Superlative by Matthew D. LaPlante

Author:Matthew D. LaPlante
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948836210
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2019-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

WHY BEETLES, WHICH RARELY GO EXTINCT, COULD HELP FEED THE WORLD

I wasn’t in the Siem Reap city market for more than five minutes when it happened. I try to be as inconspicuous as possible when I travel, but I get distracted easily and I’m clumsy, and that combination doesn’t lend itself to unobtrusiveness.

I was studying a basket of dried fish when a little boy stepped in front of me and began filling a small plastic bag with tamarind pods. I stepped backward to give the kid space—and felt my flip-flopped foot hit something squishy. An anguished squawk rose above the market clamor, and I spun around to see that I’d stepped directly into a chicken pen.

My family keeps hens, usually three at a time and sometimes as many as eight, so I know my poultry. I bent down to examine the bird, which had one leg wired to the side of the cage. Given the crude way in which it was cuffed, I worried I might have broken its leg, but it didn’t seem worse for the wear. Still, its owner wasn’t happy with me.

That is how I came to own a chicken in Cambodia.

I didn’t keep the bird for long—just the time it took to accept it from the hands of the woman at a cost of 20,000 Cambodian riel, and then to present it back to her as a gift. She was tickled, and offered me a small bag of what I at first took to be roasted nuts. When I looked closer, though, I saw she had given me a bag of mealworms.

“Oh,” I said, reaching in to fish out a few of the bugs. “You want me to give the bird a snack?”

I leaned down to feed the chicken, and the woman starting laughing.

“Ot yl tae!28 No . . . to this way,” she said, putting her hand in front of the bird.

Then she gestured as though she was eating. “Yes . . . to this way.” For emphasis, she grabbed one of the worms from my bag, threw it into her own mouth, and made an exaggerated example of chewing and swallowing.

Crispy and sticky, the bugs tasted like roasted pumpkin seeds cooked in something sweet. When I pointed to the tip of my tongue and smiled, the woman showed me a bottle of Coca-Cola she had poured into the pan. I was eating Cambodian American fusion food.

When I tell this story to many of my American friends, they often look a bit nauseous. When I tell just about anyone else, they look bored. Mealworms are beetle larvae, after all, and beetles are the most widely eaten insect in the world, with about 350 species on the global menu.

This makes sense, because scientists have discovered and named more individual species of beetles than any other animal order.29 One in four described animals is some form of beetle. The shortest, at one-hundredth of an inch in length, is Scydosella musawasensis, which was discovered in Nicaragua in 1999 and not seen again until 2015, when it was rediscovered on a fungus in Colombia.

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