Eating Bugs

Warren Belasco has done a lot of thinking about the future of food. When he asks students what they think the future of food will be, one answer stands out: “probably food in a pill.”  Why not? It’s efficient, speedy, involves no need to plan meals, shop or clean up.  Still, even those who think this is where we are headed do not necessarily favor it.  The space program offers a good counterexample.  Compact foods in tubes, a “drink” like Tang, various versions of the “meal in a pill” theme, have been kind of a bust with astronauts. Nutritionists have now done a better job mimicking real meals, even going so far as to fashion a table around which astronauts could gather.

Down here on earth, the latest incarnation of the “meal-in-a-pill” is the drink soylent. It claims to offer a nutritionally sufficient alternative to old-fashioned food.  Just gulp down the drink several times a day and no need to bother with meal-planning, shopping, cutting, peeling, seasoning, cooking or cleaning up.  Soylent recently branched out, developing a crunchy bar as a snack supplementing the bland drink. (When my students tasted the liquid soylent their general reaction was: tastes like the milk left in the bowl after eating cereal).

So, here go the contradictory moves. People think we are headed in the direction of synthetic food.  There is little evidence that synthetic food will catch on.

It could just be that the future of food lies not in the direction of artificial concoctions but rather in expanding the kinds of creatures we eat.  I’m talking entomophagy here--what could very well indicate the direction of food’s future. “Entomophagy” might be a big word but it means “eat little things”  insects.    

The background is by now familiar: lots and lots of humans

crowding the earth, meat eating as an ecological disaster, starvation and ill-health as evils to avoid.  Result: we need a new food source.  Sci-fi, techno-geek types go the “meal-in-a-pill" route. Head-in-the-sand types pretend there is no problem.  Others take the entomophagic gamble: we’ll just have to get used to eating insects.  They are already available online.  Entomophagy already has its boosters.

Plentiful, easily replenishable, insects can help provide the amount of food needed for a crowded planet. They can do so in ways that are nutritious, plentiful and do minimal damage to the environment.    It all seems “win, win, win.”  But, then, the “ick,” “yuck,” “gross” factor kicks in.  Disgust raises its head at this point and disgust is not to be taken lightly. Paul Rozin the psychologist who has studied disgust is straightforward about its association with humanity:  "It's hard to imagine civilization and culture without disgust, the sense of what's inappropriate. If you could imagine a person who is free of disgust, it's sort of hard to imagine how they would be distinctly human. It's got to do with the modern sensibility; it is the -- the -- sign of civilization."

Disgust operates as a safety device.  Socrates used to say that he felt a kind of voice within which never told him what to do, but regularly warned him not to do something. Disgust is sort of like that.  A lovely table, nice china, a plate full of vomit--disgusting and not to be eaten.  For many of us, insects sort of cross the border from the merely distasteful to the disgusting.  Can this be overcome?

Some indications say yes. First of all, not all human find the ingestion of insects to be disgusting.  Second, taste is educable. Third, educability arises from a simple fact; disgust is not infallible.  The familiar example of stinky cheese is regularly used as an example of the second and third indicators.

Predicting the future is fraught with difficulties. Right now it looks like eating bugs is inevitable.  For some of us it’s not as much of a change as it might seem.  I write this from Maine where the great delicacy is lobster.  Fishermen refer to them as “bugs.”  The word “lobster” derives from an old word meaning “locust.” There is also actual evidence of a genetic link between land bugs and lobsters.  A moral case can be made for refusing to eat lobsters.  David Foster Wallace did so  most famously.  For those who savor the crustacean, entomophagy (albeit in disguised form) is already part of their diet. Switching from ocean bugs to earth and air bugs might not be too big a step after all.