Ologies with Alie Ward - Entomophagy Anthropology (EATING BUGS AS SUSTAINABLE PROTEIN) with Julie Lesnik

Episode Date: January 1, 2019

DO YOU CARE ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE? Okay cool. No matter what your diet, get this episode in your ears. Entomophagy Anthropologist Dr. Julie Lesnik -- an enthusiastic expert on bug eating -- breaks down the human past, present and future of insect cuisine for our surging population. If you're considering cutting back on meat, or if you're a vegan helping others explore more sustainable options, Dr. Lesnik will get you pumped as hell for changing mindsets. We talk about grasshopper tacos, ant omelettes, the nature of life, humane bug slaughter, water conservation, deep-fried scorpions, at-home mealworm farming, cricket chips, protein needs and the cultural biases that are literally killing us. Also: termite farts.Dr. Julie Lesnik's website, www.entomoanthro.orgSubscribe to her brand new YouTube channel, Octopus & ApeTo try crickets: EatChirps.com, use code Ologies10 for 10% off Chirp ChipsAly Moore's Bugible.com and EatBugsEvents.comMore links at www.alieward.comBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris and Jarrett SleeperTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's that lady who wants to sample three gelatoes but can only bear to make the gelato person give her two samples and then just buys the flavor that she always gets. Alleyboard. Back with another episode of Allergies. Okay, so speaking of eating, actually, you're about to change the way you look at food and the future. So finally, the power to change the planet. It's in your hands, dog, and it's in your smoothies and it's in your mouths.

Get ready for some bug science, some human history, and some dare I say hope. But before hope comes business and this is the part where I thank patrons at patreon.com slash olergies for making this show possible, which has its challenges, but I love making it. Thank you to everyone getting merch at olergiesmerch.com. Thanks to everyone hitting that subscribe button, just mash it up, and thanks for writing the podcast, even leaving reviews that you know that I read in the dark with a candle and a monocle and I softly weep because y'all are so nice.

So I read you one each week for proof. This week's Dre J Lane says, I've been minching on this lovely podcast. It's like tapas, but if the tapas were a taste of all the different olergies that you've ever wondered about or never knew existed, tapas made of bugs for this episode at least. Okay, entomophagy anthropology. Let's just get the heck into it. So entomon in Greek means insect, phage means to eat, and anthropology, of course, is the study of human peoples.

So I'm so stoked about this episode. And this ologist, perhaps the leading expert on planet Earth about this topic. She got her bachelor's at Northern Illinois University in anthropology. She got a master's and a PhD in anthropology at University of Michigan, and she's an assistant professor of anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit. She wrote the literal book about humans eating bugs. It's titled Edible Insects and Human Evolution. Not only does she speak at seminars, she organizes the seminars.

I first saw a video of hers where she referred to eating insects as just eating very tiny animals and I was just charmed and I needed to make her my friend. So she came by my hotel room one morning when I was last in Detroit and we had a lovely time chatting about gateway bugs, grasshopper tacos, abandoning learned cultural fears, unctuous scorpions, termite farts, food security concerns, and spider bullshit. So open up and say, ants for entomophagy anthropologist Dr. Julie Lesnick. Okay, cool. So here is your microphone.

Okay. Can we do it? Yep. Yep. You hang on to it and just kind of talk right into it. All right. I can do that. And so we were e-mailing about this.

You would be an entomophagy anthropologist? Yeah. So I'm an anthropologist, but there's so many subfields of anthropology and I focus mostly on biological anthropology, but what I do instead is I really focus on insects as food and I come to it from all different anthropological angles. And so I decided sort of the best thing to do is just kind of name it my own thing and it's entomophagy anthropology is the name of my website. And so that's really kind of how I identify myself is that I study edible insects from

every anthropological perspective. Do you guys all know each other, people who study entomophagy anthropology? Is it kind of like a click of people who all really study it at a high level? So I would say that I'm probably the only truly entomophagy anthropologist, entomophagist anthropologist. There's a lot of people who study kind of insects as a food source, like in primates or for people, but they tend to just study it as one component of like the bigger picture. So what is food for this population?

And then bugs are part of it. So there are people who have definitely written on insects as food before and I'm far from the first, but I'm the first to really dive into it to this detail. That's so exciting. How do you describe this at cocktail parties? So I was like, Julie, what, so what do you, what do I do? That's fun. I generally say, well, it's really funny because it really depends on who I'm with.

And if I'm trying to impress them and, and what I think their kind of comfort level with different sciences are because my background is really in archaeology. I came into this through tool use. And so then understanding how early hominids use tools so that like, you know, and so understanding tools really makes me an archaeologist. So if I'm trying to sound really cool, I'll be like, I'm an archaeologist. If I'm trying to sound really smart, I'll say I'm a biological anthropologist because nobody knows what that is.

And then, and then if I think that I can use the word evolution without having issues, I will, I will say I study the evolution of the human diet and I focus primarily on insects. So it's really hard. I have to read the room and I do a lot of public communication and I think almost this very multifaceted background that I have and needing to read the room and figure out what to tell people I do has been sort of the first step in public communication, being able to know what pitch, what cell, what description is going to work in a particular crowd. And so I've been doing that for 10 years trying to explain what I do.

And so I think it was pretty easy. I'm just going to take it to bigger audiences. And so how long ago did you go from studying tool use to studying bugs? And was there a light bulb moment where you're like, you know what? So I started studying tools, tools first. So I went, I was an archaeologist as an undergrad, I worked in Europe just because that's where field schools that I could get on to were. And then in a going into graduate school, I had this very like philosophical existential

moment of like, as archaeologists, we dig up garbage all the time, and that's essentially what we do. It's what's left behind. And I was like, why do we have garbage that was like, it was very existential, but it was I really wanted, I used to, this is going to sound like a complete tangent, but I used to train horses. And so animal behavior and stuff was always very natural to me. I've always been an animal person.

And so at some point, I kind of wanted to, to relate humans back to that biological being that we are as opposed to the sort of like elevated God that we pretend we are sometimes. And so that was really the driving question for me going into grad school. And so I kind of wanted to study sort of the, pretty much the origins of the genus Homo and like, when did brain size expand and when did we start having the ability to think these bigger questions? And so it was, my application was so existential, it was really funny. And but I was like, but the one thing I can do is look, I can look at how tools get more

complex, you know, that is the one thing in the archaeological record that I could use. And so then it just became available to me to study these bone tools that are from South Africa that were demonstrated to be, have been used to dig into termite mounds. So researchers had done experiments on sort of their own bone fragments to match the, to find the best match for the wear pattern on these ancient tools that are about 1.7 million years old. And their conclusion was termite mounds. So this came out right before I started grad school.

And so while I was in grad school and I had no idea what I was going to do, my advisor was wonderful. He, he's very similar to me and is interested in kind of everything. And so he's like, we'll just throw a bunch of things at you and see what sticks, you know, like clearly this existential question, why do we have garbage and you need to, you need to narrow this down a little, but we'll give you the time. So Julie had that chance to go to South Africa and she was looking at tools used to dig into termite mounds.

And then because of her love of animals, it got her interested in chimpanzee behavior around termite mounds. She's like, what is happening with primates and termites, primates, termites? Let's get into it. I like to imagine her standing on termite mound in khaki shorts and dusty field boots just pumped as hell. And then sprinting into a library maybe, but the funny thing is, is in, in reading it and reading all the words, all the work, it was like, well, how many it's probably eight termites?

And I was like, well, what termites? So I started thinking about it and I was like, started looking into it and there's 85 genera of termites in sub Saharan Africa. What? Yeah. They're crazy diverse. And they eat a bunch of different things. So we think of them as eating wood, but they can eat grass, they can eat soil.

And then they're social insects, so they have a caste system. So if you eat the queen, that's different than eating the soldier, which is different than eating the worker. So this whole, like, hominids ate termites just didn't sit well with me. I was like, that's like being like, hominids ate food. Yeah. You know, like it didn't tell us really anything. And so that's really where my dissertation went off in an angle I never expected was

to learn more about termites and reconstruct, you know, what I thought, which termite genus were hominids eating. So that was my dissertation. And so it all kind of made sense to me because I wanted to study brain size and you need to understand tools and food and understand brain size. So it took this turn towards termites that might seem like it came out of nowhere. But for me, it made sense at the time. Did you like bugs before this?

I just liked nature. I was not necessarily a bug lover. Um, but I think about it and my mom was raised me to like, if there's a bug in the house, you get a, a glass and a postcard and you take the bug outside. Um, and so I definitely had a respect for them that I didn't realize was unique. Um, until I started studying them and then termites are just fascinating. I mean, they're the social behavior of them. They, they communicate through pheromones.

They, they're just, they were just spectacularly wonderful. Just sit there and read about. It was just something new. And I think that was a big thing was I was studying human evolution. So now to see evolution on a totally different scale. I mean, it just, it, it happens so much faster because, you know, generation times so much smaller and they get so specialized. And the termites that chimps eat and the ones I focus the most on are fungus farmers.

So they, yeah. Yeah. How do they have their lives together so well to form their architects, right? So they build these nests so that the heat and everything can be regulated. It has chimneys. So they're architects. And then inside that structure, they have a symbiotic relationship with fungus. So the termites don't even eat their own food.

They harvest food, bring it into the fungus that digest it partially. And then the termites eat the byproduct. I mean, they're just endlessly fascinating. I can't keep a house plan alive. How are they doing that? I know there's so much better than us. Like they're much more talented. And how, how many termites would an ancient hominid have to eat in order to be healthy

and have enough protein and, and really be satisfied? Yeah. So I think it probably works out to, I think I did some calculations where I said, if they're eating 100 grams of termites, they'd be getting a really significant portion of the protein that they need in their diet. Quick question. How many termites is 100 grams of termites? I had to look this up because one, I live in metrically challenged America.

And two, who would know this? Probably not even termites. So the average weight of a fresh termite is around two milligrams. And of course, this varies species to species, worker to worker, but it would mean 100 grams of termites is about 50,000 termites. And the average colony size looked it up, starts at around 60,000, but it can go up into the millions. So termite, fun fact, they outweigh humans on planet Earth by about 100

million tons. So termites, they roll deep and probably every termite in the world has more friends than you or me. And I think that based on some observations from chimps, sitting at a termite mound for an hour and sitting there kind of fishing and pulling them out that you could get about that much. I mean, it's a concentrated hour. It has to be a probably a good active mound for that day.

But yeah, you can get quite a bit with just a little bit of effort. On my door, I'd hang a sign, gone fishing. And what kind of tools do chimps use? They typically, do they just dip a stick in there? Kind of like it's a corn dog batter or what? Chimps, they, it's amazing that actually how refined the tools are. So some chimps will use like a long blade of grass or a stick that they strip of leaves with their teeth.

And just like there are regional cooking trends, like how an iced oat milk lavender vanilla latte might be easier to come by in LA than maybe Oklahoma, which hosts a festival dedicated to eating bull testicles. Different chimp populations have different strategies and perhaps preferences. But some run it through their pre-molars, so it shreds. And then that one blade of grass turns into a lot of basic hair, basically hairs, which increases the surface area, which means more termites can attach to it. Oh, my God, like a feather dust kind of, right?

Yeah. And so, yeah, the more, so it's like a mini broom. So the termites they're going after with this method are the termite soldiers. And again, these are the macro termites termites. And so macro termites have more of a mechanical defense. So the soldiers have pinchers. And because the soldiers don't reproduce, they're actually a dispensable cast. So the pinchers are pretty unilateral, like they bite and they don't let go. So that's why they can then drag them out of the mound, because the soldier does

its job, but it tacks the breach in the mound and then doesn't let go. And the chimps can drag them up. Oh, and so, right. Boned by your own defense. Yes. Yeah. So chimps have like spectacularly like worked around this. And so what people do is they dig a hole into the mound and dip a whole broom in. And it might just be from the vegetation, like grab handfuls of grass.

And so it increases the surface area. So you just get all these termites out in one big dip. And so that's basically what the chimps are doing when they're running that grass through their teeth and fraying it. So they're increasing the surface area. And how long did you study this before you dipped into a mound and like, let's pull up a chair. So I, let's see.

So I started grad school in 2004. And it was 2008 that I was doing my dissertation field work. My PhD advisor told me that I was not allowed to come home from Africa without being able to tell him what a termite tastes like. And I was not excited about this. I was squeamish. I think I got out of it one year. I think he told me that in 2007 and I came home without doing it.

But I had also gotten malaria in 2007. So I was like, I was a little scared of insect-borne illnesses. I didn't feel like eating a termite. And it was just, that's just my justifications and post-fessional. I just didn't want to eat a termite. And, you know, I made an excuse. Did you get a pass though? So in 2008, I was not allowed to come home without.

Oh my God, malaria. I ate one termite off the stick, straight out of the mound, bit it right away. And it just tasted like dirt. You know, like I was all like squeamish. Like, oh, that was gonna be, it tastes like dirt because there was probably more dirt than termite, really. It wasn't until 2014, I'd say that I've like started eating bugs. Yeah.

Oh, so relatively recently, it took you another like six years to really be like, OK, all right, I'm studying it. Yeah. It, uh, so I was totally just studying it for academic purposes, you know, like this was not something I thought was going to save the world. And, and in doing, you know, fortunately for, you know, in time of my dissertation, I had the internet. I could Google things and I would Google edible insects or edible termites.

And I would see things come up about people who are saying insects were a sustainable, you know, future of the food. But all of the kind of clips and everything were kind of facetious almost. Like it was a lot of times like somebody who was serious about it. But then the reporter was kind of mocking it. I can't, I can't do it. I can't do it. I can't do it.

I'm sorry. I can't do it. So that was sort of my first introduction into it. And so of course, like the reporter was telling me these people were crazy. So of course, I thought they were crazy, you know, and so I never really gave much more thought to it. And then in 2013, the UN food and agriculture organization came out with a big statement, say, like detailing the benefits of insects as food, saying,

if we need to feed this growing population, the 10 billion that we're supposed to have by 2050, we need to start rethinking food. And so they offered insects, you know, as a, as an option. And it got a lot of media attention. And I was at that time already preparing my book. I was in talks with editors about a book on edible insects and human evolution. I was just going to kind of reconstruct the insect portion of the hominid diets. And I was really going to focus on the female forager and hominids.

And then this UN statement came out and I was like, oh, well, that I can now frame this. I can now, this now matters. Like, and it came out. And I saw also on the statement that there wasn't a social scientist. So it was entomologists and agricultural scientists and people that work for the UN and, you know, wonderful, amazing, smart people. But there was very little appreciation to kind of like the cultural sensitivities of this and why don't we eat bugs here?

And that's, that's really rooted in a deep colonial history. And, and so I realized that there was a, I knew a lot about edible insects. I was an anthropologist. I had a lot I could offer this conversation. And so I stepped up and I started going to conferences and I started reaching out to these people. I hosted my own conference. I brought everybody to Detroit in 2016 for the first US based conference dedicated entirely to Insects as Food.

So quick aside, some seminars and last year's Insects as Food Conference include Ethics for Insect Eaters, Eating Insects in Western Culture, a unique approach and my favorite, one that I would very much like to crash in the future, quote, What's Hoppin? Impact of edible cricket consumption on gut microbiota in healthy adults. A double blind randomized crossover trial. If you ever lament that Americans only care about scandalous tweets and cable programs featuring catfights over trays of champagne, just remember

somewhere, maybe in a Detroit ballroom, people are gathered to save the future. One cricket started scone at a time. And so, yeah, so that statement was really that sort of moment of calling that I was like, I can do so much more than what I'm doing. Did you kind of get butterflies in that moment? No pun intended, like realizing like, oh, there's this, this is my perfect in for this. I'm going to be the person that does this. And so at first I just thought as a strategy, like, oh, maybe I'll get a job

because there's people are interested in bugs. It was my first thoughts and then it became then it became my crusade. Then I was 100% on board and then this is what I'm meant to do. And now I'm like, everybody needs to make sure their work matters and start from the beginning when you come up with your project, figure out how you can take it out to the world and to the communities and show that it matters. So it's important to understand early hominids and knowing where we came from is really cool and really fun.

And people love to know about it. But the best way to tell them about it is if we can kind of sneak it into a climate change discussion or a food security discussion or, you know, population movement discussion, all these things that really matter today. Like if we can frame these questions that then people will hear us more. And now as an anthropologist, walk me through in what cultures it's not OK to eat bugs because I feel like it's it's really inverse. So there are more people on earth who eat bugs than who don't, right?

So. Or maybe not. Yes and no, like it's so hard. It's hard to calculate the numbers, but a lot of people eat bugs. More countries have cultures that eat insects than countries that have zero insect consumption. And so the people who don't eat bugs are really the Western the Western world in air quotes, because Western is really hard to define.

But basically Western is Europe and then the areas around the world that's been continually impacted through, you know, colonization and continual migration. So that leaves us to the United States and Canada, especially. But then Australia and New Zealand can get get kind of designated as Western. But countries like Mexico and South Africa that had European colonization and some European migration since we don't always call them Western, but the cities are Western.

If you look at Mexico and South Africa, they don't eat bugs in the cities. And it's a rural thing. So it's in the cities that kind of got Westernized and globalized and kind of play on that economic and political scale. But then the rural areas have been much more where the traditional foods have lingered, and it's all just it's all unique. The colonial history of each of those countries. And so, yeah, so it's Western.

It's a very Western idea to not eat bugs. And so that was kind of where my research took a turn. And I wasn't expecting this. I wanted to understand that more. And the first thing I thought was, well, if Western is stemmed in Europe, and I was thinking kind of human evolution and the first hominids in Europe, or at least the Neanderthals who were well established in Europe. It's like, OK, that's the Pleistocene.

That's the Ice Age. They probably weren't eating bugs. And so if we trace our ancestry in Europe all the way back to Neanderthals, the very first occupants were not eating bugs. I have never thought about this. This is exciting. And so the way you make life for yourself in these Northern latitudes is that you have to eat meat because we can't eat the bark off the trees

or the dead grass under the snow, but you can eat the deer that can eat those things. Were they not eating bugs because it was too chilly for bugs? Or why weren't they both? I think in for the majority of the time, they wouldn't have been available. Like if you think of snowy, you know, glaciated Europe in the lower end of their range, you know, below the glacial cover or in the seasons in the summers. There might have been insects available, like a swarm of locusts that came through.

Locusts. They might have appreciated like a reprieve from needing to hunt that day because there was locusts. But at the same time, they would have been nutritionally redundant because insects are animal foods. They offer us pretty much all the same things meat does. So like if Neanderthals were super great at hunting, the insects wouldn't have necessarily offered them much.

And so I and then I look through European history and there's there are instances of people writing about eating insects in Europe. But it wasn't very widespread. And so that just started making me think that it's a latitude. It's an environment thing. And so just with basic statistics of there's this great database of number of insect species consumed per country. And that came out with the U.N. statement.

And so I just use that. And, you know, using basic statistics, I was able to show that insect consumption follows latitude, it is much more tropical resource and kind of as you leave to higher latitudes, insect consumption reduces. Oh, my God. Yes. So it's colder, fewer bugs chilling on branches like, hello, I am a tiny, crunchy hot dog for you. So people eat fewer bugs.

That gets passed down for generations. So simple. This is so simple, but it blew my mind. So there's a very strong environmental signal. But that doesn't say why we hate insects, right? Just because like you, you're not in the right environment for them and you don't eat them. We shouldn't have the like super strong negative responses that we do.

And so then I started thinking about, OK, well, if you're in Europe and you don't eat bugs and then Christopher Columbus travels to the Caribbean and travels across the latitudes in a way that's never been done before and ends up in the tropical islands and sees insect eating. What's the response? And so I was like, I wonder if there's anything in letters. Like, is there any journals or letters? Oh, my gosh.

They are just like the there is a companion of Columbus who's like their beasts for eating bugs. I can't imagine anything more beast like than these people who eat the grubs and the spiders and the. So just these immediate negative reactions that that's what then goes back to Europe immediately othering this population, which they needed to do and wanted to do because they wanted to take their land and enslave these people to take care of their plantations.

So it was almost like I read it as like propaganda. Like the more we can talk about these people like beasts, the more we can treat them like beasts of burden is how these letters came across to me. Wow. Christopher Columbus, what a hater. I write. I mean, like. Just like every Columbus day, I'm just like, right. This is so awful. So side note, kind of like sending food back because it has shards of glass in it.

Columbus Day has been swapped out in many cities and states for indigenous people stay. Now, this is in part due to the efforts of Lynn Smoky Hart, who is an African American and Lakota civil rights activists and a rodeo hero of South Dakota, who lobbied for his state to change the focus of the holiday, as well as to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Now, did I Google him and watch a trailer for his documentary, Just Bucking Crazy and then find and follow him on Facebook? I sure did.

And so can you. He seems cool as hell. Anyway, Julie's research about why some cultures are freaked out by bugs continued. So I was like looking into psychological disgust and basically like a two year old will put anything in their mouth. Like we have to teach kids what's sanitary, what's gross, what's disgusting. But then we teach it to them while their brains are developing, it then becomes programmed. Like they grow up to think that garbage is gross and toilets are gross.

And so if we go, oh, don't put that bug in your mouth, they think bugs are gross. And so we can take sort of our cultural stigmas and turn them into real disgust mechanisms if we train them to our kids at young ages. So for me, getting over this is going to be a generational change. It's going to be changing our attitudes towards kids putting a bug in their mouth and being like, no, no, no, no, not that bug. That one's dirty. Let me go get you some crickets that were farmed in a facility just for human consumption.

So that's sort of the change, I think, that needs to happen for this to really take off. How often do you have to cite the change in attitudes toward lobster? Your work, right? I, you know, only I don't. Maybe it might be like my hipster thing, like I'm not going to cite the thing that everybody else. OK, I'll take the hit. I'll be the uncool one to throw this in. But lobster, which, by the way, gets its name from the old English word for spider,

used to be food for the poor, just a shameful dish. So lobster would wash up on New England shores in piles, sometimes two feet deep. And it was fed to orphans and indentured servants. There was even a law that prisoners shouldn't be subjected to it more than a few times a week. Anything more would be torture. And then the railroads came along in the mid-1800s. See the Faroequinolegy episode. And they figured these idiots out west, they don't know that this is trash food.

Let's pretend it's fancy. And so we out west loved it so dang toot and much that lobster became more scarce. We were just gobbling it up. So the price went up and now eating these scavenging sea bugs is still a marker of just luxury. So soon this will be the fate of cricket burritos. What also gets cited a lot is sushi, actually. So so lobster is great. But the thing is, is people, because we tend to shell the lobster,

they still don't associate it with a large arthropod. But then now it's reached such an elite status that now they forgive it when it is a full lobster. And but it is amazing how we can just have one opinion about something that's huge and stares at you when it's on the plate. A lobster is an excellent choice. But the better the thing that we do talk about a lot is sushi because raw fish was disgusting. And but we got over it and it took kind of hiding that raw fish in this in the rice, like in a sushi roll and before even getting to their office using avocado that had a similar

texture using the California roll. And so grinding up crickets or mealworms into a powder that you can't see the eyes. You can't see the legs. You don't get legs stuck in your teeth. You can put it in things like protein bars or chips or cookies or just put a scoop in a smoothie, making it familiar, making it foods we already eat, making it fit our lifestyles. And I think that's really the way that this is going to kind of take hold here in the United States. Some other bugs that might make an appearance on menus of the future.

Beetles, caterpillars, bees dead, of course, locusts, grasshoppers, stink bugs, and perhaps even flies. Those that feed on cheese taste like cheese. Yeah, your old dad word right here has eaten grasshopper tacos graciously prepared by Lepidopterologist Phil Torres, plus a whole menu of other bugs, which we'll get to later. Just admit it. You're intrigued. You know, when it comes to getting Americans in the Westernized world to be on board with crickets, do you think that with climate change being such a pickle to put it mildly, do you think that's what's

going to push people over to try things? I, you know, I'd hope so. But actually, I think what we're seeing now. So the wonderful thing is, I mean, gosh, now two, two thousand thirteen was five years ago. So we have five years of people being really excited about this stuff. So I'm not the only one like I have this, like I had 200 people at my conference in 2016. So there are a lot of us working on this. And the thing that we're seeing, I think a lot of the data is coming out, is telling people it's

environmentally friendly is not getting us anywhere. Really? Yeah, I thought that would be such a draw. You'd think so. I mean, I ate a cricket bar in the airport a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, you know what, it's better, it's better than eating beef jerky. And I think and it's not that it's not drawing some people in, but it's just not drawing in the numbers that are going to make the change.

OK. And so I and and there's been a lot of people saying this since day one with all of this. And it and I absolutely believe it is to be true. Is that what needs to happen is they just need to be so delicious that people need it. Like they need to try that whatever cricket thing. Delicious. And that requires having chefs and food scientists and everybody on board to experiment and come up with these amazing, delicious things.

Because, my opinion, no protein bar is really that good. Like we have that. That's a good point. Like we eat them because we have to. It's convenient. It gets us the protein we need right after a workout or we forgot to eat. They think you have protein bars that taste better than others, but protein. They're not candy bars.

They're not Snickers. No, they're just not. And so so those aren't going to change the world. I think they're a wonderful opportunity. I think it it's great that they're there. But what we need is I don't know just that thing that everybody must have because it tastes so good like popcorn crickets or something. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

They make it unhealthy. Yeah. Just to get it on board and get me. Because crickets, they do have their own unique flavor. I mean, for the most part, most animal proteins, we just cover it up with seasoning and flavor. Anyways, but there is a flavor in crickets that's unfamiliar. So according to bug chef Ali Moore, not to be confused with me, Ali Ward, crickets taste like popcorn or nuts.

And Ali site, bugable, B U G I B L E dot com has a whole list of bugs and their flavors. She also throws bug and wine pairings and insect dinners. So you can find a link on bugable.com to her chef site. She is a human delight, this Ali Moore. And having eaten her bugs, she's a great chef. So what are some beginner bug eater strategies? And so finding that deep fried thing that gets everybody on board

and gets you more familiar with that flavor and then you're more willing to use that flavor in other areas of your life. And in terms of the environmental impact, if that is motivating, you say, maybe you're trying to cut down on your red meat consumption, your factory farming, and you want to go, as you said, in one of your talks to eating tiny animals, I love that you referred to them as tiny animals. You're like, yeah, they are just just animals. They're just very tiny animals.

But if you were to try to sketch out the difference between eating 100 grams of insects versus 100 grams of meat in the different environmentally, like, what are we talking? Oh, my gosh. So I always like to my my I use this. Maybe this is my Detroit or in me. Actually, I think it was my husband who's from Detroit, who who gave me this metaphor originally is thinking about the scale of the different livestock.

So cows to pigs to chickens to insects. And they're very similar to like the fuel efficiency of different vehicles on the road. So like cows are yours. You're very large trucks that are just eating up resources. And you're not like the turnover on that is awful. And then pigs might be your SUV and then, you know, chickens might be your sedan and then crickets are your smart car.

Meep, meep. Oh, my God. And so it is everything scales with size. So the smaller you get, the more efficient those animals are at converting the feed you give them to converting that to energy and nutrients for us. Oh, my God. So I'm going to repeat that because it's my podcast. I can do whatever I want.

And also because it's important. And so it is everything scales with size. So the smaller you get, the more efficient those animals are at converting the feed you give them to converting that to energy and nutrients for us. Y'all, boom, we can't each drive a Mack truck around town to run errands. It's not a good look. So crickets and insects are at the absolute smallest end of that scale. The most striking numbers, the one I definitely have in my head is the

thousands of liters of water. It takes to cultivate traditionally raised livestock and then insects are 50 liters of water. Oh, my God. So according to one cricket retailer, chirps chips, one pound of beef takes two thousand gallons of water to produce a pound of whey protein, a thousand gallons, one pound of lentils, 700 gallons of water. A pound of eggs takes about three hundred and seventy five gallons of water

to make soy two hundred and fifteen gallons of water per pound. But a pound of crickets, are you ready for this? I don't think you are one gallon of water for a pound of crickets. Just one, just one. Of course, every farm is a little different. Those numbers are broad. But if we start to dress in tuxes and just belly up to all you can eat cricket buffets, will it stay sustainable?

When we scale up crickets to the level of producing chickens, how efficient are they going to be? And that is an important question we need to ask. And, you know, the people are working on. But but just in general, just in them, their physiology is biological beings is more efficient than any of the other livestock we we eat. Is there any flim flam about eating bugs that you would want to debunk first and foremost? Disease vectors is one.

People always think that they carry diseases and they don't unless they're exposed to them when I offer insects to people or the insects I eat are produced at facilities just for human consumption. So those facilities are clean to the standards of anything, whether you are processing cheese or vegetables or meat, you know, there's a certain standard of cleanliness that we have to have in our food production facilities. And so as long as you get your insects from there, you don't have the contaminants. And so as opposed to if you're wild foraging insects, you don't know where

they've been, you know, you don't know what runoff they went through or any of the kind of contaminants they could have walked through. But when they're produced at a facility for human consumption, they are there is nothing, there is no vector in the insect themselves. And so they're not exposed to any of our pathogens. If they then they're completely safe for us. So that's one of the things that I think is I think people think of them as disease salient as as vectors, and they're really not.

So we have much more issues with romaine lettuce, for instance, than we do with crickets. Oh, yeah. And that is and that's the and the same thing is, is it's like, OK, we're scared of romaine or spinach. It's always spinach, but it's all just coming from the pigs. It's runoff from the livestock going into those fields. That's where the contaminations come in or from cows. And so it's it's our meat that we're eating that's producing that.

It's not the lettuce's fault and crickets aren't producing that. Yeah, crickets. There's not just rivers of cricket shit going into fields. No, anything like there's so they produce such a life produces like fine powdery when it's called frass. P.S. frass is bug shit, which sounds so cute. And it looks just like sand or tiny seeds. And so it's it's easy to deal with.

It's a great fertilizer. You know, it's not that disgusting toxic stream of shit running down the road. You know, so and what about cockroach milk? I'm fascinated by that. Fascinated. I I've not had it. OK, I don't even know if I could have it. I don't even know where to get it. I don't know. OK, I look this up and you can't buy it at Whole Foods or anywhere yet.

But it's a crystalline substance. It's produced by Mama Pacific beetle cockroaches. And it has triple the nutrition that cow milk has by weight. And it looks like silver glitter. According to one researcher, it tastes like any other milk. But once again, cockroach milk, the future. But to me, it was just fascinating. It doesn't bother me at all.

Like I want to try it. It it reminds me so in. Like so in the Bible when they're talking about mana from heaven and it's associated with insects, they're not eating the insects themselves. They're eating a secretion. The locusts secrete like a sugary substance. And so that is thought to be sort of in translations that is thought to be the mana. And so when I read about this cockroach milk, I was like,

oh, they're producing a sugary excretion like it's mana. And so it kind of made me excited to think about it. And then also the other thing is that now I could be wrong. It's been a while since I read the paper about this cockroach milk, but it is it's a sugary secretion that I believe the cockroach mother uses to feed her young like I'm pretty sure it's a food source because there's why else would she be producing a sugary secretion? I like it made cockroaches more relatable because mom is taking care of her kids

in a way that we do and that our mammal relatives do. And so it it actually endeared cockroaches much more to me than than they had than I had before when I started thinking about cockroach milk. I mean, it's just funny that we eat cheese all the time for so many different mammals. But then the idea of like, oh, God, no, right. From what we will eat the secretions of very so much. Give me a glass of milk. Yeah, I'm thinking about it.

But so what insects have you personally eaten? And how were they? They are man. I mean, I've had crickets and mealworms the most because that's what's farmed here in the US. I've had a lot of termites, which are my favorite. But so one they're my favorite because I've had them the freshest. Besides life from the mound.

I've had them like straight from the mound, boiled for a minute, salted. Consumed and they tasted just like popcorn. It was delicious. But I always like to put this like asterisk caveat is that termites are kind of like mini cows and they produce a lot of methane. And so for as delicious as termites are, I really do not ever want to see them scaled and produced on a large like scaled production for human consumption because we're just going to run into the same greenhouse gas issues that we do with cows.

Why are they so farty? It's because of digesting just cellulose dense. Yeah. So it's like the when you break down just, you know, really dense cellulose matter, whether it's wood or grass, that's what cows are doing. And so it just takes so many levels of digestion in the symbiotic relationships with the bacteria that breaks it down.

So it's really the bacteria and the guts that are, you know, creating the gases. So yeah, they have a very similar diet to cows. And so they produce a very similar byproduct. Yeah. So maybe those would be at the bottom of your bug list. Yeah. So it's like they're delicious, but like get them in a marketplace when you're traveling. And I had surprisingly had a June bug and June bugs.

And June bugs are creepy because they're they like hit you in the head and they're basically like a little flying helmet. Like they're just solid, right? But it was a nice crunch to eat. Actually, it was a very pleasant crunch. You eat the shell? Yeah, they were whole. Yeah.

Okay. It's like a soft shell crab. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a spider roll. Yeah. And it's the other thing is thinking of chitin of the exoskeleton as animal fiber. Like we're kind of obsessed with fiber in our diets

because it kind of fills us up without giving us excess calories. And it keeps our digestive systems moving. Like if a large cat is eating a gazelle, it's the bone and the cartilage. And that's fiber for them. Like the same thing that cellulose is in our diet is fiber bones and everything is fiber for these carnivores. And so it started making me think of exoskeletons as animal fiber. Like it's a beneficial part of the diet.

And so how much of it we do have chitinase in our system? We do have the genes to produce chitinase, which is the enzyme necessary to break down chitin. But we don't really have a great idea of how much energy we can extract from it. And so I think for a long time I was like, oh, we don't really know. Maybe insects aren't as good as we thought because maybe we're not getting as much protein or energy because we don't know how much chitin we can break down. And I started thinking about like, it doesn't matter how much chitin we can break down.

We need the fiber anyways. Like it's still a useful resource to have that. So yeah. So Junebugs, great source of fiber. What about like silkworms? Or I'm trying to think the things I've eaten. I've eaten water bugs. Oh, I've not had a giant water bug.

Those are tough. Yeah. Those were a little tough. It was just the meat of it. And it was cold. But yeah, it was tasted a little bit like bananas. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Scorpions tasted like amaretto. They tasted like marzipan. Oh yeah. Scorpions have a very weird like a sharpness to them too. I don't know what the word is. I don't know. But we'll just say unctuous. Unctuous, sharp.

Let's go with unctuous. But yeah, scorpions were surprising to me. Like again, a flavor I'd never really tasted before. But amaretto is pretty interesting or to go more almond. But I feel like it had like, gosh, I wish I had a word for this. Like a tannin or a ting that just like resonated for a while. I felt like it stayed with me. And not in a bad way, but just in a very different way.

Some other folks describe scorpions as fishy. Like a little shrimpy. And again, Chef Allie Moore says they're her favorite. To her, they are beef jerky. Ask. Silkworm is delicious. I've had it mostly in like soups. And what I like in that too is if you have bubble tea.

Like to me, the whole like silkworms in the bottom of my soup is like getting the bubble in my bubble tea like through the straw. So that's to me what silkworm larva is like. So what else has truly grubbed? Oh boy. Japanese beetles, which were just less crunchy June bugs. To me. Oh, Mopani worms are common in South Africa.

I don't really like them. They're like, I've eaten them because I have to. But they're kind of, they're kind of weird. They're the, because they're hairy caterpillars. And when you cook them, the hair kind of singes off. But it's still kind of like particulate. Yeah, bristly there. Little bristly and the flavor, I guess they're just very grassy.

So yeah. So Mopani worms is not my favorite. Definitely. I mean, like you make them in like a tomato sauce. And so similar with everything else, like if everything else around it's delicious, they're just a vehicle for kind of getting the rest of that good stuff in your mouth. So, but the worm itself, the caterpillar itself is not my favorite. I hear ants.

Some ants can taste like lemons. Yeah. And that's the defense mechanisms. If they have the formic acid defense mechanism, then you get a real tangy, lemony kind of effect from them. But their eggs, Escamoles is like a delicacy in Mexico, which are ant eggs. And ant eggs are eaten probably everywhere ants are. So I know in Southeast Asia, they eat ant eggs as well.

And their eggs, like it's crazy. I've only seen it in a video, but they have like a whole like frying pan of these ant eggs. And so the ant eggs themselves are only, you know, a half a centimeter in diameter. But they fry them up and it turns into like one big omelet. Like it looks amazingly delicious. And I've had them in a dip. I've, you know, and they're just kind of savory and interesting texture. And they're delicious.

I mean, the ant eggs are really one of my favorite things. But the fact that they're eggs, like they cook a lot like eggs, like kind of blew my mind. Oh, it's so nuts. There's just a lot of teeny tiny tiny eggs. Yeah, if you cook enough of them, you have an omelet. So this delicacy, AKA Escamoles, AKA Mexican Caviar, it's pricey because the ant eggs are small and they're dug up from the root systems of agave plants. But I hear that it has a consistency of cottage cheese with a nutty, buttery finish.

If given the chance, I would hella try this. Please do not tell the ants. Do you think that the way to get people to maybe curb their meat consumption is to maybe just scale smaller and smaller animals? Do you think? Or we're not going to stop eating animals. We're never going to stop eating meat. No. And I think that the one thing and just sort of being like a reducitarian or a flexitarian

or any of these new kind of words that have come out, which is where I consider myself, like I don't eat a lot of meat, but I haven't eliminated meat from my diet, partially because I go to South Africa and they're like, here, here's some meat with a side of meat. And it's just, it's harder to say I'm a vegetarian. And that's just the anthropologist in me. It's hard for me to be like, oh, I'm from a country where I have the luxury to choose a vegetarian option, but he, so please appease me and give me a vegetarian option. So I try really hard to make sure that I maintain meat in my diet because I just personally feel

awful if I have to like ask for something special when I'm traveling. And, and so I've reduced my meat a lot. And I think the one thing that there's been the sort of resurgence of Meatless Mondays. So Meatless Mondays was, you know, World War two, just trying to get more resources available and in having food to send overseas. But most meat going to feed the biggest army in U.S. history, a series of Meatless Tuesdays went into effect. Side note, they changed it to Meatless Mondays because M's, they're like, oh, duh,

what were we, Meatless Tuesdays is so stupid. And so now there's kind of been this resurgence of a Meatless Monday. And the thing I think it does is, yes, it, it reduces your consumption of meat by a little bit. But by making yourself go Meatless one day, you start exploring. You're like, oh, I wonder what seitan tastes like. Or I wonder what I can do with just cheese. Or I wonder what a vegan dish might taste like. And, and so it allows you to explore because you need to find something to eat that day

that doesn't have meat in it. And you can eat cheese pizza every Monday too. But like it also does encourage you, like you might get sick of that eventually and encourage you to look for something else. So I think insects are one of those something else's, you know, is you're trying to find something to just reduce your impact. Insects are a really interesting option. Because there's problems with our soy products too.

You took a green bean and you turned it into that. Or you turned it into a burger or you turned it into a turkey. And, and it was like how much processing and how much energy goes into that. And is that really more environmentally sustainable? Like I know that we're not, we didn't hurt any animal and that's great. But when we're talking about impact of resources, I'm not sure that's necessarily the best option. So an insect to me is all of the benefits of the animal foods.

You don't have to over process it to get it. And ethically crickets, they already thrive in dark and cramped spaces. So to farm them, you're not really changing the quality of their life that much. Like you are a chicken or a pig or a cow. When you put them into confined spaces to raise them in large amounts. So to me, insects just represent this like the right balance. Do you know anything about the insects ability to suffer pain at all? Like is their ganglia smaller?

I'm really reaching here. No, that's a really great question. I don't have a wonderfully eloquent answer. Their central nervous system is incredibly simplified compared to a higher order organism. But they will evade pain. If you go in there with something hot, they will move away from it. So they are self protective. So therefore they do experience pain and negative reactions to stimuli.

So because of that, they are sentient. So there are vegans, for instance, who will not consider insects part of their diet because you are killing lives. And it's so interesting. I've dabbled a little bit in sort of like food ethics philosophy. And this goes back to like when I was an undergrad. So I'm kind of reaching here. But I have a colleague I want to work with on this more.

But is that some people quantify minimizing your harm by the number of individuals you affect. So to murder one cow is one life, but it produced a ton of food. And so to eat crickets, you have to murder many, many lives. And so if that's how you quantify your impact, insects are not going to be the answer for you. Oh, wow. Okay. So everybody comes to it with a very different perspective. There are vegans who don't eat milk, eggs, meat, and do eat insects.

Because kind of similar what I was telling you about sort of the soy products and such is that there are ethics behind eating soy and the animals that are killed when we're farming the fields and the amount of energy that goes into it. And this is what I was talking about as an anthropologist. Like if we culturally stigmatize meat so much, like I'm a fervent vegan and I'm going to criticize anybody who eats an animal product, I just criticize the world's cultures. Right. And there's a lot of people here in the United States or around the world

that that's the only nourishing food they have access to. And so to be so demonizing of it when people need it, bothers me. And so I think a lot of the kind of entovegans, the people that are really trying to reduce their meat consumption, but look at insects as an appealing option, are thinking along those scales too. Like that this is an important food for people and it really ticks a lot of the boxes of minimally harming life and the environment if you choose to eat them.

Right. And when you kill one cow though, you're not killing just one. I mean, think of all the microbes and mites and insects that live on the cow that you also just killed. Like, you know, so it's like, what do you determine in this life? What is life? Yeah, right. You know, we're filled with trillions of lives.

So how one determines a life might be personal, but according to some models of biology, and you may have learned this in school under the device Mrs. Gren, a life must involve movement, reproduction, sensitivity, growth, respiration, excretion, and nutrition. Although NASA's Astrobiology Institute defines life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. So we're constantly killing things just by breathing them in and washing our hands and cooking our vegetables.

And not to get too existential, but we're really maybe no better than a dirty turn up only to be uprooted to death and roasted. Sacrificed alongside innumerable silent tiny creatures that relied on us for life. Isn't that liberating though? Nothing matters. Tell someone that you love them. Sign up for ukulele lessons. Live your life.

Wear clothes you're not supposed to. We're all going to die. PS, before we do, how much protein do we need in a day? Much less than people think, only about 50 grams a day for the average person. And then you read like protein shakes and it's like 50 grams. And I was like, you don't need that. Most people over consume their protein. Yeah, I'm sure there's some brosefs out there that'll like-

Oh my gosh. Oh, a minimum of 200 grams a day by breakfast. When someone is like, okay, I'm into it. I'm on board. I want to try it. What do you suggest? Do you suggest that they go online and get cricket flour and start putting it into their cakes and such?

Or what do you think? I think that experimenting with the powder yourself is a great way to start. For me, the very first thing I did was put it into a cake. So I take about one quarter of the white flour and I replace it with the cricket powder. And then the cake has like a little bit nuttier of a flavor. And otherwise you would not notice any different. Like side by side taste test, you could tell. But like just serving a piece of cake, most people generally can't tell.

Surprise. And so that's actually where I started. Wish I drank smoothies for breakfast. I don't. I've tried. I need something to chew in the morning. But that to me, a lot of my colleagues that are very committed in insectivores put like a scoop of cricket protein powder into their shakes in the morning or their smoothies.

So that's a great way. So if you're already using a protein powder, just trying to replace it with a cricket powder instead. But yeah, if you eat protein bars, give cricket protein bars a try. My favorite product, people always ask me like, how many bugs I eat? Like how much do I eat bugs? And I truthfully don't. Like let me say, I wish I drank smoothies because then I'd eat a lot more. But the one thing I do eat regularly are chirps chips, which are tortilla chips.

They advertise it as one cricket per chip. Oh, it's so cute. It's okay. But they're delicious. They're just hardier tortilla chips. Like they have sriracha flavor, you know. So like they're kind of, they're just hardier Doritos. And yeah, so they're my favorite.

That's how I eat my bugs is Doritos adjacent tortilla chips. Yeah. So Sidebar, this company by Total Coincidence had just reached out to ask me about advertising, but I told them that they had legit just come up during the recording of an episode all about eating bugs. So just like, don't worry about paying me. And I did ask if they could hook up any discounts for oligites and y'all, I don't make a dime off this, but I just wanted to help them out because they seem

like they're doing great stuff. And I figured you might want to try eating bugs. So if you want to try cricket chips, you can go to eatchirps.com and you can order the five ounce party size bags of their chips and you'll get 10% off using the code oligies10. So eatchirps.com. These are the chips that Julie was just talking about. So free ad for them, a few bucks savings for you and good karma for me, unless you count all of the cricket ghosts that will haunt my underpants.

Are there any movies or TV shows about eating bugs that you hate or love? I hate or love. So there have been a couple of documentaries in the last couple of years about insect consumption. The Gateway Bug is really good documentary and it's available on iTunes and Amazon. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. And over half of that is watering feed for livestock. Put down everything.

Like put down your smartphone. Everyone stop what you're doing. Just stop. Let's figure out our water and our food. Whatever you're doing is not as important as our water and our food. The thing I really love about the Gateway Bug is it shows sort of the reality of the industry because it's hard because to start a life as a cricket farmer, it's uncertain. And it doesn't work out for everybody who tried it.

And but we need more. Like we don't have enough farming for the demand that there is. Like all of the farms for the most part are supplying the protein bars and the chirps chips. And so the straight to consumer price is really pretty high because they need their supply to go to their contracts. So we do actually need more farming, but it's really hard to get off the ground because it is such an uncertain field. I mean, it hasn't gone mainstream yet.

So the Gateway Bug really kind of shows the reality of cricket farming. Like that there's all this potential and all this great opportunity in the future, but it doesn't always work out as you hope it does, as you hope it would. Bugs on the menu is another documentary. And so yeah, I think that there's a lot out there. There's on YouTube, it's called Can Eating Insects Save the World. So you can just stream that. And that's a really good, like he travels throughout Southeast Asia.

Please do not try to write that down while riding a horse or giving someone a close shave. I'm going to put all the links up at alleyward.com slash oligies. They're there for you. Dad just wants you to be safe. There's a lot of things out there. And I think the, you know, there's less fear factory type things out there now. Yeah. They're used there.

It's still there. I still catch it and it just like makes me cringe. I think of like an older white dude in a Tommy Bahamas shirt hosting a food travel show being like, uh-oh, about to eat some grubs. Wish me luck. Yes. And you're like, no. Yeah.

Okay. And they're in, and it's so funny how I hear these things and it just like courses through my body this like rage of like, could you just keep that opinion to yourself? Like we didn't, we didn't need that. Yeah. Um, and this thing is, is like, you know, we have the great loss of not having Anthony Bourdain anymore because he was the most amazing like food, you know, journalists there was because

he was so accepting of other cultures. There was none of that. It was all let's celebrate their food because people are worth celebrating. And so going back and just watching more Anthony Bourdain and, and even if he's not eating bugs, just anything that seems weird to us and just seeing it as food is just, is such a beautiful way of portraying it. So we need more of that. So embracing different foods and cultures, it's not only a better, fuller way to experience

what it means to be human, but also maybe we can stop the apocalypse by eating more grass hoppers. Okay. Onward. Can I ask you some Patreon questions? Yeah. Okay. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a

quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors, why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where Allergies gives our money, you can go to alleyword.com and look for the tab, Allergies Gives Back. There's like 150 different charities that we've given to already with more every single week. So if you need a place to go donate a little bit of money, but you're not sure where to go,

those are all picked byologists who work in those fields. And this ad break allows us to give a ton of money to them. So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. Okay, your questions. Christopher Brewer wants to know, is bug protein the best protein for muscle recovery? Any idea? Well, it is good for muscle recovery just because it has all of the essential amino acids.

So it is a complete protein, so it's as good as any for muscle recovery. Killer. Jordan Wormie wants to know, highest protein insect, biggest bang for the buck in terms of eating the creepy crawlies? Jordan, let's call them not creepy crawlies. Stay away from the C words. Only thing I can really give you is from my specific research, but don't eat termites, don't farm termites, but termite soldier.

So it's really interesting that all the casts have their own kind of nutritional profile. And so the soldiers are the most protein rich compared to workers or the fine grape productives. So anything in its more adult phase is probably going to have more protein. And anything in its younger phase, like a caterpillar or a beetle larva is going to have more fat. So crickets are going to be more protein rich, more likely than your mealworms. And mealworms are going to be more fat.

So from buttery to meaty. Exactly. Just like us. Yes, we get sinewy as we get older. Right, exactly. Rosaria, Neyra wants to know, what are the best bug recipes? I think that the best thing to do with bugs for me to start is to put them in a taco. Because in your taco, you have all the things you already love and are super familiar with.

So your salsa and your guacamole and your sour cream. And so you just toast up your crickets with some chili powder, a little bit of lime, and you put them in there and it's a wonderful place to start. I've had them. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's a good crunch. Yeah, it was a great crunch. It's like a bunch of little soft shell crabs.

Yeah, it was great. Thank you, Phil Torres for that. And for adding cricket powder to your Norwegian wedding cake, which was, I can attest, so good. It was dense, chewy, nutty. I very much regret not stuffing more of it into my purse. AJ Chalabnick wants to know, are there any insect fine dining experiences? There are. And so in Brooklyn, Joseph Yoon of Brooklyn Bugs does amazing fine dining events.

So that's where I've had his catering. I've had scorpions on crab cakes. And he always is garnishing with caviar and really trying to make it an elevated experience. So that would be one example. And then in addition to Joseph Yoon and Brooklyn Bugs, Noma in the Netherlands, they have served it at their restaurant, but also they have research scientists specifically that are their chefs and research scientists that work with bugs. Oh my God.

So easy to get a reservation there. Oh, easy. Yeah, so check it out. Tell them I sent you. P.S., right after this interview, Julie texted me saying she meant Noma and Denmark, not the Netherlands. And I was like, girl, I got you. Don't worry.

But either way, plan on a few months lead time and like $400 a person if you're going to go to Noma. Otherwise, you can Google your city plus edible insects. You're bound to find a few places unless you move somewhere that trends toward testicle festivals, in which case you can order your own ingredients or pencil in a grasshopper taco on your next big city business trip or just move. I don't know. Ellen Alexander wants to know, why would eating bugs be better than say a vegetarian or vegan diet? Assuming you're properly meeting your nutritional needs.

That's a really great qualification to say, assuming you're meeting your nutritional needs, because that's the hardest thing. When you're a vegetarian or vegan, people worry about their protein, but it's not protein as it's listed on a label. It's getting all of those essential amino acids. And so insects offer you all of those essential amino acids in a one-stop shop, so you don't have to make sure you're pairing all your foods correctly. But the thing I think that they do offer is that if your vegetarian or vegan diet is really

reliant on those processed foods, if you're eating fake foods that are derived from a vegetable, the processing and energy that goes into that is extreme. So eating insects, they're a whole food as opposed to those processed foods. So that is another benefit of them. Oh, great answer. Lauren Eckert wants to know, given recent studies showing that insect populations are in massive decline in some areas, do you think insect protein is still a sustainable option moving forward? I love that question.

Yes, I do think it is because if you're focused on eating the insects that are farmed for human consumption, so the cricket populations at Entomo Farms in Toronto who's producing them, that's not at all affecting kind of global ecology and insect loss. So for us here in the United States, eating the farmed insects is not a problem. Increasing insect consumption around the world where it might increase wild harvesting can potentially be problematic, but I don't think that's not going to be the reason why insects go into decline. It's more of the climate and then the climate that changed that we're inducing or at least

contributing to, that's the problem. Mae Jernigan wants to know, I was told by an entomologist that Goliath beetles taste a little muddy and also a bit like lobster and have a ton of protein. Is farming beetles like this feasible for future humans when resources are scarce? Those are some big, those big-ass beetles. Yeah, those are huge beetles. Goliath beetles, by the way, are like the size of a golf ball. They're so large that if one enters the room, it's rude not to say hello to it.

I don't know much about like farming Goliath beetles, but palm weevil beetles. So palm weevils are pretty large and their larva are really large and actually it's that larva is the most consumed around the world and one that you see the most on fear factor. So it's like a two, three inch big fatty larva. This is fear factor. This is what we do. And those are already semi-cultivated. So how people around the world eat those is the beetle lays its eggs in a fallen palm branch.

And so if you're going out and you want palm hearts or palm leaves or anything else from the palm tree that you use as a resource, you leave the branch on the ground and you know when you show up a couple months later that a beetle has probably laid its egg there and now their larva. So that's how it's consumed around the world. So it's already semi-cultivated. So taking that process and cultivating it is what people are really working on now, especially in parts of Africa that are less food secure, where this is a natural resource for them,

where if continually wild harvesting could be detrimental, so if they can start cultivating them on site as opposed to semi-cultivating is one way that they can then kind of control the reproduction of them and have that continual kind of abundance of them. Right. Those things are just like little squirming hot dogs. Yeah, there. I always think of it as like, I haven't eaten one yet. Full disclosure, I've not. It'll be hard for me.

But I've heard that to me they're just big packs of butter. They're just fat is what they look like to me. But then the little beetle face of them apparently tastes like bacon. Oh, a little crush. Yeah. Do people eat them raw? Most people fry everything up a little bit. Yeah.

So that's a nice thing. They fry up in their own oil. Like you don't even need to add anything because they're just used. Because they're butterballs. Because they're butterballs. Molly Mickelson wants to know, what are some of the worst case scenarios if someone were to eat a bug or bug while it's still alive and moving? I guess you wouldn't eat a chicken while it's alive, right?

No, right, right. And the thing is, it's going to die as soon as it hits your stomach acid. It's not, and probably your esophagus swallowing is going to crush it. So it's not going to have much of a life once it hits your mouth. So it's no way to live. No, go ahead. Yeah. Sophie Cousinot wants to know, a friend of mine is super allergic to all shellfish and

claims this means they're probably also allergic to insects. Does that make sense? Are they just trying to find an excuse not to try eating bugs? I think a lot of people had that question. Aki, Henry Strong, Ryan Moore, Gail Klassens, and Sophie Cousinot specifically had that question. Just for the record. That's a really great question, and truthfully, we always say if you have a severe shellfish reaction, you're going to want to be careful around insects.

However, I am not sure it's ever triggered at least that same severe anaphylactic response in somebody who had a shellfish allergy. The thing is, is people might have specific insect allergies. So if you're just a person who's allergic to everything, you might not want to try them. To me, there's less concern of allergies because we do consume insect parts regularly. There are insect parts in all of our processed foods. How does that work? I know peanut butter has just got a whole mess with them.

Big Newton is just like wasp central, right? Yeah. So we already eat bugs. So what that is, is that if you're thinking about things on an industrial scale, I remember learning about this well before I studied eating bugs. I was in high school, and somebody told me about a cockroach that fell into a vat of custard for a Boston cream donut at Dunkin' Donuts. And you just have to scoop up everywhere around that cockroach, because you're not

going to throw out that 100-gallon vat of custard. That's not economical. So that's why the FDA says, oh yeah, some bug parts are fine because we know you're going to try to get that whole cockroach out, but you're probably going to miss a leg. Come on, kid. Whoopsie-daisy, oh well. So it's not economical to start from scratch every time you think a bug contaminated it. So they've come up with a number of allowable insect parts.

And yeah, peanut butter is one of them that has a lot. Fig Newtons, because figs are just, yeah, the insects live in those figs, and you pick it, you eat it. And that's how probably most of our ancestral insect consumption started. Our non-human primate cousins eat lots of bugs just by eating fruit and leaves. So we have that too. So it means that we have the chitin. We have a lot of the insects parts in our system.

And our system knows it's not harmful, and it doesn't cause a reaction. So we should be primed to where insects should not cause too many problems. But everybody's individual. People are allergic to all things these days. Olyph Dochki wants to know, if insects taste like nuts, why don't we just eat nuts? Well, I guess we do eat nuts. We do eat nuts. I'm not exactly sure the, I would say two things.

One, I'm not sure of the complete amino acid profiles of nuts. I'm sure some of them have it, but not all. But two, nuts are pretty water-intensive to cultivate. So actually, when it comes to water resources, crickets and insects are probably a better idea. Olyph Boom. Good answer. Do we eat any spiders while we sleep?

Olyph I don't know. I mean, I'm sure, but like, probably not the quantity that people think. Like I don't think as many as the scare tactics say that we do, but. Olyph I could do a whole 10 minute aside about the research I just did about swallowing spider statistics and the conspiracy theories behind it. But it boils down to, it's a myth. Spiders are terrified of you. They do not crawl in your mouth.

You should be so lucky because of free snack. Come on, man. Oh, Greer Nelson has a question. How are the bugs that are sold as edibles killed? Oh, that's a great question. So this is something I was going to mention earlier is that one. So the insects will be fasted for a while. So they aren't fed.

So they then clear out whatever was in their intestinal system. So you get a clean bug. And then most commonly they are then frozen. So you put them into a freezing chamber freezer, I think we call them. But you put them in a freezer and basically they go into a natural state of hibernation. They go into a torpor and then you keep them in there and then they will ultimately die. So that is pretty much the most common way that they are killed or slaughtered right now. Which when you compare that to mammals and chickens.

So it's more humane but is freezing feasible for the future? That's how it's done most commonly. Like most people starting out that everybody has a freezer. It's pretty easy to get a freezer. But as we scale up, that's getting harder. Like you're losing efficiency as you scale to larger scales. And so farms are looking for other ways that are going to be less humane. And so I want to like really kind of talk to the farmers and be like,

okay, well, that's fine if you're scaling up that way. But can we make a certification or something that lets people know that insects are consumed in this more humane way when they are? Because that's how we're going to get the vegans. Like the vegans, like we're on the same mission. We really are. And so fighting against each other is so counterproductive. And so by having these sort of slaughter ethics,

I think is a way that we can get more of them on board. And then we can have more of a symbiosis in our kind of goals instead of fighting with each other. Yeah, I wonder if freezer, if running freezers is energy. Yeah, I think that's part of it too. Is it a lot of energy? And I think it's the time, you know. So I've definitely heard kind of whispers of we need to change this as we scale up. And I'm just like, but no, that's one of my favorite things to tell people.

What about people thinking that they're like, I'm just going to farm my own crickets, kind of like having chickens in the backyard. So truthfully, I think that's the best idea. Yeah, I think for actual food security, the best thing to do is to control your own food. And the crickets use very little resources. There are like both mealworms and crickets at home farms that you can kind of buy. Yeah, Kickstarter right now.

So Livin Farms, so L-I-V-I-N. I think Livin Farms, they just launched a Kickstarter for their kind of smaller, easier to manage home farm for mealworms. With our hive, you can grow healthy mealworms in a small space in your home. And so to me, that's where the greatest impact is actually going to be. Oh, that's kind of cool. I guess if you have dreams of like owning a goat farm, like you could really scale it a lot smaller than that.

Yeah, exactly. If you're somebody who's interested in backyard chickens, who, you know, can commit the time to caring for them, it's really, and the wonderful thing is they eat our food scraps. So like you're cooking, you cut the top off the carrot, and you give it to the crickets. Like it's so great. And also eat the whole carrot. Don't get the processed baby carrots, just cut, you know.

Oh, that's a good point. Yeah, like you just get like ones like Streamline are processing here, people. But so get the whole carrot, peel it, cut off the top, give it to your crickets, and you just like channeled your food stream a lot. Right. And while they're peeling the carrots, they can always listen to podcasts. Exactly. That's what podcasts are for. Right.

Last two questions I always ask. What's the shittiest thing about your job? What's the hardest thing, the most annoying thing? Anything. Anything. The hardest thing, and this is, I think it's so funny because I commiserate with so many academics on this, and I get it. I understand.

But the thing is, is so our research is funded by grants, right? We get grants. They're like, Julie, that's a wonderful idea. Here's $20,000. It is so hard to use my money. The red tape through universities to have access. I do so much bureaucratic paperwork to prove that I'm using the money, how I said I was going to use it in my grant.

It is a nightmare. And then the hardest thing I have to do is wire money overseas. Like I do work in Tanzania, and so I need to send money. Oh, the university cannot figure that out. And it's the same everywhere. I mean, some are better than others. But in general, it's really hard. Like you would think like, oh, you won this grant.

You trust me to use my own money. Nope. Really? That is the hardest part. Even if she's out there nibbling raw termites, I imagine she enjoys being outside way more. Do you like the fieldwork aspect? I do.

And that's kind of what got me into this is I always tell people that I'm happiest when I'm dirty. Like if I, like that's, I love, like if I can't shower for the week because I'm camping, like that, that's where I'm happiest. So. So many microbe friends. So many microbe friends, yeah. And then if we're all not showering,

we don't all realize we smell. So it, you know. Just acclimate the, acclimate the herd. Yeah. What is the best thing about your job? What do you love so much? Or about entomophagy anthropology. Right.

The best thing I love, my favorite thing. That's my favorite thing about what I do, about entomophagy anthropology is the fact that I get to teach it. I love talking about it. I love teaching my students, I love giving public talks, but I love being able to do so much science outreach and science communication on both human evolution and on food sustainability and, and cross cultural issues

and biases. Like I hit all of these issues that to me are so important with just this little topic of eating bugs. Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, very tiny animals. You're really great at what you do. This is, this is one of my favorite interviews. Yay, thank you so much. I'm now, I'm slightly hungry for cricket.

Right. I am. Okay, so you can find Dr. Julie Lesnick at entomoanthro.org and I'll put a link in the show notes. She's at Julie Lesnick on Twitter and she and her awesome husband are launching a YouTube channel. I'm very excited for them. It launches in March.

It's called Octopus and Ape. You can go to octopusandape.com now. You can also find them on YouTube. There's already a teaser up, so you can subscribe now and then you'll see the first episodes as they premiere. Already, it's adorable and super well done. So more links, of course, always in the show notes and at alleyward.com.

Allergies is on Twitter and Instagram at Allergies. I'm at Allie Ward with 1L on both. For Allergies merch, like hats and totes and shirts and pins and beanies, you can go to allergiesmerch.com. You can also tag your photos of you in your merch with Allergies merch on Instagram. And then I creep those pictures and I repost them. Thank you, Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch,

as always for managing that. You guys are awesome. Thank you, Erin Talmert and Hannah Lipo, who manage the very wonderful Allergies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to Jarrett Sleeper of the My Good Bad Brain podcast and just of general internet charm and hilarity for some editing help this week. And as always, to Stephen Ray Morris for giving the episodes wings.

He pieces all the parts together for me. He is also the host of The Percast, which is all about cats. He's gonna like next week's feelingology, you guys. Get pumped. Now, if you listen to the end of the episode, you know I tell you a secret this week. I have two secrets. One, beginning next week, there's gonna be a few changes to Allergies.

Please listen to a bonus episode coming out in a few days to hear more about that. Also, another secret is I really want to make and play with slime. But number one, I don't have any children. And I just, I haven't found a way to make this an activity that I somehow just found myself in the middle of. Also, it seems like such a waste of glue, but I will watch slime videos on Instagram and just be momentarily transfixed.

Like, what does the squish feel like? What does it feel like? But it's so good. I don't know. Maybe you'll make the dream come true. Can I just be a person who's just an adult making slime for herself? In an apartment? Can I do that?

I don't know. Maybe I will. Maybe I should live my dreams. As should you. Happy 2019. Be nice to people. Kick ass. Eat a book.

If you want. Okay, bye-bye. Hack a dermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, lithology, and technology. Meteorology,

peptology, nephrology, cereology, cellulogy.