100 Million Years of Food (3 page)

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During a morning stroll near the hotel, I chance upon bright red-orange papaya at a roadside cart run by a shy teenager. Her uncle, Mr. Amnat, comes out to chat with me and practice his English. He owns the laundry shop just behind the cart.

“I'm looking for a cricket farm. Do you know where I could find them?” I ask him. Seeing his confusion, I sketch a cricket in my notebook. Amazingly, Mr. Amnat says he knows just the place.

I return two days later to the papaya stall. Mr. Amnat drives up in a muscular black pickup truck. We surge past small markets and tight intersections. Mr. Amnat relates that he used to run a sugarcane farm, then began rearing pigs before settling down to the laundry business. I find it a little ironic that we are looking for eco-friendly insect cuisine in a gas-guzzling truck, but Mr. Amnat says his vehicle runs on 20 percent ethanol. We pop into a market where a woman sells two types of crickets, one light brown and crispy—preferred by Mr. Amnat—and the other a dark wine color and softer in texture. The cricket seller gives us directions to one of her suppliers a few miles out of town.

Out on the highway, rain begins to thrash the window. Mr. Amnat swings the truck into the driveway of a rural dwelling. Next door, some teens are partying with loud music, food, and drink. A bare-chested, potbellied, bespectacled man greets us. The cricket farmer, a retired municipal officer, invites us to the back of his house. Under a tin roof are fifteen or so concrete bins covered with blue mesh. Lively screeching fills the air. Peering through the mesh, I see thousands of plump brown-black crickets crawling over egg cartons and strands of vegetation. Pans of sand are placed inside for the crickets to lay their eggs. The farmer also shows us two pink-speckled lizards with huge eyes and suckered toes, geckos that he is raising in a dark wooden box for their meat.

Considering that crickets produce 50 percent less carbon dioxide than cattle per unit of weight gain and convert feed into food twice as efficiently as chickens, four times more efficiently than pigs, and twelve times more efficiently than cattle, insects deserve to be more popular on menus.
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Since insects aren't warm-blooded, they don't need to consume as many calories as warm-blooded animals when putting on weight. Insects also use up less water than livestock per unit weight of flesh. A backyard operation like this farm, located in a warm climate (insects are small creatures and therefore are more vulnerable to cold than mammals) could contribute impressive quantities of protein for a surging, hungry population, yet the farm could still be readily managed by a retiree. It's hard to deny that edible insects could create a much smaller environmental footprint than equivalent-sized portions of meat, especially in densely populated countries that don't have space for rearing bigger livestock.

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To help me make sense of insect cuisine, I return to Bangkok and catch a bus out to the suburbs, then wander across the carefully cropped grounds of Mahidol University, desolate on a Friday afternoon like many campuses around the world. A kindly, bespectacled woman is waiting for me in the Nutrition Institute. Professor Jintana Yhoung-Aree hands me a stack of documents on insect nutrition as she leads me out to her tidy compact car. It's a short drive to a busy restaurant that the professor says is famous for northeastern Thai cuisine. She orders fried frog legs with cabbage and bitter melon; fried chicken; bamboo shoots and baked spicy fish; coconut shakes with ice and sugar; and weaver ants and pupae in a fiery sour broth, flavored with lemongrass, mushrooms, garlic, and chili. Though my wimpy tongue can barely handle the ant soup, overall it's a brilliant, satisfying meal. Here, I finally taste insects in the setting of a varied cuisine, not merely deep-fried and served as street food, but as the accompaniment to a savory, balanced meal.

We are no longer pure insectivores, and our bodies have adapted accordingly. Chitin, the chief component of insect exoskeletons, is structurally similar to cellulose and may be a useful source of fiber, but primates that live largely on insects possess enzymes to digest chitin. Humans possess these chitin-breaking enzymes in our stomach juices to a limited degree, which means we are unable to extract some of the available calories from insect foods.
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Eating insects has other potential drawbacks as well. Although insects are more dissimilar to us than mammals and birds and therefore may carry fewer of the deadly diseases that infected livestock can pass to us, raw insects can still transmit bacteria and parasites and thus need to be well cooked. Since insects often defend themselves by producing toxins with the help of plants they eat or may ingest pesticides or heavy metals spread by human industry, there's the possibility that insect toxins could seriously spoil a meal. Insect parts are also potential allergens, containing proteins in common with known allergenic animals like shrimp, lobster, and dust mites.
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Nonetheless, as side dishes, like the refreshing weaver-ant soup the professor treated me to, insects are perfectly admissible. After all, more than 1,600 different species are known to be eaten worldwide, which could not have come about if insects were harmful to health. The likely historical epicenter of insect eating was in the Americas, due to the fact that large herbivores were never domesticated in pre-Hispanic times and thus there was a shortage of protein.
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Edible insects are practical in developing countries where meat is scarce or expensive, because insects provide essential amino acids, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, B vitamins, beta-carotene, vitamin E, calcium, iron, and magnesium, sometimes in concentrations exceeding that of familiar meats like beef, pork, and chicken. The spurs on locust legs may snag briefly in the throat, and roasted silkworm larvae might not rival caviar anytime soon, but fried cicadas are astonishingly light and buttery, and queen termites are fabulous wrapped in egg. Moreover, having an interest in insect cuisine doesn't necessarily banish you to the realms of social doom—I have met many people who were willing to try eating insects during tropical adventures. It turns out that you can have your insects and eat them too.

Our earliest primate ancestors were happy to hunt down insects, which, to our diminutive forebears, were like triple burgers with all the fixings. However, the climate started to cool down, moisture levels increased, and the dominant tree types shifted dramatically. A new kind of tree offering a new kind of food emerged on the scene. Long before meat-eating became fashionable among primates, fruits arose as a tantalizing source of calories and nutrition, packing enough fuel to power the evolution of a new kind of primate, bigger and smarter than its insect-crunching forebears.

 

THE GAMES FRUITS PLAY

Heroes on earth once lived, men good and great,

Acorns their food,—thus fed they flourished,

And equalled in their age the long lived oak.

—
F
REDERICK
E
DWARD
H
ULME,
Bards and Blossoms; or, The Poetry, History and Associations of Flowers

When durian falls, sarongs rise.

—Indonesian/Malay saying

If the joys of eating are comparable to the joys of sex, as is sometimes claimed, then fruits—fun, attractive, breezy, and noncommittal—qualify as a summer fling. (By contrast, starches and vegetables are the in-laws, indispensable but tricky to deal with, sniping at us through a fog of flatulence and indigestion.) Who among us mortals would want to dispense with the teasing seductions of fruits?

However, the call of fruits is bundled in a sphinxlike contradiction. Across human history, fruits have generally served as accompaniments to meals, rather than the main course. Despite the seasonal availability and enticements of fruits, omnivorous animals such as bears and birds prefer to mix fruits with protein sources like insects and other prey. Bears and birds fed fruit-rich diets rapidly lose weight.
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Humans also lose weight when their diets include large quantities of fruits.
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Not a great way of losing weight, though: High concentrations of fructose, the predominant sugar in fruits, have been associated with excessive production of lipids, insulin resistance, pancreatic cancer, elevated uric acid levels, gout, cardiovascular diseases, and other metabolic disorders. Bloggers have speculated that Apple founder Steve Jobs's pancreatic cancer was related to his experimentation with extreme fruit regimens. Ashton Kutcher, an actor assigned to play Steve Jobs in a recent movie, was hospitalized for insulin and pancreatic issues after mimicking Jobs's fruitarian diet for a month to prepare for his movie role.
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In the early 1980s, a fifty-five-year-old farmer was admitted to a hospital in Toulouse, France, complaining of chest pains. The results of a preliminary examination were inconclusive, but an x-ray picked up a scattering of tiny nodules throughout the chest. The farmer suffered a fatal heart attack, and an autopsy was duly carried out. The examining physicians noticed a profusion of crystallized fatty acids in the victim's lungs. Analysis of the granules unveiled the presence of chemical compounds (hydrocarbons) commonly found in apple peels. When questioned, the farmer's family recounted how the farmer had eaten
a kilogram of apples every day for eighteen years
, amounting to perhaps five or six tons of apples over his lifetime. Though the investigating physicians believed that the heart attack occurred due to plaque accumulation in the arteries rather than apple consumption, in their report they remarked upon the striking manifestation of the lipid crystals throughout the victim's lungs.
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That an act as innocent as eating fruit could have egregious effects on the human body strikes the Westerner, raised on the virtues of “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” as bizarre. However, few people in traditional societies would think to stuff themselves on fruits. But why is this the case? Aren't fruits supposed to be the healthy food par excellence?

To tackle this paradox, let us first note that around 60 million years ago, our primate ancestors lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C.
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Considering how extremely important vitamin C is to our bodies—it shields cells from oxidation, prevents scurvy, and provides critical amino acid and neurological (neurotransmitter) functions—ditching vitamin C is akin to a rock band firing the drummer. The show can go on, but why take such a drastic step?

There have been other cases of vanishing vitamin C synthesis. Ray-finned fish, a group that comprises 95 percent of the fishes living today, lost the ability to make vitamin C between 210 million and 200 million years ago, while close relatives like lampreys, sharks, rays, sturgeons, and lungfish retain the ability. Guinea pigs relinquished vitamin C production 14 million years ago. Bats ceded the ability to make vitamin C starting around 60 million years ago.
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Many birds in the Passeriformes family, such as swallows and martins, have also lost the ability to produce vitamin C, while other birds in the same family, such as crows and mynahs, still have or regained that ability. Among our primate cousins, monkeys and apes cannot produce vitamin C, but more distant relations like lemurs and lorises still can.
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Remarkably, in all of these cases, only one gene was affected: the GLO (L-gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase) gene, which produces an enzyme involved in the last step of synthesizing vitamin C. When this gene is knocked out,
only
vitamin C production is halted. If other genes producing other enzymes affecting vitamin C had been affected, this would have had much broader harmful effects, and the organism would have been unable to survive or reproduce effectively. As it turned out, knocking out only vitamin C was possible during evolution because vitamin C could be obtained in the diet. Each of the vitamin C–deficient species listed above had a rich source of vitamin C available in what they ate from plant foods, insects, and so on. In these cases, making vitamin C was superfluous to survival, because there was already enough vitamin C to handle the animal's basic needs.

The loss of vitamin C synthesis around 60 million years ago implies that our ancestors must have had access to a lot of fruit or insects in rainforest environments. By 30 million years ago, our ancestors had evolved into frugivores, animals that subsist on fruits. Our molar teeth lost the sharp, narrow ridges that insectivores use to grind up chitin into edible bits and evolved instead the blunt molar teeth characteristic of committed frugivores. Though insects and leaves still needed to be eaten to supplement the protein shortfall of a fruit-only diet, the period from roughly 60 million to 30 million years ago marked the height of a heady romance between fruit-bearing trees and our lineage. Like flashbacks to a high school flame, the vestiges of this passion still smolder within us today.

Consider the case of durian, one of the world's most infamous fruits. Although renowned for its aphrodisiac qualities, it is also one of the most foul-smelling fruits on earth. Because of this, it is banned from public places and public transport in some Southeast Asian countries, even though it remains popular there. I remember vividly the time I lost my durian virginity—I was only twenty-five—under the tutelage of a barmaid who worked evening shifts at the Hard Rock Café in Saigon. Thin and restless, Tham had a habit of teasing me relentlessly. On her motorbike, we picked up a bulky, spiky fruit from a street-side vendor and conveyed the cargo to her friend's house. The women squatted around the durian on a tiled floor. A foot-long knife was procured. A breathless ambience seethed in the room. The women were excited—but at what? On the floor lolled a fruit reminiscent of an explosive naval mine, with a fearsome camouflage-green spiky rind. I sat next to the women, who ignored me, intent on this wretch of a tropical fruit. Tham's friend hefted the knife, thrust it into the durian, and carved out a hunk. Greasy golden fruit was extracted from the thick cavity, accompanied by a stench evocative of spoiled onions, rotten meat, and the menace of coal gas. The women dropped the pieces into their mouths, like hyenas feasting on antelope innards. I managed to eat about a fingernail's worth, then had to stop. It tasted as bad as it smelled, though the revolting creamy paste started to suffuse my body with tingly sensations. I felt like a frog being tapped with electrical wires. I wanted to spit out the durian, but that wouldn't have been polite.