This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode What’s the Buzz on Eating Bugs? Can Insects Really Save the World?, first released on August 20, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

[BUZZING CICADAS]

BROADCASTER: You recognize that awful noise? It’s the sound of a massive insect invasion. Trillions of c-c-c-c-cicadas are emerging across 12 states—from the Midwest to the East Coast, after more than a decade underground.

BROADCASTER 2: The collective noise from the insects can be as loud as a jet engine. It is so loud that some residents in South Carolina called the police. Cicadas are also beginning to come out in Illinois, which will see two broods co emerge for the first time in 200 years.

CYNTHIA GRABER: Trillions of cicadas came out of hiding this summer all around the US, and some people were talking about…eating them.

JOSEPH YOON: What I found is that the terroir will tremendously impact the flavor. The cicada lives underground for 13 or 17 years, slowly feasting on plant or tree xylem, and so it’s going to give it a very vegetal quality with a little mild hint of nuttiness.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Which is exactly the tasting notes I’m looking for in my wine—and also, I guess, my cicadas. We, by the way, are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Nicola Twilley, although my husband calls me bugs. I hope affectionately.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber, and this episode, we are indeed all about bugs—the real ones. Not Nicky.

TWILLEY: For a lot of folks in the US and Europe, eating insects is either super adventurous and unusual, or, if you’ve watched so much Fox that your brain has melted, an evil plot foisted on you by the global elite.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s part of a larger agenda. Nobody eats bugs voluntarily. They’re filthy. People need to be persuaded to give up meat and if necessary, forced.

NOOR BIN LADIN: I don’t want to eat the bugs. I don’t want to live in the pod. And nothing they can do will make me.

CARLSON: Eating insects is repulsive and un-American.

GRABER: But actually insects are a totally normal part of a meal in most of the world, and they’re not something people are forced to eat, they’re a delicacy.

TWILLEY: So what are the rest of us missing out on—and why, apart from deliciousness, might we want to get on the insects-for-dinner train?

GRABER: Is there any truth to the idea that eating insects will help us reduce our global warming emissions and produce enough protein for a growing population? Will insects save the world?

TWILLEY: All that this episode plus a healthy serving of bacon-flavored bugs. But before we get into it, we have important news. We’ve told you we’re doing our first ever Gastrohang, complete with prizes, trivia, and a behind-the-scenes peek at making an episode, on September 26. But what we haven’t told you is that if you want an invitation to that, you have to sign up as a supporter by September 1st. Take a moment to do that now, so you don’t miss out!

GRABER: If you already support us at the fan level or above, you’re on the list, and you’ll get an invitation in a few weeks! This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the public understanding of science, technology, and economics, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the vox media podcast network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

GRABER: All right, so we are here at Barra in Union Square. It is a lovely restaurant that’s supposed to be like you’re hanging out in Mexico City. Welcome Nicky and Claudia. Hi Tim.

GRABER: That would be Claudia, our producer, and Tim, my spouse.

TWILLEY: Neither Cynthia nor I lives in the cicada brood hot zone, but we didn’t want to get left out of all the buzz. So when we met up in Boston a couple weeks ago, we went out for grasshoppers instead.

GRABER: So we have guacamole with chapulines, and peanuts with chapulines. And these, I’ve had tiny chapulines and these are a little more, erm, substantial.

TWILLEY: These are real bugs. Like, these are the kinds of things you would sweep up from your kitchen floor and toss in the trash. They are, I’m going to say, an inch long, brown, let me pick one up for—very lightweight. Of course, bug-like. You can really see, like, leg, head….

TIM BUNTEL: [background] …antenna.

TWILLEY: You know, the whole shebang.

GRABER: Chapulines are what these grasshoppers are called in Mexico, and they’re a common addition to dishes, particularly in the state of Oaxaca. Tim and I ate them there, and Claudia and Nicky had both tasted them in the past, too.

TWILLEY: I remember really liking them, but it was definitely time to refresh my memory.

[CRISPY BITE]

TWILLEY: It is delicious. Crunchy. Salty. A little, a little note of something that is like, like almost herbal. I don’t know how much of that is whatever they’ve been cooked in, and how much of it is the grasshopper, but I am a fan.

GRABER: Oh, they’re very toasty. They are quite tasty. I get the herbal thing. Want to try, Claudia?

CLAUDIA GEIB: Okay. Yeah. If you, you can give me a bowl of these. I’ll just eat them. They’re good.

BUNTEL: I might need another cocktail before I do this, but I’ll give it, I’ll give it a shot. [EATING] Oh, yeah, salty, smoky. A little bit umami, maybe. Good, good spice and kick. Yeah, it’s all right. If you jam them to the back of your mouth into the molars so your tongue can’t— [LAUGH] can’t detect things, pretty good.

GRABER: I’m going to be honest, the shape might be a little off-putting if you’re not used to it, but in general they were just a fun, crunchy part of our meal.

TWILLEY: Honestly, though, becoming a crispy topping for guacamole is pretty much the least of what an insect can be or do.

ANNE SVERDRUP-THYGESON: They rule the planet in many ways. They, they dominate the planet. They are the little, cogs that keeps everything ticking, everything working,

GRABER: Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson is a professor of conservation biology at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the author of a book called Extraordinary Insects. And she says there’s an extraordinary number of them, too.

SVERDRUP-THYGESON: We reckon that there is in total right now, as we sit here, between one and 10 quintillions of insects living out there. Which means that there is at least 200 millions for each of us humans.

TWILLEY: The longest insect is two foot long, the tiniest is so small it can land on the tip of a human hair—they’re on every continent, in every color, doing everything.

GRABER: And some of those things they do are super cool. They break down all kinds of organic matter—without insects, we would literally not have healthy soil. Plus they actually farm, for themselves.

TWILLEY: Well yeah, insects have been farming for much longer than humans have. Leaf-cutter ants have fungus gardens that they tend and weed, and harvest to provide food for their gigantic city-sized nests of up to eight million individual ants.

GRABER: And more than one species of ant has been known to farm another insect! They keep a supply of aphids, because the aphids live on nectar. Aphids need nitrogen, but nectar doesn’t have a lot of nitrogen in it, so they have to drink a crap ton of nectar, and then they expel any sugary liquid that they don’t need.

SVERDRUP-THYGESON: Ants have kept, you know, aphids as farm animals to collect this sugar, this honeydew, for, for millions of years.

TWILLEY: Anne says we could definitely learn a thing or two about farming from insects—like how they manage to raise their fungus in a monoculture without pesticides. But actually insects are already helping us with our own farming everyday.

SVERDRUP-THYGESON: Of course, everybody knows pollination. That is the main thing that people—is aware of already. And of course, that’s super important.

GRABER: Our main staple crops like rice and corn are pollinated by the wind, but a lot of our fruits and vegetables and nuts rely on insects. In fact three-quarters of the about 100 or so plant species that humans mostly eat are pollinated by insects. And not just by the domesticated honeybees that are transported around the country for pollination.

SVERDRUP-THYGESON: Several studies have shown that wild bees, including bumblebees and also, different sorts of moths and butterflies, even beetles and many other insects contribute much more to pollination of plants than the honeybees do. And they all have different ways of doing it. So having this huge variety of wild insects is of paramount importance, for our production of our food plants. And, and to get these crops that we are dependent on.

TWILLEY: Insect pollinators help increase yield, but also—and I never knew this—their pollination services also improve the final fruit or nut.

SVERDRUP-THYGESON: Take strawberries, for instance. There was a German study that concludes that insect-pollinated strawberries are less ill-shaped, they are redder, and sweeter. And they are firmer, and that means they have a longer shelf life. You can get a 50% higher price for insect-pollinated strawberries because they keep much longer and taste better. And this is the case for several other types of insects. Blueberries that are insect pollinated will be bigger.

GRABER: For strawberries, it’s probably because one strawberry is actually made up of lots of teeny fruits. Each little dot you see is actually a separate fruit, and so insects are probably helping the plant be more thoroughly pollinated.

TWILLEY: Anne told us that no one knows exactly why insect-pollinated blueberries get bigger, or insect pollinated apples and tomatoes are rated higher by taste test panels, or why insect pollinated rapeseeds have a higher oil content. But they do, thanks to insects.

GRABER: Another way bugs assist our farming: a lot of people think of insects as pests because they eat crops, but other insects are also helping with pest control, because insects eat a lot of other insects!

TWILLEY: There was a study in my home country, the UK, that found that if farmers there turned part of their fields into wildflower meadows, they actually ended up getting the same yield as when they grew crops on the entire area.

SVERDRUP-THYGESON: Because even though the area is then less for producing your crop, the variety of natural insect predators will increase the production in the remaining areas.

GRABER: Because of the wildflowers, there are just more insects to eat the insects that would otherwise be eating the crops.

TWILLEY: So at this point, I’m convinced: insects are clearly already an essential part of our food system. But what about actually eating them?

GRABER: It turns out they already provide a major source of food in a lot of the world. The Gastropod team plus Tim, we all had tried chapulines before, we knew they’re not unusual in Mexico. But actually today about half the world’s countries have communities that enjoy insects.

TWILLEY: Arnold Van Huis is emeritus professor of entomology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and he said all kinds of insects are on the menu, all over the world.

ARNOLD VAN HUIS: Everything is eaten, also cockroaches are eaten. Spiders, you name it, everything is eaten.

GRABER: Before any of you out there jump out of your seat to tell us that spiders aren’t insects, we know. And Arnold definitely knows. But he says that spiders fall into the same general category of edible bugs.

TWILLEY: Even if we leave out our eight-legged friends, there’s an incredible variety of insects on the menu. In Thailand, deep-fried giant water bugs are a popular street food snack. In Korea, silkworm pupae are boiled and given a bath in soy sauce, and you can buy them in cans at HMart. And then there’s my personal favorite, lemon ants, which are a delicious adornment to dishes in South America.

GRABER: In southern Africa, caterpillars are so popular that in the Democratic Republic of Congo they can make up 40 percent of someone’s total animal protein consumption. One particular kind called the mopane is a delicacy and harvesting it when it’s in season can bring in more money for rural families than most other crops.

TWILLEY: And in all of these countries, none of these insects are considered famine foods or foods for people who are so poor they can’t afford anything else.

VAN HUIS: No, they are not a, a last resort at all. They just like them.

GRABER: And actually eating them can help with getting more from regular crops, too. Like with the chapulines, these are grasshoppers that would be eating crops, so people collect them from the fields, that’s pest control. But then they also get to eat them, too, that’s dinner.

TWILLEY: And it’s been dinner for a long, long, long, long, long long time.

MACKENZIE WADE: Entirety of human history, people have been eating insects. And maybe not absolutely everywhere because insects are particular. You’re usually eating insects in places where it makes sense. Where insects are larger or there’s more social insects that are gathering together, so you can collect them more easily.

GRABER: Mackenzie Wade is a PhD candidate at UC-Santa Barbara where she studies social anthropology, and she researches and promotes bug farming and eating in the US.

WADE: But there are records of human insect-eating all throughout history in so many different regions of the world.

TWILLEY: Insects are nutrient-dense and often quite easy to harvest, and so it makes a ton of sense to eat them. But for a long time archaeologists kind of ignored them as a prehistoric food source. One problem is that they don’t leave the same kind of trace—there are no bones, like you get with big game, or axes and spears.

GRABER: Plus one other problem, there was a bit of sexism going on. Most archaeologists were male, and they were interested in what they assumed early men were doing, and that’s hunting.

VAN HUIS: I think early humans ate insects. But the point is that, you know, all the focus was always on the big game. While women, for example, they, are often involved in collecting the insects. But there is also archaeological evidence that, that people, ate insects, early humans.

GRABER: A team of researchers found evidence of tools for gathering insects in a cave in South Africa—this is the site of some of the oldest traces of early humans, from 1.8 million years ago. But those bone tools that had been found there were originally thought to have been used to dig for tubers or to tan hides.

TWILLEY: But then, more recently, another team of researchers made replica bone tools and used them to do a bunch of different things—including tanning hides and digging tubers, but also harvesting termites by digging into their mounds. And they found that the tiny marks left on the bones by digging into termite mounds were the best match for the marks on the ancient tools. So that’s pretty good proof that right back at the very start of human history, people were making and using tools to harvest insects.

GRABER: As we said, this had been a bias in the field of archaeology, but gradually researchers have come to realize how important insects were as food. And in part they’ve figured this out because even today, women are mostly the ones who harvest insects, and this is an incredibly important source of nutrition both for them and for their developing babies and toddlers.

WADE: And if you actually look at the amount of food that women are eating while out and also bringing back, it’s much higher than we’ve thought before. And men, we often think of these, like big ticket items. Maybe they’re coming back a few times a week with a large kill. But if you’re thinking about what’s actually sustaining people in the everyday, it’s things like insects and nuts and roots. And things that women and children are gathering in the field and bringing back.

TWILLEY: And the same is true among our closest relatives. Female chimpanzees are the ones who collect insects in chimpanzee communities, it’s something they can easily do with their children on board, and researchers have found the chimps spend the same amount of time foraging for insects regardless of how much animal meat they have access to—so it’s something they clearly value.

GRABER: But so if we’ve loved insects and eaten insects for more than a million years, why didn’t we domesticate them the same way we domesticated cows and pigs?

TWILLEY: Well, if you have an abundant supply available and easily harvestable in the wild, it’s not really necessary to domesticate them. But Arnold says, we did sort of learn how to cultivate them.

VAN HUIS: I give you one example. We have the palm weevil. Well, the palm weevil, they really come to rotten trunks of palms. So what the local population do, they cut the palms, leave them for about two, three weeks. Then they come back and then they harvest the larvae. Because the weevils are attracted to the rotten palms. They lay their eggs. And in two, three weeks, you have the larvae.

GRABER: This story that Arnold is telling, he’s describing cultivating insects in the tropics, in warmer countries, and that’s not an accident. Insects are more commonly eaten in these countries.

VAN HUIS: I think one of the reasons that, that insects are eaten in the tropical countries is that they are much bigger. And that has to do with temperature. That’s an evolutionary issue. So insects are much bigger. They’re often clumped together. They are available throughout the year. All those things we don’t have in temperate zones. So that’s probably the reason, that insects are eaten in tropical countries more than in temperate zones.

TWILLEY: But that’s not to say that people in temperate parts of the world, like Europe, didn’t ever enjoy insects.

WADE: Insects like locusts are an important insect that has been consumed that we can point to in Europe. Also, the Romans and Greeks were also consuming insects, specifically cicadas, there are lots of historical records of cicadas being included in dishes in Greece and Rome.

GRABER: In fact Aristotle himself thought that cicadas were delicious and wrote about the best way to harvest them. And Pliny the Elder, who has appeared on this show before—not literally—he described a particular kind of beetle larvae as quite tasty. Especially when they were reared on flour and table wine.

TWILLEY: Wine-fed insects? Look at those ancient Greeks making chocolate-dipped crickets seem passe!

GRABER: And because these bugs were so handy, tasty, and a useful way to dispose of field pests, Europeans kept right on eating insects up through the 1900s, at least in France and Germany. They turned a large brown beetle called a cockchafer, or a maybug, that was eating their crops into a soup.

TWILLEY: Apparently it tasted delicious, kind of like crab. People today still make a mock-chafer soup using crab as a substitute because there are almost no maybugs left thanks to pesticides, which have also made the remaining ones unsafe to eat.

GRABER: There are various theories for why Europeans and Western societies in general have given up on insects. One, we developed really efficient agriculture and so we relied more on larger animals. Plus we moved to cities, and didn’t have access to as much foraging as in the past. But that doesn’t seem to be enough to explain the deep-seated disgust in the West when it comes to eating bugs.

WADE: And so, there’s this then question, if insects have been consumed in history in Europe quite often, then what else is happening? Because there’s something else here.

TWILLEY: To answer that question, Kenzie and Arnold both pointed to an attitude shift that happened when Europeans began exploring and colonizing overseas in the 1600s. These explorers and colonists were encountering novel cultures—where insect eating was much more common—and they were using that difference to define those cultures as lesser. Which was a helpful way to soothe their consciences as they exploited local resources.

WADE: If you look at anthropological texts, it’s so clear because you have these quote unquote, explorers, or settlers who are coming to these regions. And they’re using food to “other” people, in the same way that they’re using so many cultural practices to other someone, and point to these differences that make people in the area where they’re moving so different from themselves.

GRABER: So that helps explain why Europeans went from eating the occasional cicada or cockchafer to thinking they’re gross. But if centuries later, we still have that deep-seated cultural disgust, then so why are so many people now saying that we in the West should all be eating insects, that they’re the food of the future? We’ve got that story, after the break.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: Arnold started his career working in pest control. And not the kind you do by eating the insects. In fact, eating insects had never really crossed his mind until he took a research trip to learn more about the cultural aspects of insects in Africa. He started in Niger because he was familiar with the country and its bugs, because he’d spent some time working there in the past. So he went to his old colleagues at the government plant protection agency.

VAN HUIS: And I asked them all kinds of questions about insects in folklore, in witchcraft, in songs, whatever. But also about edible insects. And then they told me that the women are making more money by selling the grasshoppers from their millet than from selling their millet. And that was an eye-opener for me because I thought, how could I have been so stupid, being there for almost three years, and not knowing this? But then I, afterwards, I understood because the people in the tropics, the Africans, they know that in, in the Western world, it’s considered as a primitive habit. So they never will talk to a white person about this.

GRABER: After this revelation, he and his Dutch colleagues started to look into eating insects more, and they were some of the very few Western academics talking publicly about this topic at the time, and so the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN asked them to write basically a book-length report about it, they published it in 2013.

VAN HUIS: I think the book was downloaded two million times in just 24 hours. It was absolutely crazy. We did not expect it at all, but it happened. I think that was really a game changer. Because a lot of people told me, well, that book was really the reason why I went into edible insects. So, yeah, that was absolutely a game changer.

TWILLEY: In the past, a handful of Europeans and Americans had researched and promoted eating insects. There were manifestos and newsletters and cookbooks, but they were niche. Arnold’s report hit a nerve, it inspired a new conversation and a new generation, including Kenzie. And that was largely because it suggested that eating insects could be a solution to one of the biggest problems we’re facing today: how to feed the world sustainably.

WADE: It really was this important moment in the history of insects as food that took them from being in the, in the, in the Euro-American West, something that was a food for the “other,” into a potential food source for communities all across the world.

GRABER: Arnold told us that his lab studied what the impact would be, what would happen if we replaced some of our meat consumption with insects? They found that insects release far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than livestock, particularly cows. They use about ten times less water than livestock. They take up ten times less land for cultivation if you look at the whole life cycle, including their feed.

VAN HUIS: So, for all these issues, land use, water use, greenhouse gas emissions, it’s much less. With insects.

TWILLEY: And then there’s the issue of what you feed your livestock, which is a huge problem within our current system. The Amazon is being cut down to grow soy to feed cattle for beef. Arnold told us that insects have a sneaky little edge here too, because you don’t have to feed them as much—even if they were the same size as a cow, they’d need less food to produce the same amount of edible animal.

GRABER: Scientists call this feed conversion. We have to give a cow 25 pounds of food for each pound of beef. For chickens, it’s three to four pounds of feed per pound of chicken, and for insects, it’s two. They are just much better at turning food into their own bodies.

VAN HUIS: So yeah. Insects are very efficient, probably because they are cold blooded, so they don’t need to maintain a body temperature.

TWILLEY: That right there is critical: insects just need less food to produce more food. But also there’s *what* they eat.

WADE: So insects do consume compost material. And if you’re looking at the black soldier fly in particular, this is where people get really excited, because the black soldier fly is just one of these magical creatures that can consume everything.

GRABER: Sure, they can eat our corn cobs and broccoli stems, but they can even literally eat waste, like animal poop.

VAN HUIS: So they biodegrade it. So, a lot of companies concentrate completely on these insects because they can use all kinds of waste streams. And transform them into a high quality protein.

TWILLEY: The exact amount of protein and other nutrients in a bug obviously varies by species and also over the lifespan of the species. Oftentimes the larvae are fattier, and the grown up bug has more protein. But overall, insects seem stuffed full of good nutrients.

VAN HUIS: I think nutritionally, insects are similar to all kind of meat products. And there is even one publication which looked at minerals, vitamins, the fatty acids and the proteins. And she came to the conclusion that it was even better than meat products.

GRABER: Depending on the insect, some have nearly double the protein of beef.

WADE: Insects have 15 percent more iron than spinach. They also have high fiber. They are good for our gut microbiome, as scholars like Valerie Stoll have shown. And insects also have all nine essential amino acids. So they’re a complete protein.

GRABER: On top of all that, there are ethical benefits. You’ve probably heard that in industrial farming, cows and chickens and pigs are smushed together without space to turn around, which is incredibly cruel. But many bugs don’t mind being smushed together in a small space, that’s how they live in the wild.

TWILLEY: And because they take up so much less space than bigger animals, it’s easier for people to raise them locally, which could in theory lead to a more resilient and more equitable food system.

GRABER: As Arnold and his colleagues started looking into this more than a decade ago, they thought farming and eating insects could make a huge difference in the west, and they highlighted a lot of these benefits in the 2013 FAO report. And the report and a related TED talk on eating bugs basically kick-started a new American and European edible insect rush.

WADE: When I first got into insects as food, it felt like there was a ton of movement. And there were a lot of insects starting to become available on grocery store shelves. There were a lot of products that even in Santa Barbara, I could go to Ralph’s grocery store and buy Chirp’s Chips, which were chips with crickets in them.

TWILLEY: This is all about a decade ago now. And I am old enough to remember that back then, insects were constantly being hyped as the future of food. No panel discussion on the topic was without an obligatory edible insect tasting. I got pitched stories about new insect food companies on a near daily basis. The TED talk, by a colleague of Arnold’s, promised we’d all be eating insects really soon.

MARCEL DICKE: I predict that later this year, you’ll get them in the supermarkets. Not visible, but as animal protein in the food. And maybe by 2020, you’ll buy them just knowing that this is an insect that you’re going to eat.

GRABER: But we’re well past 2020 now, and I’m guessing most of you have not just gone into the supermarket and bought a product with insects in it as part of your weekly groceries. And in fact, a lot of the early insect farms and companies went bust.

TWILLEY: Part of the problem was that we don’t actually know a ton about insects. Even for the species we know, which is probably only a quarter of all the insect species, we don’t know much or sometimes anything about how they live, what they eat, how they reproduce—and all of those are things you need to know to create a functioning insect farm.

VAN HUIS: Well, farming insects is completely different from livestock. So then you get into issues like, what kind of crates do you use? How, what is the ventilation? How do you make sure they get enough oxygen? I mean, all those issues are quite important. And, how do you make them lay eggs? Is important. So the reproduction unit. And in the production unit, you rear, let’s say the eggs, until, mostly the last larval stage and then you harvest them. How do you harvest them? And what do you do after the harvest, you have to process them.

GRABER: These are all important questions, and it’s been taking a while to figure it all out. Plus it takes a lot of investment in new farms that have to build new structures and learn all this at the same time. It’s like how it took decades to figure out how to farm shrimp successfully, we talked about that in a recent episode.

TWILLEY: But so my question here is, well, why do we have to farm them? Couldn’t we just take a lesson from the millions of people ‘round the world who currently eat insects? They just go out and gather them as needed, maybe with a little light encouragement like in the case of the palm weevil.

GRABER: Well, there’s a number of problems with that. We don’t have as many masses of large insects like in tropical regions. Plus we in Europe and the US aren’t really a foraging culture anymore, as a whole. But also, if all of us went out foraging for insects, there’s a serious chance that we’d over-harvest them, and some would disappear. And we use so many pesticides—even on people’s lawns—that I’d be worried about foraging them.

TWILLEY: That’s an issue even in countries where insect-eating is still traditional, and it’s one of the reasons insect-eating is on the decline there as well. People in those countries are using more pesticides and, just like in Europe with the cockchafers—if you start spraying your fields, then there are fewer bugs and the remaining ones often aren’t safe to eat.

GRABER: But also, as people urbanize and become more westernized, they’re just eating fewer insects.

VAN HUIS: So even in, in, in tropical countries, if you go to urban areas, then people don’t eat insects anymore. I interviewed once a teacher and he said, well, when I was a child, I ate insects, but now, we have a kind of standard of living. So we don’t do it anymore. So still, it’s considered a primitive habit.

YOON: And it’s really a sad effect of globalization that I’m encountering all over the world right now. Because countries with a long history of eating insects are now showing a sense of shame. They’re like, oh, other people around the world aren’t eating insects.

GRABER: Joseph Yoon is the founder of an organization called Brooklyn Bugs, and he calls himself an edible insect ambassador. You heard him talking about the terroir of cicadas at the start of the episode.

TWILLEY: An ambassador for edible insects might sound like a strange title, but Joseph’s mission is to tackle the other huge reason we’re not all eating insects already. Sure, there’s things we need to figure out to farm them, and issues with pesticides, but the biggest challenge, at least in the West, is getting people to want to eat them.

GRABER: So how are Kenzie and Joseph and all their colleagues in the field doing that? That story’s coming up, after the break.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: To get us all to eat more insects, there’s no single solution. In the West, and in urban areas, there’s issues of disgust and stigma but also supply chain and cost. But it turns out that even in rural areas in parts of the world where insects are still a traditional, beloved food, even there, there aren’t necessarily enough insects to feed a growing population.

GRABER: But some people are working to get more insects to people who want to eat them, and we called one of them up.

CORTNI BORGERSON: Hey guys, this is Cortni Borgerson and I am a professor of anthropology at Montclair State University in the United States.

GRABER: Cortni’s currently working in Madagascar, with communities that live in and around a national park there.

BORGERSON: And the Masoala National Park is not only home to some super cool lemurs, it’s one of the world’s most biodiverse places, and, it’s also one of the world’s least food secure.

TWILLEY: To feed their families, a lot of folks living in the area resort to hunting wildlife in the park, including these super cute and super endangered little lemurs. It’s that, or go hungry.

BORGERSON: And when faced with that choice, a lot of families make the exact same decision I would, I know, if I was in their shoes. Which is to feed their kids, even if it means going out and hunting some of the world’s last remaining lemurs.

GRABER: So Cortni and some of her colleagues have started a project that focuses on increasing access to a different food, it’s also a local food—a bug called sakondry.

BORGERSON: Now sakondry, which is also called the bacon bug in the United States because of its incredible bacon-like taste, is a traditionally eaten insect. It’s been eaten here for generations in Madagascar, and it’s extraordinary.

TWILLEY: Bacon for the win. Cortni brought us along with her on a bacon bug harvesting and cooking expedition. Sadly, we weren’t actually in Madagascar, but with Cortni as our guide, it kind of felt like it.

BORGERSON: So right now, I am walking out of the rainforest right up against the beach where we just pulled up on a boat here, the Masoala Peninsula. And we’re here.

[CHILD’S GREETING]

BORGERSON: [GREETING IN MALAGASY]

[ROOSTER CROWING]

BORGERSON: We’re hiking out to a community where we’ve been working on farming sakondry with them.

GRABER: So people have been foraging for sakondry in the forest, but it turns out that you can create a good home for them, kind of like we described with the palm weevils.

BORGERSON: And one of the nice things about sakondry, or the bacon bug, is that you can farm them right here outside your home, along your fence line, and in little places of land that isn’t usually used. So sakondry lives on different types of vine bean plants. The same type of vines you might be planting in your garden or like, harvesting from out there in the yard right now from your bean pole, are the types of plants that sakondry like to live on.

TWILLEY: Cortni’s been working with the villagers to plant beans along their fence lines, and then the bugs colonize them naturally, and live on the bean stalks, sipping a little bit of the sap that’s flowing around the plant, but not enough to harm the bean harvest.

BORGERSON: Which means that this incredible native bug not only arrives on its own from the forests, then we can take care of it here and provides two sources of food in a place that used to provide none. Anyway, let’s go get some sakondry.

[RUSTLING]

BORGERSON: Okay. So I’m peeking through this bean plant here, curled right underneath the plants themselves underneath the shade. And we’re looking for the bugs. It’s really fun. You’re like tucked underneath the plant. You kind of feel like you’re playing, like you’re a kid down here. Aha! Got one. Hold on. Okay, so these guys have really cool little unicorn horns that sprout from their heads and they’re fantastic jumpers with little fluffy bustles behind their butts. They almost look like beans themselves. And they’re super easy, you just grab one off the branch… as they hop. There’s some more. I’m just picking them one by one off of this branch.

GRABER: Cortni sent us pictures, we have them on our website, they are indeed adorable. And after she collected a bunch of them, she took them to the kitchen to fry them up.

BORGERSON: So we’re going to wash them here first, twice to remove that fluffy feathery bustle. Other than that, that’s it. They don’t have any wings. Little legs fall off when you cook them. So they’re really quite easy to prepare. And quite delicious. They’re also very fat filled, in a good way. All those omega fatty acids that are extremely rare in places like this. Around the world. Which means that when you cook these guys up just like cooking bacon in a pan, they release their own fat into the pan. No need to buy any expensive oil or anything like that in a place like this where those things are scarce. These guys make everything you need.

[QUIET SIZZLING, CLANG OF METAL AGAINST POT]

BORGERSON: I’m going to keep stirring them here in this pan, just gently toasting them until they get nice and crispy on the outside and they’re all ready to eat.

GRABER: Cortni cooked them until they turned from pinkish to toasty brown, and the scent of the delicious bugs cooking brought the neighbors over.

BORGERSON: There’s more and more people arriving as everyone can smell- smell them starting to cook, which is great.

[CONVERSATION IN MALAGASY]

[METAL SCRAPING ON PAN]

BORGERSON: They’re all ready, everyone’s talking about how nice and rich they are.

TWILLEY: And then everyone chowed down. This project is a clear win in terms of increased food supply.

BORGERSON: It’s like being able to suddenly grow bacon and pick it from your backyard, which I really wish I could do in the States.

GRABER: And when it comes to lemurs—they were the original impetus for this project—it’s making a significant difference. People aren’t hunting nearly as many lemurs in the regions where sakondry farming has been introduced.

BORGERSON: Right now, the lemur populations are three times higher where we have been working. And they’re continuing to increase, or at least maintain compared to the places where we didn’t do the project where they’re dropping out super fast, and it’s really, really alarming.

TWILLEY: Cortni’s continuing her work, she hopes sakondry farming will spread across the region, and we have links to how you can support it on our website.

GRABER: Another reason Cortni’s work is important is that, as Arnold said, in countries that enjoy insects, eating them is on the decline. As people urbanize, insects develop a real stigma because of Westernization. So it’s critical to do everything possible to make sure insects remain sustainable and accessible—and also not stigmatized.

YOON: And so this is really a really big thing that we are trying to actively combat and come up with like, campaigns to raise the dignity, appreciation and awareness of edible insects and really have a lot of countries that with this long history to be able to like embrace it, and be very proud of this.

GRABER: These kinds of campaigns are taking place all over, and they’re different depending on the culture—planting vines to cultivate bacon bugs works well in Madagascar, but in more urbanized countries, you need a different approach.

TWILLEY: In South Korea, which is an industrialized country with a long but declining tradition of insect eating, the government is actively funding insect farming R&D. They’re developing standards for insect growing and processing, and piloting all sorts of programs to help promote insect consumption, too—mostly in the form of ground up flour and protein powders. And the industry is growing at a pretty impressive rate.

GRABER: These are both great examples of how to encourage more people to access and enjoy more insects that they already traditionally eat. But that approach won’t necessarily work here in the West. We have other challenges to overcome.

WADE: Yeah, a lot of people, when they think about eating insects, are very worried about texture. And some people don’t want legs in their teeth. They don’t want something that’s going to be squishy.

TWILLEY: Both Kenzie and Joseph have spent a lot of time offering Americans their very first taste of edible insects at festivals and events and museums. And a lot of people’s initial responses are not super positive. There’s a lot of fear, and frankly like we said, real revulsion.

YOON: And to see like, the reactions of these ideas that insects are disgusting, they’re like the things crawling around that we don’t want in our house, they bite us, carry disease, and eat the plants in our garden.

VAN HUIS: And, well, the problem with disgust is that it is an emotion. It has nothing to do with rationality.

TWILLEY: Just to be clear, some insects can carry disease—think about fleas and mosquitos. But most don’t, especially the ones we eat. Most also don’t bite us, and, like we said, plenty of them are helping us grow our crops. But disgust is a powerful emotion and it’s hard to overcome.

GRABER: Kenzie deals with this by starting people off with the least obvious form of eating insects, and then works people up to whole ones. She starts with something you’d never even know has any insect in it at all.

WADE: Chips that have ground up crickets inside, you can’t really see them. It’s something that is very familiar to us. It’s just like eating a bag of of regular, corn chips. Then there’s chocolate with insects inside and protein bars with insects inside. And then you go towards the end where you’re actually eating full insects, whole. That, they look like insects. They have the eyes. They, they have all the things that a lot of people would be more afraid of.

TWILLEY: Joseph follows a similar strategy.

YOON: And I love this lightbulb moment because we often have tasting menus of like, ten different dishes and often we start with a very simple dish. Perhaps a cricket gougère, little French cheese puff. So many times on countless occasions, people take it, I encourage everyone to smell their food, take a bite. And they have this look of almost, disappointment? And they’re like, huh, it tastes like food. Bingo. It tastes like food! And, it’s almost like a little game. And I’m almost reeling them in because they’re like: All right, I’m ready to try something a little buggier. So then, maybe they’ll move on to the next dish, which has like, maybe black ants in guacamole. And, and they taste it, they’re like, oh my gosh, the flavor of the ants. And it continues to reel them in.

GRABER: Both Joseph and Kenzie have options ready to start people off with basically invisible insects, like in those chips with the cricket powder, but they say that some people are really ready to go straight for the whole thing right away. Not everyone in the West feels disgust.

YOON: What we saw is that for first time eaters, it’s almost 50/50 on whether they would want to see the insect or hide the insect. And I think most people like, Oh, you have to hide it for it to be successful. And it’s like, not really.

TWILLEY: And those people who are ready for full insect from the get go—those are often kids.

WADE: When I think about the demographic of people, usually folks who are a little bit older are more hesitant. And it’s wonderful when you see a family walk up with kids, because most often the kids are the ones that are immediately filling their hands full of insects and chomping them down. And the mom is like, oh no, don’t do that. Or, oh no, you do that, I’m, I’m going to be way back here in the back, not even close. And the kids kind of then help their, their mom or another parent to find—or to try them and to really engage in the experience too.

TWILLEY: Get them while they’re young! But what about us stuck-in-the-mud grownups?

GRABER: Both Joseph and Kenzie say the best way to think about insects is to focus on them as a new exciting food with fun flavor experiences that you haven’t ever tried before. It’s like, they’re not a replacement for a food you should give up, but instead a new food you want to add to your dinner.

WADE: What do bugs taste like? That’s like saying, what does meat taste like? And of course the taste of chicken compared to lamb or beef, all of these things have such distinct flavors. So with those 2,000 different types of edible insects, every single one has a very different flavor profile. So some insects are going to be much meatier. Some are going to taste more like seafood.

TWILLEY: This is where eating insects gets really exciting, for me at least. Sustainability is obviously nice, but a whole new world of flavor to explore? Now I’m paying attention. And some of the insects Joseph cooks with sound truly delicious.

YOON: When we think about black ants, they have formic acid as a defense mechanism. And so it has this like incredibly tart sour flavor. And if you eat it by itself, it’s almost like you’re eating these pop rocks. People are like, oh my gosh. You add it to like just the smallest piece of avocado or guacamole? And it just becomes like, beautiful. And, and it’s really very, so similar to lemon. If you were to bite into a lemon, you’re like oh my gosh, so sour, so tart. And then if you add it to guacamole then all of a sudden it’s like oh wow, it’s just part of the flavor profile and. And so then if you look at something like palm weevils, which I ate both in Thailand and Ecuador. They, they have this like, very interesting sweet quality because they live in palm trees. And bamboo worms, they have like a little sort of, a creaminess to them. And grasshoppers, they have a little bit of a meatier crunchiness than the crickets. And I regularly get them fried with a little lime and salt.

GRABER: Joseph is a professional chef. Before launching Brooklyn Bugs he worked full-time as a private chef, and he uses all these great textures and flavors to create new, delicious dishes to help introduce Westerners to the joys of eating bugs.

TWILLEY: And when better than during this summer’s cicada bonanza?

YOON: I’ve made a lot of dishes with cicadas now. Two of my favorite preparations, one is the cicada kimchi, because kimchi is like my all-time, go-to favorite food. And I love to prepare cicadas in kimchi. And the kimchi juices like, permeate inside the cicada.

GRABER: Joseph also likes to fry them up.

YOON: And it is a marvel to see people pac-manning these like cicadas like that—and, this is like, really so fun and so gratifying for me because, people like, try it and be like, oh my god that It just tastes so delicious. And, and they’re like, can I have more?

TWILLEY: But while deliciousness might be enough to get people like me excited, Joseph says it’s still not enough to get insects regularly onto our plates.

YOON: Sometimes people think it’s like a very linear process of transformation. Like, oh, all you have to do is make it delicious and get the nutritional information out there and then people will… and it’s like, it’s never that easy, right?

GRABER: On a broad scale, most Americans still as a culture don’t have a tradition of eating insects, and so doing events that reach maybe a few hundred people at a time, it’s not an easy leap to then bring these bugs into our larger food system. And so instead many companies right now are focusing on raising bugs to feed livestock, fish farms, and even pets. Which can be a more sustainable option than what they currently eat.

WADE: In the US really there, there are a lot of farms that are now transitioning just to livestock feed because they’ve had such a problem marketing to American consumers. Tyson, for example, is a great example. There is part of their waste stream that they could not reduce. And insects came in to fill that gap, black soldier fly larvae in particular.

TWILLEY: This is pretty recent and exciting news. At the end of last year, Tyson, which is the biggest producer of chickens in the US, they acquired a stake in an edible insect company. Now they’re building the first industrial scale facility in the US to use waste from producing chickens to feed black soldier flies that will be turned into food for livestock, pets, and farmed fish.

WADE: And now they’re able to reduce the waste that they’re producing, which is fantastic. And I think there’s a lot of people involved in the insects as livestock feed sector, which is fantastic, but I hope that more people really hold up insects as human food and continue to—continue this really difficult fight to convince consumers in the US and in Europe, where insects are often considered to be disgusting, to really convince them that insects are a really delicious food source that we can incorporate into our diets.

TWILLEY: It is of course much more efficient and sustainable to eat an insect directly, rather than feed it to a chicken and then eat the chicken. But still, in a place like the modern United States, feeding insects to livestock might be a relatively easy way to begin incorporating more insects in our food supply.

GRABER: But there’s another problem: right now, insects are still expensive, even as animal feed. For instance, bugs are still more expensive than soy for cow feed.

WADE: Yeah, I think affordability is a huge issue. And over the years I’ve expected it to become more and more affordable, as it should be. Because insects can be raised, you know, on less feed, and less land, and therefore they should be a really affordable way to include protein into your diet. But that hasn’t been the case yet. Insects are still really expensive.

TWILLEY: In a way, that’s not super surprising. We are still right at the start of figuring out how to farm insects. and so there’s still a ton to do to work out how to keep different bugs happy, and reproducing and growing, and then processing them efficiently. It’s not something humans have ever done at this scale before so people are figuring it out and building the infrastructure from scratch. And it’s likely the price will eventually come down as farming scales up.

GRABER: But also, as farming scales up, we have to keep an eye on the goals. It would be a bad outcome if farmed insects just fed beef, because regardless of their feed, industrially raised beef is still very bad climate news, and we need to eat less of it. And also, we have to make sure that we’re not just replacing one industrial protein with another, we have to make sure that the farms are sustainable.

TWILLEY: That said, there seem to be benefits to eating insects kind of no matter what. They take so much less feed than cows do, and produce dramatically fewer emissions. And I, for one, would love to eat more of them myself. I’d love to regularly see them on menus and in stores.

GRABER: That might not be so far off. It’s true that here, there was a bit of a boom and then kind of a bust that happened in the insect world. People said it would be THE future of food, and of course no one thing is THE future of food. But Arnold is excited about the progress the field has made so far.

VAN HUIS: They often say that it doesn’t go quickly, to my opinion, it goes very quickly. So it’s, if you see what we achieved in about ten years time, it’s unbelievable.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: If you’re like me and that all left you super hungry to actually try insects, we have lots of links on our website. You’ll also find a link to read more about Cortni’s project and how to support it.

GRABER: Thanks to all our guests this episode, Cortni Borgerson, Arnold van Huis, Mackenzie Wade, Joseph Yoon, and Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson. We have links to their research, projects, organizations, and books on our website, gastropod.com. We also saved some super cool stories, including Great British Bake Off insect gossip, for our special supporters newsletter this episode.

TWILLEY: If you’re already a supporter, look out for that in a couple weeks, and thank you for making the show possible, we can’t wait to see you September 26 at our first-ever Gastrohang. And if you’re not, why not sign up now to get that newsletter—and your invitation to our Gastrohang!

GRABER: Thanks as always to our producer, Claudia Geib, and to my partner Tim for braving chapulines with us—he’s still hasn’t totally joined the insect revolution. It’s a journey. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode!