100 Million Years of Food (2 page)

One problem with this strategy is that many people don't know what their ancestors ate. In
100 Million Years of Food
, we'll venture through the major stages of food history, from fruits, meat, starches, alcohol, and dairy to aquaculture and genetically modified crops, explaining why we ate various foods and the impact these foods have on our health. First, though, we'll step back a hundred million years in time and consider a food that some of our most distant ancestors evidently relished: insects and their creepy-crawly kin. Good enough for our ancestors—and good enough for us?

 

THE IRONY OF INSECTS

The supreme irony is that all over the world monies worth billions of rupees are spent every year to save crops … by killing a food source (insects) that may contain up to 75% of high quality animal protein.

—
M
.
P
REMALATHA ET AL.,
“Energy-Efficient Food Production to Reduce Global Warming and Ecodegradation: The Use of Edible Insects”

If you eat that ant, I'll never kiss you again.

—Ex-girlfriend during camping trip

Few books advocating ancestral diets bother to mention bugs. This is rather strange, because bugs were once a major source of calories for human societies. It's a shame that so many people in industrialized societies today are repulsed by eating insects, because insects can be an excellent source of nutrition and eminently eco-friendly as well. On the other hand, insect cuisine has its drawbacks, which enthusiasts tend to gloss over. To understand what eating insects represents to our species, it's illuminating to step back in history, to a time when our ancestors licked their narrow muzzles in eager anticipation of a bug feast.

If you and I had been born 100 million years ago, we would have leapt from tree limb to tree limb in the depths of a humid tropical forest, scouring the leafy shadows for our favorite foods: skittery bugs that yielded a satisfying squirt of fat and peanutty protein when eaten.
1
There is some debate about whether our insectivore ancestors lived in Southeast Asia or Africa,
2
but during a recent visit to Vietnam, my inner early primate had me longing for grubs, so …

I post a notice on a social networking site for travelers: “Hello, I'd like to try eating insects at a restaurant in Saigon. Does anyone know of any places that serve insects or want to join me?” Within hours I have collected suggestions for restaurants that serve insects, and even a handful of intrepid dining companions. I scribble down contact information in my little brown notebook and head out the hotel door.

Phung Vong, a student with a willowy frame and gentle demeanor, is waiting on her motorbike, smiling at me. I sit up front and take the handlebars. Following Phung's directions, we zip along dark streets lined with massive fig trees, then over a long low bridge, a metaphorical crossing to another world. Almost immediately, we are lost. We drive back and forth along a broad avenue flanked by open-air beer and barbecue joints, searching for any signs of an insect eatery—but what would give it away? A peculiar aroma? Grasshopper legs dangling from patrons' mouths? We finally spot a large green and white picture of a jaunty cricket backlit by fluorescent white tubes:
REC REC
reads the sign, an allusion to the sound emitted by a cricket, in Vietnamese. By this point I am ravenous and ready to feast, even if it means tucking into a pile of jagged limbs, wispy antennae, and splayed wings.

Our fellow diners arrive on another motorbike; it turns out they were also lost. I'm curious to see what type of people gravitate to an open request for eating insects. We are joined by Nhat, a soft-spoken tourism company employee, and Andi, an Indonesian backpacker with flowing beetle-black locks. Nhat and I select live palm worms in fish sauce from the menu—seventy-five cents for each one.

Andi shakes his head vigorously when asked if he will eat insects. “Just chicken for me!” He met Nhat a few hours earlier through the Internet and has tagged along for the visual experience—he extracts a hefty DSLR camera from his bag—not the culinary experience. The two palm worms are brought in separate bowls, still alive, wriggling fiercely in a bath of turpentine-colored fish sauce with a few slivers of chili. The glossy brown heads of the grubs, the larvae of a weevil that infests palm trees, glisten like popcorn seeds; the wriggling abdomens have pale rubbery ridges. The owner of the restaurant, chubby and affable, comes out to instruct Nhat and me: we are to grasp the heads, pull off the fat white bodies with our teeth, and discard the heads, taking care that the larvae do not nip our tongues with their formidable pincers in the process. Biting down on squirming larvae seems barbaric, but my brain is starting to swim due to hunger, and the fish sauce is muskily aromatic. How bad could their fat glistening bodies taste? And am I not a direct descendant of insectivores, albeit roughly 100 million years removed?

I pick up my grub with chopsticks, examine the wriggling form at the end, then seize it carefully between my front teeth, taking care to keep the gnashing mandibles away from my tongue. A quick yank, and then my mouth tingles with a creamy infusion, pleasing in a mayonnaise-y way, especially in my famished state. I drop the decapitated head back into the bowl of fish sauce.

“Mmm! That was good!” I announce to the table.

Andi regards me with horror and newfound admiration.

Nhat's turn. Her hands wobble as she picks up the wriggling larva in her chopsticks. She puts it back down in the sauce, picks it up again. Breathes in deeply, out, in, closes her eyes, opens them again. The chopsticks quiver like guitar strings, but they travel upward, arduously, eventually delivering the squirming worm coated in rank-smelling fish sauce into her mouth, her teeth closing gingerly over the silk-white flesh just behind the bulbous head. Now it's my turn to admire Nhat.

The next dish is a monstrous fried centipede. It's all mine. No one else shows any appetite for it, not even brave Nhat. But why? If previous customers had fallen sick or died after eating it, the restaurant would have banished the centipede from the menu, right? I pick up the centipede by the tail. Although thoroughly fried, it sways back and forth in my hands like a wooden snake. If one squints one's eyes, the centipede could pass for a long, skinny tiger prawn. But my appetite and resolve are rapidly ebbing.

I bite into the centipede. The head is not bad, not much worse than eating shrimp skin. The middle section, however, is utterly vile and bitter. It is hard to resist spitting the whole thing out. No wonder these creatures slither about the forest floor with such impunity.

*   *   *

Insects were once a significant part of the diet in Southeast Asia, but under the influence of the French and Americans, they were increasingly omitted from Vietnamese cuisine. In Saigon, a megacity teeming with 7 million inhabitants, I can find only two restaurants whose menus feature insects and their ilk, such as scorpions and centipedes. What does this say about insect cuisine? Are insects such miserable fare that only poor people, dim-witted anthropologists, and daredevils eat them?

Thailand was never completely overrun by a European empire, in part because its rulers were able to exploit a rivalry between the English in Burma and the Malay Peninsula and the French in Indochina and thereby stave off invasion. As a result, the Thais were more successful at retaining their traditions, including insect cuisine. To see how insects are used in the context of a meal, rather than as novelty snack items at a beer house, I book a ticket to Thailand.

A few weeks after my Saigon insect excursion, I arrive late at night in Bangkok. I head by train to the Nasa Vegas Hotel, an imposing warehouselike structure on the outskirts of the city, conveniently located by the Metro line and priced within my modest budget. Since I have arrived on a Friday night, all the cheapest rooms are taken, but luckily I can afford to splurge for a single night in an Executive Deluxe room, exactly the same size as the budget rooms, but with swankier bedspreads and more solid doors. It's a good thing I don't believe in ghosts, because the Nasa Vegas is a ghost-friendly establishment: murky, tunnellike hallways, layers of dust, long sweeping staircases that few bother to ascend or descend except me. At four in the morning, I'm awakened by the sound of women laughing shrilly in the hallways.

The next evening, rain and wind lash the streets. I'm standing on the edge of a Bangkok boulevard on a Saturday night. I don't speak ten words of Thai, but I've always understood that if you keep your head up, smile, and look on the bright side, things are bound to turn out well. While tourists bumble about Bangkok in search of boobs, booze, and bargains, I slip into a convenience store. “Where can I find the bus to Khao San?”

The clerk and the people on the street offer conflicting directions—stand here, go there, look for this or that bus. A thin, pale, fashionable young woman notices my bewilderment. “Come with me!” she says, introducing herself as Milk. I obediently fall in behind her like a pup clinging to the heels of its mother. Milk says she was heading to Khao San anyway and offers to guide me to my destination. We board a bus, disembark at a mall, find one of Milk's friends in the crowd—another thin, sharp-featured girl with heavy makeup—then catch another bus to the tourist ghetto of Khao San. We thread through the drunken tourists and six-foot transgenders as a girl in a bar belts Adele's “Someone Like You” with enough angst to rip a heart to shreds. Across the passageway, adolescent girls twirl about on metal poles, their expressions distracted. Milk leads me through the throngs to a cart with a display of glistening fried insects. The seller is dark, plump, dressed in the plain manner of a country woman. Milk is proud of the bamboo-worm caterpillars. “I really like these! I used to eat these a lot when I was young,” she exclaims.

The stringy white caterpillars could pass for chicken jerky in texture and taste. There is something incongruous about Milk, the paragon of hip Thai youth in her blue jeans, shimmery blouse, and brilliant makeup, tucking into a cup of fried caterpillars. Is this what the historians mean when they say that Thailand charted a course between the demands of the West and her own proud heritage?

I shell out some Thai baht for giant water bugs and black water beetles, each one about an inch long. Giant water bugs and water beetles were among my favorite pets during my childhood, when I collected them from puddles and ponds and raised them in bottles and aquariums. Eating and swallowing them, even after a good chew, is another matter. There are a lot of sharp edges to contend with. I feel like I'm snacking on disposable razor blades.

Milk takes me to meet two of her male friends, who order spicy green curry and fried noodles with pork and chicken from a stand. I watch the men hungrily shovel food down. Perhaps the insect carts in Khao San are a novelty after all, just like the palm worms and centipedes in Saigon. Milk and her friends look like they are on a happy double date. They say they will party and drink a lot that night. Feeling out of place and tired, I excuse myself from the group. Milk leads me to a taxi stand and tells the driver to take me to the Nasa Vegas. As the taxi pulls away, I wave, but she has already turned to rejoin her friends, the memory of the insect-eating tourist perhaps already fading from her thoughts.

The next day, I take the Metro, setting off around five in the afternoon. The girl next to me moves to another seat. I can't blame her. My shirt smells horrid because I tried to wash and dry my laundry in the room—the hotel laundry services were exorbitantly priced, with a load of laundry costing the same as a night's stay. Arriving at the vast Chatuchak Market, I wander along the stalls, the shops shuttering up in the late evening as rain sprinkles down. I find two little carts with some shriveled crickets and grasshoppers and not many customers. I eat a fried egg perched on a heap of noodles, sitting alone in the dark on a curb, feeling dispirited.

*   *   *

I read that insects are popular in northeastern Thailand, so a few days later I take a quick flight to the Thai–Laos border. My hotel room is airy, clean, cheap, quiet—a world away from the smog of Bangkok. Udon Thani is transected by narrow lanes traversed by trucks, cars, motorbikes, and elementary and college students. The local cuisine is sour, bitter, dazzling hot. By a stroke of good luck, while I'm struggling to communicate my inquiries about food in a market, a Thai American passerby rescues me from my linguistic abyss. Amy, who grew up in California, is in Udon Thani to start an educational consulting business. I tell her about my quest for insect foods. She offers to take me to Rajabhat University to find people who can assist me with finding local insect cuisine. With the help of Amy and staff and professors at the university, I end up with the cell phone number of a Vietnamese student who is doing his master's degree at the university and is fluent in Thai. He and I arrange to meet that evening in front of the university gates.

“Elder Brother Stephen!” Seven
P.M.
sharp, a young man pulls up at the university gates on a beat-up motorbike. He has a narrow face that is dashing in a daredevil way. A current of nervous energy seems to run from his toes to his fingertips. He hands me a helmet. “I borrowed the bike from a friend.”

Hoang, from the hardscrabble north-central region of Vietnam, was sponsored by his seafood export company to study in Thailand. He plays tennis and teaches Vietnamese. When his face creases into a soft smile while taking a call from a Thai student, I guess that the local girls must flock around him.

Hoang ferries us to a gleaming downtown night bazaar. We come across stalls with lavish displays of glossy black water beetles, giant water bugs with wicked pincers, several species of grasshoppers and crickets, ants and pupae. The insects are fried in vegetable oil and seasoned with soy sauce. The grasshoppers have a solid crunch to them. The spurs on the legs take some getting used to. The mole crickets, with stubby arms, are lightly chewy with a tang. My favorite: ants, pleasantly soft with a bit of sour. You have to shovel down dozens to even make a dent in your appetite. When we've had our fill of soy-seasoned crispy limbs and papery chewy bodies—50 baht ($1.60) for a plate of ants, crickets, and grasshoppers—Hoang folds the remaining insects into a napkin, to take home to his friends.