 What a cool way to kind of integrate all of these different steps of environmental protection. I love it. Okay, that was very quick recap. We are going to throw back to Lund where we are already getting started with our second presentation for the morning. Her recent and delightful book, Edible Insects and Human Evolution, examines the role insect consumption played in the diets of our earliest human ancestors, as well as the role it continues to play in contemporary human societies around the world today. Dr. Lesnick is also known for her work on edible insects as a potential solution to the global food and nutrition crisis that many countries currently face. As our planet's human population continues to increase exponentially, and global food production and distribution are increasingly disrupted by international conflict and extreme weather related to climate change, among other things, meeting this challenge will require us to overcome our entomophobia or our fear of insects. And this is where Dr. Lesnick has been playing an important role by engaging the public through radio talk shows and edible insect events and providing expert testimony for government policymaking relating to insects as a safe food source. The title of her talk today is Latitude and Attitude, Environmental and Cultural Impacts on the Perception of Insects as Food. Won't you please join me in welcoming Dr. Julie Lesnick. Thank you so much. It's just such an honor to be here and an honor to follow Dr. Kelomu. So to start, I actually want to acknowledge land acknowledgments to get us started. At the beginning of the conference, we heard a wonderful land acknowledgment. President Bergman acknowledged the Dakota people as the stewards, as a traditional stewards of the land we are gathered on today. And we even got to hear the words and the song of the Dakota people thanks to Everett Black Thunder. And so the point of land acknowledgments is to try to reverse invisibility. We have this sort of notion that with colonization here, that with removing indigenous peoples off their land and by forcing assimilation through boarding schools that their cultures have disappeared. And that is not true. There is rich, diverse indigenous cultures. And so the least we can do is acknowledge it. And so simply anywhere you are here in the United States, you are on native land. And acknowledging it is the bare minimum. It's the start of a conversation. In order to reverse invisibility, we need to provide more opportunity and we need to do so much more. And so just as a simple way to start, this image here is actually a sticker from a clothing brand, a native-owned brand. And so one of their lines is you are on native land. And so I encourage you to paste these stickers everywhere and wear their t-shirts and start forcing more people to have these conversations. But they're just a streetwear business. They have amazing other lines that are not as in your face. So to my talk. To start, I will go over a little bit about edible insects and human evolution. Really just have time to touch on two kind of key time points. Then we'll get into the latitude and attitude, which is my work on trying to understand our attitude towards edible insects here in the United States. And then lastly, try to understand the role of insects in the future of food. So starting with edible insects and human evolution. So in my book that has this title, I go through the stages of human evolution and I try to reconstruct what it looked like, what the insect diet looked like at each of these stages across the course of our evolution. Now this diagram here though that you're familiar with is really not an excellent representation of evolution. It is much better to think of it like this. And even this is a way over simplification. It isn't just branching, it's more weaving and a braided river is another metaphor we're using, continual population, mixture and integration over millions of years. We don't bucket ourselves into beautifully easily defined species and definitely not ones that we can name millions of years later. So one of the issues with this diagram is that the chimpanzees on the left and the humans on the right are both alive today. And that these other stages that it represents are extinctions that happened over the course of human evolution. Somewhere over the course of the six million years that both humans and chimpanzees have been independently evolving. And one thing that we have in common amongst other things with chimpanzees is that we both use tools to forage for termites. And so it goes to reason that if chimpanzees use tools and we use tools that this last common ancestor and across these stages of human evolution they may have been using tools to forage for termites or at least eat other insects. And so to give you an idea of what that intelligence looks like I'm gonna give you a quick video of a chimpanzee in the Republic of Congo. And so this is Maya and you'll see she approaches with a stick and she's gonna use this stick and she's going to perforate open a hole in the nest that's gonna lead to a tunnel. And then what you're gonna catch here that you might not have noticed is she has a second tool in her mouth and she's grabbing that and she's threading it in. And then the termites will bite the end of the tool and she'll use that as an opportunity to pull them out and eat those termites. So this is a very complex task. It involved two tools. It involved pre-planning. She showed up with both tools. She knew exactly what she was doing and this gets passed on generation to generation in these populations of chimpanzees. So the one time point I wanna start with is about 1.8 million years ago that we are at this time this is a genus Australopithecus but we also have the origins of the genus Homo around this time and at sites it's actually kind of difficult to tell who is who and who's doing what with what artifacts. And so at this time we are definitely bipedal. We are very human-like in a lot of ways but we still have a lot of retained more ape-like characteristics. And so one site is Swartcrums in South Africa where we have these bone tool artifacts. They were, they're clearly some sort of digging implement based on sort of the polish and wear pattern that is isolated on one end. And they preserve scratches that show that they were digging into something. So researchers had done a bunch of experiments with their own bone tools on different things like stripping bark off trees, digging in the ground for tubers, digging into termite mounds and they found the best match of the wear pattern of the artifacts looked most similar to the tools that were used to dig into termite mounds. And so this is really the research that launched me into the direction I went. I followed up these experiments in my own dissertation research and I really started looking more at the termites as a food source. If we know these tools were being used or suppose they were, what can we actually get nutritionally from those termites? So that's really what I focused on. But more recently, at another fossil hominin site, so Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, right around the same time period, now we're at 1.7 million years ago, we have a, part of the reason why Olduvai is famous is that the fossils are so well preserved. And that's because of a volcanic ash layer that fell over. So one, the catastrophic death of whatever that volcanic ash killed, but anything that was already there then got extra preserved with this ash. And so that same tuft of ash just beautifully draped over this ancient termite mound. And so we are currently analyzing it. It's amazing the organic materials and what we can analyze in it. We can name the termites to the genus level 1.7 billion years ago. And we're just still teasing through the data and trying to figure out what other beautiful things we can learn about the ecosystem back then. But we know that hominins use tools that look like they were used to termite mounds. We know they were walking around where the termite mounds were. We don't have evidence they put them in their face, but this is about as best we can do in paleoanthropology to reconstruct what was going on in the past. And so it seems that termites were a valuable resource. So that time period here, now we're zooming out. So this is humans within all of primates. And so we were just up there in the top right looking at kind of the last common ancestor between us and chimpanzees. But I want to shift down here. This is about 50 million years ago. And at this point in our evolution as primates, we were all insect specialists. And so this primate here, the Tarsiers, if you notice the branch goes all the way straight down. Like there's not branching from it. So Tarsiers today very much resemble this primate that lived 50 million years ago. They're different time changes, but there are a lot of fundamental similarities. So this adorable bug eater here, something just like it, is part of our collective evolutionary legacy. We come from insect eaters. So we know that insects are primate food. We know they're an ape food. We know they're a hominin food. And so today we know that they are food for billions of people around the world. And so looking at this, this is data, this map is from 2015. It is tough to get all of the data in one place. I'm sure it's even been updated since then. But with what we have, you can see that in this data that is number of insect species consumed in the country, that the darkest filled countries, the ones with the most insect consumption, tend to be more equatorial, more tropical. And so when I first saw this image, it reminded me of this. This is a phenomenon we have in ecology called the Latitudinal Diversity Gradient. And it basically is that there is more biodiversity at the equator, and then as you get further away from the equator, it is going to gradually reduce. This is due to a lot of different things, just the quantity of sunlight, different weather patterns, a lot of different factors. It's not super cut and dry, but we definitely see this biodiversity gradient. So I wanted to study this. I wanted to kind of test it statistically to see if I could see this gradient in insect consumption patterns around the world today. So in doing this test, I also added some other variables in there to kind of ask other questions about insect eating patterns. So starting with the basic to test this gradient, I need to know the number of insects consumed, but also a centroid latitude or some mark of latitude for that country. And then I looked also at area and population as like possibly like more space, more people, more chance someone's eating insects as a possible hypothesis. I then used percentage of farmed land because there is this sort of idea that once we became agricultural, insects became pests and we stopped seeing them as food. And so that was sort of an explanation that I'd been hearing about why we weren't eating insects here. And it didn't really hold up to observations I've had around the world, but I wanted to statistically test this. And then lastly, gross domestic product as a measure of wealth. Are wealthier countries avoiding eating insects because they have better choices available to them? And sort of this idea that insects would only be consumed as a fallback food. So going and doing these analyses, what I found is that the significant correlations between insect consumption and these variables existed for latitude and also for gross domestic product. It was very strong for latitude. The logistic regression could predict insect consumption 80% of the time, which was a really strong result. And so we're gonna look through that. We're gonna look at the gradient a little bit and then we'll get back to gross domestic product. So in order to test a gradient, the predictions that you make is sort of, if you're eating insects between zero and 10 degrees latitude and then looking at insects between 10 and 20 degrees latitude, like those two areas right next to each other might not look very different. You might not see significant differences. You also are arbitrarily making those boundaries. So I tried to make sure in my statistics that I changed that boundary so that I didn't have an artifact of how I measured and cataloged my data. But then you should expect that these groups that are further away, so between zero and 10 and maybe 30 and 40 degrees latitude, you should expect significant differences between those groups. So adjacent groups shouldn't be different from each other in a gradient and more distant groups should be different from each other in a gradient. So I'm gonna show you my data slide and to prep you for that, what we're gonna look for is there should be asterisks suggesting the significant differences in gray shaded boxes and the bolded outline boxes should not have asterisks in them. So the bold outlined are adjacent and the gray are more distant. And so in this ugly data slide, what you can see is that there are, the pattern really holds, but there are just these three. So really you don't see, you don't see many asterisks in those bold boxes and the gray have a lot of asterisks and that holds up to prediction. But there are these just three little asterisks that are kind of out of place. And so of those 30 paired tests, three of them resulted in this. The interesting thing about them though was all three of those that were kind of outside of prediction fell between 40 and 46 degrees latitude. Now that is exactly where we are today, right? This is the 45th parallel is the transition outside of the mid-latitudes into more northern latitudes. A transitional environment, we know north of here it just gets harsher. And so maybe that's what we're seeing. Maybe we're seeing that there is an actual boundary up here. Maybe insect eating can't happen past the very easily past the 45th parallel. But another thing going on is that most Western countries are in this area. And so Western is a difficult thing to define. It's basically Europe and then countries that have had continual emigration from Europe and long histories of European colonial history. And so in order to test what's going on here, I took Western countries out of my analyses. So again, trying to work with the best geopolitical definitions in order to remove the correct countries. But what I see there then is that that correlation with GDP goes away. The latitude correlation sticks and that there is no relationship anymore between gross domestic product and insect consumption when the Western countries are taken out. So there's just this artifact, by all of us being in this area and having such aversion to insects, we're breaking the gradient. We've created this sort of artificial boundary in that data. But that doesn't go to explain why we have such strong negative reactions here in the US and across Europe. And so really this comes down to our colonial history. If you think about it, if you think about Europeans, you know, Columbus 1492 and an environment that doesn't foster a lot of insect eating, traveling across latitudes in a way that had never been done before, entering into the Caribbean and encountering people eating insects, this was something that they had to understand and try to figure out and had strong opinions about. The only real associations they probably had with insects as food was sort of either what animals ate or with spoiled foods. And so to encounter indigenous people consuming insects, they had some strong opinions. And so here is a quote from Diego Alvarez-Chonka who is a companion of Columbus on his second voyage. They eat all the snakes and lizards and spiders and worms that they find upon the ground so that to my fancy, their bestiality is greater than that of any beast upon the face of the earth. Over 350 years later, US Senator John C. Fremont, an actual participant in the California genocide, a government-sanctioned murder of thousands of indigenous people in California. And he is quoted as saying, roots, seeds and grass, every vegetable that affords any nourishment and every living thing, insect or worm, they eat. Nearly approaching to the lower animal creation, their sole employment is to find food and they are constantly occupied in a struggle to support existence. And so again, we have this dehumanization, beast-like, lower animal creation. It's taking people that are as physiological the same as us, we're all the same, we all have the same capacities and reducing them to something lesser. And very specifically, we know partially because here we have it directly stated from John C. Fremont that dehumanization is one of the stages of genocide. We have enough data to know what precedes genocide. We know that multiple things have to produce the right climate and dehumanization is a critical key component of that. And so to remind you again that you are on native land, we need to recognize that our aversion to eating insects is not about the insects. It is about a fear of looking uncivilized. And that is a definition that was given to us by colonists who wanted to steal land. So moving on to the future of food, which unfortunately isn't gonna go much more upbeat. You didn't know we're in a global food crisis. So the global food crisis is, there are 350 million people suffering extreme hunger. And most of that isn't here in the United States, most of it we can stay blind to. But we have degraded our soil. We have drained our aquifers. Our land is not gonna continually support the food production we're asking of it. And so eventually this problem is gonna hit home and it's gonna hit hard. And we've been fighting it, we've been fighting it hard for a long time, right? We've been buying those green products and trying to make a change. And we're really not seeing those changes. And what we know are learning is that we have this myth that we can vote with our dollar. And it's this idea that if we buy products that reflect our values, then there will be more products that reflect those values. And there'll be more of those positive changes in our society if we just express our voice through how we spend our dollars. The problem is it doesn't work because we're constantly being lied to. Eating organic Doritos doesn't help anyone. It only helps the manufacturer of Doritos. And so we're not giving any data on how we want to see the world look different. We're giving data to marketers so that they know what to market to us because they want to know what we will buy. And so to make change, we have to consume less. And so... So one way we can consume less is to consume things that consume less things. And so in 2013, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization was the first to put this data together for us to look at the resource use of traditionally raised livestock to compare cows and pigs and chickens to crickets. And I'm not giving you any actual numbers here because they're constantly changing and you have to account for different methods but the trends are the same. There is a physiological difference in these animals. As large mammals, a lot of the food you put into those animals just turns into heat that we release into the environment. But when you scale down, we are more efficient with our heat and so we get more efficient as you scale down to pigs or to chickens. But then when you get to crickets and insects, they're not losing heat the same way mammals are and they're so small and they're so efficient. The energy conversion ratio of what we put into insects and what we can get out of them as food is incredibly efficient compared to our traditionally raised livestock. So all of the arguments though for the best sustainable ways forward don't change our behaviors. We can make the most rational arguments but we have a lot to overcome. We have this deep history of insects being gross to us and we don't, and the colonial quotes, the 1493, the 1800s quotes still exist today. 2022, as a reaction to this idea of eating insects, Alex Jones says that they're alien to our normal life. This is anti-human and anti-life on this planet to eat insects. So again, dehumanization, still going on. We still use this rhetoric. Not only are we making insects less potential of a resource that can make difference when we speak this way, but we're dehumanizing people and contributing to a genocidal environment. And so we need to be careful about how we talk. We just do. And so one way, a great exercise is just to, and we're all here doing it. We're learning to love insects and learning to talk about them differently and just acknowledging that they are food is a great place to start. The end of this quote I find the funniest though, the idea that it's anti-life on the planet because everything is, we have all of the evidence to say that that's not true. Almost like every sort of life form eats insects. Across animals, right, we have reptiles, amphibians, birds, insects, mammals, humans. But then even outside of animals, we have carnivorous plants can eat insects. We have fungus that can kill ants. So everything eats insects. Insects are the scaffolding that life is built on. And so when we're thinking about ways to be eating, we need to go back to the basics. We should be looking at that scaffolding. And so one of the most efficient diets is actually what you could call, an entovegan. And this is what gorillas do. They have a largely plant-based diet and the only animal products that they consume are insects. And so if you are looking for the most efficient diet, it would be an entovegan diet. I do not have an entovegan diet. I'm not asking you all to go via entovegan. I'm not even a vegetarian, right? But the truth is it doesn't fall on us as individuals. If everybody here left today and became an entovegan, we would not see a change in the environmental output of, you know, and how we're using our resources. This is not an individual thing that we can change. We need new food systems. We need revolutionary ideas. We have this idea of sustainability. You know, it's sustainable food systems, sustainability. And I use the word all the time. But I've caught myself, though, that if I'm not saying environmental sustainability, the word sustainability can also mean a way to preserve your business to make sure there'll be profits in the future. And so many corporations have sustainability statements, but it's really about how they're gonna make sure they still have enough resources so that they can produce their product and make money. And so we have to be careful about sustainability because what sustainability does is just fixes the little immediate problems in front of us. It's the system that's the problem. And so by correcting the system, we need to dig it out at the root. And so we need to start thinking less about sustainability and more about stewardship. And so stewardship is a relationship with the land. This is responsibly using and protecting the resources of the natural environment. And so on a superficial level, they might sound the same, but they're different here. They're different in how you actually interact with the world. The first one thinks about us. The second one thinks about all living things. When I was a student in anthropology and was taught about animal domestication, I was taught it was symbiotic. We couldn't live, the humans couldn't live without those animal resources and that those animals needed us to live. Without us, they wouldn't have the food and the safety and they surely would die. And this was very mutualistic, right? Beneficial to both of us really. And it's this idyllic farm. The idyllic farm you see on the green grocery containers. And so this can exist. You can find this on homesteads. There are people who can call their cows in. They'll come in when they want to be fed, you know, when it's time to be fed. Chickens wait outside the coop to roost for the night. You can see mutualism if you look for it, but it doesn't scale. And I would argue this if we're talking about symbiosis. This is beyond just the predator-prey relationship. Factory farming is parasitism. We had a lot of empathy for that cockroach and the parasitic wasp. And we need to remember to have empathy for the animals that we're gonna have on our plate in a few minutes. And so this is a hard system to change, right? We all know, we've known this for a long time and we just kind of put it outside of our mind because we can't change it. As individuals, there's so little we can do. It needs to be a systemic change. But there, so we need to start thinking differently and we need to start revolutionizing how we think about the future of food. And we can learn a lot from insects. Bees are semi-domesticated. They are literally free range. They are the only thing that are actually free range. They go and they live their lives and they come back to the hive that is safe and they know that that is there. And so we are providing them something useful. And they are semi-domesticated though instead of what we would call semi-cultivated because we have selectively bred them, right? We have selectively bred the bees that are gonna produce more honey, but really they then get to live their lives and we do have this sort of mutualism relationship with them. The most common consumed insect around the world is the palm weevil larva. And these are semi-cultivated. The palm weevil will lay its eggs on downed palm branches. And so people around the world, anywhere in the tropics where you can find palm trees, there are gonna be some palm weevils too. And so if you're going out and you're gonna fell the trees, maybe you want fronds or palm hearts or something else as a resource, you can leave some branches on the ground. And if you show up a few months later, you'll have an excellent harvest of these palm weevil larva. And so the domestication and especially the factory farming is not stewardship. But looking at semi-domestication and semi-cultivation, that looks a lot more like stewardship. And so I don't know what it's gonna look like, but I think about ant farms and then it gives me a place to start to think about this and what role insects can play going forward. And so one, there are at home farms where you can farm your own crickets or you can farm your own mealworms. Now mealworms are a little more popular because they're quieter. But crickets I think are actually a little easier to rear, but they're loud, they sing. But you can farm your own mealworms and it's not very hard. And so in an ideal sort of, if I am thinking about what the ideal end-to-vegan diet would look like, everybody would have a mealworm farm or maybe even beyond, maybe it doesn't have to be end-to-vegan, you could have chickens, you can have backyard chickens that you share your mealworms with and then you have their eggs too. Right, and so this can be done at a household level, it can be done at a community level. It can be done in the neighborhood or the town. And so three thinking food systems to not be global but instead be local is a really good place to start. And then I think about what semi-cultivation of ants would be like and I just imagine that maybe we'll have giant ant hills like we create this perfect environment that ants want to live in. They already want to live in our house and eat our food so I think this could work. But we could imagine a way that you could have an area of just giant ant hills that we go and we sustainably harvest from. There are new ways of thinking and I think one of the beautiful things about insects is it challenges us to think differently. And so in our food system is one way that I think they could really help us. So we are on native land and we need to be stewards but we have so much to learn. Good place to start is to read and listen to more indigenous voices, to elect officials who will protect the environment before they protect corporations. And so I'm gonna leave you with one last quote, one that does not have a dehumanizing statement in it. And it's from Robin Wall Kimmerer, a professor of ecology and a citizen of the Pottawatomie nation. If you have not read Braiding Sweetgrass or any of her other work, consider that your homework. What she gives us here in this quote is what she refers to as the honorable harvest. And the honorable harvest is just a part of her culture. It isn't anything that's written down, it's just the relationship you have with earth. It's the relationship you have with all living things. We don't have that. So she kindly wrote it out for us so that maybe we can learn and start feeling that for ourselves. Take only what you need, take only which is given, never take more than half, leave some for others, harvest in a way that minimizes harm, use it respectfully. Thank you.