Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  In overcoming the resistance to certain foods, Frederick J. Simoons, the author of the classic text on culinary taboos Eat Not This Flesh, says timing is everything, and there is usually more than one factor at play. When Emperor Meiji ate beef—a sacrilege in Buddhist Japan—it was because the country was ready to embrace the West. Noritoshi Kanai, the eighty-eight-year-old president of Mutual Trading Company, which imports gold flakes and matsutake essence to sell to high-end sushi restaurants like Masa and Nobu, introduced sushi to the United States in the 1960s. Because sushi is raw and handled without gloves in front of the customer, everyone told him that the American public would never accept it. The convergence of three factors, he says, changed their minds: the food pyramid, which emphasized fish; the rise of the Japanese car; and Shōgun, the best-selling novel by James Clavell.

  Insects, the wiggly, bridge-party shockers that helped get America excited about eating, are back, and this time around they may, like Evian, be here to stay. The conditions are promising. America’s food intelligentsia bemoans the industrial-scale farming and food processing of the present, and forsees a Mad Max future. Insects are danger-tinged but eco-friendly, and little explored as food. Once a staple on Fear Factor, they were featured on Top Chef Masters a few seasons ago; the winning dish was tempura-fried crickets with sunchoke-carrot purée and blood-orange vinaigrette. During the London Olympics, the celebrated Danish chef René Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, has repeatedly been named the best restaurant in the world, served a tasting menu at Claridge’s, the five-star Mayfair hotel. The eight-course meal cost more than $300 a head and featured chilled live ants, flown from Copenhagen, on cabbage with crème fraiche. “When you bite into the ants, they release the flavor of lemongrass; what you taste is light and citrusy, in contrast to the edible soil you have just consumed,” the Bloomberg food critic wrote.

  Guelaguetza, the Oaxacan restaurant opened by Bricia Lopez’s parents, serves a scrumptious plate of chapulines a la Mexicana—grasshoppers sautéed with onions, jalapeños, and tomatoes, and topped with avocado and Oaxacan string cheese. Lopez says that more and more Anglo hipsters—Jonathan Gold readers—are coming in to order them. “Eating grasshoppers is a thing you do here,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh my God, I ate a grasshopper, woo.’” She went on, “There’s more of a cool factor involved. It’s not just ‘Let’s go get a burrito.’ It’s ‘Let’s get a mole’ or ‘Let’s get a grasshopper.’” According to the FDA, insects sold as human food must be raised specifically for the purpose in a facility that follows “good manufacturing processes”; “wild-crafting” is not condoned, for fear of pesticide contamination or disease, nor is diverting bugs from the pet-food stream. The USDA, which typically handles meat, doesn’t contemplate insects at all. Until a citation from the health department prompted them to set up a certified facility in Oaxaca, the Lopezes got the chapulines they served at Guelaguetza from friends and relatives, who packed them in their carry-ons when they visited from Mexico.

  The contemporary vogue for bugs reflects not only a desire for novelty but also a degree of pragmatism, and that may guarantee their staying power. José Andrés, a winner of the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Chef award, makes a very popular chapulín taco—sautéed shallots, deglazed in tequila; chipotle paste; and Oaxacan grasshoppers, in a handmade tortilla—at his Washington, D.C., restaurant Oyamel. He sees bug-eating as both a gastronomic experience (he recommends the mouthfeel of a small, young, crispy chapulín) and a matter of survival. “We need to feed humanity in a sustainable way,” he says. “Those who know how to produce protein will have an edge over everyone else. World War Three will be over control of water and food, and the insects may be an answer.”

  According to the ecologist Daniel Pauly, Mexico’s tradition of insect-eating arose from a lack of alternatives. Before the arrival of the Europeans, there were neither cows nor horses nor other large mammals that could be easily domesticated. The same went for the rest of Latin America: this is why Peruvians, and tourists to Cuzco, eat guinea pigs. “Even the Aztec killing machine was not able to reduce the population sufficiently,” he says. “That Mexico developed a taste for bugs may be related to population pressure.” He went on, “Why are we even contemplating eating insects? Because we are gradually running out of things to eat.”

  • • •

  Demographers have projected that by 2050 the world’s population will have increased to nine billion, and the demand for meat will grow with it, particularly in dense, industrializing countries like China and India. In 2010—a year in which, according to the United Nations, nearly a billion people suffered from chronic hunger—the journal Science published a special issue on food security, and included a piece on entomophagy, the unappealing name by which insect-eating properly goes. Acknowledging that the notion might be “unappetizing to many,” the editors wrote, “The quest for food security may require us all to reconsider our eating habits, particularly in view of the energy consumption and environmental costs that sustain those habits.”

  From an ecological perspective, insects have a lot to recommend them. They are renowned for their small “foodprint”; being cold-blooded, they are about four times as efficient at converting feed to meat as are cattle, which waste energy keeping themselves warm. Ounce for ounce, many have the same amount of protein as beef—fried grasshoppers have three times as much—and are rich in micronutrients like iron and zinc. Genetically, they are so distant from humans that there is little likelihood of diseases jumping species, as swine flu did. They are natural recyclers, capable of eating old cardboard, manure, and by-products from food manufacturing. And insect husbandry offers an alternative to the problem of factory farming: bugs like teeming, and thrive in filthy, crowded conditions.

  In late 2010, a group of scientists at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands, published a paper concluding that insects reared for human consumption produce significantly lower quantities of greenhouse gases than do cattle and pigs. “This study therefore indicates that insects could serve as a more environmentally friendly alternative for the production of animal protein,” the paper said. One of its authors was Arnold van Huis, an entomologist who is working to establish a market for insect-based products in the Netherlands, with funding from the Dutch government; the agriculture ministry recently gave him a million euros to research insect husbandry. “We have a food crisis, especially a meat crisis, and people are starting to realize that we need alternatives, and insects are just an excellent alternative,” van Huis said.

  On a trip to Africa, in 1995, when van Huis was on sabbatical, he traveled to a dozen countries, interviewing locals about their relationship with insects. Half the people he spoke with talked about eating them, and he finally overcame their reluctance—born of centuries of colonial opprobrium—to share some with him. “I had termites, which were roasted, and they were excellent,” he said. When he got home, he offered a bag of termites to Marcel Dicke, the head of his department. Dicke liked them, and the two men started a popular lecture series that addressed insects’ potential as a food source. After van Huis and Dicke organized an insect festival that drew twenty thousand people, they were approached by several mealworm and cricket farmers who had been serving the pet-food industry but were interested in diversifying. “We know that Western peoples have some difficulties psychologically with ingesting insects, so we are looking at some ways of introducing them into food so that people will no longer recognize them,” van Huis said. Insect flour was one option. “Another possibility is that you can grind insects and make them into a hot dog or a fish stick,” he said. Together, van Huis and Dicke helped get mealworms and processed snacks like BugNuggets into the Dutch grocery chain Sligro.

  The Dutch are, for reasons of geography, especially concerned about the effects of global warming; they are also progressive when it comes to food development. But entrepreneurs in the United States are starting to explore edible insects, too. Matthew Krisiloff
, a student at the University of Chicago, recently started a company called Entom Foods, which is working on deshelling insects using pressurization technology in the hope of selling the meat in cutlet form.

  “The problem is the ick factor—the eyes, the wings, the legs,” he said. “It’s not as simple as hiding it in a bug nugget. People won’t accept it beyond the novelty. When you think of a chicken you think of a chicken breast, not the eyes, wings, and beak. We’re trying to do the same thing with insects, create a stepping-stone, so that when you get a bug nugget you think of the bug steak, not the whole animal.” But before he can bring a product to market, he must overcome a daunting technical challenge. Insect protein does not take the form of muscle, but is, as he put it, “goopy.”

  In Dicke’s opinion, simply changing the language surrounding food insects could go a long way toward solving the problem that Westerners have with them. “Maybe we should stop telling people they’re eating insects,” he said. “If you say it’s mealworms, it makes people think of ringworm. So stop saying ‘worm.’ If we use the Latin names, say it’s a Tenebrio quiche, it sounds much more fancy, and it’s part of the marketing.” Another option, Dicke said, is to cover the bugs in chocolate, because people will eat anything covered in chocolate.

  • • •

  The practice of ethical entomophagy started haphazardly. In 1974, Gene DeFoliart, who was the chair of entomology at the University of Wisconsin, was asked by a colleague to recommend someone who could talk about edible insects as part of a symposium on unconventional protein sources. Then, as now, entomology was more concerned with insect eradication than cultivation, and, not finding a willing participant, DeFoliart decided to take on the project himself. He began his talk—and the paper he eventually published—with a startling statement: “C. F. Hodge (1911) calculated that a pair of houseflies beginning operations in April could produce enough flies, if all survived, to cover the earth forty-seven feet deep by August,” he said. “If one can reverse for a moment the usual focus on insects as enemies of man, Hodge’s layer of flies represents an impressive pile of animal protein.”

  DeFoliart, who died in early 2013, envisioned a place for edible insects as a luxury item. The larvae of the wax moth (Galleria mellonella) seemed to him to be poised to become the next escargot, which in the late eighties represented a three-hundred-million-dollar-a-year business in the United States. “Given a choice, New York diners looking for adventure and willing to pay $22 for half a roasted free-range chicken accompanied by a large pile of shoestring potatoes might well prefer a smaller pile of Galleria at the same price,” he wrote. He and a handful of colleagues, including Florence Dunkel, now a leading entomophagist and a professor at Montana State University, in Bozeman, began to study and promote the potential of what they called “mini-livestock.” In The Food Insects Newsletter, their journal, they reported the results of nutritional analyses and assessed the efficiency of insects like crickets—the most delectable of which, entomophagists are fond of pointing out, belong to the genus Gryllus.

  A couple of years ago, a group of DeFoliart’s disciples gathered at a resort in San Diego for a symposium on entomophagy at the annual conference of the Entomological Society of America. Because there is no significant funding available for entomophagy research, it has never been taken seriously by most professional entomologists. Dunkel, who in her half century in academia has many times heard colleagues discourage interested graduate students, often finds herself at odds with others in her field. It was a relief, then, to be among the like-minded. “Your soap-moth-pupae chutney—I’ll never forget how that tasted!” she said, introducing a colleague from the Insectarium, in Montreal, which holds a bug banquet every other year. The entomophagists hoped to capitalize on the momentum they perceived. “We don’t have to be the kooky, nerdy entomologists who eat bugs because we’re crazy,” an entomologist from the University of Georgia said. “Twenty years ago, sushi was the eww factor; you did not see sushi in grocery stores. Now it’s the cultural norm.”

  At the conference, Dunkel talked about her frustration working in West Africa, where for decades European and American entomologists, through programs like USAID and the British Desert Locust Control Organization, have killed grasshoppers and locusts, which are complete proteins, in order to preserve the incomplete proteins in millet, wheat, barley, sorghum, and maize. Her field work in Mali focuses on the role of grasshoppers in the diets of children, who, for cultural reasons, do not eat chicken or eggs. Grasshoppers contain essential amino acids and serve as a crucial buffer against kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency that impedes physical and neurological development. In the village where Dunkel works, kwashiorkor is on the rise; in recent years, nearby fields have been planted with cotton, and pesticide use has intensified. Mothers now warn their children not to collect the grasshoppers, which they rightly fear may be contaminated.

  Mainly, the entomophagists bemoaned the prejudice against insects. “In our minds, they’re associated with filth,” Heather Looy, a psychologist who has studied food aversions, said over dinner after the symposium. “They go dirty places, but so do fungi, and we eat those all the time. And you don’t want to know about crabs and shrimp and lobster.” Crabs, shrimp, and lobster are, like insects, arthropods—but instead of eating fresh lettuces and flowers, as many insects do, they scavenge debris from the ocean floor.

  This injustice—lobster is a delicacy, while vegetarian crustaceans like wood lice are unfit for civilized man—is a centerpiece of the literature of entomophagy. Why Not Eat Insects?, an 1885 manifesto by Vincent M. Holt, which is the founding document of the movement, expounds upon the vile habits of the insects of the sea. “The lobster, a creature consumed in incredible quantities at all the highest tables in the land, is such a foul feeder that, for its sure capture, the experienced fisherman will bait his lobster-pot with putrid flesh or fish which is too far gone even to attract a crab,” he writes.

  As it is, contemporary Westerners tend to associate insects with filth, death, and decay, and, because some insects feed on human blood, their consumption is often seen as cannibalism by proxy. Holt takes pains to stress that the insects he recommends for eating—caterpillars, grasshoppers, slugs—are pure of this taint. “My insects are all vegetable feeders, clean, palatable, wholesome, and decidedly more particular in their feeding than ourselves,” he writes. “While I am confident that they will never condescend to eat us, I am equally confident that, on finding out how good they are, we shall some day right gladly cook and eat them.”

  Holt’s compelling, albeit Swiftian, argument addresses the food problems of his day—“What a pleasant change from the labourer’s unvarying meal of bread, lard, and bacon, or bread and lard without bacon, would be a good dish of fried cockchafers or grasshoppers”—but he is innocent of the nuances of food marketing. Among the sample menus he supplies are offerings like “Boiled Neck of Mutton with Wire-worm Sauce and Moths on Toast.” At dinner in San Diego, it occurred to me that this naïveté had carried down. I was sitting next to Lou Sorkin, a forensic entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History who is also an expert on bedbugs, probably the most loathed insect in the United States today. He had arrived at his latest culinary discovery, he said, while experimenting with mediums for preserving maggots collected from murder victims. Realizing that citrus juice might denature proteins as effectively as a chemical solution, and might be more readily available in the field, he soaked large sarcophagid maggots in baths of grapefruit, lemon, lime, and pomelo juice, and voilà! Maggot ceviche. “It’s a little chewy,” he said. “But tasty.”

  • • •

  Food preferences are highly local, often irrational, and defining: a Frenchman is a frog because he considers their legs food and the person who calls him one does not. In Santa María Atzompa, a community in Oaxaca where grasshoppers toasted with garlic, chili, and lime are a favorite treat, locals have traditionally found shrimp repulsive. “They
would say ‘some people’ eat it, meaning ‘the coastal people,’” Ramona Pérez, an anthropologist at San Diego State University, says. When she made scampi for a family there, she told me, they were appalled; the mother, who usually cooked with her, refused to help, and the daughters wouldn’t eat. The coast is less than a hundred miles away.

  Eighty percent of the world eats bugs. Australian Aborigines like witchetty grubs, which, according to the authors of Man Eating Bugs, taste like “nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella, wrapped in a phyllo dough pastry.” Mealworms are factory-farmed in China; in Venezuela, children roast tarantulas. Besides, as any bug-eater will tell you, we are all already eating bugs, whether we mean to or not. According to the FDA, which publishes a handbook on “defect levels” acceptable in processed food, frozen or canned spinach is not considered contaminated until it has fifty aphids, thrips, or mites per hundred grams. Peanut butter is allowed to have thirty insect fragments per hundred grams, and chocolate is OK up to sixty. In each case, the significance of the contamination is given as “aesthetic.”

  In fresh vegetables, insects are inevitable. One day, cleaning some lettuce, I was surprised by an emerald-green pentagon with antennae: a stinkbug. I got rid of it immediately—force of habit. But daintiness about insects has true consequences. As Tom Turpin, an entomologist at Purdue University, said, “Attitudes in this country result in more pesticide use, because we’re scared about an aphid wing in our spinach.”

  The antipathy that Europeans and their descendants display toward eating insects is stubborn, and mysterious. Insect consumption is in our cultural heritage. The Romans ate beetle grubs reared on flour and wine; ancient Greeks ate grasshoppers. Leviticus, by some interpretations, permits the eating of locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets. (The rest are unkosher.) The manna eaten by Moses on his way out of Egypt is widely believed to have been honeydew, the sweet excrement of scale insects. Turpin thinks it comes down to expedience. Unlike bugs found in the tropics, those found in Europe do not grow big enough to make good food, so there is no culinary tradition, and therefore no infrastructure, to support the practice. He told me, “If there were insects out there the size of pigs, I guarantee you we’d be eating them.”