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

by David Waltner-Toews

  Such an awesome planet. So little time. My advice to aspiring entomophagists is to get out there and learn from the experts: the people who live where they eat, the attentive ones, the ones who see beyond commodities, the ones who care. Find the voices. Listen to them. Share their stories across cultures. Tell them, and retell them. Redefine normal. You can still make a difference.

  PART VII.

  REVOLUTION 9

  In the old stories, perhaps a tale by Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, after the intimacies of eating, or sex — which are, after all, similar, just with different partners — the man or the woman, or both, would have a smoke, or a brandy, or both, pondering the meaning of what had just transpired. Since the nineteenth century, insects have caused Europeans like Darwin to question their most fundamental religious beliefs. Can we eat crickets and mealworms and talk about the meaning of life? Can insects on the plate not just help us to live longer, but also help us learn how to live well? As John Lennon proposed, let us imagine heaven here on earth.

  IMAGINE

  Beetles, Entomophagy, and the Meaning of Life

  “Imagine there’s no heaven.”

  —John Lennon

  “The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten.

  The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.”

  ― W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

  About a millennium BCE, when managing honey bees already had a long history in the Middle East, and prophets were eating locust proteins to supplement the sweets they pillaged from bees, a fierce, violent, emotionally volatile bard announced that “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1). It may have been the bravado of a bloodthirsty warrior, sure that the Old Man had his back, but it was a sentiment with which many European naturalists and natural philosophers would later concur. In 1738, for instance, Friedrich Christian Lesser — a physician and member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists — published Insecto-theology: Or a Demonstration of the Being and Perfections of God, from a Consideration of the Structure and Economy of Insects.

  This same sentiment is reflected today by even the most aggressively atheist neo-Darwinists, who proclaim that the diversity of insect species reflects the genius of nature itself. The general argument is that, in understanding nature, we are not only pursuing the ancient Delphic maxim that we should “know ourselves”; we are also somehow bettering ourselves socially and morally. As Dr. Samuel Johnson famously declared to his biographer, James Boswell, after rescuing a bug that had crawled on his nose, “There is nothing, sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”

  All this sounds good, but really, in terms of everyday life, what does it mean? European naturalists, as well as the teachers and camp counselors who guided my childhood, saw nature as an illustration, a lesson. For them, the idea that nature could be understood and valued on its own terms, like the notion that art could be valued for its own sake, was a foreign concept; nature was seen to provide an almost endless storeroom of moral lessons, food, and materials for building stuff. The idea that nature must be for something is deeply embedded in the twenty-first-century perspective that runs through much of the sustainable development literature, as well as magazines such as The Economist, which is less well known for its strong environmental stances. The twenty-first century version of insecto-theology asserts that the biosphere is best understood as a provider of ecosystem services, like water, food, and entertainment — the natural counterpart of a laundry service for diapers or hospital scrubs. Or even a platform providing open-source software that generates metaphors and philosophical ideas.

  Recent proponents of entomophagy have made similar arguments. Entomophagy, we are informed, is a way to reduce the size of our ecological footprint, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, eat in a sustainably healthy fashion, and create an eco-friendly society. At one level, I find this hopeful, interesting, and even, some days, exciting. At a deeper level, I am troubled. As Nobel prize–winning scientist Joshua Lederberg wrote, in an introduction to Haldane’s Daedalus Revisited, “Above all science is bereft of deontology: it cannot tell why one should be interested in science or anything else.”120

  Entomophagists imply that we should want to develop sustainable ways of living in the natural world because we care about it. I agree, but I ask myself, why do I agree? Caring, as I argued earlier, is the basis for an ethically grounded response to insect suffering. But if science cannot provide an answer as to why we should be interested in the world to begin with, where can we begin to look for a reason as to why we should even begin to care? Why should I care if entomophagy is, in Daniella Martin’s words, “the last great hope to save the planet”? Who cares if we kill each other, destroy landscapes, and drive species to extinction? The planet will someday — billions of years into the future, or tomorrow — be extinguished. So we trash the place and leave early: why care?

  Some evolutionary biologists argue that we have a common-sense notion that we should be good to each other in some vague way. But again I ask, why? Because this will enable us to win the evolutionary race to out-breed everyone else? We’ve been there. Done that. Some of us are past breeding age, and are relieved and happy to have finally arrived here.

  There is an element of that attitude that nature is useful — in this case useful as an illustration — in the (possibly apocryphal) story about J.B.S. Haldane, who, so the tale goes, found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from studying his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

  Following in the spirit of Haldane, one reason to write a book about eating beetles is to understand the mind of an alleged Creator and then, in some naturalist version of a shared feast such as communion or Passover or Eid al-Fitr, to eat him (or according to your metaphorical tastes, her, or the great genderless All-Encompassing Being).

  I am going to risk something here, but in considering entomophagy as a narrative thread through the evolution of life’s diversity and messy connectedness, it would only be the timid and small-minded who would retreat to the Cartesian laboratory, in which how is consistently confused with why. At some point, the answers to a five-year-old’s persistent refrain of why? — because of DNA, because of gravity, because of pheromones — begin to ring hollow, and one is left with saying, well, because that’s how it is! Which of course is a recognition of some kind of failure — whether of intellect, courage, or imagination I am still unsure.

  What, after this quest through the webs and tunnels of the world, can we now say on the subject of a universally creative being who has an inordinate fondness for beetles? Does speaking of meaning after pondering the material structures and mechanisms of insects, evolution, and entomophagy not seem excessively presumptuous, in the same class of arrogance as the Dawkinites’ self-description as “bright ones”? Maybe. I’m going to call it late-stage bravado. Like the Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence, I believe that, as we get older, we should become more radical, more venturesome, less tolerant of the frass of intellectual timidity that plagues so much of modern life. I think I’m in reasonably good company here.

  “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for [humans] to describe?” asks the physicist Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” Hawking concludes his book by announcing that “if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the
question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”121

  Hawking’s mistake, conditioned by decades of thinking like a physicist, is that he is expecting theory to provide the fire, but that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it? The fire is beyond the theory, just as reality is beyond language. To imagine the fire behind the mysterious forces of gravity, spaces between quirks and quarks, stars, planets, and black holes, does not lend itself to theoretical constructs that lead to prediction. The question is how we can begin to understand ourselves as one rare animal among millions of others. Or, perhaps more accurately, according to those, like evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, who say we have evolved from bacteria and are in fact complex communities of collaborating bacteria, we are one animal composed of trillions of other, smaller organisms.

  As with so many important things in life, we don’t really have a good language to talk about this. In the same introduction to Haldane’s Daedalus Revisited, to which I referred above, Lederberg declared that biology “is already so fact laden that it is in danger of being bogged down awaiting advances in logic and linguistics to ease the integration of the particulars.” And as Albert Einstein famously argued, “We can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking that we used when we created them.” Yet all our languages carry with them the “same kinds of thinking,” the intellectual constraints, social baggage, biases, and blinders of the cultures from which they emerged.

  In part, then, this quest for meaning is a search for a language. Some have proposed English, that omniglot, ever-syncretic lingo of a small island, as a possibility. Others might consider other religious or politically important languages: Latin, perhaps, or Arabic, or Chinese, or Russian. Early Cartesians dreamed that science might provide a universally understood sort of Esperanto. Others have proposed mathematics as the universal language, which works if you are a mathematician or a physicist. But none of these encompass Hawking’s dream of a language that enables “philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why.”

  The traditional language often uses shorthand names, often connected to stories, each with their own baggage, as a starting (and, too often, finishing) point. There are hundreds of these. The more familiar ones would include God, Allah, Yahweh, Brahma, and Ahura Mazda. Others have attempted to escape the cultural rootedness of names and refer to characteristics: light, goodness, love, fire, the force. All these names aspire to recognize what lies behind the words, the invisible baggage carrier. Indeed, we all need constant reminding that the words we use are not the things to which they refer. The names are shorthand ways to communicate, and that’s something that, as humans, we need to live with. All language is metaphoric and I, for one, celebrate that. The problem arises when the scholarly authors, oblivious to the cultural baggage borne by their supposedly neutral descriptions, make definitive claims.

  Darwin saw the behaviors of some parasitic wasps as a reason to abandon a belief in the Victorian version of God. In an 1860 letter to the American naturalist Asa Gray, Darwin wrote, “I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.” Darwin’s abandonment of “God” — like Hawking’s desire to understand the “mind of God” — is not about gods in general. Darwin is rejecting a particular sort of god, the curmudgeonly Old Man so beloved by politically and economically powerful patriarchs and kings and businessmen because he’s clearly on their side, and by self-styled know-it-alls and revolutionaries because he’s such an easy target. Hawking is talking about something else. But what?

  Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, an acute observer of the natural and cultural complexity within which we and our sciences have emerged, has commented (with regard to the apparent moral conundrums raised by parasitic wasps) that we “seem to be caught in the mythic structures of our own cultural sagas, quite unable, even in our basic descriptions, to use any other language than the metaphors of battle and conquest. We cannot render this corner of natural history as anything but story, combining the themes of grim horror and fascination and usually ending not so much with pity for the caterpillar as with admiration for the efficiency of the ichneumon.”122

  The head-banging contradiction at the heart of this is that on the one hand, we, who consider ourselves at the very least to be reasonable and sometimes rational, are evolution made conscious of itself, who suddenly understand the truth of how we came to be. On the other hand, the truth, as we understand it, is that we are here through processes of random mutations interacting with natural and human-devised selection pressures and disasters, from incoming comets and earthquakes to polluted waters and desertified grasslands. And the sole relevant outcome of this process is that one’s offspring live long enough to reproduce. We are here now, us waterbags of chemicals, microbes, and bugs, anxious cucumbers with brains, pronouncing that we understand, when the very process that produced us gives us no reason to believe that we have a basis for such understanding. Any tentative confidence we might have is derived from trial-and-error, sharing of stories, structured experiments, observations, mathematical models, and a continual challenging of each other, with, underneath, an unsubstantiated belief that the universe is not, at the very least, malignant or tricky. Excuse me, folks, but this is faith — a strong belief in things we hope for — by another word.

  In the first half of the twentieth century, the scientist, paleontologist, geologist, and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote a book called The Phenomenon of Man (try to ignore the dated patriarchal language), with an introduction by British evolutionary biologist Sir Julian Huxley. To Darwin’s naturalistic perspective of the physical world perceived through our bodily senses, Teilhard added a narrative of the emergence of internal complexity and personhood, which he based on evidence from paleontology and evolutionary biology. He was trying to come to grips with what we now call the mind, and the creativity of human societies. His interpretation of the data threatened both religious and scientific orthodoxy; the Catholic Church would not allow his books to be published in his lifetime, and the British defenders of scientific dogma, such as Peter Medawar, Steven Rose, and Richard Dawkins, called him a charlatan and purveyor of bad poetic science and deception.

  In the introduction to The Phenomenon of Man, Huxley asserts that “we must infer the presence of a potential mind in all material systems, by backward extrapolation from the human phase to the biological.” Emerging as it did within a tradition that thought it ridiculous to imagine that dogs were capable of suffering, or that elephants might show emotions, and that such things, although apparently observable, were clearly anthropomorphisms, this was a strong assertion. Now, of course, most reasonable scholars agree that what we see as the world is a function of both the observer and the observed, and that what we think of as consciousness, emotions, suffering, and culture among other animals are not mere anthropomorphisms. Indeed, recent investigations into rudimentary consciousness and the possibility of suffering in insect communities are consonant with Teilhard’s earlier attempts to integrate the material and the experiential worlds.123 Being a priest, he argued that “religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of the same complete act of knowledge.”

  The great twentieth-century philosopher and writer Arthur Koestler took a nonreligious stance on the subject, grounded in complexity and systems theories. In his books The Ghost in the Machine and Janus: A Summing Up, he asserted that anything we can think of — from atoms to arthropods to eco-social human societies — can be described in terms of Janus-faced holons.
A holon is simultaneously a whole, composed of smaller elements, and a part of something larger. Seen as holons, we are individuals, made up of cells (which were probably originally single-celled life forms), and also members of eco-social systems that include plants, animals, soils, and social communities.

  When Thomas Huxley’s 1893 Evolution and Ethics was translated into Chinese, the Chinese characters used to render evolution (tian yan) could be read as “heaven’s performance.” What better way to speak of the unfolding universe? This is John Lennon’s “Imagine” in other words. The evolutionary record gives evidence of the world’s increasing complexity and our emergence within it, held together and bent by gravity, by strong and weak nuclear forces, and arriving at something like Regier’s love and Wilson’s biophilia. In Teilhard’s words, “driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.”

  This way of thinking about the evidence offers a possible reason why we should care, not just about science, but about the evolution of life on this planet. The fire that makes equations possible is both the alpha and the omega of the universe: the point at which evolution began and its ultimate end. More than that, since the fire is in us, and we are in the fire, “we are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.” Since consciousness has been emerging as part of the evolutionary process, the fire is in the process of being created. Since this flame is in all things in the world, we all are participating in creating the world of the future.