The question that I get asked the most is: How did you become interested in starting a project about eating insects? I don’t think it was necessarily a single moment for me, but rather an accumulation of things—surging food movements, exposure to cultural practices through personal travels and various media outlets, self-reflection, and my personal relationship with insects. I’ve been fascinated and compassionate with insects ever since I was a kid. Whenever it would rain, I would pick up any earthworms I found on the sidewalk or street and place them into a nearby grassy area so it would lessen the chance for them being stepped on or ran over, which I still do until this day.

I have moved beyond the sandbox and learned about different cultural practices through various media and while traveling around the world. I learned that other cultures eat insects, but was curious as to why ours doesn’t, which led me to begin thinking about how we select, accept, and adopt cultural identities. I began to reflect how I identify past and current self. What changed? How did my moving from the Central Valley suburbs of Fresno, to the Northern Californian college town of Davis, to the metropolitan coastal city of San Francisco influence me? How do we identify ourselves with familiar and unfamiliar people and cultures? We all exist in the same system, but there are drastic disconnects between peoples, much like our relationship with insects. We may be easily dismissive with things we are not familiar with because the unfamiliar challenges our identities, and thus causing identity anxieties.

These thoughts rolled around my head for quite some time. In my first semester of graduate school, I was asked to come up with a personal sustainability project. Of course, I thought of bugs. It turns out that farmed edible insects are extremely efficient—they have a extremely short gestation rate, and take less resources to produce than traditional livestock. Insects compete in nutritional value with other food sources, plus they can be eaten whole. I saw this as a great opportunity to finally turn these thoughts into actions. I learned a new word—enthomophagy, the consumption of insects. I initially focused on the nutritional and environmental benefits of this diet, but I became more and more interested in the practice from a cultural perspective.

For my thesis I explored the ways in which branding can be used as a tool to help people learn to think differently about insects as food. I feel that, in order for entomophagy to take off, it needs to have an active and supportive grassroots following. A culture of entomophagy needs to be formed. All these years later, I still love insects—my passion for them has brought me here, and keeps me excited about all the ways in which we can benefit from eachother. The only thing that has changed in my relationship with insects is that now I eat them. My ability to feel empathy with these creatures that sit on the bottom of the food chain and at the same time to eat them, has allowed me to take on the role of the mediator between insects and a larger audience.

I hope to continue working on the complex challenges in promoting entomophagy, as well as collaborating more with others to understand it—but more importantly in the larger scope, I hope by introducing this practice to people, we can all learn more about ourselves and raise larger questions. I’d like to hear your stories and what all you out there think. Thanks for reading!