Chapter 4 — The Small & the Six-Legged

"There are insects and insects. My insects are all vegetable feeders, clean, palatable, wholesome, and decidedly more particular in their feeding than ourselves." — Vincent M. Holt, Why Not Eat Insects? (1885)

I n 1885 a young Englishman named Vincent Holt published a slim, exasperated pamphlet whose title was also its entire argument: Why Not Eat Insects? He could not for the life of him understand why a country that devoured the lobster — "such a foul feeder," he wrote, that the fisherman baits his pot with flesh too rotten to attract a crab — should recoil from a clean, green, leaf-fed grasshopper. Holt belongs, chronologically, with the Victorian zoophagists of this book's second chapter, another Englishman turning the animal kingdom over at the dinner table in the confident afterglow of empire. But he was making a stranger and more durable point than the acclimatisers ever did, and it is the point on which this chapter turns. He was not proposing a novelty. He was pleading with his countrymen to rejoin the rest of the human species.

For the plain fact, which the freak-show framing of insect-eating always contrives to hide, is that eating insects is not the exotic practice; refusing to is. The habit even has a proper name — entomophagy — and it is followed, as an ordinary and unremarkable part of the daily diet, by a large share of the people alive. The squeamishness this chapter must explain is not a universal human instinct that a few adventurous cultures have overcome. It is a regional peculiarity, concentrated in Europe and its cultural offspring, and it is the thing that requires accounting for. The insects are just food. It is the disgust that is the curiosity, and the disgust is where the book is heading — but first the food deserves to be seen for what it is, which is dinner, for roughly a third of the world, tonight.

An Ordinary Food for Two Billion People

The single most useful document on the subject is not a cookbook but a report. In 2013 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations published Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security — Forestry Paper 171 — the first attempt by a major international body to gather what is actually known about insects as human food and animal feed. Its headline figures are worth stating precisely, because they are so often rounded up into hype and so rarely simply quoted. The report documents more than 1,900 insect species recorded as eaten by people, and estimates that insects form part of the traditional diets of at least two billion of them. Those two qualifiers — "more than," "at least" — are the FAO's own, and they matter: the true numbers are floors, not ceilings, because much insect-eating goes unrecorded by the agricultural statistics that count cattle and wheat.

That report did not spring from nowhere, and the man most responsible for it did not live to be thanked in person: the FAO dedicated its 2013 volume to the memory of Gene DeFoliart, an American entomologist who had spent the last third of his life insisting the world look at what it was refusing to see. DeFoliart taught medical and veterinary entomology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and in 1974, by his own account, was seized by an inescapable logic — people need protein; insects make it cheaply, cleanly, and with a fraction of the land and feed that cattle demand — and from 1978 he turned his energies to the case for entomophagy. He founded and edited The Food Insects Newsletter, gathered the scattered ethnographic record of who ate what into a single scholarly resource, and argued, against a wall of Western distaste, that the insect was not a famine food but a rational livestock in miniature. The great UN report is, in large part, his argument grown up.

Nor is any of this new. Entomophagy is older than our species — the other great apes crack open nests for termites and grubs, and our own ancestors surely did the same — and it runs unbroken through the very record the West likes to think of as its own. Aristotle, in his Historia Animalium, tells the reader frankly which cicadas eat best and at what stage of life; the Romans, on Pliny's testimony, fattened a beetle grub they called cossus on flour and wine for the table; and the wild food that sustained John the Baptist in the wilderness, in the plain words of the Gospel, was "locusts and wild honey." The classical and scriptural worlds that Europe claims as its inheritance ate insects without embarrassment. The squeamishness is not ancient and it is not universal. It is recent, and it is local, and that — as much as any nutritional table — is what needs explaining.

Honesty, which this volume prizes above a good headline, requires one correction to that famous figure before it is repeated any further. The "two billion" is an estimate, not a census. It rests on the patchy ethnographic record of which peoples eat insects at all, scaled up across the populations of the regions where they do, and it counts the occasional eater beside the daily one; sober reviewers treat it as an order-of-magnitude claim rather than a headcount. This does not weaken the argument — a figure that is at least hundreds of millions, and very plausibly a couple of billion, still describes a food that most of humanity has always taken for granted. But the number is a lighthouse, not a laser, and the book that wants the reader to trust its wonders is obliged to say which is which.

What are all those people eating? The report breaks the global appetite down by order, and the proportions quietly demolish the idea that insect-eating is a marginal or emergency affair. Beetles make up about 31 per cent of the insects consumed; caterpillars about 18 per cent; bees, wasps and ants around 14 per cent; and grasshoppers, locusts and crickets some 13 per cent, with the remainder spread across cicadas, termites, dragonflies, flies and more. These are not famine foods choked down for want of anything better. They are, overwhelmingly, preferred foods — seasonal delicacies awaited like the first asparagus, market goods that often cost more per kilogramme than beef, gathered and traded and cooked with as much care and pride as any other ingredient a cuisine holds dear. As Volume I argued of umami and Volume IV of authenticity, the test of a real cuisine is not scarcity but attention, and the attention lavished on the world's edible insects is the attention of connoisseurs, not of the desperate.

The nutrition behind that preference is not sentiment. Many edible insects carry protein comparable, gramme for gramme, to meat or fish, and often carry it alongside minerals a diet of staple grains tends to lack — the mopane worm and a great many caterpillars are notably rich in iron, a matter of real consequence in regions where anaemia is common, while the fatty grubs of palm weevils, relished across the tropics, offer a soft richness closer to marrow than to lean meat. This is precisely the FAO's interest. Insects deliver dense, often complete nutrition from small inputs of land, water and feed, and they do so most abundantly in the warm regions where human population and human malnutrition are both climbing fastest. The report's subtitle — future prospects for food and feed security — is not a flourish but a thesis: that a food two billion people already value could feed a great many more.

And the environmental arithmetic, at least on paper, is what turned that thesis into a decade of investment. The clearest early sum was a 2012 life-cycle assessment of mealworm farming by Dennis Oonincx and Imke de Boer of Wageningen University — the study the FAO leaned on hardest — which followed a kilogram of edible mealworm protein from feed to fork and set it beside the same protein from milk, chicken, pork and beef. The insect won on the measures that matter most in a warming, crowded world: markedly lower greenhouse-gas emissions and far less land, for a similar outlay of energy. Later reviews sharpened the contrast into numbers a reader can hold — beef's carbon cost reckoned at something like six to thirteen times the mealworm's per unit of protein, and its thirst at roughly five times the water. The reasons are not mysterious, and they are the reasons the rest of this chapter keeps meeting: an insect is cold-blooded and spends nothing to keep a large warm body warm, nearly all of it is eaten, and it turns feed into flesh with an efficiency no cow can touch. Those advantages, as the Field Note will insist, are real but conditional. On paper, though, they were enough to make a two-billion-year-old habit look, quite suddenly, like the future.

A Tour of Real Tables

Consider, then, a handful of those tables, each with its own insect, its own season and its own long tradition — a gallery in the manner of this volume, drawn with specificity rather than spectacle.

In the highland valleys of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, the insect is the chapulín, a grasshopper of the genus Sphenarium gathered from the alfalfa and maize fields in the warm months, toasted on a clay comal and dressed with garlic, lime juice, chilli and salt until it turns a deep, lacquered red. The Zapotec and Mixtec peoples, and the Aztec and Maya before the Spanish came, have eaten them for thousands of years; today they are sold by the cupful at markets and football grounds and folded, hot and crackling, into tacos. Gathering them is also, not incidentally, a form of pest control that needs no chemical — the field is weeded of the very creatures that would strip it, and the weeding is harvested as dinner. Nearby, in the drier country of central Mexico, comes the luxury end of the same tradition: escamoles, the pale larvae and pupae of the ant Liometopum apiculatum, dug from the roots of agave and maguey, gently fried in butter with onion and the herb epazote, and eaten in soft tacos. Buttery, faintly nutty, with a texture between cottage cheese and cooked rice, they have been prized since the time of the Otomí and are sold today, under the affectionate name "insect caviar," at prices to match. The name is older than the joke: it comes from the Nahuatl azcatl, an ant, and molli, a sauce or stew, and in the Aztec world the dish is thought to have been reserved for nobility and priests. It is a luxury still, and a fragile one — a kilogram of escamoles can fetch anywhere from thirty-five to a hundred dollars, and the men who gather them, the escamoleros, work by a code of restraint, taking perhaps two-thirds of a nest and leaving the rest to rebuild, in the knowledge that a raided colony must be allowed to recover if there is to be a harvest next spring.

Across the Atlantic, in the mopane woodlands of southern Africa — Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa's northern provinces, Namibia — the insect is the mopane worm, the fat caterpillar of the emperor moth Gonimbrasia belina, which feeds on the mopane tree and is harvested by the sackful in its season. Degutted, boiled and dried, it keeps for months and travels to market as a staple protein — some fifty to sixty per cent protein by dry weight, rich in iron — cooked into stews with tomato and onion or eaten dried as they come, a chewy, savoury mainstay of the regional table. It is also a serious economy, not a curiosity: the cross-border trade in mopane worms across Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa is valued in the tens of millions of dollars a year — estimates run from around forty to a hundred million, the range itself a mark of how much the harvest swings with the rains — and in Botswana alone the industry is reckoned to support the livelihoods of well over ten thousand people. Most of that gathering is done by rural households, and very often by poor women, for whom the caterpillars ripen at a pointed moment: the main harvest arrives in late December, exactly when a family needs cash for the holidays and the coming school year. The mopane worm is not folklore; it is protein, income and timing at once, for some of the driest country on the continent. That very success now presses on the source. As commercial demand has climbed, gatherers have begun taking the caterpillars earlier and in greater number, and researchers warn — a 2025 genetic survey of the species said so in as many words — that the wild mopane worm is being harvested faster than it can reliably replenish, its future clouded by over-collection and by a warming, drying climate. The lesson is the one this whole volume keeps arriving at, and the one Chapter 6 will make explicit: even a food gathered from the bush by the poor is not, on a hungry and heating planet, endlessly free.

In the arid heart of Aboriginal Australia, the insect is the witchetty grub, the large white larva of the cossid moth Endoxyla leucomochla, which lives on the roots of the witchetty bush; dug from the earth and eaten raw, when it tastes of almonds and cream, or turned briefly in hot ash until the skin crisps and the inside sets like a savoury egg, it has been a reliable desert food and a thread of culture for tens of thousands of years, high in protein, fat and the B-vitamin thiamine. The very word is a gift from the Arrernte people of the central desert — witjuti, the name of the bush whose roots the grub bores — and the food it names is dense enough to matter: the grub is largely fat, so that a small handful dug from a single bush can carry the energy of a light meal, no trivial thing in country where the next meal is never promised. It is the most celebrated of all the foods Australians now call bush tucker, and for the Arrernte and their neighbours it has been supper, medicine and story for longer than agriculture has existed anywhere on earth. Farther east the tour reaches Korea, and beondegi — silkworm pupae, the boiled or steamed by-product of the silk looms, sold hot in paper cups from street carts, chewy and nutty and smelling, to the initiated, of childhood. Once a cheap protein that fed the country through the hard years after the Korean War, they are now nostalgia food and drinking snack both, canned as well as fresh, and, like the silkworm everywhere it is eaten, richly nourishing.

Across the tropics runs a whole family of fat, pale grubs that a good many cuisines rank above any of these — the larvae of palm weevils, the beetles of the genus Rhynchophorus, which bore into the soft heart of felled palms and grow marrow-rich on the pith. In southern Thailand and much of Southeast Asia the species is the sago palm weevil, Rhynchophorus ferrugineus, now deliberately farmed by seeding a length of cut sago or coconut trunk with beetles and harvesting the grubs a few weeks later; on New Guinea and across the Amazon their cousins are gathered from wild felled palms in the same way, in a tradition thousands of years old. The nutrition explains the devotion. A sago grub can run past half its dry weight in fat — one analysis put the fat, carbohydrate and protein at roughly fifty-nine, nineteen and sixteen per cent — a soft, buttery, almost bacon-like richness laced with potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, zinc and iron, and it is eaten with relish either raw and still moving, when it bursts creamy on the tongue, or skewered and grilled until the skin crackles and the inside runs like warm custard. It is, in much of the tropical world, not a dare but a treat a child begs for.

In Cambodia, in the town of Skuon, the speciality is a-ping — deep-fried tarantula, tossed in sugar, salt and garlic and fried until the legs are crisp and the body yields a soft interior. Honesty compels a taxonomic aside, in a chapter with "six-legged" in its title: the tarantula has eight legs and is no insect at all but an arachnid, and it earns its place here only by belonging to the same broad human habit of eating the small invertebrates other cultures fear. Its Cambodian story is not a happy origin but a resilient one — the trade grew in the privations of the Khmer Rouge years, when forest spiders helped keep people alive — and it has since become a genuine regional delicacy, sold by the trayful to bus passengers at the Skuon roundabout and studied by nutritionists at the University of Copenhagen for its useful load of protein, zinc and folate.

And at the far, gleaming end of the spectrum sits the tasting menu. When the Copenhagen restaurant Noma, several times judged the best in the world, brought a ten-day residency to Claridge's hotel in London in the summer of 2012 and served live ants over a dish, its chef René Redzepi was not manufacturing shock; the kitchen had tasted its way through some thirteen species before choosing a particular red ant precisely because it carried, alongside the sharp citric snap of its formic acid, a compound that reads as lemongrass. Getting the creatures to the table was its own saga — around twenty-two thousand live ants foraged in the Danish forest and flown to Mayfair, the supply running so low mid-residency that a runner was despatched back to Copenhagen for more. Nor was the kitchen playing alone: its research arm, the Nordic Food Lab, spent years in earnest study of edible insects as flavour — work gathered in 2017 into a book, On Eating Insects — treating the ant and the bee larva as ingredients with terroir to be understood, not curiosities to unsettle a critic. The insect had become a seasoning, chosen for flavour as a cook chooses a herb — which is, of course, exactly what the cook in Oaxaca or the gatherer in the mopane woods had understood all along.

Some of the most prized insects of all are not gathered from a field or a tree but out of the air, in the brief hours when a colony sends up its young queens and kings to mate. Across sub-Saharan Africa the first heavy rains of the season bring the winged termites — the alates of Macrotermes and their kin — boiling out of the mounds after dark in their millions, and whole families wait at the holes with lamps and basins to catch them; dry-fried or roasted they taste, by common report, of peanuts, and they are astonishingly rich, running from a quarter to over two-fifths protein and from a third to two-thirds fat by dry weight, a feast dropped from the sky. The same nuptial flights are harvested a hemisphere away. In the Santander highlands of Colombia the spring rains loose the hormigas culonas, the "big-bottomed ants," the fat, egg-heavy queens of the leafcutter Atta laevigata that the indigenous Guane prized centuries ago and that are still toasted with salt today and sold at a price to rival good meat, crunchy and nutty and faintly of pork crackling; in Mexico the same leafcutter tribe yields the chicatana, the flying ant of the first summer storms, toasted and ground with chilli into a smoky, celebrated salsa. The harvest lasts a day or two in a whole year, and its rarity is exactly what makes it treasured.

The gallery could run much longer. The maguey worm colours a bottle of mezcal and, dried and ground with chilli and salt, seasons the rim of a glass in Oaxaca; the giant water bug — maeng da, the great flat Lethocerus of the paddy fields — is pounded into a Thai chilli relish for the sake of the extraordinary pear-and-apple perfume the male carries in his scent glands, a nam phrik built, in effect, around one insect's cologne. The purpose of the tour is not to catalogue every dish but to make a single fact unmistakable — that across the warm world, on every inhabited continent, the insect is not an ordeal to be survived but an ingredient to be chosen.

<figure> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="100%" viewBox="0 0 640 448" role="img"><title>AN ATLAS OF EDIBLE INSECTS — entomophagy sited across the world</title>  <rect x="11" y="11" width="618" height="426" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.3"/> <rect x="18" y="18" width="604" height="412" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.6"/> <path d="M28 28h18M28 28v18M612 28h-18M612 28v18M28 420h18M28 420v-18M612 420h-18M612 420v-18" fill="none" stroke="#b5502a" stroke-width="1.3"/>  <g fill="none" stroke="#c8b79a" stroke-width="0.6" stroke-dasharray="1 5"> <path d="M52 92V356M119 92V356M186 92V356M253 92V356M320 92V356M387 92V356M454 92V356M521 92V356M588 92V356"/> <path d="M52 92H588M52 145H588M52 198H588M52 251H588M52 304H588M52 356H588"/> </g>  <g fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.9" stroke-linejoin="round"> <path d="M96 118C120 108 150 112 168 126C178 136 176 152 160 160C150 178 132 176 120 168C104 158 92 140 96 118Z"/> <path d="M160 158C158 172 150 184 148 198"/> <path d="M150 206C168 200 186 210 190 232C194 258 180 300 166 322C158 332 150 330 148 318C142 288 140 250 146 220C147 214 148 210 150 206Z"/> <path d="M296 176C330 168 366 178 372 206C378 236 360 276 340 302C332 312 322 312 316 300C300 270 292 232 292 200C292 190 292 182 296 176Z"/> <path d="M330 138C348 132 366 136 372 148C374 158 364 166 352 164C340 162 330 154 330 144C330 141 330 139 330 138Z"/> <path d="M382 140C430 126 510 130 552 150C570 160 566 186 540 198C500 214 430 212 400 196C384 186 374 158 382 140Z"/> <path d="M556 168C562 172 566 184 562 196"/> <path d="M478 232C492 226 502 234 500 246C498 256 488 260 480 252C474 246 472 236 478 232Z"/> <path d="M508 258C514 256 518 262 514 268C510 272 504 270 504 264C504 261 505 259 508 258Z"/> <path d="M525 262C531 260 535 266 531 271"/> <path d="M520 292C544 284 574 290 582 306C586 318 576 332 556 334C534 336 516 326 514 310C513 302 514 296 520 292Z"/> </g>  <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.9" stroke-linecap="round"> <path d="M72 118V100M72 100l-4 8M72 100l4 8"/> </g> <text x="72" y="96" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="8" fill="#43331f">N</text>  <g fill="none" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.7" stroke-linecap="round"> <ellipse cx="90" cy="337" rx="5" ry="4"/><ellipse cx="83" cy="332" rx="2.6" ry="2.2"/><circle cx="78" cy="329" r="2.4"/> <path d="M82 335l-7 -3M84 337l-8 2M87 340l-7 5M87 331l6 -4M89 333l7 0M90 337l6 4M76 327l-6 -5M80 326l-2 -7"/> </g>  <g fill="none" stroke="#b5502a" stroke-width="1"> <circle cx="150" cy="200" r="5"/><circle cx="330" cy="300" r="5"/><circle cx="500" cy="180" r="5"/><circle cx="485" cy="250" r="5"/><circle cx="512" cy="268" r="5"/><circle cx="548" cy="312" r="5"/> </g> <g fill="#b5502a" stroke="none"> <circle cx="150" cy="200" r="2.3"/><circle cx="330" cy="300" r="2.3"/><circle cx="500" cy="180" r="2.3"/><circle cx="485" cy="250" r="2.3"/><circle cx="512" cy="268" r="2.3"/><circle cx="548" cy="312" r="2.3"/> </g>  <g font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" fill="#43331f"> <g font-size="10" letter-spacing="0.6"> <text x="150" y="176" text-anchor="middle">CHAPULINES</text> <text x="330" y="322" text-anchor="middle">MOPANE WORM</text> <text x="500" y="156" text-anchor="middle">SILKWORM PUPAE</text> <text x="470" y="246" text-anchor="end">PALM WEEVIL</text> <text x="524" y="264">FRIED TARANTULA</text> <text x="548" y="334" text-anchor="middle">WITCHETTY GRUB</text> </g> <g font-size="7" letter-spacing="0.5" fill="#6f5a40"> <text x="150" y="187" text-anchor="middle">MEXICO</text> <text x="330" y="333" text-anchor="middle">SOUTHERN AFRICA</text> <text x="500" y="167" text-anchor="middle">KOREA</text> <text x="470" y="257" text-anchor="end">SOUTH-EAST ASIA</text> <text x="524" y="275">CAMBODIA</text> <text x="548" y="345" text-anchor="middle">AUSTRALIA</text> </g> </g> <text x="320" y="414" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="12" letter-spacing="3" fill="#43331f">AN ATLAS OF EDIBLE INSECTS</text> </svg>

<figcaption><em>Plate 8. An atlas of edible insects — chapulines and escamoles in Mexico, the mopane worm across southern Africa, the witchetty grub in the Australian desert, silkworm pupae in Korea, the palm-weevil grub through Southeast Asia and the Amazon, and fried tarantula at Skuon in Cambodia — each an ingredient chosen, not an ordeal survived.</em></figcaption> </figure>

The New Livestock

If the warm world eats insects out of unbroken habit, the cool world has lately begun to farm them out of arithmetic, and the story of that attempt — its real promise and its equally real stumbles — belongs in any honest chapter, because it is where the ancient food meets the modern balance sheet. The turning point was regulatory. Europe, which had never formally decided whether a whole insect counted as food at all, was pushed to choose: a 2020 ruling of the European Court of Justice found that whole insects had fallen outside the old rules, and the current Novel Food Regulation then swept them firmly in, so that any insect sold as food in the European Union now needs a licence earned through a safety assessment by the European Food Safety Authority. The licences came one careful species at a time. The dried larva of the yellow mealworm, Tenebrio molitor, became the first insect ever authorised as a food across the EU, in June 2021; the migratory locust, Locusta migratoria, followed that November; the house cricket, Acheta domesticus, in 2022; and the larva of the lesser mealworm, Alphitobius diaperinus, in 2023 — four species, several forms apiece, whole and frozen and dried and milled to a pale protein flour for baking into pasta and bread and snack bars. The Authority attached one honest warning to its approvals, and it is the same one this book's recipes carry: insect protein can set off reactions in people already allergic to crustaceans and dust mites, with which it shares its allergens. The rest was left, rightly, to the eater — the Commission's own careful phrasing is that it is up to consumers to decide whether they want to eat insects or not.

The louder half of the modern story is not about feeding people at all, but about feeding livestock — and here the insect of the hour is the black soldier fly, Hermetia illucens, whose larvae will devour almost any organic waste and convert it, with startling speed, into fat and protein and fertiliser. That single trick — turning food waste into feed for fish and chickens and pets — drew more than a billion and a half dollars of investment into insect farming over the last decade and raised gleaming, automated factories meant to breed the creatures by the trillion. The French firm Ÿnsect closed a single funding round of some three hundred and seventy million dollars in 2020 (betting, as it happens, on the mealworm rather than the fly); the Dutch company Protix and the French InnovaFeed built industrial plants around the black soldier fly; and for a few years the trade carried the confident air of an industry certain of its moment.

That confidence has since met the ledger, and the correction is instructive rather than fatal. Investment fell sharply after 2022; in 2025 Ÿnsect, once the sector's great hope, was forced into restructuring and hunting a buyer, and one of northern Europe's largest insect farms collapsed into bankruptcy despite tens of millions in backing. The reasons echo, at the scale of a factory, the caution the Field Note will press about a single cricket: the environmental case for farmed insects is real only when the insect is fed on genuine waste and reared in a climate that does not have to be paid for. Heat a fly barn through a European winter, or feed the larvae grain a chicken could have eaten, and the advantage that justified the whole enterprise begins to leak away — a point recent reviews have pressed, questioning whether the environmental benefits of insect farming have been overstated. The honest reading is not that the idea failed but that it was oversold: insects remain a superbly efficient way to turn waste into protein, and a mediocre way to turn good feed and expensive heat into it. The two billion people in the first half of this chapter never had that problem. They let the sun grow the insects and the season serve them — which may yet prove the more durable technology.

Why the West Recoils

If insects are nutritious, delicious, and eaten with pleasure by most of humanity, the honest question is not "why do they eat that?" but "why don't we?" — and the answer is neither instinct nor good sense but history, which is the argument this chapter hands forward to the next. Human beings are not born disgusted by insects; small children will put almost anything in their mouths, and the aversion arrives later, taught. What Europe and its offshoots inherited was a particular accident of geography and agriculture. In the cool temperate zones where wheat-and-cattle farming took hold, insects were small, seasonal and rarely large enough to repay the effort of gathering in quantity — while in the tropics, where insects grow big, swarm predictably and can be harvested by the kilogramme, they became and remained food. Then settled grain-farming did something decisive to the European imagination: it recast the insect as the enemy. The locust that darkened the sky, the weevil in the granary, the blight on the crop — the insect became, in the agricultural mind, precisely the thing that stood between a family and its bread, an omen of famine rather than a relief from it. To that was welded the long association of insects with rot, filth and the spread of disease, until "creepy-crawly" hardened into a category of the unclean. None of it is written into the human body. All of it is written into a particular culture's memory, and a thing learned can, as Holt hoped, be unlearned.

The anthropologist Marvin Harris gave that accident its sharpest general form. In Good to Eat (1985) he brought the logic of optimal foraging to the human menu: a people takes up a food when the calories and protein it returns repay the labour of finding and catching it, and passes it over when they do not, however plentiful it may be. Where insects grow large, swarm on a timetable and can be scooped by the basinful, they clear that bar with ease and become dinner; where they are small, solitary and scattered among people who already keep cattle and pigs and grow wheat, the same insects fail it, and the culture that skips them is not being fastidious but efficient. Harris then stood the usual explanation on its head, with a formula this chapter could take as its motto: we do not, he argued, refuse insects because they are dirty and disgusting; rather, insects became dirty and disgusting to us because we had no good reason to eat them. Disgust arrives, on this account, to ratify a choice the stomach has already made, dressing an accident of economics in the language of the sacred and the foul. That is very nearly the whole argument of the chapter to come.

Even the West's own scriptural inheritance is less hostile than the modern flinch assumes. The Book of Leviticus, in the very chapter that forbids the pig and the shellfish, pauses to permit the leaping insects: "the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind," runs the eleventh chapter at its twenty-second verse — the passage Holt set at the head of his own argument. The grasshopper he begged his countrymen to try had never, in fact, been forbidden them. That a culture could keep the prohibition and quietly mislay the permission is itself the clue to what disgust really is: not a fixed law of the body but a classification, drawn and redrawn by each society around what it has decided belongs at its table. The next chapter takes up that idea head-on, through an anthropologist who read those same verses of Leviticus not as a code of hygiene but as a diagram of order.

That is the deeper reason a book about the daring palate must give insects a chapter of their own rather than a paragraph of astonishment. The daring, here, is a trick of perspective. There is nothing bold about eating a toasted grasshopper in Oaxaca; it is what one does, the way one might eat a prawn — itself, let us remember, an armoured bottom-feeding arthropod that Europe decided, somewhere along the way, to find delicious. The line between the prawn on the celebrated plate and the cricket on the feared one is not drawn by chemistry, or nutrition, or even flavour. It is drawn by culture, and the next chapter is about who holds the pen.

Field Note — The House Cricket

Acheta domesticus, the common house cricket, is the insect the modern West is likeliest to meet first, because it is the one being farmed at scale for food — milled into a pale, nutty flour for protein bars and pasta as much as sold whole and roasted. As a nutritional package it is genuinely impressive: crickets run to roughly sixty to seventy per cent protein by dry weight, with a complete set of the essential amino acids, useful iron and B-vitamins, and a fat fraction rich in unsaturated oils. As livestock they are frugal in a way a cow cannot be. A cricket is cold-blooded, so it spends none of its feed keeping a large warm body warm; almost the whole animal is eaten, with no hide, hoof or skeleton to discard; and it reaches slaughter weight in weeks. The FAO's 2013 report puts the feed arithmetic starkly — to make the same amount of protein, it reckons, a cricket needs something like a sixth of the feed of a cow and half that of a chicken — and adds that insect-rearing generally emits far fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia, and drinks far less water, than conventional livestock.

Honesty, which this volume prizes above enthusiasm, requires the other half of the ledger. Those glowing ratios describe crickets raised on good feed, and the good feed is much of the point. A careful 2015 study by Mark Lundy and Michael Parrella at high, farm-realistic densities — its title says it plainly, Crickets Are Not a Free Lunch — found that the celebrated feed-efficiency largely evaporates when crickets are reared on the low-grade agricultural by-products they are so often promised to thrive on: growth collapsed, mortality soared, and fed on a poultry-grade diet the crickets converted feed into protein little better than the chickens would have. The sustainability case for the insect, in other words, is real but conditional — it holds when the cricket is fed well and reared warm, and much of its advantage is spent if it must be heated through a temperate winter or fed grain a person could have eaten. The house cricket is a very good argument for eating insects. It is not, on the evidence, a miracle, and the difference between the two is exactly the honesty the rest of this volume has tried to keep.

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<g fill="#43331f" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="9.5" letter-spacing="1.5"> <g fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.7"> <path d="M168 196 L132 152"/> <path d="M196 336 L120 356"/> <path d="M256 402 L152 432"/> <path d="M250 300 L250 122"/> <path d="M360 306 L430 142"/> <path d="M405 348 L520 306"/> <path d="M460 350 L545 408"/> </g> <g fill="#43331f" stroke="none"> <circle cx="168" cy="196" r="1.7"/><circle cx="196" cy="336" r="1.7"/> <circle cx="256" cy="402" r="1.7"/><circle cx="250" cy="300" r="1.7"/> <circle cx="360" cy="306" r="1.7"/><circle cx="405" cy="348" r="1.7"/> <circle cx="460" cy="350" r="1.7"/> </g> <text x="128" y="150" text-anchor="end">ANTENNA</text> <text x="116" y="359" text-anchor="end">HEAD</text> <text x="148" y="435" text-anchor="end">WALKING LEGS</text> <text x="250" y="114" text-anchor="middle">PRONOTUM</text> <text x="434" y="138" text-anchor="start">FOREWING</text> <text x="525" y="309" text-anchor="start">ABDOMEN</text> <text x="550" y="411" text-anchor="start">CERCI</text> </g>

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<text x="320" y="560" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="13" letter-spacing="3.5" fill="#43331f">THE HOUSE CRICKET</text> <text x="320" y="576" text-anchor="middle" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" font-size="8.5" letter-spacing="2.5" fill="#6f5a40">ACHETA DOMESTICUS · MICRO-LIVESTOCK</text> </svg>

<figcaption><em>Plate 9. Acheta domesticus, the house cricket — an anatomical and nutritional study of the small livestock that feeds, in one form or another, some two billion people.</em></figcaption> </figure>

The kitchen end of all this is neither laboratory nor dare, but a snack older than the Aztec empire. If a reader wishes to meet the six-legged table honestly, the doorway is the same one Oaxaca has used for millennia: the grasshopper, toasted bright and dressed with lime.

Chapulines — Toasted Grasshoppers with Lime, Garlic & Chilli

Oaxaca's everyday snack and market staple: grasshoppers toasted on a hot pan until crisp and lacquered red, sharp with lime and chilli. Eaten by the handful, folded into a warm tortilla with guacamole, or scattered over eggs.

Serves 4 as a snack · Time 15 minutes

Ingredients

100 g (3½ oz) whole dried edible grasshoppers (chapulines), from an edible-insect supplier
1 tbsp neutral oil
2 garlic cloves, finely minced
finely grated zest and juice of 1 lime
½–1 tsp ground dried chilli (chile de árbol or guajillo), to taste
flaky sea salt, to taste
to serve: warm corn tortillas, guacamole, lime wedges

Method

If the grasshoppers are not already cleaned and dried for eating, follow the supplier's guidance; food-grade chapulines usually need only toasting.
Warm a dry heavy frying pan or comal over a medium heat. Add the grasshoppers and toast, shaking often, for 3–5 minutes until crisp and fragrant. Tip out and set aside.
Add the oil and garlic to the pan and cook 30 seconds, just to soften, not colour. Return the grasshoppers, add the chilli, and toss 1–2 minutes to coat.
Off the heat, add the lime zest, a good squeeze of lime juice and a pinch of salt; toss. Taste and adjust. Serve warm, with tortillas, guacamole and extra lime.

Cook's note: Buy chapulines from an edible-insect supplier or a Mexican grocer — insects raised and processed for food. Never gather grasshoppers or other insects from gardens, verges or fields, which may carry pesticides, parasites or (as has been found in some informally traded chapulines) heavy-metal contamination. People with shellfish or dust-mite allergies should treat insects with caution, as they share the allergen tropomyosin. Sourced properly, chapulines are a safe, sustaining and entirely authentic taste of Oaxaca.

The grasshopper and the prawn are close cousins, both armoured arthropods hauled from field or sea; one sits on a celebrated plate and the other on a feared one, and no fact of chemistry decides which is which. The line is drawn somewhere else entirely — in memory, in classification, in the deep human machinery that sorts the world into the clean and the polluting, the edible and the abhorrent. It is time to look directly at that machinery, and at the emotion it runs on. The next chapter turns from the food to the flinch, and asks the oldest question at this whole table: not what we eat, but why the very thought of some of it turns the stomach.

บทถัดไป · 8 / 15Chapter 5 — The Anthropology of the Strange