Grasshoppers - agricultural pest or sustainable food?

What if we shifted our perspective from seeing some animal species as a problem to seeing them as an abundant and tasty source of food? Over the next few episodes, we’ll hear three "problems" in three regions: grasshoppers as pests in Mexico, invasive crayfish in London and overpopulated white-tailed deer in the United States.

With a rising trend for traditional foods, demand for grasshoppers has exploded in Mexico in the last decade--but is it sustainable? We ask sociologist-biologist Elena Lazos Chavero about the environmental, political, cultural, and health consequences of Mexico's appetite for grasshoppers.

For more info and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/episode56

Guests

• Elena Lazos Chavero, professor-researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico.

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew

The way we industrially produce and eat food today has caused a lot of harm to our environment. But perhaps there is another way? I’m not talking here about organic farming or regenerative agriculture. Instead, we’re asking a different question: what if we ate the problems we caused?

 Welcome to the nature season of Feed, a food systems podcast presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler. 

Anna Lappé

Food systems are 1/3 of all emissions, creating this climate crisis that we're faced. Food systems are one of the biggest drivers of water pollution, air pollution, biodiversity collapse.

Tania Eulalia Martinez-Cruz

So I think what we know for sure, is that we need to transform food systems.

Johan Jorgensen

But that would require a kind of fundamental systemic shift.

Matthew

In our last episode, we heard calls for a transformation of industrial food systems. In the next three episodes, we’re asking:

What if, in some cases, by simply changing our perspective, we can eat some of the problems we caused and take better care of ecosystems in the process.

In Mexico, we explore the pros and cons of eating grasshoppers, which have caused a lot of crop damage to some farmers. In London, we follow Crayfish Bob as he traps and sells the invasive crayfish that threaten the native population; and in our last episode, we ask a conservation biologist if we can hunt enough of the overpopulated white-tailed deer to bring more resilience to the forests of the eastern US.

All these cases are very different, but they might lead to a common solution. Turning a problem into an abundant and sometimes tasty source of food, but is any solution really that straightforward?

Bernd

Can we do this all by eating them? Yes, we could.

Elena

We cannot think that miraculously an insect or even a vegetable or a fish would provoke a change by itself.

Matthew

First up, we look at who wins and who loses as more and more people start demanding grasshoppers on their plate. 

Elena

Why exactly grasshoppers?  There is a long tradition of grasshoppers in the food system in Mexico. And it was all of a sudden that also grasshoppers became a plague. So the idea of transforming a plague into really a sustainable food was really a good question.

Matthew

You may recognize the voice of Elena Lazos Chavero who we spoke to in the first season of the podcast.

Elena  00:02

I am Elena Lazos Chavero. I am professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the UNAM that it's the National University of Mexico. 

Matthew

Elena has an interdisciplinary background with degrees in biology and anthropology. Lately, she has turned her attention to insects as a possible “nature-based solution.”

Elena

Well, insects in Mexico have a very long tradition in the food systems since pre-Hispanic times. But since like eight years ago, there have been also a lot of discussions in Mexico about the future of food based on insects or nature-based solutions. They have always been consider as a very sustainable food, rich in proteins, a food to alleviate food poverty and insecurity. So I was wondering if that was so. 

Matthew

Elena is part of a bigger project examining the role of insects in the food system across Latin America, looking at Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador. From a quick look, this seems like such a promising solution. Grasshoppers have become a plague or a pest in many fields, eating broad leafed crops like alfalfa, maize and amaranth. So this nature-based solution promises to eliminate this pest and turn it into a source of nutrition.

But for Elena, this question isn’t only about the environment - but also the social, cultural and political dynamics. So to approach this topic, she had to understand the many different meanings of grasshopper, or in spanish, Chapulines. 

Elena

There are festivals of grasshoppers. There is a football football team called Chapulines. Many handicrafts symbolizes the Chapulines.

Matthew

So for some they represent a regional and cultural symbol that they’re proud of.

Elena

What caught my eye and my ear was the insistence of some sellers saying that their grasshoppers were the best, because they were from Oaxaca.

Matthew

But for others, they are a pest.

Elena

And on the contrary,  many farmers in Puebla consider them as a serious plague for many harvests. And even they go with agrochemicals. And even in the 70s, there were a political program from the government that was to eradicate completely the chapulines. 

Matthew

And they’ve also historically been viewed as peasant food.

Elena

Even in many places of Puebla they don’t eat them. They consider them for poor people or for indigenous people, and they are not considered themselves as indigenous people.

Matthew

So the grasshoppers took on different meanings to different people. In one state of Puebla they were trying to eliminate them, while in neighboring state of Oaxaca they were culturally important.  But attitudes changed over time, for a variety of reasons.

Matthew

If you were going to make a movie about this complicated story of grasshoppers.  Where would you start this story?

Elena 

Yeah, I think that I will start the story with children. I was collecting chapulines with the children of a family and just talking with them and just discovering what they knew about the chapulines habits, where they were hiding, how to collect them. Why in these plants and not in other plants. Why in this part of their parcel and not in another one, that was like reflecting a lot of environmental knowledge. And they were 9, 10, 11 years old. So, it was very, very interesting for me to see and I was like, where do we go. And they knew very well. We have to go there and they said why not in the other part. No, no, they don't hide there. 

Matthew

The scene Elena offers here isn’t typical of the way chapulines are harvested and roasted now. So this image of children harvesting the chapulines is like a time capsule. As she’s about to get into, the market for chapulines has changed so drastically, it’s nearly unrecognizable from the family-based traditions she just described. 

Elena

Because the market now has been pushing a lot of massive harvest of Chapulines so that has had a lot of environmental, social and economic consequences. 

Matthew  

You said before that the children were harvesting the grasshoppers - who is doing it now? Maybe we'll start there. And afterwards we could talk about who is eating them and what is the market like, or how the market has driven those changes?

Elena 

Since 8 to 10, 12 years ago it started to grow the business. They started to see that everybody was looking for the chapulines. So then now we have a wholesale suppliers. It is big families that are in the business. Now they don't collect them one by one. No, but they use the big nets that they go in the night and they collect them as if they were fishing with these like massive nets very, very quickly. So they pass these nets over the crops and it’s really efficient as in a big scale. 

Matthew

You sent me a video of the people catching and they're, they're moving around these fields, almost like they would be weeding with a scythe, you know, like they would be cutting down grass. And they're doing this and this really swift motion with this net that I don't know is like two meters long or so. It seems like it's quite a technique too. But like you said, it's not really discriminating there may be getting more catch in that process. 

Elena

They are collecting now many many other insects. No, I was astonished of how many lady bugs, dragonflies, coleopterists, bugs, beetles, bees, even now they told me that even they were collecting sometimes snakes or even rabbits. And so the market started to grow not only by people from Oaxaca but they started to send it to Mexico City. And in Mexico City, itt started to be a super food because it was so nutritious with so many proteins. That then in Mexico City there was a big big demand of Chapulines . So now you can find them in many bars in many restaurants in many markets. 

Matthew

This might be a familiar story to you. Or at least part of it. All of a sudden some new food gets quote ‘discovered’ and marketed as a super food. The production of is incredibly sustainable and have we mentioned all of the amazing health benefits? We’ve seen this with kale, quinoa, and chia seeds to name a few. 

You might only  interact with these food in markets or when you go out to eat. But there’s always a bigger story behind how the food gets to your plate. 

In this case, as the demand for chapulines grew, some powerful actors in the region began to take notice.

Elena

Now the business even starts to be controlled by the Narcos. In the sense that it really has become a big business, and a lot of money involved in that. So they take it even to the United States, for all the Mexican population that is living in the states. So they were telling me, there was a man that told me, “Oh, yeah, I pass 100 kilos, through the border.” I said, “That's impossible. And how to the police don't tell you anything. Well, the migration?” I said, “No, because everything's cooked, nothing is raw. it's nothing illegal.” 100 kilos, I said, “Wow.” So then, you can see that also for the Mexicans that many, from Oaxaca, but also from other states in the United States, then there is a big market there.

Matthew

I'm trying to imagine how much 100 kilos of grasshoppers are, given that they are not a heavy insect, right, So you have to collect an enormous amount to kind of get to that, that mass. 

I did a crude calculation and it’s something like 350,000 grasshoppers in one truck.

So you said like eight to nine years ago, this is where the demand started to kick in. 

Do you know what caused that sort of drive in demand? Was there a particular person or movement? Or what made this kind of insect revolution catch on in this area?

Elena 

Yeah, I think there was a big movement because of the Mexican cuisine as a patrimony heritage. And that made a lot of movements around Mexican cuisine. 

Matthew

So around this time, there were more efforts to conserve traditional crops to preserve different Mexican food cultures. For example there was a lot of discussion and investment in protecting the many different varieties of maize. This movement also included other cultural foods like grasshoppers. Which, on first glance, seems to be very positive, but this national attention had some other consequences.

Elena

It brought a big demand from Mexico City and from other states. Because when I made the map of the distribution of the chapulines, they are everywhere. And now I could find them in a market. No, so that was spectacular for me. Because I said, well, when I came like 20 years ago, nobody was eating them. And everybody was saying, No, that's really horrible to be eating insects. 

Also you catch it in Cancun with all the tourists and all the restaurants that are having this explosion of the Mexican cuisine. They are selling chapulines with guacamole and in tacos, or in tostadas that they will be having like appetizers but that they are now very, very expensive. In comparison of 10 years ago.

Matthew 

So this brings me to ask you about what are the bigger impacts of this? How have things changed? And I want to touch on the environmental impacts, maybe the health impacts, the social impacts. We’ll unpack that one at a time - what are the environmental impacts of this type of harvest now?

Elena

In Oaxaca there was this tradition, but then it started to grow. And they started to over exploit the Chapulines. Now that is why there is a depletion of grasshoppers in Oaxaca. And then they need to bring them from Puebla.

And now in Puebla, now it starts to be also an over exploitation and what they say is that in some regions that there were many grasshoppers, and now they don't find it. So now they are moving to the other state that is Tlaxcala. And now they are invading Tlaxcala, the collectors of Puebla, they enter the parcels of Tlaxcala, or the communities of Tlaxcala in the night and they are collecting and collecting all the grasshoppers. 

So now we can see that really, there are depletions and and mainly this also because of the methods of harvesting because of with these big nets, what they are bringing it is a lot of insects. And when I was like looking at them and seeing, I was calculating that around 60 to 70% of the collect were grasshoppers. But the 40% were other insects. And now an entomologist made all the list because we were collecting and the entomologists she described all the species and she found 22 species of other insects that they were in this collecting system. 

Matthew

Since we conducted this interview, Elena updated me that the entomologist found that the catch was actually 55-60% of all other insect species and 40-45% grasshoppers.

Elena

So in that sense, well, the harvest of grasshoppers is not at all sustainable, but it's still sold as if it will be very sustainable. Because we are only collecting because it was a plague and we are making a service for the farmers. We don't see the other parts that it is not at all sustainable. 

Matthew

So Elena wouldn’t call the grasshoppers from Southern Mexico in its current system an environmentally sustainable solution - but what about the social impacts?

Elena

Now there are a lot of conflicts around the harvest. The collectors enter parcels in other communities without being authorized. So among farmers there is an ambiguity. For some, it's fine because they get rid of this plague,of these pests. But others are against it because the collectors harm and damage the crops. Mainly alfalfa or the Amaranth, that they step on it. And then afterwards, the farmers have a lot of problems to harvest their own crops and they have an important loss. 

So they have been trying to make negotiations. “Well, you come, you pick them, but you give me half of it, or you give me 1/3 of it.” And as they go at one o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the morning, of course the farmers are not there. So then it is a lot of complex conflicts that have been around because what I was asking them, “Who can say is the owner of the chapulines?”.  Many people were saying well, it's the commons. Other ones we say no, we're the owner of the parcel. And otherwise we're saying well, they are God put them down there so I can pick them because God put them there.

Matthew

How are those disputes typically settled? 

Elena  

That's a problem that they are not settled. There are continuous conflicts around this,  

Matthew 

I was really struck by how you describe this way of harvest. And when I think about the consumers, they probably imagine a very different harvest, they imagined this sort of traditional harvest, this artisan type of hand-picked or very small scale. And I imagine also the labels and the marketing around it is depicting this type of artisan harvest. 

How is this affecting the local communities? And you've already mentioned a few different communities. Like you said, the grasshoppers and Oaxaca are being depleted. And that used to be a more traditional part of their diet. So how does this play out in those regions?

Elena 

For local communities that they use to eat - During the season, it was like a daily traditional food that they will be picking all the time. And it was important because it was when there was no maize. There was the harvest of maize it is until October. So the chapulines will be coming to not like replace all the maize of course. But it was an important component of the food diet of daily peasants. Of course, now they prefer to sell it, because it represents more money. And even though sometimes they will - well children, they like it very much.  And I see that all the time children come and try to eat a little bit. And the parents are saying, oh, “no, no, no, I'm going to take them to the market. I'm going to take it to the market now.” 

So then you see a big difference for their own diets. And also, as it has become so expensive. For example, the urban workers that used to buy their chapulines and have a taco during the day of chapulines. When I was like interviewing these consumers, they told me, “Oh, no, no, before I could eat one taco of chapulines daily, now it is once in the week. Because it has become very expensive. And then I  prefer to buy a pasta.” It's cheaper, or other kinds of food that it's really very rich in calories but very low in nutrients. And not as chapulines. So then there has been really a change in the diets. 

So then this discourse about chapulines as alleviating food poverty, it is not so, because the market has been driving this economic inputs and, they are selling it in order to have a little bit more of money. 

Matthew

So Elena sees grasshoppers in this instance as not meeting these claims that they improve food security and provide support for rural communities. But what about cooking and health. Is it providing a good source of nutrition to those who can afford it?

Elena

I think there are two aspects that we have to consider very important. One, is that when they are collecting it. We don't know if really the day before the farmer spray an agro chemical. And then afterwards well the chapulines were eating perhaps maize that was all already with this agro chemical. There is no sanitary regulation at all. So this is one part.

The other part is that before they were cooked as roasted only. They put it in these big like plates and we call them Kamales. And they will be roasted there. And now they are fried, with a lot, a lot of cheap oil. Once they poured eight liters of oil. I was like eight liters! Of course it was a big pot. I said,  “Wow!” Because they were combining it with peanuts. No, because as appetizers they are very, very popular now in the parties or in the bars or in the restaurants to have these appetizers, the peanuts and chapulines mixed. But they have so much oil. They're cooking very cheap oil. So now it is like children before they like it only roasted. And now they prefer this combination with the peanuts. And we see them that they are eating really a lot. But it is all greasy. You have this transformation in the cooking also has an impact in the health.

Matthew

My question to wrap this up is how have your views changed on nature-based solutions after you've spent so much time with these chapulines? 

Elena

I think that with all food we have to analyze the context and we cannot think that miraculously an insect or even a vegetable or a fish will provoke a change by itself, positive change in the food system. We have to see really all these cultural, economic aspects that they will be driving into one or other aspect that we didn't consider it before. Some positive, of course, some negative of course 

So then when we say, the chapulines will be alleviating the food poverty, it was really very naive to consider it like that. And we have to see well, what are the economic drivers that have been provoking these over exploitation for example, and depletion of biodiversity? And socially what is happening? 

Matthew 

So insects or grasshoppers in this case, don't necessarily pass the test as a positive nature based solutions from how they're sold and packaged to what the reality behind the scenes looks like.

Elena

Yeah, I think so that we have to consider a lot of regulations and a lot of things in the sense of, yeah, the communities will be regulating the harvest thing? Who has the right to harvest? When? And how much? It is not that it will be forbidden. Of course not. But in a sense of how to regulate these activities, that it is the big question. 

And also, of course, now that has become so popular in the food diet of the many of the Mexicans, you cannot say no.  And if there is good regulation, and a good information, I think it could be still a good possibility to be eating Chapulines because it's cultural embedded in the traditional Mexican cuisine, but I think that we have to always see and put it in a balance and really working very much in the regulation.

Matthew

I think that's a whole that's a hopeful place to leave it at and that there is an opportunity for them to be produced and consumed in ways that benefit, perhaps health and environment but in the present form, it needs some work to get there. So, Elena, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Elena 

It was a big pleasure, Matthew, thank you very much for the invitation .

Matthew

A big thanks to Elena Lazos Chavero and to you for listening. Next week we’ll look at Crayfish.

Since this year, TABLE has expanded its collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University to the Americas. We now welcome the University of the Andes in Colombia, National Autonomist University of Mexico, and Cornell University in the US. You can follow our work by subscribing to our newsletter Fodder. This episode was edited and produced by me, Matthew Kessler. Music by blue dot sessions.