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

by David Waltner-Toews

  The policies and regulations are safety nets to guard against unscrupulous or ignorant producers and food sellers. They are the bureaucratic version of a prenup. But a marriage is not defined by a prenup.

  ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE?

  Renegotiating the Human-Insect Contract

  Are we happy just to dance?

  It is all very well to talk about loving insects and creating regulations, but in the world where we live, the human–bug relationship would fall into what Facebook calls the “complicated” category. To make things work, we are being asked to make a long-term commitment to a set of institutional arrangements even as we want to try to disrupt, or at least change, those arrangements. Although many issues related to insects in the food system can be managed by modifying food safety and disease management regulations, dealing with ecological issues is a much trickier business. Here we will find ourselves in a landscape characterized by a tension between regulatory fences and the open ranges of human and ecological possibility, between what we think we need legally and what we desire. This is also where the issues of how we harvest insects raise their problematic heads and wagging fingers. For argument’s sake, let us reconsider the general categories I suggested in the introduction — foraging in the wild, semi-management, and intensive farming — and see where the different entomophagical candidates fit.

  Some insects are, and probably always will be, gathered opportunistically (cicadas, locusts) or seasonally (termites, grasshoppers, black flies). If one examines the issues that arose in the American and Madagascar locust plagues, the main issue preventing their uses as food was a lack of appropriate methods to harvest, process, preserve, and store them. Termites are probably never available in sufficient numbers to warrant new technologies. The periodical cicadas offer some interesting possibilities, and the success of a few enterprising companies such as the Anderson Design Group suggests that with the right harvesting, processing, and preserving technology, the staggered thirteen- and seventeen-year cycles could be translated into a rare and expensive treat from year to year. To my knowledge, no one has tried harvesting black flies, but there seem to be so many that surely there must be some opportunities for foodie entrepreneurs.

  For insects that are semi-managed — that is, they could probably survive and maybe even thrive if our civilization collapses — what is lacking is a better understanding of how these insects interact with the landscapes in which they live and the infrastructures that can assure their access to sustainable, healthy food sources. These would include mopane worms and palm weevil larvae. We could also include honey bees here, but their status in human society is more ambiguous than that of the other two, and their history as a semi-domesticated species offers some lessons about the limits of domestication.

  In several of the countries of southern Africa, including Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, increased demand for mopane caterpillars has transformed them from a subsistence food into a valuable cash crop. South Africans themselves collect almost two tons of them every year, with a total value measured in tens of millions of US dollars. Botswana exports huge numbers of the caterpillars to South Africa, where many are packaged and sold or processed for livestock feed. Pretty much all of this is foraging of wild caterpillars, which has created serious concerns about sustainability.

  The caterpillar population depends on rainfall and available mopane trees (Colophospermum mopane). Because of good prices and high demand, many collectors are harvesting greater volumes not only of the larvae, but even pupae, thus putting the future of the population of moths — and hence the sustainability of the harvest — at risk. This overharvesting is compounded by the cutting down of mopane trees for construction and firewood. In parts of Botswana, mopane caterpillars have disappeared altogether, and in Zimbabwe, armed gangs have reportedly attacked and robbed mopane foragers.

  One response to overharvesting of the wild caterpillars is to intensify and intentionally manage production — that is, to shift from opportunistic foraging to farming. A four thousand-hectare woodlot can theoretically support almost 200 tons of caterpillars annually. In the Uukwaluudhi Conservancy in Namibia, traditional leaders have imposed restrictions on harvesting times; each harvester pays a fee to the community leaders, so that the leaders, who are presumably there to protect the long-term interests of the community, benefit. It’s not exactly community engagement, but it’s a start.

  An intensification of the approach used by the Uukwaluudhi Conservancy could be developed, moving toward the kind of management one sees with palm weevil larvae. Such an approach requires creation of protected habitats and a good sense of the feed and space requirements of the insects at different stages of their life cycle. The unpredictability of moth population sizes and their uneven geographic distribution, combined with price and weather instability, make this a risky business. These are, after all, wild animals, totally dependent on the resilience of well-defined ecosystems. Recognizing this, many Thai farmers have taken up farming crickets, palm weevil, and mealworms.

  Questions of social justice and ecological sustainability, as well as ethnic and gender equity, create further complications in shifts from foraging to farming. Globally, women and children tend to be the primary insect foragers. In Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, women and children spend more of their time foraging than men, and insects are a higher proportion of their diet. Women in two Amazonian Yanomami communities, for instance, compensated for limited access to vertebrate protein, which was mostly eaten by the men, by eating more insects. Among the Tucano people in the northern Amazon, insects constituted about twice as high a percentage of animal protein for women than for men, who had greater access to fish and game. In sub-Saharan Africa, the rural women and children who have traditionally harvested mopane caterpillars to supplement their income and improve their nutritional status are being increasingly displaced by young, unemployed men. In general, these harvesters — men and women alike — are poor and, lacking market information and transport, get low prices.

  In the past, when commercial enterprises and development agencies have created programs to improve household nutrition and health in what used to be called “developing countries,”110 and what I would now call insect-eating countries, the original rationale has been to help poor rural women and children. We see the same rationale being paraded out for raising insects. Often the people organizing these programs have had good technical and marketing skills; they know how to get chickens growing faster and staying healthier. These same experts, however, have often demonstrated a lack of social and ecological awareness. As some of these programs, such as those dealing with backyard poultry, have been successfully scaled up into commercial money-making enterprises, men have taken control, leaving the women and children with little to show for all their hard work. Similar patterns are already occurring with insect-rearing. In Matt Broomfield’s April 2016 Motherboard article on raising insects and the empowerment of women (which I referred to in the chapter on the “green hopes” of entomophagy) he acknowledges that “it is men who profit from the higher end of the insect market. The Zimbabwe study found that while women sell mopane worms at bazaars, bus terminuses and beer halls, the more lucrative wholesale trade remains the preserve of men. Women cannot access the infrastructure necessary to transport large quantities of worms cross-country. Moreover, as men have the capital to buy worms in bulk, on average they pay only 90 Zimbabwean dollars per kilogramme of worms, compared to the 160 Zimbabwean dollars paid by women.”

  Concerns about the environmental impacts of foraging have emerged in Southeast Asia and Japan as demand for edible insects has increased so rapidly. Insects are traditionally eaten in parts of Thailand, mostly in the northeast. In the past decade, exploding demand in urban and tourist areas has created severe environmental stresses. When the environmental impacts are within a country’s national boundaries, that country can introduce regulations and management programs. When
insects are imported, regulating gets more complicated.

  In the world of entomophagy, imports are a short-term solution that externalizes environmental (and social) costs from consuming countries to producing countries. To meet consumer demands, Thailand now imports silkworm pupae, ground crickets, leaf-eating grasshoppers, mole crickets, and giant water bugs. Annually, wholesalers at Rong Kluea market on the Thai–Cambodian border import about 800 tons of edible insects from Cambodia, Myanmar, Lao PDR, and China. This includes about 270 tons of silkworm pupae from China (which are not foraged) and 170 tons of grasshoppers from Cambodia. The environmental impacts of these imports in the exporting countries remain unregulated and largely unexamined.111

  In Japan, a number of factors complicate the picture. Charlotte Payne and her colleagues discovered that, although some 117 native species were traditionally eaten in Japan, the diversity and volume of insect consumption have dropped dramatically. Wasp larvae, grasshoppers, and silkworms are still eaten in measurable amounts in some parts of Japan, but native populations have been declining, as they are worldwide. Patterns of entomophagy in Japan, as elsewhere, are part of dietary changes in global popular culture, but they have been affected by pesticide use and industrial accidents such as that at Fukushima, on the one hand, and consumer demands for insects not just as food, but for entertainment and as pets on the other. Japan imports insects from Thailand, Korea, China, and New Zealand. Without careful ecological management at the source, this is surely not sustainable.

  Edward Hyams, in his landmark book Animals in the Service of Man: 10,000 Years of Domestication, discusses only three insects: silkworms, honey bees, and cochineal insects. He includes cochineal insects because, although the insects haven’t been selected and bred, humans have cultivated host plants to specifically attract and feed the scale insects for the production of shellac and dye. Although they are an element in twenty-first-century food fights, and although they once fed a desert tribe in the Middle East, they are not generally considered part of the new entomophagy, and I shall not expand on their cultivation.

  Silkworm production may offer some useful parallels for shifts from foraging to insect farming. Varieties of silk-producing moth larvae have been domesticated in China since about the third millennium BCE, in India from about a thousand years later, and on the Greek Island of Cos from about the fifth or fourth century BCE. For economic and political reasons, Chinese silkworm production, based on the breeding and selection of Bombyx mori moths, has historically dominated global production. Like the weevils and mopane caterpillars, the moth larvae used in conventional silk production require food from a particular tree and hence are dependent on the maintenance and/or cultivation of that tree. Over a period of thirty to forty days, caterpillars grow to ten thousand times their hatching weight; during that time, thirty grams of the caterpillars will eat through more than a ton of freshly picked mulberry leaves, so that, without domestication, the industry would cause serious ecological damage.

  The particular moth’s association with a particular tree and eco-cultural history in China makes it an interesting case study to look at when considering several other edible insects, such as mopane caterpillars and palm weevils. Silk production in other parts of the world has recognized and respected the cultural origins of the cultivation and ecological features of the moth, so that the benefits are more widely distributed than if sericulture were treated as a generic insect production system in a way similar to, say, chicken production. The problems of trying to introduce sericulture without understanding its ecological context are well illustrated by the initial attempts to make the United States into a great silk-producing country in the nineteenth century. According to entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer, a resolution put forward at an 1842 meeting of the New England Silk Convention read, “Resolved: that, inasmuch as in America and China the mulberry tree is found in the native forests, it is manifest indication of Divine Providence, that this country, as well as China, was designed to be a great silk growing country.”112 What the early American silk enthusiasts did not understand was that Bombyx mori much preferred China’s white mulberry trees (Morus alba) over America’s red ones (Morus rubra). As Waldbauer adds, “Perhaps the author of the resolution misread Divine Providence because his botany was weak.” One challenge of intensifying mopane caterpillar, palm weevil, and cricket production will be to ensure that understandings of biology, culture, and the relationships between them are strong.

  It appears in general that as the demand for edible insects increases, management of protected areas and sanctuaries might be the most sustainable option for foraging in the wild, if careful attention is paid to social and economic relationships during this transition. I was encouraged when the reports from the UK’s first public Insects for Food and Feed Conference (in 2015) explicitly addressed the challenges of trying to solve wicked problems in a complex world. Charlotte Payne, Andrew Muller, Joshua Evans, and Rebecca Roberts, for instance, encouraged participants to repoliticize the insect-eating movement, contextualizing it in the inequitable, complex agri-food system we inhabit. Others raised questions of who we mean when we talk about “us” feeding “them.” Darja Doberman, a graduate student — in my experience, they are usually the leading-edge scholars — proposed that in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, crickets could be grown on millet husks left over from brewing beer, and then millet-based foods could be fortified with cricket flour. This would seem to represent a strategy that respects ecological concerns, local culture, public health, and nutritional science.

  For insects that are intensively farmed, such as crickets, mealworms, soldier flies, and perhaps silkworms, we can probably adapt research, management protocols, and regulations already in place for other intensively managed animal species. A lot of the research into livestock agriculture in the past few decades has focused on efficient use of feed resources, FCRs, and managing environmental pollution, and insect farming can benefit from some of that work. Nevertheless, there are additional complications. For one thing, they are often being introduced as a solution to problems identified in other livestock agricultural activities, such as greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, depletion of fish stocks, and clearing of the rainforest to grow soybeans. As one would expect with any wicked problem, the “insect solution” creates new problems even as it solves old ones. However, with some careful attention to environmental, gender, and economic issues, farming them can provide a useful, “soft” entrance for insects onto our plates.

  If silkworm cultivation offers one way to think about how we manage our relationships with edible or otherwise useful insects in transitions to domestication, honey bees, with their ambiguous status as both wild and intensively managed, offer both helpful analogies and serious warnings about the limits of domestication and the unintended consequences of new technologies.

  In terms of the links between the ecological niches in which bees thrive and value-added product diversity, as well as the introduction of innovative technologies, the history of human–bee relationships is instructive. Farming food animals and crops is a high-risk business, and one survival strategy is to develop multiple, diverse, and value-added products. In dairy farming, this means yogurt, many different kinds of milk and cheeses, veal (from bull calves), and hamburger (from old cows). And just as not all milk is created equal — that from Jersey cows has a higher fat content and is therefore valued differently from Holstein milk — not all honey is alike in value.

  Some of the value of the honey is related to the specific varieties of pollen and nectar eaten by the bees. The New Zealand (manuka) teatree Leptospermum Scoparium, for instance, is the basis of a billion-dollar industry due to the medicinal qualities of the honey produced by the bees that harvest its nectar. Rich in the antibacterial chemical methylglyoxal, manuka honey sells for as much as ten times as non-manuka honey. As one might imagine, this has spawned a rush by other countries to find their own sources of methylglyoxal-rich honey. While peopl
e would like to be able to feed bees on specific crops to reap the economic benefits, the bees, like all of us, need diversity in their diet.

  The pollen that the bees eat, which has protein content that varies by plant and by season — from under 4 percent to over 40 percent — is necessary for physiological development. Hence the volumes and varieties of pollen bees have access to are as important as the fact that there are flowers around.

  This need for a diversity of possible pollen and nectar inputs is a key factor in how bees have become essential to agriculture, and also explains in part why they have not adapted well to industrial monocultural agriculture. Honey bees thrive as a domesticated species only if their human caretakers provide access to a diversity of protein-rich pollen. One of the most dramatic, and ultimately problematic, innovations in the history of modern beekeeping occurred in 1851, in Philadelphia. Reverend L.L. Langstroth designed a hive composed of stacked boxes that contained moveable, framed combs with fixed wire frames and plastic foundation sheets to standardize the cell size and comb structure. Langstroth hives have separate compartments that exclude the queen and hence are full of pure honey, rather than honey mixed with brood. New boxes are added to the top as the hive fills up. This design enabled easy automation and set the stage for the entry of beekeeping into its current role as a key player in the industrialization of agriculture. The bees do all right in Langstroth hives, but the hives were designed for the convenience of people, not for the well-being of bees. Bees may have trouble accessing their own honey stores in a Langstroth, and can starve during droughts or in winter even though there is honey close by in the hive.