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

by David Waltner-Toews

  He was concerned, he finally said. With all the film crews and the researchers coming into his village, he was upset that all these foreigners were concentrating only on the fact that they sometimes ate insects. Sure they did. But that was not who they were. They were a diverse and multifaceted community, living regular lives, trying to be sustainable, to make a living, to have meaningful lives. They sometimes ate insects, but they were not defined by this. He wanted me to remember that as I worked on my book.

  Waiting for my delayed flight at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, I thought more about what Daesuke-san had said. It was true. I sometimes ate locally foraged maple syrup, and apple butter made from locally grown apples, but those foods did not define me. I suppose the foods I grew up eating — verenicke and borscht and porzeltche and pfeffernuesse and paska — were, by virtue of their historical and familial baggage, part of my sense of identity. Throwing a handful of bugs into the borscht and adding cricket protein powder to my paska would change their ecological and nutritional values, but not how they related to my sense of cultural identity. Food and taste are very deeply rooted in the warp and weft of interwoven personal, family, and ecological histories. If we changed the content of our food but kept the form — substituted bugs for ham in the bean soup, for instance — would that, across generations, also change the culture that gave us meaning, the sense of who we were? I suspected so, but wasn’t yet sure how.

  In March 2004, I had been at the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt. The occasion was a special conference of that massive global initiative of the early 2000s, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. The conference was titled Bridging Scales and Epistemologies, and it emphasized the challenges of listening across cultures, having mutually respectful communications across different worldviews, and creating effective linkages that could encompass individuals, villages, governments, and, indeed, the whole earth. If the world of insect-eating is any indication, it seems to me that the important conversations needed to begin designing these bridges have barely begun.

  SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE KITCHEN WINDOW

  Culinary Renewal from the Margins

  Cool stink bug cream and a nice weevil tart,

  I feel your taste all the time we’re apart

  Southeast Asia, as many YouTube videos and enthusiastic travelers will tell you, offers a veritable buffet of insectivorism and seems to be at the forefront of linking the cuisines of insect-eating and non-insect-eating cultures.

  Introduced into Thailand in 1988 based on technology developed by Khon Kaen University, cricket farming and demands for its products in Thailand and beyond have exceeded even the most optimistic expectations. By 2011, twenty thousand Thai cricket farmers were putting out more than seven tons annually. Schools had introduced programs to fortify school lunches. The highest input costs were feed-related. Many were giving the crickets chicken feed, although vegetables such as pumpkins, cassava, morning glory leaves, and watermelon were often fed just before harvest to improve taste.

  In neighboring Lao PDR, cricket farming has been slower to commercialize, and has only been around since the early aughts. Nevertheless, various ethnic groups in the region have been eating insects for a long time. Even now, although under duress to give up their “primitive” habits by television-inspired globalization, some 95 percent of Laotians are reported to eat insects of one sort or another. The surviving entomophagical practices include, for people living near water such as a paddy field, scavenging for diving beetles, water scavenger beetles, water scorpions, giant water bugs, stink bugs, and dragonfly larvae. In the dry season, people eat the larvae and adults of dung beetles. Stink bugs are sold fried or live to be prepared at home. Cooks remove the stink by boiling them, and then make them into a paste to be eaten as a side dish. People in South Africa, Malawi, Papua New Guinea, and Mexico also eat stink bugs.

  In August of 2015, Thomas Weigel (the cricket project manager for VWB/VSF) took me to the Dong Makkhai market, just outside of Vientiane, where the vendors sell a variety of products foraged from Laotian forests. One of the authors included in Forest Insects as Food: Humans Bite Back reported that “among the edible insects [at the Dong Makkhai Market] the biggest sellers are weaver ant eggs (23 percent), grasshoppers (23 percent), crickets (13 percent), honeycombs (13 percent), wasps (9 percent), cicadas (5 percent) and honey bees (5 percent). The highest price is paid for young cicadas — about US$25/kilogram.”

  The foods Thomas and I saw on display in the market were as stunningly diverse as the reports indicated. Heaped on the display tables were mushrooms, seeds, frogs, turtles, honey laced with some kind of bitter, medicinal plant product (passably okay, I discovered later, with Nutella), and a wide variety of six-legged wildlife — different sizes of grasshoppers, small white crickets, house crickets, mole crickets, wasps, wasp eggs and larvae, dragonflies, and dung beetles. Many of these were already roasted or fried, but in a few cases live crickets were on display, freshness assured by their scrabbling attempts to escape their deep plastic bowls, resident flies circling the rims. Thomas and I bought a couple of portions of fried crickets and some larvae of unknown (to me) provenance. We crunched these as we wandered around looking at other freshly foraged offerings. At one stall, where we stopped for lunch (noodle soup, no insects), several young women (and their mothers) offered themselves to us as suitable marriage partners.

  At another stall, we were offered more pedestrian (compared to the marriage proposals) fresh, fat, white hornet larvae. Here we accepted the offer; the soft, velvety larvae were smooth on the tongue and of a pleasantly cool, buttery, custard-like consistency. On the table, Asian giant hornets, fat and a few centimeters long, wandered lost and disoriented over the cells of the broken comb-like nursery of their dead brood. It made me sad to see them, but thinking about food often gives me a sense of my own mortality and of being inextricably caught, squirming, a turmoil of conflicted feelings, in the web of life, with its expected death, unexpected beauty, and necessary loss. In deference to the many indigenous peoples of South America, Mexico, Africa, Australia, and Asia who consider bee, wasp, and hornet brood delicacies, I bought a piece of the nest with larvae and some dead giant hornets, which the seller mixed with kaffir lime leaves.85

  Back at the house, I improvised a curry with the hornets and their babies and decided that if this was going to work for me, first, I needed a better recipe, and second, I should probably consult with a chef from one of those many indigenous cultures.

  A few days later, several of us — including Fongsamouth Southammavong, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture, and Daovy Kongmanila, an animal scientist at the National University of Laos— drove through the flat, green landscape to visit the VWB/VSF cricket-rearing projects. One of these, near Vientiane, involved sixteen farmers in the village of Hatviangkham (HVK), near the university. The aim of this was to create value-added products for crickets to be marketed in Vientiane. The other, in Bolikhamxay district, an impoverished area that had recently suffered serious flooding and food shortages, was about three and a half hours’ drive south of the capital. If I had come just a week earlier, the roads would have been completely impassable. Indeed, while we were in Bolikhamxay, we heard that a dead body had been found — presumably drowned in the floods. Even now there were large areas of red, slimy ruts.

  After having taken a design workshop, the farmers had built their own cricket-rearing crates, about a meter by two meters and one and a half meters high. The crickets scrambled around, hiding as I watched, retreating to large paper maché egg cartons that were propped against the walls of the pen. Farmers left out trays filled with sawdust or rice bran where the crickets could lay their eggs. The farmers (all women) were feeding chicken feed to the crickets, occasionally supplemented with fresh produce such as water spinach and cassava leaves. For the last five days before harvest, the crickets were on a vegan diet. After forty-five to fifty days, just after eggs had been laid for next cycle, the farm
ers said they harvested about five kilograms of crickets. They knew when to harvest, they said, because at breeding time the males chirped like mad and scrambled after females. Then they waited until the females laid their eggs. The frass was used for garden fertilizer.

  Our lunch was courtesy of Fongsamouth’s college roommate, now a director in the Provincial Agriculture and Forestry Department. Our four-wheel-drive vehicle bumped and slid along a slimy, winding red mud road between hills and alongside a man-made lake. At road’s end, we walked to a gazebo overlooking the water. I leaned on the railing as the director’s staff fired up the barbecues. An electric line was strung down from the hillside to a lightbulb dangling over the water. This would be turned on at night, the director said, to attract insects for the carnivorous fish in the lake; the fish were caught for food. Cassava leaves were thrown into the water to supplement the diet of the herbivorous fish. A wooden house up on stilts perched on the other side of a small earthen dam. Next to it was an insect trap, similar to the ones I had seen in Cambodia, consisting of an upright panel of metal corrugated roofing with a fluorescent tube light stuck vertically in the center of it and a tub of water below. I was told that this is the preferred method for catching insects in Laos and is used by many households. I walked over and looked into the water trap: a few giant water bugs, dragonflies, moths, and an iridescent jewel beetle. Andrew Vickerson at Enterra Feed in Canada, who had worked in Cambodia, had worried aloud to me about the problem of “by-catch” with these systems. I supposed this might be a problem for any scaled-up version of insect foraging.

  Daovy explained to me that many people used the bugs caught in this way for themselves or to feed fish or other animals. She related how one morning she and her husband woke up later than usual, and their chickens had eaten all the bugs in the traps next to their house.

  The other VWB/VSF project involved both cricket farming and the production of chips and salsa, both with crickets as ingredients. The chips were made of manioc flour, dried and ground garlic and shallots, and dried crickets. The manioc dough was rolled into sausage-like shapes, wrapped in plastic, and then steamed. The steamed dough was cooled in the refrigerator overnight and then sliced thinly. The chips were fried in hot oil. Before the final production stages, Thomas and his colleagues had visited pubs and beer shops (it’s a living, eh?), distributing samples to elicit orders. By the time the orders were finalized, however, some of the HVK farmers had eaten their crickets or sold them in local markets. To offset this, Thomas needed to pick up a half kilogram of crickets. So, on the way into the city after the visit to Bolikhamxay, we stopped at a commercial farmer unconnected to any foreign aid or development project to see if we could buy from him.

  The farmer was a young guy, in his twenties; he had seven pens of crickets and was growing them on chicken feed. His production — eight to fifteen kilograms every six weeks, selling at 35,000 LAK86 per kilogram to market sellers (who resold it at 50,000 LAK/kilogram) — was good. We asked him how he had learned cricket farming. From the internet, he replied, and from other farmers. Now he was at a stage where he shared eggs with several other people in the area who were interested. As we were speaking, another guy strolled over from a nearby building. He explained that he was a section head in the Department of Agricultural Extension and Cooperatives, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and that he was growing crickets as a hobby. He had six crates. I wondered where development projects fit into this context. Were they unfair competition? Were foreigners once again stepping in thinking that they knew better? Or (my preferred interpretation) were the projects a stimulus to promote new farming and food practices?

  The following day, at the university food science laboratory, I watched as several of the staff prepared five versions of cricket salsa for consumer testing. They worked with mortars and pestles in the lab and a small outdoor barbecue for roasting onions and garlic. After preparing the salsa, they tried the different versions out on individuals on or near the university campus. Later they returned to the laboratory and entered the information they’d collected — about color, smell, and taste, for example — into a spreadsheet. The “best” salsa would then be presented to the HVK villagers, who would (based on previous experience) modify the recipes as they saw fit, changing ingredients “more or less to taste.” This, it seemed to me, was a way for the villagers to claim both ownership and agency over the process. These modifications also, for better or worse, created challenges for anyone attempting to industrialize the process.

  In a 2015 article in Trends in Food Science and Technology, Matan Shelomi, a postdoctoral research fellow at Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology and a specialist in the evolutionary genetics of insect digestive enzymes, suggests that we should think about insects in Western and European food systems the way we think about nuts; we already describe insects as having a nutty flavor, and many of the more popular ones, such as mealworms and crickets, are already used the way nuts are — as optional ingredients in otherwise complete foods, as snacks, or as a source of cooking oil. Indeed, fried up with some salt, garlic, and kaffir lime leaves, heaped over fresh-cut cucumber, the karaoke crickets Thomas and I had shared had tasted fresh and crunchy, like beer nuts for drinkers with nut allergies. The analogy is useful but, like all analogies, imperfect. In terms of spoilage and food safety, insects are still more like shrimp.

  Cricket farming in Lao PDR and neighboring countries involved small initial capital investment and appeared to be a good way for poor people living on the fringes of large urban centers to make a living and improve the nutrition of their families. The logic of international development suggested that the next step was to “scale up,” and Thomas was exploring the idea of working with a national beer-brewing company to use their brewer’s waste as cricket food, which would be a way to improve growth, reduce costs, and close a frayed and broken ecological connection. This all sounds good, but I get nervous about luring farmers into the industrial global agri-food system so they can make more money. For one thing, if backyard chicken rearing is any indication, as soon as the crickets go from being subsistence to commercial, the management and income will shift from women to men, and one of the original rationales for this work will be lost. I also worry that, like Thai people who flocked from the countryside to Bangkok in the 1960s, rural Laotians will use their increased disposable income to build giant shopping malls and to sell enough cars to turn the streets into noisily impassable canyons between skyscrapers. Already Thomas could point out to me the Chinese-financed apartment blocks and shopping malls bulldozing their way across the green landscape on the edge of Vientiane. Was this the future? Would there be a place for small-scale cricket farmers just trying to keep their families healthy and well fed? Was it any of my business what they did with their increased income?

  Cricket farming might improve household nutrition and increase income for smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia, and improve the lot of rural women there, but what roles could it have in North America, where industrialized livestock systems were well entrenched?

  Canada’s Entomo Farms offers an example of what might be done. Rather than starting from the wants of consumers, Entomo Farms started from the farm and decided to take a more direct approach to putting insects on the dinner table. Ecologists Tim Allen and his colleagues Joe Tainter and Tom Hoekstra have called this approach — starting from the resource base rather than the consumer — “supply-side sustainability.” Marketing themselves as “the future of food,” Entomo declares that they are producing the “world’s most sustainable superfood.” Having started out as “reptile feeders,” producing insects for reptiles and fish, they had made the cross-species leap just a year before my 2015 visit. Dedicated, enthusiastic, smart, and media-savvy, the owners have been profiled in Canadian newspapers and radio programs and celebrated their innovative fare with politicians at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto. In a Canadian Business article on Entomo, reportedly “North America’s largest cri
cket farm,” journalist Carol Toller marvels at how easily and delightedly nine-year-old Kayla Goldin, daughter of one of the three brothers who operate the business, scarfs down a handful of waxworms. Toller parades out the usual rational arguments in favor of eating insects: on a weight-for-weight basis, they use a lot less land and water than other domestic livestock, and on a per-weight basis, they convert feed inputs into meat more efficiently than, say, cattle.

  The title and subtitle of the article get at the primary challenge in scaling up, however. “How a New Wave of Food Entrepreneurs Hope to Persuade Us to Eat Bugs,” announces the title. The text beneath reads, “Crickets might just be the miracle food for a hungry 21st century. The only catch? Convincing squeamish shoppers.”

  Entomo is just a few hours down the road from where I live, near the small city of Peterborough, Ontario, so, in the summer of 2015, before I set off on my entomophagical world travels, I drove over to see for myself what was happening. On my way, I noticed a sign beside the road that read “This land is our land. Back off government.” If I didn’t know rural Ontario better, I might have started worrying about rural survivalist gangs and whether insects were a menu item for them: Cormac McCarthy meets the Organic Prepper?87

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but there was nothing special that would broadcast this as a cricket farm, the way one might recognize a dairy farm or a feedlot by the sight of it, or a pig farm by the smell of it. The farm building looks like what it is — a converted, warehouse-like chicken barn, about ten thousand square feet, set in a very lightly rolling countryside, a patchwork of boreal forest, corn, and pastures.

  The business was started by Darren Goldin along with his two brothers, Ryan and Jarrod; partners Caryn Goldin (culinary manager) and Stacie Goldin (media specialist) are also clearly important members of the team. Darren greeted me as I pulled up to the large open door of the building, a windrow of frass bags along one side of the asphalt parking lot. The former occupant, a now-retired chicken farmer, lives on the neighboring farm and is apparently happy with what these new insect farmers are doing.