these poultry were inedible, exuding a pungent, oily odor. Others lamented the great stench of rotting carcasses along the lakeshore and in ponds, streams, and wells. Again, one of the issues raised by this situation — an intense, special case of the issues faced by all human settlements for more than ten thousand years — was the question of how best to harvest and preserve sudden windfalls of food. This question has been a driving force behind the long histories of fermentation, salting, sugaring, refrigeration, drying, vacuum-packing, and, more recently, genetic modification of fresh produce to extend shelf life. I have the sense that, were we to take insects seriously as food, we could solve the storage and preservation problems as we have for grains, dairy products, and fresh produce. In pre-Columbian America, some indigenous groups came up with the ingenious idea of making a “desert fruitcake” of insects, pine nuts, and berries, mashed together and sun-dried. The Honey Lake Paiute prepared a soup of dried crickets and locusts. The Japanese have produced hornet pickles and alcoholic drinks, Europe has its history of mead, and a group in the United States is now testing beer fermented with yeasts carried by wasps. The possibilities may not be endless, but the list of preservation methods is most assuredly long.
In Mexico, some species of grasshopper are considered serious pests of corn, beans, alfalfa, squash, and broad beans. Since the 1980s, many farmers have tried to control them through spraying organophosphate insecticides (mostly parathion and malathion, both of which are considered relatively nontoxic to people). The grasshoppers are also recognized as a source of food, an Aztec tradition going back at least 500 years. Even today, between May and September, harvesters from Santa Marıa Zacatepec (Puebla) head out into the fields before dawn; they are able to capture 50 to 70 kilograms of grasshoppers per week, and 75 to 100 tons per year. The annual sale of this grasshopper harvest brings in US$3,000 per family; for six months, this provides the main source of income for these people.
This is all well and good for the harvesters, but what about the farmers who want to control the pests? Two researchers from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México decided to find out. Over two years in the first decade of this century, René Cerritos and Zenón Cano-Santana monitored grasshopper infestations in field plots that had been sprayed and compared them to plots where grasshoppers were harvested manually. Although the lowest grasshopper infestation rates were in fields that were treated with insecticides, the researchers concluded that mechanical control still reduced the infestation to manageable levels, saved the farmers annual costs of US$150 for insecticides, brought extra income into the village, reduced risks associated with water and soil contamination, and eliminated negative effects on nontarget species.72 Mechanical harvesting had the added social advantage that it required farmers and harvesters to talk to each other and coordinate their activities. The World Bank used to call this social capital, and, in a region where social breakdown is a problem, it is not a trivial advantage.
In the long run, we need these kinds of alternative commitments; complex eco-social systems are more equipped to resist pest infestations, but nurturing these systems will take some serious rethinking of how we live. In the meantime, can we find ways of living, however uneasily, together with insects? Although the Soviet Union and the United States never fought their ideologically based wars directly, the bloody battles in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Uruguay, Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, and Vietnam were surrogates. Non-Russians and non-Americans died in large numbers to keep alive the Russian and American dreams of world domination. That is how empires work. Similarly, since Rachel Carson’s documentation of the unintended negative consequences of pesticides entered the public discourse, the war against pestiferous insects has not stopped, but merely shifted. These war metaphors, having informed medical practice, are now, in the language of surgical strikes, coming full circle, creating a mythology that offers the illusion of killing no innocent bystanders.
One of the most widely known and practiced strategies to control insect populations with minimal collateral damage is what has been called companion planting (by friendly gardeners) and intercropping (by more serious business farmers). More than 1,500 species of plants have some insecticidal properties, but even noninsecticidal plants can provide some field-wide resistanc
e to the spread of pests. Another strategy is to bring in other insects that prey on or parasitize the ones you don’t want (the pest-control equivalent of surrogate wars). More recent strategies have included the use of pheromones, genetic modification, and even playing distressing, infuriating music. I’ll only talk about a few of these strategies to make the point that, even if some agribusiness leaders support the contestable and doubtful assertion that pesticides are necessary to feed the world, we have options other than starvation and revolution.
Farming of course predates industrial pesticides by more than a few millennia. A 2013 report from the National Academy of Sciences in the United States suggests that agriculture in China goes back more than twenty thousand years. Citrus trees have probably been cultivated for a couple of millennia. Mandarin oranges, which as children in the hinterlands of western Canada we called Japanese oranges, originally spread from their birthplace in North India or Southern China across Southeast Asia, and from there to Europe and around the world.
Having cultivated citrus trees for thousands of years in a country that was the birthplace of entomology, it is no surprise that Chinese farmers had experience with pests and nontoxic pest controls. They were aware, for instance, that the citrus stink bug, citrus leaf miner, leaf-feeding caterpillars, and aphids could — and would — attack their lemon, orange, pomelo, and tangerine trees. Not having access to malathion, acetamiprid, methidathion, cyhexatin+tetradifon, spinosad, and other modern weapons of the war on insects, they tried working with nature rather than running immediately into battle against it. Perhaps they had read the advice of Sun Tzu in The Art of War, written almost half a millennium BCE: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects Page 15
