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

by David Waltner-Toews

  Langstroth hives have enabled a multimillion-dollar migratory pollination industry in many industrialized countries; thousands of hives are loaded up on trucks and moved from one monoculture site (almonds, cherries, blueberries, canola) to another. If they are not trucked elsewhere after the monoculture has flowered, the bees are left trying to survive in what to them is a virtual desert. Once in the system, the pollinators are in a bind: truck on to the next place or go home and look for more diverse pollen sources. Large-scale pollination businesses have been reported to have 20 percent normal losses, and up to twice that percentage in those where colony collapse disorder occurs. All beekeepers experience deaths and losses as bees starve, freeze, or suffer from a variety of diseases. Nevertheless, the high rates of hive loss in recent years is yet another sign — like salmonellosis in raw meats — of what we have come to consider “normal” for industrial agriculture.

  Coming back to Cahill’s idea that renewal comes from the margins, where can we look for alternatives to the current, Langstroth-dominated industry while still acknowledging the contractual agreement we have with honey bees? Adam Gopnik, in a BBC commentary on the history of how Europeans viewed the queens and kings of honey bees, recounts the story of Charles Butler’s 1609 observation and announcement that a beehive was “the feminine monarchy.” Gopnik concludes his piece by saying that “one moral of the tale of the bees is, of course, always to trust the Butlers rather than the Aristotles of the world. Trust the man who sees the bees instead of the old Greek philosopher who just had opinions about them.”113

  With that in the back of my mind, I decided to consult my very own in-family “man who sees the bees,” my son Matthew. On his website, he argues that his use of Warré hives “attempts to emulate the way bees build inside a hollow tree. . . . New, empty boxes are added to the bottom of the hive, so the brood are always protected by an insulation layer above. The queen always has the option of laying her brood in new comb, and when it hatches out, the bees can put honey into that comb. The hive has an insulation box on top to keep the temperature more stable inside the hive, and the walls of the hive are made of thicker wood for better insulation. In winter the bees are free to move up or down the hive to find honey. Fewer stresses on the bees mean they can deal with other things (disease, pests, seasonal variability, environmental toxicity). The entire structure is well suited to staying in one place.”

  Matt has followed the usual Warré apiarist practice of adding his hand-crafted boxes to the bottom of the hive (nadiring), which requires heavy lifting. Also, he notes that honey harvest is lower than with a Langstroth, although the selling price for such artisanal honey is higher than for commercial products from larger apiaries.

  “In the end,” says Matt, “I get better quality honey and happier, healthier bees. The benefits far outweigh the costs in my opinion!”

  As we consider expanding, diversifying, and more carefully managing insects in our agriculture and food systems, can we learn from the unintended consequences of innovations in beekeeping? Can we manage crickets, mealworms, palm weevils, and mopane worms in ways that respect our relationships, including the benefits we share in those relationships? One salient lesson we can learn from the history of beekeeping is that sustainably and ethically managing mopane caterpillars, crickets, mealworms, and palm weevils will require us to pay attention to a whole range of social and ecological conditions and interactions that go far beyond FCRs, shelf life, and consumer attitudes. Once we step out of the laboratory, what previously appeared to be observable, independent “facts” become malleable conversants speaking languages that range from pheromones to singing, and from magnetism to visual perception. The laboratory facts are but a few words contributing to dynamically changing networks of communities.

  The idea that technology experts and scientists who wish to make a difference in the world need to work with the communities that are the intended beneficiaries of their altruistic efforts is not new, but it seems to need repeating, reinforcing, and recharacterizing on a regular basis. In part, this reiteration is necessary because there are some deep tensions in this proposed relationship between the scientific community and the world at large. Scientists want to make general claims about the world: smoking is bad, crickets are good, pesticides are bad for health, pesticides are necessary for good nutrition and health, commercially produced mopane caterpillars will solve protein malnutrition, insects will provide global food security. But, as even the National Science Foundation in the United States asserted in a 2003 report, the kinds of questions raised by interactions between ecology and human well-being often require a “place-based” science, and, unlike laws of gravity or the speed of light, ecological and health-related truths are not universal. Scientists and the communities they work with have very different agendas and perspectives. Communities are internally heterogeneous, with their own historically based power structures, gender dynamics, economic activities, ecological constraints, and a mix of desires and goals that are often not well articulated.

  This tension between what we think of as normal, puzzle-based science and the complexities of the universe we inhabit is not new, nor is it unique to entomophagy. We now have several decades of theoretical and applied scholarly work to guide us through the mess in some reasonable fashion.

  There are ways of working with and through these dilemmas and tensions. In the 1990s, in an attempt to balance the natural world and the human-constructed one, some of us pictured this kind of integration in what we called the “Butterfly Model of Health,” with the biophysical environment as one wing of the butterfly and the socioeconomic environment as the other.114A picture is a useful heuristic, a don’t-forget-this checklist. In practice, we were working from a scientific base of what we called the “new science,” or “post-normal science,” which I referred to when talking about BSE. I would direct any applied scientists and scholars in the entomophagy field to explore that literature. The bottom line is that, both from a scholarly point of view (to get good-quality evidence) and from an applied perspective (to use that evidence to improve the world in some way), the peer group needs to be expanded to include a wide range of people who have experience and information on a subject, and others who will be affected by how one acts on the information. Such approaches, in which those who live in the areas being protected or managed are integrally involved in creating, implementing, and assessing adaptive plans, have a documented history of effectiveness in achieving multiple, interacting goals. These goals now include health and nutrition, ecological resilience and biodiversity conservation, ethics, and welfare. Based on the mixed legacy of previous attempts at improving human well-being, we can add economic and political sustainability, ethnic and gender equity, and the more challenging issues raised by recent attempts to integrate human, animal, and ecosystem health. Examples of these integrative approaches include EcoHealth, One Health, and Resilience.

  Recently, Emily Yates-Doerr, an anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam, raised many of these issues specifically with regard to how entomophagy-related research is structured and its results promoted. Her 2015 article, “The World in a Box? Food Security, Edible Insects, and ‘One World, One Health’ Collaboration,” examines the tensions between the way laboratory scientists think about problems (linear, boxable, replicable, exportable anywhere in the world) and the way eating habits and taste preferences emerge from complex local, historical, cultural, and eco-social dynamics. In my quarter-century of teaching the epidemiology of foodborne and waterborne diseases, I found that I had to repeat, year after year, that people do not only eat for nutrition. We eat particular foods prepared in certain ways because of the quirks of our histories, for enjoyment, and as a source of identity.

  As Yates-Doerr concludes in her research paper, “The results of the scientists’ research suggest that for any particular food security initiative to succeed, more than ‘One World’ or one form of health must be incorporated into the resea
rch framework. To impact the food supply of ‘the world,’ it is necessary to attend to many different worlds.”115

  Having been around the One World–One Health–EcoHealth block more times than I care to remember, I agree with Yates-Doerr, and I would extend that way of reframing to life beyond research. The oneness of the world in which we live emerges from, and is only possible because of, complex relationships among “millions and millions” of diverse organisms, people, landscapes, and cultures. Our challenge as entomophagists — and as humans — is to envision the oneness even as we nurture the diversity.

  WE WERE TALKING

  Where Is This Going?

  Crickets and this guy with diamonds?

  The flight from Toronto to London, followed by the Heathrow Express and then the crowded metro to the small hotel near Regent’s Park left me aching and a bit queasy. It was almost noon. I had a 1:30 lunch reservation at the Archipelago Restaurant,116 which is known for its exotic and eclectic menu, including several dishes that feature insects. I figured the hour-long walk in the bright sun across the park and some light bug dishes would help me get my feet back on the ground.

  Entering Archipelago is a bit like walking into a nineteenth-century curiosity shop, chockablock with peacock feathers, Buddhas, and wooden Indonesian wayang golek puppets, a collage of greens, reds, pinks, and browns, wood, glass, cloth, and brass.

  After telling them the password they had given me to hold my reservation, I was offered a table near the window with a glass Buddha with a reddish translucent body, a gray head, and a crown of golden curls for my dinner companion. He didn’t say much but seemed to enjoy the ambiance. There was one other person in the restaurant, a clean-cut thirtyish American studying archaeology in England. He too was trying all the bug dishes, announcing that he was probably the only adventurous eater in the small Michigan town where he’d grown up. I asked him how he liked the insect dishes, and he was enthusiastic.

  My lunch consisted of Summer Nights (Pan fried chermoula crickets, quinoa, spinach, and dried fruit), Love-Bug Salad (Baby greens with an accompanying dish of zingy, crunchy mealworms fried in olive oil, chilis, lemon grass, and garlic), Bushman’s Cavi-Err (Caramel mealworms, blinis, coconut cream, and vodka jelly), Medieval Hive (Brown butter ice cream, honey and butter caramel sauce, and a baby bee drone), and Chocolate-Covered Locusts (white, milk, and dark), served with a small glass of sweet white wine. The insects were integrated into the dishes, adding crunchy texture and subtle flavors.

  I chatted with the man serving me, an Australian who had once been an event organizer at the Sydney Opera House and more recently had led tours around the UK and Europe. Himself an eclectic world traveler, he fit right in. The restaurant had been started by a guy from South Africa, who had seen a need for the kinds of “exotic” meats on offer — zebra, crocodile, pythons — in his adopted hometown. Insects had been on the menu from the get-go, so Archipelago was not part of the “new wave.”

  Archipelago had more insect-based sweets on the menu than I have seen elsewhere, and with their mix of chewy and crunchy and the understated flavors of honey, caramel, nuts (in the Bushman’s Cavi-Err), and chocolate, they surprised and delighted me. The insects were clearly present, but not in my face; the food had a more relaxed feel than the insect dishes at le Festin Nu or Uchiyama-san’s Tokyo street theatre, and seemed more eclectically “normal” than the hip conversation starters at Public in Brisbane or the light sprinklings of insects at Billy Kwong in Sydney.

  After lunch, I thought about one of the restaurants I had not visited on my 2015 travels — Noma in Copenhagen, where Chef René Redzepi had led, cajoled, and tyrannized his kitchen staff to two Michelin stars and several “Best Restaurant in the World” awards. As I mentioned earlier, Noma had also been hailed as a champion of entomophagy. Then, in 2016, after watching Pierre Deschamps’s dramatic and revealing documentary Noma: My Perfect Storm, I went back to look more carefully at the stories under the headlines. Although Redzepi had certainly introduced insects onto his menu, promoting entomophagy was not a large part of his agenda. As the champion of “Nordic cuisine,” Redzepi’s mission was to get chefs to discover edible — and delicious — plants and animals in their local ecosystems, Nordic or otherwise. The intent was to have chefs and diners alike become more aware of the natural ecosystems in which they lived.117

  Suddenly my experience at Billy Kwong in Sydney made sense. They were following the hot, “rock-star” global chef, downplaying insects and emphasizing locally and seasonally available produce. All good stuff, but not about promoting insects on the plate. Just normalizing them as part of a diverse food palate. This also resonated with what “lumberjack” Daesuke-san in Kushihara, Japan, had told me. They ate local foods and, yes, occasionally hunted and consumed hornets, but that did not define who they were. In October 2016, I asked Vancouver chef Meeru Dhalwala how the reintroduction of insects was coming along. It was a continuing challenge, she said, and they’d made no further moves to do so at their restaurants. In fact, she had recently spoken at a “Future of Food” conference, where her topic had been “Insects, Seaweed and In-vitro meats.” Insects, then, as part of a diverse response to generating food options in a crowded, resource-challenged planet.

  When I consider the role of insects in the “Western” cuisine of the future, I recall how my three-year-old granddaughter, when I emptied a few packets from Entomo Farms into small bowls on the table in front of her, didn’t hesitate for a second. She just gobbled them up and then tipped the bowls back to get the last few crumbs. I asked her which she preferred and she said, again without hesitation, that she liked the mealworms, because the legs didn’t get caught in her teeth. And I can still picture one of my grandsons, who, also about three, dug into his Christmas stocking and pulled out two snack packs from Entomo Farms. His response? “Crickets! Yummy! Mealworms! Wow!”

  All things considered, I’m not really worried about whether or not insects will become a more central part of the human diet, whether on earth or out into space.118 We will get over the wave of insects as a hot new trend among foodies. I suspect that, on the human consumption side, restaurants like Public and Archipelago will become the norm, and, on the production side, we will see a wide diversity, from Ynsect to Entomo and Enterra. Over the next few decades, billions more of us will deliberately eat insects, and by deliberately I mean we’ll eat them by choice, and not simply in the form of the insect bits we already devour in our coffee and bagels, lentils and tea, or burgers and ketchup. Not everyone will eat them, and some will only eat them from time to time, as part of a varied diet. I occasionally eat shrimp when I travel, but only if I am near the ocean, and they have not traveled across continents to my plate. To me, they are neither adventure eating, nor new, amazing, weird, or world-saving — all those labels that are applied to eating insects. At home, I don’t eat them. We live far from the ocean, and my wife is allergic to shrimp and shellfish. I eat insects when I share a meal or a snack with other insect-eating humans. As we move further into the twenty-first century, some people will continue to eat insects as important sources of protein, as part of a diverse diet in a complex world, or as a way to demonstrate bravado; in other situations, insects will be used to enhance the nutrition of people at risk, such as those in refugee camps; still others will eat them as ingredients in a frugal life.

  I am delighted with the prospect that some insects will show up as an option in our supermarkets and on our plates. I am more concerned about how that process happens, and the unintended consequences of bungling that process. The most active leaders in the new entomophagy movement are helping us to rethink the ways we as humans feed ourselves and to ground what we do more completely in ecologically sound practices. Even as some are working to close loops in the agri-food system, recycling waste and replacing fishmeal and soy with insect products, others are finding ways to reinvent our agri-food practices completely.

  During the hi
storic shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, our ancestors allowed the animals now so entrenched in our food system — cattle, pigs, sheep, even fish — to creep in, almost without thinking. This is the first time in recent history that humanity is faced with the possibility of making some conscious decisions, based on the best available information we have, about what sorts of animals and practices might help provision us in a heavily populated world. If we see it merely as a technical issue, or a way to add yet another item to our diet, or even a way to reduce our footprint, we will have bungled this once-in-a-millennium opportunity.

  Torres Strait islander Kerry Arabena, in a vision that transcends and integrates political and ecological history, argues that we are all indigenous to the universe.119 Our imaginative and physical renewal will come from rediscovering this sense of indigeneity, drawing on a rich mixture of indigenous and local knowledges and the various sciences, experiences, and explorations of eco-social complexity that characterize Western scholarship. From this perspective, renewal can come from a kind of deep ecological understanding and rediscovery of the millions of arthropods who have made us and sustained us.

  This, then, is my aspiration for the new entomophagy movement: not just that we will put yet another item on our plates, but that in looking at the insect world more closely, we will see the world, and imagine ourselves, in a new way. Perhaps, in exploring the possibilities of insects as food, we will discover a more complex understanding of ourselves.

  I would like to see insect-eating as a normal culinary option. I would like to see it as a way to open our eyes to the rich array of human cultures and diverse ecosystems we inhabit, to reimagine our place among the millions and millions of other animals we share it with, and to open collective eyes to our common indigeneity in this puzzling and stunningly mystifying universe.