So let's play a quick game to get ready for this episode. I know you're very competitive, so can you name at least five of the ten commonly eaten insects around the world?
Name five? Okay?
Crickets, worms, mm hmmm, the egg the ant eggs, yeah, good, beetles, Yes, ah, that's what.
You got.
Four? Oh that's all I got? What else that's good? Ants?
Crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, termite scorpions.
Grassops scorpions, yes, grubs.
There's so much, but there are so many insects. Over two billion people in the world eat insects as part of their diets.
My name is Evil Longoria and I am Myra and welcome to Hungry for History, a podcast that explores are past and present through food.
On every episode, we'll talk about the history of some of our favorite dishes, ingredients, and beverages from our culture.
So make yourself at home, even culturally it's part of their diet.
Yes, yes, How do you feel about eating insects? Which ones have you had?
I've had crickets and what are the crickets called though? Chapolinis chapolinis and cscamlis.
Those are the two I've had. A warm. I've had a warm and tequila. Yeah, but that's it. That's it.
I haven't had grasshoppers, I haven't had beetles, I haven't had ants. No, just I'm taking for Mexico. The chapolinas were there was a variety. There was large, small, medium, spicy, not spid like. They had bins and bins and bins and you could choose which one you wanted.
Yeah. I love chapoliness. I love a good chapoline. I always have them in my fridge. I have what Yeah, how do you how do you eat them? How do you prepare them? I just have just on a corn.
Yeah.
I put some avocado, some chapoliness, some fresh lime juice, nothing more delicious. They have protein.
It's tasty for me. That has just how much protein does that really have? I mean, how much do you ton?
A ton to that? Not a lot? And we will get to that they have a ton of protein. Well, we will get there.
So okay, So I want to know this because I don't want to have to eat a bucket of chapolinas just to get the equivalent of one egg white.
Okay, you don't.
We'll get to protein, which is such a buzzyard right now.
I heard that if you're allergic to shellfish, that you probably.
Would be allergic to eating insects.
They have similar proteins.
Oh, that's good to know. But people been eating insects for a long time.
For a long time. They're nutrient dense, they're sustainable, and they're culturally significant across the world, in particular Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And we even have biblical traditions even mentioned insect eating in the Book of Leviticus, the third
book of the Old Testament. Most winged insects are considered unclean, but insects that hop like locusts and crickets and grasshoppers are permitted, and so which you know, many communities in the West were eating bugs, you know, if they're mentioned in these in these books. But they eventually avoided eating insects altogether, because then it just became too difficult to identify which species were allowed and which were not. But even in the New Testament we see insect eating as
a more sort of in a more symbolic tone. John the Baptist is described as surviving on locusts and wild honey and the wilderness, and so this idea of this diet of bugs signals austerity and resilience and really like spiritual minimalism. Right, insects in the biblical world, they exist at this intersection of survival and spiritual meaning and law. So they're really quite interesting in that sense.
So what's the first recorded case of eating insects? Is there a recipe book? Yeah?
Well not. You know, it's interesting because we have the first recorded written evidence. But the recorded case of eating insects is we see in Europe can be found in northern Spain and Meda in a series of paintings that date back from like northern Spain is where I'm from?
Are you talking about?
Ask at the media. I'm not sure where that is? Is that in as studios? I don't know. Look, insect eating is not super common in the US or in you know, or in the modern US, or in Europe, but it definitely used to be, because we see the recorded case of insect eating in Europe the first in me. It's in the Basque country in the Oh, that's where my people are from.
Oh, it's you.
This is why I have bugs in my fridge to eat.
It's in the cant Province. Technicquely.
Okay, okay, so it's in between a studios and Basque country.
I want to say that. You know, scientists have recorded identified about a million in sectist species so far, and over two thousand of them are eaten around the world. Oh that's a lot of bugs. Yeah, that's a lot of blocked Yeah. Well there was pretty digestible, right, yeah, because the're roasted and fried and ground and you know, you just have to avoid the ones that feed on toxic plants or live in polluted areas. You are brightly colored. But yeah, how do you know that?
How about cuse me, bug? Are you eating toxic plants? Because that means you're toxic for me?
But yeah, not all insects are edible. But let's talk about these like references to it. So we have this recorded case in Spain, in northern Spain. This blew my mind. Aristotle, the fourth century BC philosopher. He dedicated a section of his work Estaria Animalum to the most delicious way of eating bugs. He loved chichiras cicadas. He said they taste it best in their final stage of development, and he also said that female locusts cooked in sweet oil with
their eggs still in inside were very sweet. And he said that grasshoppers were a mouth wateringly nutritious snack. I think that is fascinating that Aristotle wrote about this. Plainy the Elder for century BC Roman author he liked to eat beetle larvae raised on flour and wine. So this you know. So we see in antiquity and then with Christianity, the practice of eating bugs in Europe really kind of died out because of all of these biblical things. It's
like it became confusing, what can I eat? What can I not eat? But we see that it didn't fully go away. There's this early seventeenth century account by an Italian naturalist, Ulisse Aldrovandi of German soldiers in Italy snacking on fried silkworms and that they were like, wow, this is delicious. And there was a French naturalist, Renee Antoine for Shaw, so.
He made a plea to bring insects back to the dining table. But it didn't catch on.
It did not catch on.
What about the US Native American communities must have eaten insects now they.
Were there was this rich culinary traditions, like lots of species were eaten and white settlers looked down upon these practices, but even they also incorporated into their diets. So in the nineteenth century, the Shoshone and other communities in the Great Basin Area, like in Nevada, Utah, California, Oregon, they formed these massive circles and beat brush to drive grasshoppers into pits and blankets, and then they roasted them and
ground them into flour. So we have lots of evidence between lots of Native American communities that really gathered bugs, and this sort of gathering of bugs were organized around the cycles of certain larvae, and so it was really a very important part of the diet. Insects were abundant, they were practical, they were delicious, and we have yeah.
And then I just find it hard than when you say delicious.
I find it hard to believe any any of it was delicious.
They yeah, but it as a sustance.
It's like sustance. I don't know, huh, delicious, But.
I think I think a good of the tapoline with like lime and a little bit of chile. I think it's delicious, and it's like a texture. It's hard to pep for, I think to people to get around this like path the text, Oh my god, it's a bug. But we see them like the Cherokees of North Carolina. They would fry to taras and hog fat and sometimes they were baked into pies and you know, yeah.
I guess like if you didn't know and and and you were okay with the texture, then you would eat it for sure.
It's definitely a cultural thing, you know, and it was practical, you know, because they're so abundant. But it was really a part of this cultural spiritual life and seasonal life.
Right.
It was kind of revolved around the seeds ins of gathering in the larvae and this and that, so you know, harvester ants. They were used as hallucinogenic aids and spiritual rituals and you know in the south central California tribes. So they really were a very important part of the original diet of the Americas. But then Westerners started yucking the yum.
They had to realize that they needed to eat bugs to survive.
They did, they did. And there's this archaeologist David Matson. He talks about Native Americans in the Great Basin and they traded insect fruitcakes. They were like nuts berries and insect bits stride into a bar and they traded this to immigrant wagon trains in the mid nineteenth century, and this trade sustained segments of western migration in the US. And so this may have this insect eating. They have saved early settlers lives, especially the earliest Mormon settlers in Utah.
And so there's evidence of this. And you know, eighteen seventy four, there was a locust swarm that decimated crops in the Midwest. And to dress this food scarcity, a Missouri entomologist who's a studyer of bugs, This man named Charles Valentine Ray. He developed recipes for eating locusts and these were and you worked with a local like known cater and these were distributed across the region.
But our locus chichada's basically or no, they're different.
No, I think they're different. Chichatas are cicadas?
Did this? Yeah? Did the insect eating and the colonies catch on?
No? I mean it was short lived. It was short list. Yeah, you know, like everything, right, Colonists they weaponized native practices and this included insect eating. So this was a sign of inferiority. And by the mid twentieth century there were like, you know, it was shameful. It was not it was beneath them. With industrialization, it just became difficult to harvest insects. So it just kind of really happen.
Can we just get to the protein, Like how much protein could a tiny little insect half? Because you know, everybody's obsessed with getting the protein in obsessed.
According to the BBC, Google searches for protein have risen two hundred and thirteen percent over the last decade, reaching an all time high in twenty twenty five. But yes, they're a rich source of protein. They contain forty to seventy percent protein by dry weight, above on par with or above traditional sources like beef for chicken.
The average grasshopper weighs about half a gram. According to an article, a grasshopper has twenty grams of protein. That's a whole thing of yogurt. By the way, that's a lot.
What so, yeah, you don't have to Yeah, that's a lot.
And they a lot.
It's a lot of protein, way more than a steak, way more. It is more than a steak. And they have all of the essential amino acids your body needs. They have iron, they have zinc, they have vitamin bees, their nutrient pat You know what, it's crazy.
This is why Simba in the Lion King was sustained with eating bugs and not other animals.
There you go, Simba leeds. Simba knew what was Simba knew he's like protein. Simba knew how to get more protein. According to the World Health Organization, over two point three billion people experience food insecurity, and experts say that if people in the US and in Europe could get over the ick, edible insects could revolutionize food systems and be part of a climate friendly solution to address world hunger.
Wow, that's amazing.
So which cultures do have like insects and their and their diets? Like, what are some what are some iconic dishes? Because I know Mexico, but obviously there's others. I know I know China because I went to China and they had a lot of insects there, because you had two billion people worldwide consume insects as their diet.
But which what are some examples?
Well, Asia, China, you said, actually the earliest earliest written evidence of insect use involving bees and wasps in particular up here in Chinese literature that go back to the first millennium BC, and that's only the written evidence, so it likely goes back, you know, much much further. And they are eating worms, crickets, silkworms, deep fried or stir fried.
But also in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos it's a common street food and they're either fried or roasted with soy, sauce, chili or garlic like grasshoppers and crickets, kind of like in Mexico. Water bugs are used in soups and stews. A pan has moca simmered and soy and sugar, and it's I know, it's it's it's it's different. It's different. We're just not used to it. I know. Larva, I think that's what it is. It's a it's a closing thing with.
Like eating octopus. Some cultures are like, how could you do that?
Right? Yeah, right, it just gets you know, you get past it. Africa, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo eat like weavil, larva termites.
Australia catchites. I don't know, they're so tiny. Australia must have eat bugs. They have so many bugs down there, but they probably have a lot of tucks and eaten bugs.
Baby, they have a witchity grub is something that they eat a lot there. It's this white larva eaten raw or lightly cooked.
Does anyone know about the America because in Mexico we have chappolinas, maggie worms, escamolas. But is there what other Latin American countries eat bugs?
Columbia, Venezuela eat certain n species and beetle larva. Insects were more than food. They were big symbolic part of this ritual world type of agriculture and seasonality and the sacred. So we see things like my gay worms and other larva closely connected to the cycles of planting and harvest, and it could be included in offerings to the gods.
They carried deep symbolic meaning like sometimes they were sociated with fertility or regeneration or the afterlife, and so even the act of preparing and sharing insects could be ritualized, so they were considered delicacies. They sort of straddled these lines of spirituality, nutrition and all of it. Basically, just like we talked about at the beginning of the episode, connected to natural cycles and lunar phases and animal migration.
So just even gathering insects was such a big part of the culture.
And so I know that, I mean, I could see how insects are environmentally sustainable food compared to livestock, because livestock beef, like raising beef, is one of the leading drivers of tropical deforestation.
It uses an enormous amount of water.
You've got to grow the feed, so that takes up land, the fossil fuels needed to transport the animals from the farm to the slaughterhouse to market, it all adds up.
And I know that. You know, cattle alone produces more greenhouse gases than cars.
So by comparison insects, if we could get out over the ick, we could probably definitely have a more environmentally sustainable.
Source of protein.
Definitely, the same ten pounds of feed that yields just one pound of beef can produce six pounds of insect protein with a much smaller carbon footprint. Wow, you just have to get over the ick.
Well, the ick is that you know, when you see the wings or the legs or the head, that makes it a hard sell for me at least.
Yeah, they just need a rebranding, right, So people need.
To market, they need a good publicist.
They need a good publicist, they need they need a rebrand, especially in the US and in Europe, because other people in other parts of the world look like we're way behind in the West and so many things, and this is one of them. This is one of them. We're so disconnected.
Our food chain in general is definitely definitely disconnected from where food comes from, the cost of you know, human life and labor. We don't factor in a lot. We just sit at a table and demand an avocado out of season.
We got to do better, We got to do better.
We got it. Well.
You had a chance to chat with Monica Martinez of Don't Bugito? Does she say bugito, which is a pre Hispanic snack at yah, And she had a lot to say about sustainability.
Here's a sneak peak of that conbo.
We just caught the chickens in the couch and just goes straight to the insects. So on that note, I start playing in my studio, like I was like trying to design some little farms, thinking that people can grow their own proteins in the kitchen, and I was using mealworms, which are not really warms. A lot of people when you say the word norm it's like yuck, gross. But milworms are larvae. I don't know that sounds better. But
they're a type of beetle. Is a darkling beetle, and beetles are one of the largest insect families in the world. So insects composed eighty percent of the biomass of the planet.
Isn't that insane?
She was absolutely brilliant. She grows her own bugs and an urban farm in Oakland. She has a background in industrial design and art. She's brilliant. She's giving insects a major rebrand in the US. She's from Act City. She's awesome. So make sure you tune in next week to hear that conversation in its entirety.
Thank you so much for joining for this episode all about bugs. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.
Thank you everyone. Don't forget to rate us and leave us a message. We love hearing from you. See you next week.
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