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

by David Waltner-Toews

  Cone-headed grasshoppers (Ruspolia nitidula) are also popular in Uganda and have been, periodically, a significant source of income, their price per unit weight exceeding that of beef in the markets. This was especially true in the 1990s, when plunging coffee prices deprived many Ghanians of their primary source of cash income. The reported constraints were that the grasshoppers had a short shelf life, and that, when retrieved from the drums where they were stored, they would bite.

  It is all very well to talk about eating grasshoppers, stink bugs, and bamboo worms in Africa and Asia, but it will take more than just a leap of the imagination for bugs to go from there to grocery stores in Canada and the United States. One of the recurring questions among the new promoters of entomophagy is how insect-eating can be taken from its remnant populations of disappearing traditional, ecologically grounded communities and integrated into an emerging, Western-dominated, global food culture.

  The success story most often cited of a food once marginal and now mainstream is that of sushi. If Europeans and North Americans can, in one generation, learn to eat raw fish as prepared in Japan, then why not insects? There are even evolutionary arguments for pursuing this line of marketing. According to the latest genetic research, insects may be thought of as descendants of terrestrial crustaceans; their closest living relatives are blind, cave-dwelling remipedes. From an entomophagical point of view, perhaps this “sisterhood” of insects and crustaceans can be used to alter the public imagination. With all due respect for, and apologies to, Daniella Martin’s YouTube scorpion-eating performances, distinguishing and imaginatively distancing edible land crustaceans from spiders and scorpions might offer more effective marketing possibilities.

  Japan was the source of the American and European infatuation with sushi, and now is also on the forefront of the new entomophagy movement. Japanese culture has a long history of explicit engagement with insects as entertainment, natural phenomena, and food. The Japanese word mushi, which can refer to a bug, a germ, an insect, or a spirit, reflects this complex cultural perspective.

  This relationship with insects is changing rapidly, as a result of both Western interests in entomophagy and how that interest interacts with the modernization of traditional cultures in Japan. Some practices, such as foraging for caterpillars while collecting firewood, have largely disappeared because not many people use firewood for cooking anymore. Apparently Emperor Hirohito had a fondness for fried wasps, seasoned with soy and sugar and eaten with boiled rice, but imperial Japan is not generally held up as inspiration for the future world. As in China and Korea, silkworm pupae, a by-product of silk production, are still widely consumed in Japan. Since they were domesticated in China some five thousand years ago, the cocoon size, growth rate, and FCR of silkmoths (Bombyx mori), which are the basis of 90 percent of the world’s silk production, have all improved relative to wild forms. About a million people are employed in the Chinese silk industry, which annually produces more than 140,000 tons of silk, 800,000 tons of fresh cocoons and, more to the point of our discussion here, more than 400,000 tons of dry silkworm pupae. The spent pupae have multiple uses, including as fertilizer, human food, and animal feed. White mulberry trees (Morus alba) are the preferred food of Bombyx mori; they are native to northern China but have now been cultivated and naturalized in many other countries, including Japan.

  Eating grasshoppers, once widely practiced in Japan, is now on the decline. Hunting and eating of wasps, giant hornets, and yellow jackets has been reported in documentary films, academic reports, and public media, but a declining supply of some of these is leading to imports from Korea and China.

  It is not yet clear which bugs will find a home in the brave new entomophagical world, or into whose kitchens they will fly. From what I have seen and read and heard, one man is ahead of this wave of insect-eating culinary changes. Born into a community in central Japan where insect-eating was normal, and now based in that most futuristic of cities, Tokyo, Shoichi Uchiyama has become a national and global champion of insect-eating. The author of several books on the delights of entomophagy, he leads and inspires the Konchu Ryori Kenkyukai (Insect Cuisine Research Association). Daniella Martin describes her memorable encounter with him in her book Edible. Having watched Uchiyama-san84 on YouTube and seen him celebrated in popular newspaper reports and an NKH World documentary on insect-eating in Japan, I had to visit Uchiyama-san as well.

  Together with the brilliant and well-organized Yukiko Kurioka of Japan Uni Agency (who had negotiated the Japanese publication of my previous book, The Origin of Feces) Uchiyama-san had arranged for me to do a book reading and give a talk the day I arrived. The reading was at a bookstore that took up the entire very large second floor of a department store. There were a lot of people in the store and, even if they were looking for graphic novels and manga, I was impressed. The topic of my talk was “Mimicking Nature: Entomophagy and Feces in a Sustainable Society.” Karen Kawabata, the daughter of my friend and colleague Zen Kawabata, translated for me.

  The audience was, if not rapt, then at least politely attentive, and even laughed at some of my attempts at “global” humor. What’s more global than Walt Disney, for instance, and the thought of Bambi’s mother eating her newborn’s feces? In the Q and A, one guy wanted to know if he should shit in his garden to improve the soil. I advised against it. Another guy suggested that Europeans didn’t eat insects because the Bible said not to. I said I thought it had a lot more to do with climate and landscape than religion.

  I had given Uchiyama-san a bag of Moroccan-spiced crickets from Entomo Farms in Canada, and several plates were passed around for people to sample. During the signing, a woman pressed a magazine into my hand, opened at a particular page that seemed to show young women cooking insects. It was only after I got home that I opened it and realized it was not a Japanese version of Bon Appétit or something similar. In an email to me, Yukiko explained: “Friday is a weekly magazine which mainly covers celebrities and their scandals as well as cultural trends. The sticky note seems to be addressed to somebody else. It says ‘I’m sorry that I did not send this copy earlier. Sega (a person’s surname).’ The article is about the young girls eating insects. They drink the vodka in which belostomatidaes [giant water bugs, Hemipterans to entomologists, toe-biters to those inclined to entomophobia] are pickled and eat fried locusts and larvae of butterflies as nibbles. The article mentions that FAO recommends entomophagy. The journalist joined the event by Mr. Uchiyama on May 18. The article goes on to explain different dishes and the charms of insect eating.”

  The charms of insect-eating, indeed. And drinking vodka. And of photoshopped Japanese girls in their panties. But I’m sure people only buy the magazine for the articles on entomophagy. In any case, I suppose what this illustrates is one of the ways that eating insects is already insinuating its way into urban popular cultures.

  The next morning, Kyoko and Kenichiro Iizuka, my local guides, took me out to join Uchiyama-san and several other people for insect hunting and roasting along the Tama River. After a half-hour train trip out of the city, we walked a few blocks to a small shop, where Uchiyama-san picked up his bicycle. The bike was loaded with the accoutrements and equipment necessary for hunting and picnicking, including a tarp, butterfly nets, a propane camping stove, and bags of cicada (locally caught) and ant larvae (imported from China). Our intrepid hunting group walked in the baking heat to the riverbank, where we parked under a bridge. Then we set off to catch lunch.

  As I walked down the narrow path among the tall grasses and shrubs, I heard a kazoo-like buzzing nearby. I approached the musical branch and was the reluctant witness to a thumb-sized hornet devouring a smaller, green insect, probably a grasshopper or mantis. Having heard all the horror stories about Asian killer hornets, I slowly backed away. Later, overcoming my better instincts for the sake of science, I checked into a much louder flapping in a tree. A praying mantis — several centimeters long — had her teeth i
nto a cicada. When I netted the pair and showed it to Uchiyama-san, he informed me that the mantis was pregnant (and thus eating for more than one!). The Japanese name for the mantis is kama kiri which translates literally as “sickle cut” (kiri meaning “cut,” as in hara kiri).

  At first, a lot of grasshoppers and mantises whizzed away just as my net came down. I finally caught a grasshopper, but when I swooped my net down on a second one and tried to stuff it into my ziplock bag, the first escaped. Eventually I learned how to cultivate patience, waiting until a bug settled before moving with startling speed to catch it, and then shaking my previous captives down to the bottom of the bag before stuffing in the newcomer.

  Back at camp, under the cement bridge, Uchiyama-san and his helpers had set up the stoves and frying pans and busily cooked up the various bugs and larvae. I was told the flavor was “nutty,” and I suppose it was. I wondered what kind of nuts, and a couple of us decided that maybe the pan-fried cicada larvae tasted a bit like almonds. Now, when someone asks me what almonds taste like, I can say, “a bit like fried cicada larvae.”

  After this adventure, Uchiyama-san and his coterie went back to his home to clean up. We met again at a railway station a few stops away, and then we were off to Akihabara, the world center of big-eyed anime cartoons, video games, movies, and manga. Japan International Volunteer Center (JIVC), which was running a community-based project in Lao PDR on the relationship between insect foraging and forest conservation, is located in an alley just at the edge of Akihabara. As I expected, results from the JIVC project looked promising but uncertain, as tends to be the case where local people are given hunting or foraging rights in protected areas. The theory was that if indigenous people were given these rights, they would protect the resources. But such a strategy does not account for political manipulation and the massive financial pressures that can occur if those resources gain traction on the open market. I spoke briefly about excrement, and the VWB/VSF cricket farming project in Laos. Uchiyama-san and his staff prepared snacks of saltine crackers smeared with what I think was some kind of insect pâté, and topped with either crushed crickets, ants, or cicadas.

  The next afternoon, Kyoko and Ken met me in the lobby of my hotel and we headed over to where Uchiyama-san has his office for an afternoon of insect cooking and tasting. There were about a dozen people, including a grad student in ESL from Ohio and an editor from the publisher Tsukiji Shokan. The space was cramped and stacked with books. According to Ken, Uchiyama-san works for a publisher that specializes in Russian literature. But one of the few English books on the shelf was by Allan Ginsberg. Suddenly it all made sense! (Well, as much as Ginsberg ever makes sense.) Are the beat poets a gateway into the mainstream? If Uchiyama-san and le Festin Nu are leaders, then perhaps the answer is yes.

  The menu included hornet larvae, silkworm pupae, and silkworms. The geographic origins of these insects were not always clear to me. Some, I think, must have been imported. The silkworm pupae were white and pink and yellow. Apparently silk producers have bred various colored strains. We snipped off the ends and the larvae dropped out. Zen roasted them in a small pan over a camp stove in the street to get the “chaff” off. The hornets were bought from a company that cleans hornet nests from people’s houses, so it was doubly virtuous to eat them. We made tea from the feces of worms that had fed on cherry blossoms. The tea was cherry-scented and, if you didn’t know where it came from, light and tasty. We also tried green tea made from silkworm larvae poop, which tasted like green tea made from silkworm larvae poop. One of Uchiyama-san’s assistants made noodles from buckwheat dough that included powdered whole bees.

  Reflecting on this later, I tried to discern where the path might be from this type of street cooking to North American kitchens and restaurants. There did not seem to be an obvious route.

  The second part of my agenda in Japan was to go hornet hunting near Nagoya. Yukiko met me at the hotel at 7:30 and guided me to the bullet train. She handed me a train ticket and a schedule with pictures of the gates I was to pass through, and pointed me in the right direction. The Japanese trains are exactly on time, and smooth, especially that bullet train. At Nagoya station I had to rush to make the connection to the fast train to Ena. In Ena, I caught the one-car train that reminded me of the hand-painted VW bus my future wife drove back in the 60s. We chugged up through tunnels and deep green chasms into the mountains to Akechi, where I was met by Shoko and her two year-old daughter, Soyoka. On the way out of town, we stopped at a small grocery store, and I noted jars of what looked like pickled hornets on the shelf. We then drove out to Kushihara, a village of fewer than a thousand people, where their AirBNB, named Lumberjack, is located. Shoko’s husband Daesuke-san, the real-life lumberjack, who does indeed own and run a small sawmill, had assured me in an email that we would go “bee hunting.”

  Researcher Charlotte Payne, who has spent considerable time studying in the area and published some essential-reading academic papers on entomophagy, assured me that he meant hornets. She also explained that although the people in the region did sometimes hunt giant Asian hornets, at the time of year I was arriving, the animals we were after would be “kurosuzume-bachi” — Vespula shidai or Vespula flaviceps — generally referred to in English as wasps.

  When I inquired later about this hornet–wasp confusion, Charlotte explained that “the confusion about terminology comes from a quirk of the Japanese language: the word ‘hachi’ (‘bat’) occurs in the common names for all Hymenoptera except ants — so, hornets, bees and wasps can be referred to by this term. Since ‘bee’ is the first Hymenoptera species that most children learn about, most people translate ‘hachi’ as ‘bee.’ Hence, many people interested in entomophagy leave Japan thinking that they have eaten bee larvae (often marketed to English speakers as bee babies) when in fact they’ve had the larvae of Vespula flaviceps/shidai, which are the most commonly eaten wasp species in the country. (Other communities allegedly eat other orders of wasps though I have never seen this first hand.)”

  The next morning, after the usual breakfast of rice, fermented beans, fermented pickles of eggplant and cucumbers, and miso soup, we were off to hunt wild hornets (this adjective probably being unnecessary as there are no domesticated hornets or wasps). I climbed into Daesuke-san’s pickup and, followed by one of his sawmill workers in another small car, drove about half an hour along a single-lane, paved valley road between cedar and Japanese cypress forests. Arriving at a cluster of houses beside the road, we met seventy-six-year-old Haru-O, otherwise called Haru-san, the expert hornet hunter. A short, weather-worn man in a baseball cap, jeans, and boots with the toes separated — which (excepting me) seemed to be the uniform of the day — he had been doing this for fifty years. Also there was a seventy-one-year-old community leader of unknown (to me) status.

  We drove in tandem up a sometimes muddy, sometimes gravelly road between steep hills, and finally stopped near a large grader, where the road was going to be extended. Haru-san prepared sticks with a spit at one end, each of which he pressed a strip of squid into (some people use eel, which is what Daesuke-san called it at first, but which his wife, Shoko, later translated as squid); these sticks, each marked with a pink ribbon, were stuck into the roadside at various intervals. Then, we waited.

  In the meantime, Daesuke-san showed me a plastic box that held thin white threads that seemed to broaden at one end (a bit like flossing strips). When, finally, one of us saw a small black hornet chewing on the bait, Haru-san took a small bit of squid, worked it into a pearl-sized spit-ball, and attached the string to it. He then approached the hornet, and prodded it to take the squid-ball from his hand. The hornet took a bite and zipped away, trailing the white thread. We watched it disappear into the green foliage between the cedars, and Daesuke-san clambered up the steep hill through wet, partially decayed logs, ferns, scree, and tree trash until he lost track of it. We waited for another and repeated the process. This time he was able to follow
it farther. After about three baited hornets, we were able to find a few holes set back into the earth in the shadow of a rotten log and a curtain of ferns. While three of us waited next to the nest, Daesuke-san went back down to help Haru. For a while, we watched hornets coming and going from the holes. While I nervously stepped back, the seventy-one-year-old whacked the earth a few times to watch the hornets come hurrying out to see who the intruder was.

  Finally, Haru-san and Daesuke-san climbed up, bringing a couple of twelve-inch-square wooden boxes. Haru-san pulled on a beekeeper’s hat and veil, and thick gloves, then dug into the earth below the holes. In about five minutes, he had unearthed a large grapefruit-sized hornet’s nest from the wet red humus and dirt. He plunked it into one of the boxes. The box was too small, but while Daesuke-san clambered back down to get a larger box from the truck, Haru-san kept digging and dropping handfuls of hornets and nest into the box. When Daesuke-san arrived with the bigger box, Haru-san transferred the nest to the new box and added more hornets, including the queen, who promptly crawled down into the nest. He tied the lid on the box and we all returned to the vehicles.

  Back at his house, Haru-san showed us the twenty nest boxes he owned. He fed them chicken liver (on a string hanging outside each front door) and rock sugar. He would feed the nests for a few months, until the November festival, at which time (so I understood) there would be a contest to see who had the biggest nest. Then they would eat most of them and let some go.

  On my final morning in Japan, during my usual breakfast (no insects), Daesuke-san showed the NHK World video about Uchiyama-san and insect-eating in Japan to two of the workers from his sawmill. The younger guy, probably in his twenties, grimaced. After the film was done, and the guys had gone back to work, Daesuke-san came over and sat next to me at the wooden table. He seemed agitated, as if he had something important to say but wasn’t quite sure how to say it.