When it comes up that I’ve lived in the Central African Rain Forest, certain questions often come up, and one of them is: “Did you eat bugs?”

Every one has seen those National Geographic specials where some natives somewhere are eating insects, and of course, Westerners who think they generally don’t eat insects are fascinated with the idea. However, Westerners eat a lot more insects than they think. You should really consider any processed food you eat that started out as a plant crop to be part insect. If what you are eating is made of any corn product, rice, wheat, etc. or pretty much anything else, consider how the foodstuff got from field to factory to your face. At no point did someone sit down and do what you do with the veggies you buy at the grocery store: take the time to clean them off and if you run into a bug, get rid of it. And, even when you do that to your own produce, you are not seeing some of the invertebrates that are just too small and too well hidden to see.

We had a more extreme than usual buggy food situation arise in the Ituri Forest one year. Our practice was to grow some food, and occasionally purchase food from a local market when one existed, but to mostly stay away from the food the local people grew, because we didn’t want to be draining away their resources. So, we would go to town every several weeks and purchase a number of long-term staples, including 20 kilo sacks of rice, beans, or other dry foods, a few gallons of palm oil, and to splurge, twenty boxes of pasta and dozens of tiny little cans of tomato paste which we would turn into feeble Italian food. The tomato paste cans always exploded on opening, so one had to learn to aim them into the pot first. But I digress.

Once you brought that food back there was no changing plans. If something bad happened to the sack of rice, there would be no rice for six weeks. We kept the food in a special food storage hut, and our cook, a locally hired woman who worked a few hours a day for us, would take very good care of it. All sorts of things can go wrong from leaks in the roof to vermin to mold or rot.

And one day something went wrong with the beans.

At first we noticed little black spots floating around in the cooked beans. A little later we noticed that among the beans, while cleaning them, there were these little tiny things that would fly away. Then we noticed that some of the beans had little holes bored into them. Eventually, we put two and two together and figured out that we had some sort of infestation. Some small beetle creature had taken up residence in our beans. Their larva would bore a hole into a bean and live there for a while, presumably eating each bean from the inside out. I’m pretty sure both the larvae and adults were doing the boring, but I can’t be sure. The way we handled this was to spread the beans out in the sun, and over time a bunch of the beetles would fly away. Then we’d wash off the beans as per usual and some of the beetles left behind, beetle corpses (of which there was an increasingly large number) and grubs would be washed away. But as each day passed, the number of beetles that would end up in the cooked beans went up and up and up, and the efficacy of getting rid of the beetles was obviated by their ubiquity. So we stopped laying the beans out in the sun. At that point we stopped eating “cooked beans” and started eating “cooked beetles and beans” or, for short “B&B”.

And eventually we discovered that this was not all that uncommon. If you want beans in that habitat, you’re gonna get beetles too. Its just that this particular batch of Beetles and Beans was farther along than usual. Eventually we had to speed up the rate at which we consumed the beans so that there would be some left for us to eat! And, as I recall, the next batch of beans had hardly any beetles in it.

Well, I’m sorry to report that you do something like this every day when you eat stuff made out of pretty much any plant, but probably to a lesser degree. When products are made in factories in the US, some sort of test is applied to the powder or juice or whatever the corn or beans or wheat is turned into, to see how much invertebrate (mainly insect) matter is in there. I assume that batches with “too much” are mixed with batches of “not much” to make batches of corn meal, wheat flour, etc. that have under the regulated maximum amount of insect matter. Right?

In any event, there is nothing wrong with eating most insects, especially those that eat the foods we eat. Chances are they are low in toxins, and they are loaded with amino acids and other protein related molecules! Here as well as the Ituri, people eat insects all the time in this manner.

But of course, that is not what people are really asking me. They want to know if I’ve ever eaten insects as part of the cuisine. On purpose.

Yes, of course I have…

It is rather annoying to have locust descend on your crops. Some years it is not too bad, some years it is bad enough to noticeably affect the food supply. But every year there is the potential for revenge, even if it is mostly symbolic.

I first learned of the locust when sitting around the fire one dryish dry-season night with some Efe Pygmies and Lese Villagers. As we sat there, amid the usual night cacophony of insect (and other) noises, the occasional moth-like creature flying into the flames, and all that, a newcomer arrived on the scene: The katydids. Something largish and green would fly around a bit in the fire-light, and suddenly veer into the flames and spend a few seconds writhing around before being consumed and falling into the coals.

On about the third or fourth fiery demise, someone reached over to a katydid that was at the edge of the hearth, picked it up, held it for a second and popped it in his mouth. Was that a joke? A quirk, of this particular person? Did he think it was a potato chip or something? Or was it a cultural practice? And if so, was it common and widespread enough to be part of the cuisine? Of course, I watched for a while and then inquired, and learned the whole locust story minus a few details, which I picked up later by examining the appropriate literature.

And yes, the folks in this region eat them and take special enjoyment in doing so as a matter of revenge. They are probably my favorites insect; They have a nutty taste and are just oily enough to seem sauteed. Very nice.

Termites are also self-oiled and the winged alates are captured locally during the full moon, especially in the dry season, when termites do a night-time mating ritual that involves everybody flying towards the moon at once. (The moon is used as a reference point to get everyone to the same buggy orgy at about the same time.) To catch the termites, you make a light (of fire, traditionally, or with Greg’s Flashlight if he has batteries and lets you) behind a basket. The termites fly from the nest towards the light and get caught into the basket.

One day we got word, spread in advance by some government herald, that the “King of the Pygmies” would be passing down our “road” (read “slippery footpath”) to visit his people. The ensuing sociological events are worthy of another, and probably sombre, essay. Let’s just say that when those considered by some to be sub-human suddenly have a “king” and all the other folks have is a “chief” that there will be anxiety and even violence can erupt. In this case mainly torture of Pygmies. But as I say, that is another story.

Hearing that the “King of the Pygmies” was arriving soon engendered significant cynicism especially among the Pygmies who have no interest in Kings. But to be polite, I inquired as to what he might like to have as a gift, in the event that he actually showed up. And, since it was termite season, and for some reason I in fact had some batteries that were charged up, “termites” was the obvious answer.

It was timed rather well: The termites were captured and put in a fine hand-woven basket the very night before the king arrived.

It turns out twenty-some years ago an infant King Mobi was taken by missionaries to Italy, where he was raised by Catholic Nuns on a diet of, well, Italian food. As you know, Efe and other Pygmies are of short stature, but what you may not know (and most people do in fact get this wrong) is that their stature is not equivalent to the short stature of the fabled “They were shorter back then” Western ancestors famous for gaining stature with changes in diet and so on. More to the point, if you feed a Pygmy from infancy copious pasta and brochette, he does not grow tall, but he will grow corpulent, and King Mobi was. That may seem like an insignificant observation, but since all Efe are skinny and buff, being hunter-gatherers and all, it was odd, in fact impressive, to everyone.

We gave the King the termites just about the time I realized he would likely not really want to eat them. As it turns out, he didn’t even want to look at them. He did want me to take many pictures of him and he wanted to know what I had to drink. And he was not speaking of water. Living, as we were, beyond the beer line, I couldn’t help him much with that.

I have to admit, though, I’m sorta with The King on this. I love me those katydids, and palm grubs are good, but termites are not my favorite bug. Unless, of course, they are mixed with peanut butter, which is another local product. Anything goes well with peanut butter!

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

From ants to aphids, mosquitoes to mantises, entomology blogger Bug Girl has covered all kinds of things that creep, crawl and fly. This week, she joins us to talk about her favorite bugs, and why she finds them all so fascinating. And anthropologist and blogger Greg Laden joins us to discuss the cultural taboos surrounding eating insects.

Go have a listen!

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

The people who lived in this village were very familiar with the idea of an anthropologist, and were aware that we had a research facility a few days walk to the east. Others, while they had heard of us, either had never met any of the outsiders or didn’t care much either way about us.

When we initially embarked on our long trek to the village, we carried enough food to get there, but not much more. I was assured by my fellow travelers that the streets of the village would be paved with food, as it were, and that we would not have to carry much with us, and if we brought just a little cash and some tobacco and salt, we could easily trade for plenty of spare rice to get ourselves back to the road fatter than we had left. Since it was technically the tail end of one of the two seasons of widespread reduced food availability, I didn’t much like that idea but I didn’t have a choice. It was simply impossible to carry enough food to make the trip there and back. So we gambled with the odds against us.

And, of course, we lost. We arrived at the village with a kilo of rice and little else, and there we found there was not much food. Even though the rice harvest was just starting, so people weren’t exactly starving, there was nothing close to an abundance. We knew that we could eat while we stayed in the village … there was enough for that … but clearly we’d have to make the trip home without provisions. We’d have to live off the land for the three day walk home … which would probaby be a four day walk since we’d be starving and you go slower when you are starving. (Another story for another time. It was not a good week to be a monkey along our route!)

The village was traditional and I was a guest, so I was treated accordingly, and had to act accordingly. This meant we travelers needed to divide up into appropriate traditional roles and mete ourselves out among the villagers per spec, and thereafter more or less spend our time that way. The Efe men went to hang around with the Efe that were living in the village and they were also able to sit with the village women when they were outside processing food; Our cook went to work and hung with the village women in the mafika … an open air kitchen building with a roof and food stores, cooking gear, etc. … during the heat of the day. And, as the adult male, I was expected to hang around with the other adult males in the baraza … the open air ramada-like roofed-over sitting area in the middle of the village. As men, we would have important things to do in this baraza. Planning things and stuff.

So, I sat there and did my Ethnoarchaeology, hanging out with the other men, observing things and writing it all down, while the women prepared our first meal together, which would include all of the rice we had brought and whatever the village had to offer.

And what did the village have to offer? There were three things besides our rice. Someone had killed an antelope that morning so there was a bit of meat. The meat was cooked in palm oil traded about noon that day with some Budu merchants who had come by to exchange forest products for oil. (The oil was traded for a forest fruit known as “eme” which is not really food but rather medicine.) Then there was sombe. Sombe is wonderful. It is the very young leaves of the casava (manioc, manihot) plant pounded and cooked with palm oil. The process is much more complex than I’ve indicated. It is the main thing to eat that I miss from the region, and impossible to get outside the forest unless you have connections and live in Belgium.

And the third thing was bugs. To be specific, palm larvae. These are grubs of some critter, and you get them from inside a palm tree, which were eaten frequently this time of year. They are fried up in a bit of palm oil which gives both flavor and color, and some salt is added. They are not very flavorful but they are quite nutritious.

When the food was all prepared, the women came over one or two at a time and gave a plate of food to each man. A woman or women associated with a particular man or men as mother, wife, sister, or daughter had prepared each plate and had brought it to the baraza, so of course, our traveling cook, Maria, brought me my plate.

When she handed me the plate, our cook also gave me a knowing look, because she knew that I was not enamored with the traditional roles of her culture and was somewhat uncomfortable getting served along with the other men in the baraza. I returned the look as I glanced down at the plate, and on the plate was some rice, some antelope, some sombe, and about a dozen palm grubs. But there was a small problem. While all the food types were neatly separated into their own zones on my plate, some of the sombe had moved across the plate and joined the palm grubs. A splotch of green leafy food rested among the larvae of the palms.

Maria was five steps away when I called out.

“Maria!”

She stopped and turned. I pointed at my plate.

“Maria, there is some food in my bugs!”

She was close enough to see exactly what I referred to.

It turns out that some jokes translate and some do not. It is all a matter of available symbolic reference and context. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pointed at a plantain or banana peel laying on the ground (these are a main crop for the region) and said to someone “Hey, don’t slip on that!” Every time I did that I amused myself but the person whom I had warned had no clue that this was funny to me, no image of Woody Allen and a giant banana peel came to their mind. The joke was always a dud.

But this time it clicked. Maria laughed heartily and, pointing at me and barely able to talk, explained the joke to the men in the Baraza. They all laughed as well. Maria told the joke to the women back at the mafika, and I could hear their laughter mixed with phrases like “Those white people… they are so funny sometimes” and that sort of thing. The joke spread across the Ituri Forest and it was also retold among anthropologists. In fact, one famous anthropologist giving the keynote address at a major event celebrating Mary Leakey’s birthday told the joke as part of his remarks. Mary Leakey LOL’ed.

Maria, there’s some food in my bugs!!!! Still cracks me up.

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

We had a situation like that arise in the Ituri Forest one year. Our practice was to grow some food, and occasionally purchase food from a local market when one existed, but to mostly stay away from the food the local people grew, because we didn’t want to be draining away their resources. So, we would go to town every several weeks and purchase a number of long-term staples, including 20 kilo sacks of rice, beans, or other dry foods, a few gallons of palm oil, and to splurge, twenty boxes of pasta and dozens of tiny little cans of tomato paste which we would turn into feeble Italian food.

Once you brought that food back there was no changing plans. If something bad happened to the sack of rice, there would be no rice for six weeks. We kept the food in a special food storage hut, and our cook, a locally hired woman who worked a few hours a day for us, would take very good care of it. All sorts of things can go wrong from leaks in the roof to vermin to mold or rot. If something bad happened to the sack of rice, there would be no rice for six weeks.

And one day something went wrong with the beans.

At first we noticed little black spots floating around in the cooked beans. A little later we noticed that among the beans, while cleaning them there were these little tiny things that would fly away. Then we noticed that some of the beans had little holes bored into them. Eventually, we put two and two together and figured out that we had some sort of infestation. Some small beetle creature had taken up residence in our beans. The or their larva would bore a hole into a bean and live there for a while, presumably eating each bean from the inside out. I’m pretty sure both the larvae and adults were doing the boring, but I can’t be sure. The way we handled this was to spread the beans out on something, in the sun, for a while and a bunch of the beetles would fly away. Then we’d wash off the beans as per usual and some of the beetles left behind, beetle corpses (of which there was an increasingly large amount) and grubs would be washed away. But as each day passed, the number of beetles that would end up in the coked beans went up and up and up, and the efficacy of getting rid of the beetles was obviated by their ubiquity. So we stopped laying the beans out in the sun. At that point we stopped eating “cooked beans” and started eating “cooked beetles and beans” or, for short “B&B”.

And eventually we discovered that this was not all that uncommon. If you want beans in that habitat, you’re gonna get beetles too. Its just that this particular batch of Beans and Beetles was farther along than usual. Eventually we had to speed up the rate at which we consumed the beans so that there would be some left for us to eat! And, as I recall, the next batch of beans had hardly any beetles in it.

Well, I’m sorry to report that you do that every day when you eat stuff made out of pretty much any plant, but probably to a lesser degree. When products are made in factories in the US, some sort of test is applied to the powder or juice or whatever the corn or beans or wheat is turned into, to see how much invertebrate (mainly insect) matter is in there. I assume that batches with “too much” are mixed with batches of “not much” to make batches of corn meal, or wheat flour that have under the regulated maximum amount of insect matter. I’m just guessing at that, of course. One of you must know…

In any event, there is nothing wrong with eating most insects, especially those that eat the foods we eat. Chances are they are low in toxins, and they are loaded with amino acids and other protein related molecules! Here as well as the Ituri, people eat insects all the time in this manner.

But of course, that is not what people are really asking me. They want to know if I’ve ever eaten insects as part of the cuisine.

Yes, of course I have, but I see I’ve run out of time. I’ll get back to you on that shortly.

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

Many, though certainly not all, insects are linked to important things in life. This is true of many things that are not insects as well. For instance, one does not walk to the right of a young male Canarium tree in the afternoon, because he who shall not be named could be sitting in the tree, and then you’re screwed. Or, one should not handle the fetus of an antelope if any females in your family are planning on getting pregnant soon. For many insects, killing them is bad because that may affect fertility of someone related to the one who kills the insect.

Generally speaking, the local culture is very uptight about babies and fertility issues generally. Some of this is spillover form the village-dwelling horticultural Lese with whom the foraging Efe share a culture. The Lese have a repressed fertility owing to a number of causes. When a fertility rule is broken, a great deal of effort may be expended to fix it. As the reproductive ecologist Peter Ellison (who was involved in the same project) once said, “The Lese and Efe are constantly afraid of overdrawing on the bank of fertility.” (I paraphrase.) One of the most dangerous things you can do is to accidentally have twins. That’s like going to an ATM machine to get 100 bucks and the machine gives you 200 bucks. What do you do with the extra money? Will you get caught? When you check your bank account later, will there be 100 or 200 bucks taken out? Will there be a fee? A fine?

An insect that you don’t know about might be an insect linked to something important like fertility, or if not fertility, something else. Better to just leave it alone and let it go on its own way.

Oh, and there is probably a lot of heterogeneity across the cultural landscape in the detailed beliefs. It is not at all unlikely that an Efe visiting a distant settlement will discover that those people have a different set of beliefs about various insects or other things. The ethnography certainly shows different things happening across time and space, rather dynamically. The Efe do not generally look at beliefs of other people with disdain. Rather, they figure that those beliefs might be valid as well, and try to incorporate them in their routine.

So it makes sense that Efe would assume that an insect they’ve never seen before … and in this very species rich rain forest that is not as unlikely as it sounds, though it is certainly not a daily occurrence … has an importance of which they are simply unaware.

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

It turns out that there are plenty of chairs and benches and other things to sit on in “Africa” though if you go into the deep forest to hang out with the Efe Pygmies siting down can get a little dicey. But what she really meant is that there is no place to sit where there will not be a bug or a spider or something either where you want to sit, under where you want to sit, or flying around where you want to sit.

It isn’t really true though. When I first went to the Ituri some people quite thoughtlessly (i.e., they did not put any thought into what they were saying) advised me to bring bug spray, because the place would be thick with mosquitoes and such. So I brought a couple of small jars of bug spray, an after I arrived, I found the big basket hanging from the roof of the supply hut that contained all the other containers of bug spray that various researchers has brought there over the previous five years or so, only to discover that there was no use for such a thing. “Maybe we’ll have a garage sale someday” I thought as I added my bug spray to the rest.

So, an Efe camp is usually in the middle of the forest, and that is a good place to sample the invertebrate life in that habitat. There are not clouds of mosquitoes or flies in the rain forest, or at least not in this rain forest. Why? There are too many bugs! If any insect tried out the strategy of being in a horde some other insect would come up with the strategy of eating the entire horde, and said strategist would simply wait round, in numbers, under wet leaves somewhere, for the next horde to come along. Really, clouds of insects, like the mosquitoes or lake flies or black flies we get in the norther states and provinces of North America exist because there is a winter, from which the landscape emerges, and into which swarm hordes of insects, one horde after another, until deadly winter returns again. A set of evolutionary stable strategies resulting in this pattern have developed in this region. If you got rid of the winters (though you could not get rid of seasonality) there would be few swarms of flying insects in a highly species rich forest environments. Swarming insects are more likely to be found in habitats with a winter, in low species diversity forests, and grasslands (including marshes and swamps). Not so much in tropical rain forests.

But that does not mean there are not a lot of insects. There are plenty, and even sitting in a camp is a great way to discover new ones. One day as I sat on my Efe Chair a whopping big slow moving thingie came along and started to climb up the chair leg. I managed to guess that it was some kind of cricket … bear in mind, though, that crickets in the African rain forest are as much like our temperate crickets as an elephant is like a hyrax. I asked the nearest Efe what it was.

He looked. Shrugged his shoulders. “No idea.”

I was surprised. Normally the Efe knew the name of anything I pointed to (and yes, I did verify their knowledge using various techniques … they weren’t usually making stuff up, though that could happen now and then). We kept an eye on the slow moving creature as it explored around on my chair and the nearby ground, and everybody who came along got asked.

“What is that thing?”

“Huh. No idea. Strange looking.”

Eventually, an older man picked the thing up with a stick and moved it several hundred feet into the rain forest and let it go. Why do that instead of ignore it or squish it? Well, the Efe don’t squish an insect or other invertebrate unless they know what it is. With good reason.

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!