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

by David Waltner-Toews

  The wonton were indeed a crispy fried pastry, wrapped around prawns, with a light sprinkling of cricket bits on top. I had to take out my iPhone and shine the flashlight on the dish to find them. Well, I thought, they really did kill them when they were little. The wonton were the perfect combination of crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle (as the polar bears in a Gary Larson cartoon said of an igloo). I ordered a plate of the crispy fried wontons with prawns and no crickets, just for comparison. Really the only difference was the sprinkling of cricket bits over the wonton, with no discernible difference in flavor. I asked my waitress if this was how the chef usually prepared insects, and she informed me that they had to be subtle about introducing such new cuisine to Australians, so yes, she only included small amounts.

  Kylie Kwong’s experience was echoed by that of Meeru Dhalwala in Vancouver. In her Tyee interview, she said, “I think in Vancouver, I’ll just quietly put it back on the menu when the time comes. I feel like putting too much attention on why people don’t like something, it subliminally reinforces the fact that you don’t like it.

  “I’m going to take a different tactic in Vancouver now. Publicity worked in Seattle, but for Vancouver it didn’t have the same effect. We had nothing but positive media attention. People talked about the idea of crickets on a restaurant menu, but Vancouverites all reacted with ‘Oh, it’s intellectually a great idea but . . . I probably don’t want to eat it.’ This time, I’ll present it like an equal member of my menu and see how things go from there.”

  Later, the waitress at Billy Kwong brought me a small dish of roasted mealworms — about a teaspoon. They were crunchy, slightly nutty, as they say, not at all greasy — and not worth traveling the world for. A package from Entomo Farms in Ontario would have done just as well.

  Head chef Damon Amos of the upscale Public Bar and Restaurant in Brisbane has a different take on bugs in restaurants, sitting somewhere between le Festin Nu’s “in your face” and Billy Kwong’s “so subtle you won’t know it’s there.” The Public, with its high ceilings, cool atmosphere, and windows on two sides, has an open, relaxed feel to it, less intense and more muted than Billy Kwong, but still susurrating with the conversations of well-off urbanites in their thirties and forties. Here, the insects were clearly on the menu but described with understated and teasing phrases: “Kang Kong, Worms” and “Salmon, Manuka Honey, Black Ants.” Kang Kong is also known as water spinach, Chinese spinach, water morning glory, water convolvulus, Chinese watercress, Chinese convolvulus, swamp cabbage, and, to botanists, as Ipomoea aquatic. This was a bowl of crispy greens with roasted mealworms. The black ants sprinkled liberally over the cubes of raw salmon, freeze-dried Manuka honey, and chamomile pearls added color, texture, and tang to the sushi-like fusion dish.

  In an interview with the Brisbane Times, Damon Amos said that he saw his role as a chef to be one of “opening people’s eyes to the possibilities of entomophagy and helping them get over their squeamishness.”95 Neal Menzies, a university professor in Brisbane and entomophagy enthusiast, concurred. In the same article, he speculated that the real value of insects in places like Australia would be as consumers of food waste and replacements for fishmeal as a high-quality protein for livestock.

  The world of “new entomophagy” inhabited by Billy Kwong and the Public is imaginatively more complex than the Cold War landscapes some of us hiked around in the 1960s. These restaurants — and the new entomophagists in general — inhabit the virtual construct of the post-9/11 internet. Within and among the worlds of danger, terrorism, plundering neoliberal and state businesses, refugees, wars, and extreme poverty, the many other micro-worlds we inhabit invade and alter our minds and perspectives daily, even hourly, and offer many alternative journeys and landscapes. There are the young and beautiful, travelers and activists, neo-urban farmers raising chickens and bees, reinvigorated and redefined indigenous nations.

  It’s not clear to me yet where the new entomophagists fit into this inchoate mix of evolving global cultures. I suspect that, coming from the margins of all these cultures, they will find many homes, some where crickets are a garnish, where ants or stink bugs add a bit of je ne sais quois; some where they are the main protein or energy source; and others where the insects are primarily protein sources for other animals. I am not surprised, and indeed it is entirely appropriate, that some of the biggest success stories on the restaurant end are in those places where, even in the face of modernity, insects have never quite left the kitchen.

  For instance, in March 2002, former disc jockey Pailin Thanomkait, thirty-two, and her partner, ex–shrimp farmer Satapol Polprapas, twenty-nine, launched an insect-serving fast-food chain in Thailand. Catering to adventurous Westerners and relatively well-off urbanites, Insects Inter can, and does, charge higher prices than the street vendors because they source their insects from known farms and guarantee them to be pesticide-free. In their public relations statements, they emphasize quality control and a special sesame oil. Within a few years of its founding, the chain was rapidly expanding the number of franchises across Thailand and talked about expanding and moving into China and Korea.

  After my bug-nibbling experience at Billy Kwong, I stood for a while at my window, looking out over the city, Sydney’s skyline silhouetted against its own glow, the dark, graceful arc of the bridge, the white, accordioned seashell of the opera house. I was — and am — puzzled by the high profile that insect cuisine carries internationally and virtually, and the low, near invisible profile it carries locally, in the daily lives of most people. This has to do with the ways in which social media have often reinforced fragmented understandings of the world; there are implicit — and false — assumptions in each isolated group that others are working from the same visions and knowledge, that there is “One World” and “One Health.” All of us humans may see a shimmering mirage of a refuge or castle or Eden on the hill, but our assumptions about how to get there, and what we will do on arrival, are not the same.

  While insects as animal feed offer opportunities to make a new green economy economically viable, sprinkling insects into the menu may provide a more open avenue for cultural change. Being a both/and type of person, I see important eco-culinary niches for both approaches, each making a unique contribution to creating a more complex global narrative about people, bugs, evolution, ecology, and sustainable health.

  PART VI.

  REVOLUTION 1

  We love animals as pets, and, if we just can’t overcome those deep desires to get our teeth into something animal, we eat them. But this plunges us into quandaries of ethics and rights, policies and regulations, food scarcity and waste overabundance. We already have trouble imagining what it means to interact ethically with dogs, cows, and chickens, but can we talk about cricket welfare? How do we even start a discussion that includes love and bugs without sounding silly? Can this story possibly have a happy ending? Let us see where we might be going, and what a “Day in the Life” might look like if bugs are on the menu.

  IT’S SO HARD (LOVING YOU)

  Ethics and Insects

  Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight.

  Most of those who have explored or extolled the promises of entomophagy — myself included — are neither philosophers nor ethicists. We have backgrounds in agriculture, food security, health promotion, and natural sciences. It is no surprise therefore that ethical issues have received scant attention by entomophagists. The challenges identified by most researchers have been related to public relations, technology, and regulations.

  The 2015 article by Matan Shelomi to which I referred earlier typifies the most common way of framing the issues. Titled “Why We Still Don’t Eat Insects: Assessing Entomophagy Promotion through a Diffusion of Innovations Framework,” Shelomi’s article returns to the nagging question of why, after all these years, and all these arguments, we (by which he means Europeans and their descendants) still don’t eat insects. In the end
, he concludes that scientists who are “interested in developing entomophagy should focus on rearing and packaging insects rather than worry over how to convince others to eat them. Create a safe and steady supply,” he cavalierly asserts, “and demand will take care of itself.” He also predicts — based on theories of innovation diffusion — that once the bigger farmers with their economies of scale and mass-rearing technologies enter the market, all the smaller farmers will go out of business. Technologies that enable the new, commercial producers to scale up, producing a steady stream of edible bug products, will represent disruptive innovations, transforming the agri-food industry. Food safety and environmental issues, he predicts, will be regulated and managed in pretty much the same way as in other livestock enterprises. For those who wish to see other non-Western cultures keep or increase their traditional insect-eating practices, he suggests that, given “the predominance of acculturation towards Western lifestyles among economically marginal populations, we may see other cultures emulate the new, fashionable trend of entomophagy and add insects to their diet . . . exactly what we wanted in the first place.”

  If one takes authors such as Shelomi (and many of the participants in the FAO conferences) at face value, entomophagy is seen to be an issue that is best — and sometimes only — considered in terms of biology, economics, and nutrition. In this view, the appropriate responses to the challenges of globalizing entomophagy are the development of new technologies and public relations programs grounded in natural science research and corporate models. Gender and power imbalances and economic inequity are externalized, to be dealt with as necessary by politicians as they are for other forms of agriculture. Basically, so the thinking goes, some combination of mass insect production systems with better advertising campaigns will get “us” where we want to go. In this context, it is not clear to me who that “us” refers to, and whether this is indeed what “we” want.

  Lest we think nontechnical questions of ethics and animal welfare are of mere “academic” interest when we are talking about insects, consider the case of Florence, Italy, where crowds have traditionally gathered every spring along the banks of the Arno River to celebrate. To the church, this is a celebration of Ascension Day, when Jesus is said to have risen into the skies. To many other people, this is more simply Festa del Grillo, the “Cricket Festival.” Some authors have argued that the intent of the festival, historically, when populations were more closely attuned to the lives of farmers, was to reduce the numbers of cricket pests. Others have argued that the festival has its roots in ancient pagan celebrations of spring. Whatever its origins, people used to bring their own crickets, or buy them — chirping in their colorful wooden, cane, or wire cages — from vendors. In 1999, however, the Commune of Florence passed a “protection of animals” law that effectively made selling live crickets illegal. Now you can buy little electronic toys that make cricket-like sounds. Is this progress, or just another step in our alienation from our biological selves? What will happen when such laws are applied to cricket farmers?

  If one takes a less naive, more realistically nuanced, attentive, systemic, and ethically grounded view than that expressed in Shelomi’s article, entomophagy is not just a “why not eat them?” issue to be solved by some technological sleight of hand. In this more complex understanding, the ethical challenges facing entomophagy are embedded in social relationships (the health and well-being of people, including producers as well as consumers) and biological webs (the welfare of the insects as animals and the health of our shared ecosystems). Rather than trying to clean up the social and ecological messes left behind by visionary technologists, we might consider how to describe the “world we want,” and then design appropriate technologies to take us there. How can we reframe the entomophagy debates to better enable us to talk about some of the nontechnical issues?

  One of the first questions that came to my mind in approaching this subject was a confusion I had about morality and ethics, which seemed to be used interchangeably in many public debates. I asked Karen Houle, a philosophy professor at the University of Guelph, about how she would differentiate between these two terms. “Morality,” she explained to me, “has to do with what we think of as rules for right living. Traditionally, these rules have been framed in religious terms. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt. So a moral person is a person who A) has a set of rules to live by and B) lives by them.”

  In some cases, such rules are absolute. My father, for instance, held the view that killing was wrong, period. This translated into a strong position against all war, no matter how just the cause, as well as opposition to capital punishment. His position was that it was better to die at the hands of an evil person than to kill them. An absolute moral code can be comforting because you always know, at least theoretically, exactly what to do in any situation. But in many situations — World War II and abortion being two examples for my father’s position — this kind of absolutist moral stance generates anguishing dilemmas. For eating insects, with whom we have such an entangled and conflicted history, an absolutist stance creates as many problems as it purports to solve. Albert Schweitzer’s philosophy of “Reverence for Life,” for instance, led to an insistence on protecting, nurturing, and saving every insect, including those crawling around in the bottom of holes dug for fence posts.96 Was this only a revulsion against killing, or was it more than that? A revolt against the natural world, the ecology we inhabit? Is not killing insects that spread disease in fact a choice to allow children to die from malaria?

  I asked Houle about ethics. “Ethics,” she said, “has to do with grappling with a situation entirely too large to comprehend, let alone make rules about, let alone figure out which rules to apply. . . . An ethical person senses that there is something in me, in the world, in life, that demands my care and attention and all my intelligence. And I could fuck this all up totally. I have to try, though. I find myself having to try. It is grounded in a sort of built-in primordial capacity for caring, and a capacity for joy and pain and knowing the difference inside oneself, every step of the way. So ethical life consists of finding ways to carefully put one foot in front of the other, without a map, and, on the way, not stepping on anything you find that you care about. All you know is you have a foot, you have feelings, others might too, at the very least they have lives, and all these lives fit together to make our one shared reality. And life is short. Your capacity to live well (i.e. feel joy rather than puny or sad) and other things being able to go on, in their way, with their beauty and strange ways of being what they are is somehow augmented by caring and trying rather than not. The opposite of an ethical person would be an apathetic person. A-pathos. Someone who is already dead inside their world.”

  Regulations reflect societal aspirations and ideals. They are to those ideals what morality is to ethics. The best technology links the ideals to the regulations. This brings us to questions of whose ideals we are considering, and to my suggestion that our technology should be informed by the world we want. But who are “we”? The moral codes we apply to animals are culturally rooted. North Americans eat cows, but in India they’ve lynched people for doing the same. In the 1990s, when I worked in Nepal, I was told it was morally acceptable to eat buffalo, but not cattle. I recall talking with a very sincere and morally conscientious colleague about the way dogs and cats were caged in Chinese food markets. He seemed surprised that this was even an issue. The people were hungry. The dogs were raised to be eaten. What was the problem?

  In an academic paper titled “Jurassic Pork: What Could a Jewish Time Traveler Eat?” the authors explore what they call “kosher paleontology.” They found that the answer to their question depended not just on which religious scholars and translators one consulted, but also on more recent understandings of Linnaean classification. It appeared that locusts and crickets would probably be okay. There was no consideration of the possibility of suffering, nor did they mention Bodenheimer’s research, which concluded that the biblical
manna was a scale insect.

  The “kosher” issue is just one example of the general problem with moral rules derived from religious scriptures, which are themselves a special case of ethics versus morality. Religious and ideological experts and authorities cannot agree on what their founding documents or scriptures mean, or what their authors intended, and therefore what the rules should be. As soon as people try to translate apparently simple ethical stances —biophilia, respect for life, or promoting a common good — into a complex, dynamic world, the public debates degenerate into contradictory rules and regulations. The questions raised cannot be resolved by gathering more evidence. We would be fantasizing if we thought that such conflicts could be avoided as entomophagy enters the mainstreams of twenty-first-century urban societies. The outcry against the use of red dye from cochineal insects to color Starbucks’s Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino was driven as much by the concerns of vegan absolutists as by those of religious purists.

  So, rather than quickly getting mired in the many sets of culturally, politically, and religiously defined moral codes, I think it is helpful to stand back and grapple with the ethical considerations from which these rules have emerged. Entomophagy is an issue that can — if managed thoughtfully — disrupt economic and gender relationships, politics, policies, and regulation. Beyond that, it can challenge our relationships with the biological world, in which we are but one entangled organism among millions and millions, and raise questions of who we are as humans — and who we want to become. In this context, can we agree on some broad ethical considerations? If so, then we can begin to devise an approach to entomophagy that is ecologically and culturally appropriate and can enable us to accommodate different regulatory approaches (a.k.a. moral codes).