Thousands of books and papers on subjects ranging from software development and business management to GMOs, health care, and climate change have been devoted to strategies that could be used to “wicked” such problems. The most successful strategies appear to involve collaborative work, imagination, and recognition that there are no definitive solutions. To paraphrase the words of novelist Douglas Adams (in The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul), “We may not have gone where we intended to go, but we think we have ended up where we needed to be.”
Entomophagy, at least insofar as it is seen as a solution to the problem of sustainable global food security, is one subset of a much larger, wicked, problem. Perhaps we can begin to tame this animal if we can name it and suggest some boundaries. So what might that big problem be? Implied but not always stated, since there are conflicting views on this within the entomophagy movement (which is one indication that this is a wicked problem), is that the current industrialized agri-food system — the same one that has given us such food bounty for the last century and made possible our much-celebrated and sometimes despised “way of life” — is that big, wicked problem.
Given that our “way of life” has become globalized, where can we find the margins of the problem? Should we look for a temporal boundary, sifting through historical and anthropological sources as foundations for a twenty-first-century entomophagy? Daniella Martin and others have argued that, if we want to eat a true Paleo hunter-gatherer diet, we should be eating bugs. I am not convinced that a modern food fad based on evolutionary survival will serve us well in the next millennium. Still, the notion of scouring wadis and gulches for overlooked oases of food in a world of eight or nine billion people is not entirely without merit.
The world today is a fundamentally different planet than when our ancestors first dug termites out of mounds or began arguing with bees over who should have access to their sweet treasure hoards. Yet there are remnants, tide-pools of living knowledge and practice that have so far escaped the tsunami of industrial progessivism. These eco-cultural remnants are relevant insofar as they have survived into the twenty-first century; they have enabled people to survive and even remain resilient in the face of radical environmental, political, cultural, and climatic changes. The boundaries we can identify here go beyond the temporal to a combination of culture and geography.
Globally, we can begin our searches in the small enclaves inhabited by marginalized people in Asia, Africa, and North and South America, enclaves where ecological and survival knowledge are sequestered, such as the American mountain valleys or Mexican forest glens that Jeff Lockwood, in talking about how locusts survived between plague years, and how monarch butterflies survive today, has called sanctuaries. These are the places where the identification, husbandry, processing, and preparing of insects are now being preserved.
But before we do so, it is worth pondering why these practices have been marginalized in the first place, and thus what the challenges might be in mainstreaming them. The progressive, modernist notion is that they are simply inefficient, suitable perhaps for subsistence, but not for a modern, science-based world. There is little credible evidence of any sort that this is true. Many ideas, people, and cultures have been marginalized by an odd mixture of so-called enlightenment science (that is, the science of non-insect-eating cultures), religious enthusiasm, colonial arrogance, television, social media frenzies, pop-stars, and well-funded public relations campaigns. Social Darwinism was long ago discredited and discarded by (most) evolutionary biologists. Its ideas, however, continue to creep into many of our activities, including our practice of science and the programs and activities we continually create to “lift people out of poverty,” or to promote health and sustainability. Just as the Victorian language we use to describe social insects is encoded with ideology, so too are the critiques from some skeptics of the new entomophagy movement. While insects may well have been eaten historically by billions of people, it is argued, they have done so because they were poor, and starving, and had no other options. Insects might have been good for subsistence, but can they improve global food security in any substantive way?
Tim Flannery, the Australian ecologist to whom I referred earlier, asserts that hunter-gatherers are quite capable of doing any of the jobs on offer in the modern world, but that the reverse is not true. Flannery goes on to cite research that demonstrates that our “tendency towards civilized imbecility has left its physical mark on us. It’s a fact that every member of the mini-ecosystems we have created has lost much of its brain matter. For goats and pigs, it’s around a third when compared to their wild ancestors. For horses, dogs and cats it may be a little less. But, most surprising of all, humans have also lost brain mass. One study estimates that men have lost around 10 percent, and women around 14 percent of their brain mass when compared to ice-age ancestors.”79
So, we can surely learn from people whose ways of living have survived by being invisible to the global economy, and who may have some tips on how to compensate for our failing brain capacities that do not involve taking more drugs. But we need to be careful to do this learning in ways that neither marginalize them further, shaming them into driving their insectivorous practices “underground,” nor suck them into the mainstream and disempower them even as we seek their inherited wisdom. It is a delicate conversation, burdened with centuries of colonial bullying.
The roots of these attitudes are deeply embedded in non-insect-eating societies. One small vignette from Adam Hochschild’s heart-wrenching history King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa speaks volumes. In 1886, Henry Morton Stanley led a disastrous, arrogant, ill-advised expedition up the Congo River to “rescue” Emin Pasha, a German naturalist and physician who had been appointed governor of Equatoria — and who in fact needed no rescuing. Half of Stanley’s 389 native porters died. Among those that survived, according to Hoschschild, “When they ran out of food, they caught and roasted ants.” Ants, then, were seen as a food of desperation, to be eaten when they ran out of “real” food. But even what we eat when desperate is constrained by what our cultures have conditioned us to see as possibilities for food. The porters saw the ants as food; their American scribe did not. I am reminded of a saying among the Yansi, an indigenous group in Zaire: “As food, caterpillars are regulars in the village but meat is a stranger.” Which says as much about what they consider to be “meat” as it does about the importance of caterpillars in their traditional diet.
As I’ve been writing this chapter, I’ve been reading my grandfather’s diary from the 1920s famine in the Ukraine, in which insects aren’t even mentioned as a food of desperation. At one point he writes, “And what did we eat? Rats, dogs, crows, horsemeat, bread made from pumpkins, beets, millet porridge and millet chaff.” Like most people of northern European descent, he was aware of insects, but when thinking about food, they were visible only as pests. My grandfather was not unusual in his views. These deeply held attitudes about what can be used as food, and what cannot be imagined as food, are difficult challenges for those promoting entomophagy as a response to a globally desperate food security situation.
Even among those who are earnestly trying to be sensitive to indigenous knowledge and culture, as well as ecological resilience, we encounter a subtle deference to the language of colonial culture. Mopane worms, caterpillars of the emperor moth Gonimbrasia belina, have been integral to the food cultures of many tribal groups in southern Africa since prehistoric times. Nevertheless, recent published reviews of this important food source refer to the practice of eating mopane worms as a “livelihood strategy” for marginalized households whose “livelihood alternatives” are otherwise limited. Livelihood strategies is a phrase often used by development specialists to describe how people in economically and politically disempowered communities cobble together a way of life, and the term encompasses provision of food and shelter, income-generation, and daily living practices. As sust
ainable development became a catchword globally in the 1990s, the phrase sustainable livelihoods was increasingly used in development aid circles. The International Fund for Agricultural Development refers to the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (often shortened to SLA, but not to be confused — by those of us of a certain age — with those Patty Hearst kidnappers, the Symbionese Liberation Army)80 as “a way to improve understanding of the livelihoods of poor people.”
I have no objection to the use of SLA terminology per se, but I have yet to hear it applied to urban professionals and Silicon Valley acolytes in cities of North America or Europe. Yet one could argue that it is these livelihoods that are unsustainable, not those of villagers in Malawi. This reminds me of the OIE program to assess animal health infrastructure. When one Chief Veterinary Officer suggested that the countries of Western Europe or North America should undergo such reviews, the OIE officials were offended. This was a tool for evaluating “developing” countries, not “us.”
Is entomophagy a kind of neocolonialism, or is it, as I am hoping, a way for modern urbanites to develop SLAs? In this century, a series of FAO workshops brought what had been a niche activity in the world food debates out into the open. I’ve already referred to the reports from these workshops — Forest Insects as Food: Humans Bite Back (2010) and Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security (2013) — that launched a kind of global beetle-mania. The reports are full of surveys and case reports of “ethnic groups” (aren’t we all, in some way, ethnic?) who ate, and still eat, insects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Suddenly entomologists, archeologists, and anthropologists were combing the world, looking for more reports of people who ate, or had eaten, bugs. Behind all this were the billions of people who, until they were “discovered” by the new entomophagists, had been quietly, with little fuss, going about eating locusts and weevils and termites just as if they were regular food. The stories of these people are, quite literally, all over the map, and are as culturally diverse as the ecosystems within which they emerged.
As insects creep into our cooking repertoire, we would do well to pay attention to those stories — which insects were eaten, and why, and how were they prepared? At its best, the path to normalizing insects on the plate is a path that leads through mutual respect to greater ecological and cultural understanding.
In parts of southern Africa, people eat the stink bug Encosternum delegorguei when the mopane caterpillars are pupating underground and unavailable. But stink bugs are not just eaten “as is”; to make them palatable, they are washed three times in warm water, then boiled, and then sun dried. To detoxify an armoured ground cricket (Acanthoplus spiseri) before eating, one should pull off its head, remove its gut, boil it for at least five hours, and then fry it in oil. An insectivorous adventurer who ignores this advice may end up being seriously inconvenienced by an inflamed bladder. Mopane worms need degutting, and dung beetles cleaning, before they are eaten. We can improvise based on the original recipes, but the traditional entomophagists among the minority peoples of China and Africa and Latin America should be recognized as the Julia Childs of the new entomophagy movement.
In many cases, Julia’s children may be already gone. I suspect it’s too late, for instance, to find American indigenous cooks who can show us how to best prepare a desert fruitcake or a locust soup.
Some recipes, however, live on in current practice. Among the insects that have been traditional sources of food for people in various parts of the world, those that have managed to find the cushiest jobs in the postmodern economy are palm weevils, mealworms, and crickets.
I’ve already given mealworms the once-over in connection to nutrient content and animal feeds, and I’ll come back to crickets shortly.
For those of us who grew up in temperate zones, the least familiar of the three are the tropical palm weevils, whose natural ecological niche I described earlier. Originating from tropical Asia, palm weevils are often considered pests because they can transmit parasites from tree to tree. They are also a culinary delicacy in much of the non-European world. Semi-cultivation of palm weevils, in which the farmer-foragers create larvae beds by knocking down trees and exposing the pith for the weevils to lay eggs, has been reported from Paraguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, and Thailand. The Jotï, a semi-nomadic people from the Venezuelan Amazon, cultivate two species, Rhynchophorus palmarum and Rhinostomus barbirostris, although they prefer the latter for its richer flavor. In Southeast Asia, where the larvae are known as sago worms, they are called “sago delight” when fried. A Cameroonian cookbook describes red palm weevil larvae, also known as coconut larvae, as “a favourite dish offered only to good friends.”
In Thailand, demand for sago larvae, once foraged for occasional snacks or eaten as a form of pest control, has taken off to the point that farmers cannot keep up with the increasing demand. The traditional farming methods are to cut down cabbage or sago palm trees, drill holes into them, and then place breeding pairs of weevils next to the holes. The dynamics between increased demand and traditional foraging are a worldwide phenomenon, and increases in human populations and the felling of palms for farming are already being felt ecologically and culturally. In Venezuela, the Jotï now walk four to twenty hours farther than they once did to find palms to prepare for weevil cultivation. In Thailand, traditional methods have been replaced by putting breeding pairs into plastic containers, where they are fed ground palm and pig feed. By 2011, 120 Thai farmers were producing forty-three tons of weevil meat annually, as well as frass, which was used for fertilizer.
In Ghana, to avoid destructive overforaging, the Aspire Food Group are feeding their palm weevil larvae a mix of old, rotten palm trees and palm wine. Aspire was founded in 2013, when five MBA students at McGill University, none of whom had background in farming or insects, won the million-dollar Hult Prize, “a start-up accelerator for budding young social entrepreneurs.” Their plan was to work primarily in Ghana, the United States, and Mexico. On their website, they announced that their mission was “to provide economically challenged, malnourished populations with high protein and micronutrient-rich food solutions derived from the supply and development of insects and insect-based products.”81
When Shobhita Soor, one of the founders of Aspire, first told me over coffee at a Montreal café about the nutritional marvels of palm weevil larvae and Aspire’s Ghana project, I was skeptical. What could a small group of MBA students with more experience in spreadsheets and texting than in farming, international development, or insects, hope to accomplish? Was this just another example of neocolonialism with wealthy, well-meaning professionals from Europe and North America trying to tell Ghanians how to live sustainably, even though we have not proven ourselves able to do so? In January 2016, when the Guardian newspaper reported on the project, I was ready to start shaking my head in cynical sadness. A quote from a Ghanian professor about the possibility of reviving the lost practice of insect-eating in Ghana among the urbanized middle classes, however, gave me second thoughts, as did Soor’s emphasis on developing sustainable farming and business practices. “We are not here to change the way people eat or tell them what to eat,” she was quoted as saying. “We are here to provide a desired source of protein and iron in a much more accessible way. Palm weevil is a great source of iron and protein.”82 Maybe the Guardian just has skilled journalists (it does), and Soor is a deft PR person (no doubt), but I couldn’t help thinking that maybe a group of idealistic, enthusiastic young people could do what the mob of old, rich, white men who doled out the money never could.
Beyond palm weevil larvae, we can cite the importance of mopane worms in eastern and southern Africa, which have valuable ecological work to do and are nutritionally rich food supplements and provide substantial cash income for rural households (25 percent in some parts of southern Zimbabwe). African countries have provided an endless stream of entomophagy stories and research reports. Almost all the people living in the for
ests of the Central African Republic are reported to rely on insects for their protein. A study of the indigenous Gbaya people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) found that insects formed 15 percent of their protein intake. Another study announced that “the average household” in Kinshasa, DRC, was eating 300 grams of caterpillars a week.
Termites, especially the fungus-farming termites of the genus Macrotermes, are a desirable food item across sub-Saharan Africa. A 2013 review of termites as food (which wasn’t included in the systematic reviews I cited earlier) asserted that they “contain significant proportions of proteins, fats and minerals. The oil is of high quality with significant amounts of polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids. The termites have unique nutritional qualities that can be exploited to provide high-quality diets, especially in the developing countries, which have been plagued by iron and zinc deficiencies as well as poor supply of dietary polyunsaturated fatty acid sources.”83
People who eat termites sometimes also eat the clay from which the termite mounds are built, which is apparently high in kaolin, a treatment for stomach upsets. In ostensibly more sophisticated Western countries, some of us grew up eating Kaopectate, which, at least in its original formulation, was much the same thing — to stop diarrhea. Pregnant and breast-feeding women are said to benefit especially from eating termite mound clay; the benefits, according to one research report, are improvements in calcium intake, stronger fetal skeletons, and increased birth weight, as well as reduced hypertension associated with pregnancy.
Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects Page 17
