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Why exterminate them when you can eat them?
How can we begin to reconcile our conflicting experience with bugs?
NO AMOUNT OF MONEY can compensate for millions of dead insect species. Money can't buy me love, pollination, honey, food - or complex, dynamic relationships among insects, plants, soil and greenhouse gases. When insect species disappear, the magical mystery Magicicada musical will be silenced, and the trees, turtles, fish and birds will suffer as they lose that periodic extravagance of fertilizer and feed. The insectivorous birds will disappear. Flowers will bloom once and then wrinkle and waste away. Once honey bees are gone, or monarch butterflies, or dung beetles, shareholder profits will not bring them back. In the pesticide and fertilizer whorehouses, money can buy a onenight stand, a few seasons of corn or soy or canola. Pesticides provide temporary, short-term, transitional satisfaction for managing our culinary desires.
Environmental engineer M. Premalatha, in a 2011 scholarly review titled "Energy-efficient food production to reduce global warming and ecodegradation: The use of edible insects," commented that "The supreme irony is that all over the world monies worth billions of rupees are spent every year to save crops that contain no more than 14 percent of plant protein by killing another food source (insects) that may contain up to 75 percent of high quality animal protein." The global agri-food system - the economy in general - however, does not run on irony.
How can we begin to reconcile, in practice, and not just in our heads and hearts, our conflicting experience with, and mixed feelings about, bugs?
People already eat locusts so that, at first glance, one strategy to control insect pests without using insecticides would be to eat them. It is a crude strategy, and has been tried. With a few exceptions, eating insect pests has not been very successful in controlling them. Still, in a search for non-toxic strategies to manage human-insect-food relationships, it is worth looking at those exceptions.
In Thailand, in the 1970s, there was an outbreak of patanga locust (Patanga succincta) in maize. When aerial spraying of insecticide failed, the government promoted eating them, and even promulgated recipes. Today, deep-fried patanga is popular, and the species isn't considered a serious pest. There are...