According to Houle,
we have made pacts with many animals over the centuries, implicitly (we have adapted to each other) and explicitly: You are my 4H pet, please come home and I will look after you. You can’t just break promises and eat your friends because you are hungry. . . . To be in the world, to come into this world, we discover that we are a party to various on-going agreements. Gentlemen agreements (who parks first in a shared drive); formal agreements (I pay taxes, the government gives me back any I overpay); informal agreements (I pick up my litter, you pick up yours; don’t come empty-handed to a potluck); natural agreements (don’t shit in the well or shit over on the side of the property. My dog knows that one); legal promises (my parents had promised each other till death do us part, before I was born: I was party to that promise).
Sometimes I think ethics is nothing more than discerning those webs of pacts we are implicated in, and doing whatever we think is appropriate to recognizing them (even if it means outright refusal to). The bees. The bees do their thing. They keep doing their thing. We benefit in a zillion ways from that. Some of us (beekeepers) directly intervene to enable that. Others (supergiant bee corporations) have the almond companies more in mind, but realize that profits depend on bees. Others (pesticide and herbicide companies) do not have the bees in their sights at all when they are spraying cash crops. The bees drop. So what if we did characterize our relation to them as a pact, a pact of mutual acknowledgment and non-interference? Minimum. Maybe even support (putting out water; building shelter). If every one of us saw the bees as creatures with whom we have a bilateral trade agreement (and our existence, theirs and ours, depends on it being honoured) then maybe we could get somewhere!104
A 2015 research project reported that every year ants cleaned up great heaps of organic street waste — the equivalent of 60,000 hot dogs — from the streets of New York. Many of these ants are considered invasive species from Europe. So we have a pact: you can live here if you clean up the garbage. Does this come down to trade agreements?
Houle laughed when I suggested this.
Please, no. Not so quick with the Market Model! We also need them for our psychic wellness. Otherwise we would be completely off our rockers. Animals, insofar as they are Other to us, and yet nearby, close, neighbours, co-creatures, can teach us how to be better humans . . . That maybe won’t work for snakes, hornets, bed bugs, midges. So that tells us that a mirror phase — that reciprocity (formal or informal) — is available, but only with some other creatures. And does it go both ways? I always wonder that. Does it have to, for this kind of ethics? Yes and again no. There are promises made on behalf of those who seem to not be able to make, or understand, promises. . . . Another consideration in this idea of a pact is that all animals are more vulnerable to us than we are to them. Maybe this fact itself (a power imbalance) dictates that it’s not right to then exploit this unlucky station of the vulnerable by inventing recipes with them in it. (They can’t do the same of us.)
A very general idea in all sorts of zones of ethics is that exploitation of vulnerability is a wrong. You are a soldier. You are guarding a prisoner. That prisoner is 100% vulnerable to you. If you do anything to him because of that (rape him, mock him, hit him) there is a wrong attaching to your being. Same with children. Same with insects in the hand of a child. Same with earthworms in the marsh that is being drained for housing. Total unilateral impact in a particular situation. The wrong is to simply act upon the other for one’s own ends, however trivial.
And what if the ends — sustainable food supplies, the alleviation of hunger — are not trivial at all?
If we step back from looking at the suffering of an individual animal and consider the ecosystem of which it is but a small member, we are faced with a different set of challenges. One of the most forceful claims being made in favor of eating insects is that they have a lighter ecological footprint than traditional livestock, require fewer resources to raise, and produce fewer greenhouse gases. But, in insect agriculture, it depends on what you feed the insects. It’s one thing if you are feeding them waste products, like Enterra Feeds does in British Columbia. It becomes more problematic if you are formulating rations that mimic those of chickens.
That old adage “waste not want not” runs through all the entomophagy literature, the sustainable development literature, and the wisdom-of-those-who-lived-through-the-depression literature. Efficiency has become one of our societal ideals. Part of me is attracted to that. It has been my argument for why pot-bellied pigs are an ideal food in Bali. They are scavengers, and if you kill one, it is generally just enough for a family meal. If you make them pets in North America, which in my view is condescending and disrespectful of the pigs, the argument falls apart. Still, I worry about not-wasting as a criterion for ethical behavior. It tends to get reframed as tweaking what I see as an already problematic agricultural system: Can we make chickens more efficient at converting feed inputs? Yes, if we feed them low-level antibiotics. Can we grow cattle more efficiently and reduce waste at the slaughterhouse? Yes, if we feed the offal and other bits of the butchered cows that people don’t want back to calves as protein supplements. A single-minded aspiration to be efficient and avoid waste too easily degenerates into a view that places short-term profits above everything else, including unfortunate “side effects” such as mad cow disease and widespread antimicrobial resistance.
What the threshold is for “waste” or “overconsumption” will change with each situation, each lake, each species, each demographic. Philosopher John Locke noted that nature and the seasons set natural limits on what was available, how much work would be done (input and outputs), and then how much each family could take. Ideally there was a balance in there: input, output, get to the next season, keep enough of the good soil, don’t eat the seeds, etc. It has a beautiful toward-the-future feel to it. There is a story about some folks in Siberia refusing to eat the seed stores even when starving. It would be like eating the future. But Locke also noted that gold put a total wrench into that system because you, personally, could harvest ten times more than you needed or could eat in a season, but sell it, so technically you were off the hook for ‘wasting.’ If the person you sold it to let it rot, that wasn’t your problem anymore. Capital has put so much pressure on the production end: fish farming, greenhouses producing and harvesting eggplants out of season, overtaxing the soil . . . that those natural limits are hardly part of our consciousness anymore.
Thus, while using insects in food and feed as a way to reduce waste in the agri-food system is an admirable goal, the use of bugs in the system-as-is must be constrained by a much broader and deeper understanding of the eco-social context within which this waste is occurring in the first place, and the ethical questions raised by that context.
The late systems design engineer and ecologist James Kay argued that the complexity of the world we inhabit always leads to uncertainty and trade-offs. The problem here is that we’re faced with a situation in which we are not sure what the trade-offs are. No matter what we eat or do, we exact costs. By just existing, we are responsible for the deaths of many insects, bacteria, animals, and plants. Even if we go with foraging and “eating wild,” there’s the problem of overforaging sometimes being more destructive than farming. Even if we don’t eat animals directly, we live in their spaces, and we eat foods that they could be eating. Of course, we also make possible other lives, in our intestines, in the habitats we create, in the decay of our bodies when we die.
Insect farmers such as those at Entomo are faced with trade-offs when it comes to water and energy use, disease control, feed conversion ratios, keeping crickets comfortable and “happy,” and keeping their own human families fed and housed. Matthew Waltner-Toews, of Unspun Honey in Australia, characterizes his beekeeping style as apicentric — that is, putting the interests of the bees first — as distinct from what he sees as the more common anthropocentric practices. Even after having made such a choice, however, he
is faced with trade-offs. He has chosen to use Warré hives, but he has also considered some of the newest innovations for apiarists, such as the much-hyped Flow™ Hive, and hives made from expanded polystyrene. In each case, there are trade-offs between convenience for the beekeeper (ease of extraction, pre-set plastic cells in the comb), comfort for the bees (insulation value, freedom to create their own cells from wax), and long-term environmental impacts (whether hives can be recycled, for instance) that might impact the world his children are growing up in.
This, then, is what I carried away from my exploration of ethics and entomophagy. We will need to consider suffering, values, context, beauty, vulnerability, ongoing multilateral commitments, and trade-offs. After struggling through these questions and finding that I could not, with any finality, resolve them — could not move from ethical questions to a moral code — I wondered if this was, indeed, the point.
The challenge in applying ethical principles to working with insects, and to eating them, is to articulate clear principles and guidelines while acknowledging the realities and uncertainties of living in a complex world. If an animal is in our care, and vulnerable, we wish to behave in such a way that we do not cause it pain or suffering. We have principles, and we care, but we need to keep ourselves from slipping into a kind of black-and-white moral code, which is a way of absolving ourselves of responsibility. It is not possible to live without also causing the deaths of others, whether we step on them in the path, eat plant foods that could have kept them alive, or eat them directly or inadvertently. Our pacts with all other living things play out in a complex web of multilingual nutritional, pheromonal, visual, and auditory conversations. Ethical interactions with insects are rife with unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, questions. There are no ten commandments.
The best we can do is to pay careful attention, keep asking questions, and take responsibility for our actions.
A LITTLE HELP
Regulating Entomophagy
You say you’ve got a real solution.
Well, you know, we’d all love to see the plan.
My mother-in-law, who grew up in China, used to say, “Locks are for gentlemen.” The same holds true for regulations and trade agreements. If a desire for ethically grounded interactions with other species, and a dream of a more cooperative, congenial, sustainable, planetary existence are what draw people to entomophagy, then policies and regulations are the prenuptial documents that give that hopeful love some shape and safeguards. They are the locks on the doors.
We already have a scientific head start at assessing the nutrition issues involved in eating insects. The food safety issues have not, however, been well studied. In fact, much of what we think we know is based on analogy and inference from other classes of animals. Many of the issues are specific to insects and regions. A few are more general. At this point, the answer to the questions, “What are the food safety risks?” and “How can we best manage them?” are “We aren’t sure” and “There is no general answer.”
With that proviso, we can suggest some issues that entomophagy promoters would do well to consider. Some food-related illnesses are inherent in the food itself. For instance, allergic reactions to eating insects have been reported, as have cross-reactions between insects and related taxonomic groups, including shellfish. But whether one can generalize across arthropod groups remains an unsettled question. From other kinds of food allergies, we know that there is a complicated relationship between genetics, exposure rates, age at exposure, and a range of environmental factors. Asian countries report a higher prevalence of allergic reactions to shellfish (which are commonly eaten) and lower prevalence of reactions to peanuts and other nuts (which are less commonly consumed) than urbanized Westerners. China reports more than a thousand instances annually of anaphylactic responses to eating silkworm pupae. Again, this is likely a function of China’s population size and higher rates of exposure to silkworms than in other countries.
Residues of industrial chemicals or heavy metals are almost impossible to get rid of once they are in a food. In this sense, they are similar to allergens; that is, they have become an inherent part of the food itself. If the best way to avoid food allergies is to avoid the foods altogether, then the best way to deal with metal and pesticide hazards is to find ways to prevent them from seeping into the food chain. With regard to insects, this usually means a shift from foraging to farming. Charlotte Payne and her colleagues identified the salt and manganese content of mopane caterpillars sold in South African markets as a concern. Other researchers have found elevated levels of copper, cadmium, and zinc in some of the caterpillars. In the early years of this century, chapulines (grasshoppers) exported from Oaxaca, Mexico, to southern California were demonstrated to have more than 300 times the lead levels deemed safe by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Investigations in Oaxaca found widespread lead contamination from nearby mine tailings in soils, plants, and wild grasshoppers. However, the most important source of the lead in the chapulines appeared to be lead-glazed chirmoleras, which are small bowls used to grind spices.
Food safety issues are contextual. Protecting the safety and quality of food requires us to ask specific questions about specific insects. Where were they grown and processed, and under what ecological, social, and economic conditions? Mopane caterpillars in South Africa are as different from crickets in Ontario as chickens in Thailand are from cows in Switzerland.
As I have already recounted throughout this book, some insects, such as stink bugs, dung beetles, and mopane caterpillars, are inedible on an as-is basis either because of what they have eaten or because their bodies produce toxins. These insects need to be prepared properly before consumption. In parts of Africa, a diet that combines cassava, which contains cyanogenic glycosides, and silkworm larvae, which lack the sulfur-containing amino acids that are needed to detoxify the cyanogenic glycosides, may lead to thiamine deficiency; the people on this diet suffer from an acute ataxic syndrome.
Bacteriologically, farmed insects reportedly have similar risk profiles to other livestock, but this is an analogical inference, and there’s very little research to back it up. Although the specific bacteria that cause spoilage and disease differ, similar methods are sometimes effective in managing risk from both groups. Most bacteriological and viral contaminants are destroyed by boiling the bugs, although spore-forming bacteria may sneak through the system. The Wageningen University food science group has determined that a mix of powdered, roasted mealworm larvae, flour, and water, when subjected to lactic acid fermentation, controlled bacterial contamination and improved the shelf life of the mealworm powder. If mopane caterpillars are degutted and dried, their shelf life is increases to almost a year. On the other hand, if not dried and stored properly, the mopane become susceptible to fungi, some of which are known to produce aflatoxins that have been associated with liver cancer.
How do we move ahead on entomophagic food safety issues? In most instances, we will need to work out safe ways to prepare and eat insects on a case-by-case basis. In other (non-insect) parts of the food industry, producers and processors often develop a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point plan (HACCP, referred to as hassep for short). A HACCP plan involves identifying any points from farm to fork at which hazards can enter the food, and putting into place procedures to control or eliminate those hazards. For instance, living crickets may be contaminated with bacteria from floor litter, birds, workers, and visitors. However, if the buildings are secure and visitors are limited, the risks are minimized; then, if the crickets are cooked before being distributed to the public, for all intents and purposes any risks associated with the bacterial hazards are removed.
These kinds of plans depend on having some kind of monitoring system, a way to detect possible contaminants. While some companies have proposed using electronic sensors to detect bacteria and toxins, others have turned to the insects themselves for help. Scientists in the US and in the UK have t
rained bees and wasps to detect land mines, explosives, food toxins, plant odors, and fruit fly infestations before they are visually apparent. The parasitoid wasp Microplitis croceipes was shown to be ten times more sensitive to volatile chemicals than an electronic “nose.”105 Researchers are also working with fungi-eating beetles to determine if they can be used to detect pathogenic fungi on food.
For edible insects that are currently not commercialized — that is, they are grown, sold, or eaten in the “informal economy” — we should be consulting with those who have the most experience with harvesting and preparing those insects. If the bugs are inherently toxic but can be detoxified through processing in some way, then this needs to be done before someone eats them. And, as entomologist Alan Yen emphasizes, “the methods developed to make inedible species edible are an important intellectual property of the traditional societies that discovered them.”
As I described earlier, Meeru Dhalwala introduced crickets into her restaurant menus in 2008 using a “soft” approach. The reactions I described earlier were those of customers, but restaurant inspectors also weighed in. Recounting how her restaurants had offered paratha (flatbread) that incorporated seasoned, roasted crickets, she said, “We were filling about two dozen orders in an evening. Everything was going great, until a reporter — we don’t really know who — complained to the Vancouver health department. We had been so focused on the new dish that we neglected to notify them. That was entirely our mistake.”
Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects Page 24
