100 Million Years of Food Page 2
Thailand was never completely overrun by a European empire, in part because its rulers were able to exploit a rivalry between the English in Burma and the Malay Peninsula and the French in Indochina and thereby stave off invasion. As a result, the Thais were more successful at retaining their traditions, including insect cuisine. To see how insects are used in the context of a meal, rather than as novelty snack items at a beer house, I book a ticket to Thailand.
A few weeks after my Saigon insect excursion, I arrive late at night in Bangkok. I head by train to the Nasa Vegas Hotel, an imposing warehouselike structure on the outskirts of the city, conveniently located by the Metro line and priced within my modest budget. Since I have arrived on a Friday night, all the cheapest rooms are taken, but luckily I can afford to splurge for a single night in an Executive Deluxe room, exactly the same size as the budget rooms, but with swankier bedspreads and more solid doors. It’s a good thing I don’t believe in ghosts, because the Nasa Vegas is a ghost-friendly establishment: murky, tunnellike hallways, layers of dust, long sweeping staircases that few bother to ascend or descend except me. At four in the morning, I’m awakened by the sound of women laughing shrilly in the hallways.
The next evening, rain and wind lash the streets. I’m standing on the edge of a Bangkok boulevard on a Saturday night. I don’t speak ten words of Thai, but I’ve always understood that if you keep your head up, smile, and look on the bright side, things are bound to turn out well. While tourists bumble about Bangkok in search of boobs, booze, and bargains, I slip into a convenience store. “Where can I find the bus to Khao San?”
The clerk and the people on the street offer conflicting directions—stand here, go there, look for this or that bus. A thin, pale, fashionable young woman notices my bewilderment. “Come with me!” she says, introducing herself as Milk. I obediently fall in behind her like a pup clinging to the heels of its mother. Milk says she was heading to Khao San anyway and offers to guide me to my destination. We board a bus, disembark at a mall, find one of Milk’s friends in the crowd—another thin, sharp-featured girl with heavy makeup—then catch another bus to the tourist ghetto of Khao San. We thread through the drunken tourists and six-foot transgenders as a girl in a bar belts Adele’s “Someone Like You” with enough angst to rip a heart to shreds. Across the passageway, adolescent girls twirl about on metal poles, their expressions distracted. Milk leads me through the throngs to a cart with a display of glistening fried insects. The seller is dark, plump, dressed in the plain manner of a country woman. Milk is proud of the bamboo-worm caterpillars. “I really like these! I used to eat these a lot when I was young,” she exclaims.
The stringy white caterpillars could pass for chicken jerky in texture and taste. There is something incongruous about Milk, the paragon of hip Thai youth in her blue jeans, shimmery blouse, and brilliant makeup, tucking into a cup of fried caterpillars. Is this what the historians mean when they say that Thailand charted a course between the demands of the West and her own proud heritage?
I shell out some Thai baht for giant water bugs and black water beetles, each one about an inch long. Giant water bugs and water beetles were among my favorite pets during my childhood, when I collected them from puddles and ponds and raised them in bottles and aquariums. Eating and swallowing them, even after a good chew, is another matter. There are a lot of sharp edges to contend with. I feel like I’m snacking on disposable razor blades.
Milk takes me to meet two of her male friends, who order spicy green curry and fried noodles with pork and chicken from a stand. I watch the men hungrily shovel food down. Perhaps the insect carts in Khao San are a novelty after all, just like the palm worms and centipedes in Saigon. Milk and her friends look like they are on a happy double date. They say they will party and drink a lot that night. Feeling out of place and tired, I excuse myself from the group. Milk leads me to a taxi stand and tells the driver to take me to the Nasa Vegas. As the taxi pulls away, I wave, but she has already turned to rejoin her friends, the memory of the insect-eating tourist perhaps already fading from her thoughts.
The next day, I take the Metro, setting off around five in the afternoon. The girl next to me moves to another seat. I can’t blame her. My shirt smells horrid because I tried to wash and dry my laundry in the room—the hotel laundry services were exorbitantly priced, with a load of laundry costing the same as a night’s stay. Arriving at the vast Chatuchak Market, I wander along the stalls, the shops shuttering up in the late evening as rain sprinkles down. I find two little carts with some shriveled crickets and grasshoppers and not many customers. I eat a fried egg perched on a heap of noodles, sitting alone in the dark on a curb, feeling dispirited.
*
I read that insects are popular in northeastern Thailand, so a few days later I take a quick flight to the Thai–Laos border. My hotel room is airy, clean, cheap, quiet—a world away from the smog of Bangkok. Udon Thani is transected by narrow lanes traversed by trucks, cars, motorbikes, and elementary and college students. The local cuisine is sour, bitter, dazzling hot. By a stroke of good luck, while I’m struggling to communicate my inquiries about food in a market, a Thai American passerby rescues me from my linguistic abyss. Amy, who grew up in California, is in Udon Thani to start an educational consulting business. I tell her about my quest for insect foods. She offers to take me to Rajabhat University to find people who can assist me with finding local insect cuisine. With the help of Amy and staff and professors at the university, I end up with the cell phone number of a Vietnamese student who is doing his master’s degree at the university and is fluent in Thai. He and I arrange to meet that evening in front of the university gates.
“Elder Brother Stephen!” Seven P.M. sharp, a young man pulls up at the university gates on a beat-up motorbike. He has a narrow face that is dashing in a daredevil way. A current of nervous energy seems to run from his toes to his fingertips. He hands me a helmet. “I borrowed the bike from a friend.”
Hoang, from the hardscrabble north-central region of Vietnam, was sponsored by his seafood export company to study in Thailand. He plays tennis and teaches Vietnamese. When his face creases into a soft smile while taking a call from a Thai student, I guess that the local girls must flock around him.
Hoang ferries us to a gleaming downtown night bazaar. We come across stalls with lavish displays of glossy black water beetles, giant water bugs with wicked pincers, several species of grasshoppers and crickets, ants and pupae. The insects are fried in vegetable oil and seasoned with soy sauce. The grasshoppers have a solid crunch to them. The spurs on the legs take some getting used to. The mole crickets, with stubby arms, are lightly chewy with a tang. My favorite: ants, pleasantly soft with a bit of sour. You have to shovel down dozens to even make a dent in your appetite. When we’ve had our fill of soy-seasoned crispy limbs and papery chewy bodies—50 baht ($1.60) for a plate of ants, crickets, and grasshoppers—Hoang folds the remaining insects into a napkin, to take home to his friends.
*
During a morning stroll near the hotel, I chance upon bright red-orange papaya at a roadside cart run by a shy teenager. Her uncle, Mr. Amnat, comes out to chat with me and practice his English. He owns the laundry shop just behind the cart.
“I’m looking for a cricket farm. Do you know where I could find them?” I ask him. Seeing his confusion, I sketch a cricket in my notebook. Amazingly, Mr. Amnat says he knows just the place.
I return two days later to the papaya stall. Mr. Amnat drives up in a muscular black pickup truck. We surge past small markets and tight intersections. Mr. Amnat relates that he used to run a sugarcane farm, then began rearing pigs before settling down to the laundry business. I find it a little ironic that we are looking for eco-friendly insect cuisine in a gas-guzzling truck, but Mr. Amnat says his vehicle runs on 20 percent ethanol. We pop into a market where a woman sells two types of crickets, one light brown and crispy—preferred by Mr. Amnat—and the other a dark wine color and softer in texture. The cricket seller gives us directions to one of her suppliers a few miles out of town.
Out on the highway, rain begins to thrash the window. Mr. Amnat swings the truck into the driveway of a rural dwelling. Next door, some teens are partying with loud music, food, and drink. A bare-chested, potbellied, bespectacled man greets us. The cricket farmer, a retired municipal officer, invites us to the back of his house. Under a tin roof are fifteen or so concrete bins covered with blue mesh. Lively screeching fills the air. Peering through the mesh, I see thousands of plump brown-black crickets crawling over egg cartons and strands of vegetation. Pans of sand are placed inside for the crickets to lay their eggs. The farmer also shows us two pink-speckled lizards with huge eyes and suckered toes, geckos that he is raising in a dark wooden box for their meat.
Considering that crickets produce 50 percent less carbon dioxide than cattle per unit of weight gain and convert feed into food twice as efficiently as chickens, four times more efficiently than pigs, and twelve times more efficiently than cattle, insects deserve to be more popular on menus.3 Since insects aren’t warm-blooded, they don’t need to consume as many calories as warm-blooded animals when putting on weight. Insects also use up less water than livestock per unit weight of flesh. A backyard operation like this farm, located in a warm climate (insects are small creatures and therefore are more vulnerable to cold than mammals) could contribute impressive quantities of protein for a surging, hungry population, yet the farm could still be readily managed by a retiree. It’s hard to deny that edible insects could create a much smaller environmental footprint than equivalent-sized portions of meat, especially in densely populated countries that don’t have space for rearing bigger livestock.
*
To help me make sense of insect cuisine, I return to Bangkok and catch a bus out to the suburbs, then wander across the carefully cropped grounds of Mahidol University, desolate on a Friday afternoon like many campuses around the world. A kindly, bespectacled woman is waiting for me in the Nutrition Institute. Professor Jintana Yhoung-Aree hands me a stack of documents on insect nutrition as she leads me out to her tidy compact car. It’s a short drive to a busy restaurant that the professor says is famous for northeastern Thai cuisine. She orders fried frog legs with cabbage and bitter melon; fried chicken; bamboo shoots and baked spicy fish; coconut shakes with ice and sugar; and weaver ants and pupae in a fiery sour broth, flavored with lemongrass, mushrooms, garlic, and chili. Though my wimpy tongue can barely handle the ant soup, overall it’s a brilliant, satisfying meal. Here, I finally taste insects in the setting of a varied cuisine, not merely deep-fried and served as street food, but as the accompaniment to a savory, balanced meal.
We are no longer pure insectivores, and our bodies have adapted accordingly. Chitin, the chief component of insect exoskeletons, is structurally similar to cellulose and may be a useful source of fiber, but primates that live largely on insects possess enzymes to digest chitin. Humans possess these chitin-breaking enzymes in our stomach juices to a limited degree, which means we are unable to extract some of the available calories from insect foods.4 Eating insects has other potential drawbacks as well. Although insects are more dissimilar to us than mammals and birds and therefore may carry fewer of the deadly diseases that infected livestock can pass to us, raw insects can still transmit bacteria and parasites and thus need to be well cooked. Since insects often defend themselves by producing toxins with the help of plants they eat or may ingest pesticides or heavy metals spread by human industry, there’s the possibility that insect toxins could seriously spoil a meal. Insect parts are also potential allergens, containing proteins in common with known allergenic animals like shrimp, lobster, and dust mites.5
Nonetheless, as side dishes, like the refreshing weaver-ant soup the professor treated me to, insects are perfectly admissible. After all, more than 1,600 different species are known to be eaten worldwide, which could not have come about if insects were harmful to health. The likely historical epicenter of insect eating was in the Americas, due to the fact that large herbivores were never domesticated in pre-Hispanic times and thus there was a shortage of protein.6 Edible insects are practical in developing countries where meat is scarce or expensive, because insects provide essential amino acids, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, B vitamins, beta-carotene, vitamin E, calcium, iron, and magnesium, sometimes in concentrations exceeding that of familiar meats like beef, pork, and chicken. The spurs on locust legs may snag briefly in the throat, and roasted silkworm larvae might not rival caviar anytime soon, but fried cicadas are astonishingly light and buttery, and queen termites are fabulous wrapped in egg. Moreover, having an interest in insect cuisine doesn’t necessarily banish you to the realms of social doom—I have met many people who were willing to try eating insects during tropical adventures. It turns out that you can have your insects and eat them too.
Our earliest primate ancestors were happy to hunt down insects, which, to our diminutive forebears, were like triple burgers with all the fixings. However, the climate started to cool down, moisture levels increased, and the dominant tree types shifted dramatically. A new kind of tree offering a new kind of food emerged on the scene. Long before meat-eating became fashionable among primates, fruits arose as a tantalizing source of calories and nutrition, packing enough fuel to power the evolution of a new kind of primate, bigger and smarter than its insect-crunching forebears.
THE GAMES FRUITS PLAY
Heroes on earth once lived, men good and great,
Acorns their food,—thus fed they flourished,
And equalled in their age the long lived oak.
—FREDERICK EDWARD HULME, Bards and Blossoms; or, The Poetry, History and Associations of Flowers
When durian falls, sarongs rise.
—Indonesian/Malay saying
If the joys of eating are comparable to the joys of sex, as is sometimes claimed, then fruits—fun, attractive, breezy, and noncommittal—qualify as a summer fling. (By contrast, starches and vegetables are the in-laws, indispensable but tricky to deal with, sniping at us through a fog of flatulence and indigestion.) Who among us mortals would want to dispense with the teasing seductions of fruits?
However, the call of fruits is bundled in a sphinxlike contradiction. Across human history, fruits have generally served as accompaniments to meals, rather than the main course. Despite the seasonal availability and enticements of fruits, omnivorous animals such as bears and birds prefer to mix fruits with protein sources like insects and other prey. Bears and birds fed fruit-rich diets rapidly lose weight.1 Humans also lose weight when their diets include large quantities of fruits.2 Not a great way of losing weight, though: High concentrations of fructose, the predominant sugar in fruits, have been associated with excessive production of lipids, insulin resistance, pancreatic cancer, elevated uric acid levels, gout, cardiovascular diseases, and other metabolic disorders. Bloggers have speculated that Apple founder Steve Jobs’s pancreatic cancer was related to his experimentation with extreme fruit regimens. Ashton Kutcher, an actor assigned to play Steve Jobs in a recent movie, was hospitalized for insulin and pancreatic issues after mimicking Jobs’s fruitarian diet for a month to prepare for his movie role.3
In the early 1980s, a fifty-five-year-old farmer was admitted to a hospital in Toulouse, France, complaining of chest pains. The results of a preliminary examination were inconclusive, but an x-ray picked up a scattering of tiny nodules throughout the chest. The farmer suffered a fatal heart attack, and an autopsy was duly carried out. The examining physicians noticed a profusion of crystallized fatty acids in the victim’s lungs. Analysis of the granules unveiled the presence of chemical compounds (hydrocarbons) commonly found in apple peels. When questioned, the farmer’s family recounted how the farmer had eaten a kilogram of apples every day for eighteen years, amounting to perhaps five or six tons of apples over his lifetime. Though the investigating physicians believed that the heart attack occurred due to plaque accumulation in the arteries rather than apple consumption, in their report they remarked upon the striking manifestation of the lipid crystals throughout the victim’s lungs.4
That an act as innocent as eating fruit could have egregious effects on the human body strikes the Westerner, raised on the virtues of “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” as bizarre. However, few people in traditional societies would think to stuff themselves on fruits. But why is this the case? Aren’t fruits supposed to be the healthy food par excellence?
To tackle this paradox, let us first note that around 60 million years ago, our primate ancestors lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C.5 Considering how extremely important vitamin C is to our bodies—it shields cells from oxidation, prevents scurvy, and provides critical amino acid and neurological (neurotransmitter) functions—ditching vitamin C is akin to a rock band firing the drummer. The show can go on, but why take such a drastic step?
There have been other cases of vanishing vitamin C synthesis. Ray-finned fish, a group that comprises 95 percent of the fishes living today, lost the ability to make vitamin C between 210 million and 200 million years ago, while close relatives like lampreys, sharks, rays, sturgeons, and lungfish retain the ability. Guinea pigs relinquished vitamin C production 14 million years ago. Bats ceded the ability to make vitamin C starting around 60 million years ago.6 Many birds in the Passeriformes family, such as swallows and martins, have also lost the ability to produce vitamin C, while other birds in the same family, such as crows and mynahs, still have or regained that ability. Among our primate cousins, monkeys and apes cannot produce vitamin C, but more distant relations like lemurs and lorises still can.7
Remarkably, in all of these cases, only one gene was affected: the GLO (L-gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase) gene, which produces an enzyme involved in the last step of synthesizing vitamin C. When this gene is knocked out, only vitamin C production is halted. If other genes producing other enzymes affecting vitamin C had been affected, this would have had much broader harmful effects, and the organism would have been unable to survive or reproduce effectively. As it turned out, knocking out only vitamin C was possible during evolution because vitamin C could be obtained in the diet. Each of the vitamin C–deficient species listed above had a rich source of vitamin C available in what they ate from plant foods, insects, and so on. In these cases, making vitamin C was superfluous to survival, because there was already enough vitamin C to handle the animal’s basic needs.