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Eat the Beetles!
An Exploration into our Conflicted Relationship with Insects
By David Waltner-Toews ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2017 David Waltner-Toews
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-314-6
CHAPTER 1
I Call Your Name
For if I ever saw you/ I didn't catch your name
Alan Yen and I were enjoying a pleasant summer-evening drink on a friend's deck in Melbourne, Australia. Alan is an Australian biologist who has spent decades studying insects and human–insect relationships. When I told him about the book I was writing, he asked me why I had titled it Eat the Beetles. Was I only going to write about edible beetles? What about all those other insects?
Indeed, why beetles? It began, I confess, as a bit of a lark, all those puns involving the Beatles being too much fun for me to resist. It was good marketing. In my own mind, I could even come up with a convoluted rationalization. The Beatles were the Cambrian explosion of popular music. From a rocky start in a dark place, their music evolved over just a few years, invoking Lady Madonna and Ukrainian girls, liberation theology and humanism and atheism, Catholicism, Hinduism, communism, and entrepreneurialism. They brought us a mix of rock, blues, folk, classical, plugged and unplugged; movies that were like a collage of rock videos well before rock videos existed; big orchestras, intimate quintets; electronic music, piano, strings; biting, stinging, sweet, and sentimental; and all the other musical organisms one might expect from an enthusiastic band of Coleoptera. So this book would be a paperback version of the 1982 movie The Compleat Beatles, a tale of kicking back and feeling at home, perhaps while indulging oneself on insect snacks during a weekly celebration of Entomo-Tuesday. (Sir Paul, are you listening?)
All that was post-hoc rationalization, however, and this is a science book. How could I justify the title not just in punny marketing terms, but as a shorthand way to describe the explorations in this text?
The 1,900 known-to-be-edible insect species documented in the 2013 FAO report are but the crust on the crème brûlée of possible entomophagical options. Given the multitudinous diversity of insects out there, the possibilities for culinary experimentation would seem to be almost infinite. Which raises a number of questions: How many different species of insects are there? What are their names? And what is the total population of insects of all species on this planet?
If we are going to eat them, we should know who they are, where they live, and what they do for a living when not being eaten. Not to "name names" when looking at entomophagical options would be like saying we can eat mammals, which would include rhinos, pandas, tigers, orangutans, dogs, cats, mice, human babies, and monkeys, as well as cows, sheep, and pigs. Of course we can, but we also have important reasons for not eating some of them that have little to do with their nutrient content or our food preferences. The same is true for insects and, as we shall see, this has important implications for the future of entomophagy.
The names people attach to the world around them reflect the way they see the world. Economists divide the world into "haves" and "have-nots." During the Cold War, the world was divided politically into the First World (Europe, United States, and their allies), the Second World (USSR, China, and their allies) and the Third World (non-aligned countries, often from the global South). Another way to divide up the world is into those cultures that have a tradition of eating insects (the insect-eaters) and those that don't (the non-insect-eaters). This way of dividing up the world does not always coincide with political and economic boundaries, but is useful for understanding some of the major challenges facing twenty-first-century entomophagy promoters. In general, most insect-eaters live in tropical or subtropical parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and most non-insect-eaters are from temperate zones, such as Europe, Russia, and northern parts of North America.
How indigenous people, urban consumers, farmers, and scientists classify natural entities is a reflection of how each group recognizes and relates to the world around them. Insects may be grouped as pests, food, or medicine, for instance, with subgroups within those. These classifications are not inherent in the bugs, but in the roles we see them playing in our lives. The details — which are where, we are told, the devil lives — are relevant to defining an entomophagy that is both culturally and ecologically resilient. The details are also overwhelming (at least to me), but that may be because, unlike Mick Jagger and John Milton, I have never had much sympathy for the devil.
One might suggest that insect-eaters are the experts in identifying and classifying edible species, or stages of species (larvae versus adults, for instance), and appropriately preparing insect dishes from potentially toxic species. Insect-eaters' knowledge and classification systems do bring with them important information. But they also bring their own problems.
Some insects poke and suck, some bite and chew, some fly, some only crawl or hop. Some species undergo incomplete metamorphosis, where the babies look like little adults (think of crickets), while others, like butterflies and moths, undergo complete metamorphosis, where the baby caterpillars grow up to look like a different species. Thus, in some parts of the world, people may be able to identify an edible grub by name, but not its adult counterpart. In southern Africa, the fat, sausage-like larvae of emperor moths (Gonimbrasia belina), called mopane caterpillars or mopane worms because they feed on mopane trees (Colophospermum mopane), look nothing at all like the adult moths. Alan Yen has documented that Australian Aboriginal languages sometimes have different names for the same species, and that these names are not consistently translated into English the same way. Non-insect-eater scientists recognize one species of witjuti grub (Endoxyla leucomochla), the larva of a cossid moth that lives in the roots of Acacia kempeana (or the witjuti bush). At least two Aboriginal groups use a different binomial name for grubs, the first name referring to the fact that it is edible, and the second name being the plant on which the grub usually feeds. Conversely, Yen writes, "indigenous people in central Australia recognize at least 24 different types of edible caterpillars from plants, and it is likely that most of these will be distinct scientific species."
By contrast, non-insect-eaters tend not to identify insects according to whether or not they are edible. Mealworms, for instance, are so named not because someone thought they made a good meal, but because they have a long history of living in — and eating — the ground seeds and grains (a.k.a. meal) that people wish to keep for themselves.
For non-insect-eaters, differences in naming reflect both scientific rules and different subcultures within the scientific community. Thus, the terms population, assemblage, co mmunity, guild, and swarm have all been used to describe a large group of grasshoppers or locusts. Entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood has suggested that there is no absolutely correct term. But this doesn't mean that anything goes. "A term is correct," he argues, "if it accurately reflects the conceptual framework of the investigator and effectively communicates this perspective to others."
He is no doubt right, but this inconsistency creates some dilemmas for those promoting entomophagy. Do we use the non-insect-eater scientific names or the insect-eater names? We would like to be able to quickly pick out the edible ones, but the scientific names might give greater opportunities for identifying new ones and for communicating across cultural boundaries.
What many people now think of as science emerged from non-insect-eaters in Europe in the seventeenth century. Biologists, who are part of this tradition, categorize life according to Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.
Arthropods (a phylum) are members of the kingdom Animalia, in the domain (a.k.a. empire) of the Eukaryotes. With their tough, chitinous external skeletons, segmented bodies, jointed feet, and open circulatory systems, arthropods are the most numerous and diverse animals on the planet. They were probably the first multicellular organisms to make landfall, preparing the way for plants. Insects — members of the class Insecta — are arthropods, but not all arthropods are insects. Besides the Hexapoda, the subphylum to which insects and a couple of smaller groups belong, arthropods include Crustacea (shrimps, crabs, lobsters), Chelicerata (spiders and scorpions), and Myriapoda (millipedes, centipedes, symphylans). People have eaten all of these, but this book is about insects, and I will refer to these other relatives only when they are important to the entomophagical narrative.
So a house cricket (Acheta domesticus) would be:
• Domain Eukarya (having a membrane-bound nucleus)
• Kingdom Animalia (animals)
• Phylum Arthropoda (arthropods)
• Subphylum Hexapoda (hexapods)
• Class Insecta (insects)
• Order Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets, katydids) (Suborder Ensifera [long-horned Orthoptera]) (Infraorder Gryllidea [crickets])
• Family Gryllidae (true crickets) (Subfamily Gryllinae [field crickets])
• Genus Acheta
• Species domesticus (house cricket)
For the house cricket, this looks easy, even with the extra sub- and infra- groupings, but in general terms, the questions of naming and counting insects — activities which are closely related, since it's hard to count things if you can't identify them — turn out to be a lot more complicated than they look, even for scientists. In some classifications, for some insects, there are superfamilies somewhere above families, and new genetic studies are changing the way bugs are classified. Scientific naming, then, is imperfect, but it's a place to start.
The terms arthropod and insect predate European non-insect-eater sciences. Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century of this current era, was a Roman naturalist and army commander, who, in the ambitious manner of a military leader, sought to describe all living things. He made a great many statements about the natural world, some of which turned out to be right, and some quite wrong (such as the observation that caterpillars originated from dew on radish leaves). Among his legacies, he left us the word insectum, meaning "with a notched or divided body" or "cut into sections." Pliny's word was actually his translation from the Greek of entomon, which Aristotle, a few hundred years before, had used to classify our little segmented relatives, and from which we derive entomology and, more recently, entomophagy.
All of us are, in various ways, segmented, often both in mind and body, but in arthropods the sections (head, thorax, abdomen) are more obvious and more obviously specialized than in most other animal types. The non-extinct arthropods — the largest phylum in the animal kingdom — encompass arachnids (spiders, ticks, mites), myriapods (millipedes, centipedes, symphylans), and crustaceans (crabs, crayfish, barnacles, krill), as well as insects. All arthropods have external skeletons (exoskeletons) and jointed appendages, not all of which are legs. But one who is fascinated by legs could do worse than spend a few summer months standing on the corner watching all the bugs fly by.
The class Insecta encompasses about thirty orders. I say "about" because the number changed while I was doing research for this book. These orders include Coleoptera (beetles like dung beetles and Colorado potato beetles), Hemiptera (true bugs, like cicadas and bedbugs), Orthoptera (grasshoppers and crickets), Diptera (flies and mosquitoes), Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps), Siphonaptera (fleas), and Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). One might think that more sophisticated science and more complete information — for instance, about genomes — would clarify and simplify our understanding of insects. Not so. A 2014 scientific article on the classification of some beetles, based in part on penis structure, was titled "A Preliminary Phylogenetic Analysis of the New World Helopini (Coleoptera, Tenebrionidae, Tenebrioninae) Indicates the Need for Profound Rearrangements of the Classification." The authors spoke not only of the usual order, genus, and species, but threw in tribes, clades, and — just to make sure they'd fully covered the territory — polyphyly, polytomy, and paraphyly, which are classifications based on variations in genetically identified ancestors and descendants.
Insects account for more than 80 percent of all described living species. Among these, four orders predominate: Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera. Although there are about a million named insect species, some researchers estimate that there could be another million — or several million — waiting to be discovered and named. There is also the counter-possibility that some of those already named are varieties of the same species. To put this into some sort of context, there are about 20,000 species of fish, 6,000 species of reptiles, 9,000 species of birds, 1,000 species of amphibians, and 15,000 species of mammals. So, most animals are arthropods, and most arthropods are insects. According to an oft-repeated quote, allegedly from paleontologist J. Kukalová-Peck, to a first approximation, every animal is an insect.
Which brings me back to the use of beetles in the title of this book. Why talk about eating beetles? Why not insects, or even bugs? True bugs, like bedbugs, cicadas, aphids, giant water bugs, assassin bugs, and scale insects, comprise "only" about 80,000 species of the millions of insect species out there. Despite this, some of the best books on insects and their taxonomic relatives written by entomologists have "bugs" in the title. These include May Berenbaum's Bugs in the System, Scott Richard Shaw's Planet of the Bugs, and Gilbert Waldbauer's What Good Are Bugs? The term bug, with Welsh and Germanic roots, was first used in medieval times to refer to devils, hobgoblins, ghosts, and other unseen and sometimes frightening annoyances, which may accurately reflect the kinds of arthropods encountered by medieval Europeans. Today, the word bug carries that etymological baggage and more, being used to refer to small insects, disease-causing bacteria, hidden microphones, and computer glitches.
If we consider only insects that people eat, however, the picture changes. There may be 1,900 species eaten by someone, somewhere on the planet, but some families and orders — Coleoptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Isoptera, Lepidoptera, Orthoptera — are more popular than others. Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths, eaten as caterpillars), Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants) and Orthoptera (grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets) each contribute somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the global insect diet. Cicadas, leafhoppers, plant hoppers, scale insects, "true bugs," termites, dragonflies, and flies each contribute less than 10 percent. On a species basis, the largest insect contributors to human diets are the Coleoptera (beetles), which contribute about a third of the total number of species eaten. In many parts of the world, beetles are eaten as adults, but in North America and Europe, mealworms (baby darkling beetles) are the most popular.
There are more species of beetles (close to 360,000) than there are of all of the rest of us animals put together. If we are all, to a first approximation, insects, then I would add that, to a second approximation, we are all beetles. This also sounds like something a Douglas Adams character would say. The word beetle, which comes from Old English and once referred to a hammering tool, and then a "little biter," carries less baggage; that's one of the reasons I have used it in the title of this book. A German car, and then, misspelled, a musical group, are not likely to add confusion to the entomophagist's kitchen.
In the past few hundred years, non-insect-eater scientists have attempted to overwrite traditional insect names with Linnaean taxonomies. Yet it is not always clear how that insect-eater knowledge maps onto non-insect-eater science, or vice versa. Given that we have no clear idea how many species there are, and that many indigenous cultures are disappearing or being absorbed into some variant of the generic "global" insect-avoidant McCulture, however, it is easy to feel as if one is a prisoner wandering around in the luminous fog of George Lucas's pre–Star Wars movie THX 1138.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Eat the Beetles! by David Waltner-Toews. Copyright © 2017 David Waltner-Toews. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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