- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab, I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Co-Operative Extension and on behalf of those folks and our other core organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it is my pleasure to introduce to you Julie Lesnick of Wayne State University. She's here at UW-Madison this week as a special speaker for the Darwin Days celebrations. She's going to be talking with us about her work on the evolution of insects as food from hominids to the United Nations. Julie was born in Lockport, Illinois and graduated from Lockport Central High School. She got her undergraduate degree at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb in Anthropology and then she got both a Master's degree and a PhD at the University of Michigan. The Master's degree was in Kinesiology, which is the study of ki-nes (audience laughs)  And she got her PhD in Anthropology and then she went directly to Wayne State University, which is in Dearborn, over by Detroit.  -   (Julie)   It's right in Detroit.  - It's right in Detroit, okay. And she's here to talk about one of my favorite topics, food and sex, please join me in welcoming Julie Lesnick to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab. (audience applauds)  - Thank you. Thanks Tom.  Thank you, I already feel at home. (audience laughs) So thank you for that welcome. I am honored to be here as a Darwin Day featured speaker, I'm going to be talking about human evolution but a part of it that you maybe don't think too much about but is actually very important, and that's diet, right? So in order for us to be who we are and have these giant powerful brains, we need to fuel it with the right foods and so that's really been my area of interest for over my career so far and I've really honed in on this idea of edible insects and how they can be contributing a lot of the necessary nutrients that we need over the course of our human evolution. But before we get started, I do want to dedicate tonight's talk to Gene DeFoliart. He was here in your Department of Entomology starting in 1959, he became Emeritus in 1991 and he just passed away only a couple years ago in 2013. He founded the Insects as Food newsletter, which is still super important to the work we're doing today. So in the 70s and 80s, when he was trying to get people to eat bugs, he was thought to be crazy. And you might think the same of me, but now there's more of us. And so we really do owe a great debt to Gene and so I did want to dedicate tonight's talk to him. So, to get you started, I want to give you a little outline, basically we're going to do a little past, present, future kind of thing, but we're going to go a little out of order and so we're going to start with the future first because, right now, people are talking about edible insects as something that could really be the food of the future, it can solve malnutrition, all these great things and so, we're going to start there but then we're going to look at my research, which is really focused on the past. I'm a paleoanthropologist by training and so that's the evolution of the human diet part. However, all of this has to do with how we eat bugs today and the fact that all of you here are probably still a little squeamish about the idea of eating bugs and so I really want to look at the evolution of it and really how that has impacted us in our decisions to, or not to, eat insects.  So going into the future, like I said, we have the food of the future here with edible insects and so in 2013, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization wrote a statement, about 200 pages, outlining the benefits of edible insects. It was widely picked up by the press. This was an Associated Press headline, and you can see, solve malnutrition, solve hunger, solve pollution, all of these things and so that's a pretty tall order. And so what I want to start with is what was the UN actually saying. So there's a difference between the news headlines and the science, believe it or not, all right? So what the UN was saying, is that insects are a very healthy alternative to traditionally raised livestock, so starting with the nutrition, what do they offer? Well, when it comes to amounts of protein per kilogram of the food, it's very comparable to our other types of livestock but the important part of it is that what it's offering is an alternative in a sustainable form, and we'll look at that in a second, but also it's still an animal protein and you're getting all of the essential amino acids that come with animal protein. So, you need these essential amino acids because without any one of them all of your amino acids are useless and so that's why it's tough to be a vegan. It's not like oh, are you getting enough protein. It's are you getting enough of those amino acids, so that all of them can be utilized in your body. So here, all of our diagrams are going to look at crickets, so crickets right now, are one of the most popular kind of foods, insects, for people here, like in the United States and Canada, and Europe. Basically, we know a lot about farming them already from the pet food industry and so now, shifting that over to human facilities, you know, you have to now meet the requirements of the FDA and different standards, but we have a lot of knowledge about how to do it, so a lot of what we're going to talk about in this part of the talk, is about crickets. So here we see that crickets offer a lot of calcium but there are many edible insects and depending on which one you eat, you're going to see different amounts of that micronutrient offer but all of them are going to offer you some amount of that useful animal protein. But the big thing about edible insects is the sustainability idea, the amount of resources that go into farming insects as food as opposed to traditionally raised livestock is greatly reduced. So, everything scales down. So cows are going to be the least efficient and then pigs will be a little bit more efficient. And then chickens, and then when you get to the scale of insects, they're tiny. The amount of turnover, what you put in versus what you get out, is such a better ratio than when you scale it up to larger animals. So the amount of land it takes to produce a kilogram of beef is 200 square meters. So that's counting the area you need for the cows, but the corn that you had to grow to feed those cows, and all of the different facilities you need to butcher those cows. There's a lot of land that goes into producing beef. You scale it all the way down to crickets? And you're working with 15 square meters. So crickets, you can work in a warehouse. You can scale everything up vertically, so you can have a box on a box on a box and really increase the amount that you can produce in a small area, like a warehouse in an abandoned area of the rust belt, for instance. And so that's really great and another thing I like to point out is, for the most part, we're thinking about bugs, they already like dark, cramped spaces so the ethics of this. And you can still have too many. There is overpopulation problems, there is balance. You need to keep your crickets happy but it's not like packing cows into a CAFO. Because cows don't like being crammed into small spaces with other members of their species, so that's another benefit of edible insects. The one that I think is the most important, what stands out to me the most, is water usage, so fresh water is a limited resource. And so going into the future, we're  So much less resources that go into this. But also, the output, so next to automobiles, cows are our biggest producer of greenhouse gases such as methane and so we look at cows giving us nearly 3,000 grams of methane or greenhouse gases when we produce that kilogram, scale it down for your crickets and it's only a gram of those greenhouse gases so there's a lot of benefits to changing to this alternative food source.  So with those numbers, the FAO still says we know there's a long way to go, there's a lot of information we still need, they end their statement with these sort of future directions, what do we still need to study? We need a better understanding of the nutritional values, so we have some numbers for crickets, we have some numbers for other edible insects but people don't necessarily do standard methods and there's a bunch, there are over 2,000 known edible insect species consumed today around the world so we don't have all of that info, so there's definitely more to do in nutrition. The environmental sustainability, the numbers I'm showing you, are kind of projections. They're based on what the pet industry is doing and what we can see in the couple of years that we've had large scale farms for people, for human consumption, but we don't know what that actually looks like. We don't have these cricket farms for people that have been around for many decades so we need that longitudinal data still to really understand the sustainability. Economic impacts, that's another thing. So if we're going to solve world hunger, this has to be a resource that's available in cheap and right now it's not, especially not here in the U.S. and we have hungry people here in the U.S. And that's something that I think we don't talk about enough and so these crickets aren't going to help those people here. To get about a pound of crickets, or a pound of ground up crickets as powder, is almost $50 and so that's not economically viable for a lot of people to be like your normal source of protein. However, if we think about it as a global problem, the people who are already eating insects, if they can just continue to do it instead of wanting to abandon their traditional food ways and try to become members of our global food system, and so if they stop eating insects because it's stigmatized here, but they don't replace it with another animal source, that's hugely problematic and that is something Gene DeFoliart talked about. There was a very important paper about why the Western attitude is important and we're still really working on that today and seeing these impacts. And then lastly, the legal framework. So right now, food regulations, we know how many insect parts you can accidentally eat but there isn't really great information on how to choose to eat insects, so there's a little bit more that needs to be done there but for the most part right now, insects are just produced as any safe food. It needs to be produced at a facility just for human consumption, you need to have your standards, to the same bacteria levels and whatever as if you were producing cheese or anything else and so there isn't really good, specific language for edible insects and that's stopping some people from wanting to carry it on their shelves in their stores. But, my major point, is that this food of the future is actually a very valued food of the past and so, in talking about nutritional values, I like to kind of play with those words a little bit because it's not necessarily how much protein, how much calcium, but also how do insects fit into a diet? How is it valued, is it a snack? Is it a delicacy, is it a staple? And so I think we need that information as well and I lump that into what the FAO is saying about nutritional values. And so this is where I've done my work and where we're going to spend most of tonight's talk focusing. So, in South Africa there is a site that's part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, so there are multiple hominid sites in this part of South Africa and one of them is the site of Swartkrans. And Swartkrans yields the fossil remains of a hominid species known as Australopithecus robustus sometimes called Paranthropus robustus. And so these hominids lived about 1.7 million years ago, they're related to us somehow, they're probably not our direct ancestor but they're definitely on our human lineage and so their behavior is going to be somewhere towards what chimpanzees might do but they're upright walking, they're larger   So this is a pretty, sort of well-documented, in that people say oh yeah, people eat bugs in the tropics. But the other thing, when people are trying to figure out who eats bugs and why we don't, is it's often described as a fallback food. It's often that, "Oh, you don't have meat." Or, "You don't have anything else." And so one of my favorite things to do in science is to test things that people think they know. And so what I did is, working with the online database of edible insects, I used the CIA World Factbook. I used just other online, published government demographic data. And I used these variables for each country. The number of insect species consumed in each country, the latitude, centroid latitude for each country. How much arable land, how much land is being farmed because if insects are a fallback food. Or another way people say is that part of the reason why we might not eat insects here is that insects are a pest to crops and once you have a crop-based diet then you have a stigma against insects. So I looked at arable land, I was like okay. Well then that means the countries with the least farming should be the ones that eat the most insects, so I used that variable. I looked at area and population to come up with population density. So if it's a fallback food, the countries with the largest population density that's outstripping the resources, those should be the ones that eat more insects. And I also looked at kind of a marker of poverty using Gross Domestic Product as trying to figure out how rich or poor a nation is. And so what I found is there's absolutely no correlation between the number of insects consumed in a country or presence or absence of edible insects in a country and population density and no correlation between those edible insects' variables and arable land. So there's no correlation there. But in a logistic regression model, latitude could correctly predict the presence of edible insects about 80% of the time. And so where you are in the world, latitude seems to be the number one indicator, number one predictor of who's going to be eating insects. But thinking about that latitudinal gradient of diversity, there should be a gradient then, of edible insects. It shouldn't just be like oh, you crossed the 30th parallel, nobody eats bugs anymore. So I wanted to test that idea of a gradient and so in thinking about that, I was like well, how do you test a gradient? So here I'll use the color spectrum to kind of model it, is that if it's a gradient, you should never notice the change as you go. So two adjacent areas should not be significantly different but as you get further and further away from each other you should start seeing significant differences between the equator and northern latitudes. But you shouldn't see any significant differences as you move along that gradient. So using this kind of ideal model, I tested how latitude and edible insects went. So this is kind of a mess, it looks crazy. But what I did, is I paired-- I created what I called latitude lots. So the easy way to start was to go from zero to 10 degrees and call that a lot. And then go from 10 to 20 and call that a lot and 20 to 30 and compare those lots to each other and to all the others. So the dark boxes are the adjacent lots. And so there should not be, the predictive model says, that there should not be significant differences in those dark, bold, outlined boxes. And that instead, you should see more significant differences in what's shaded. Well you can't really say-- It would be shaded in kind of the bottom left corner. These are the further and further apart you get. And so that's pretty much what I found. Of this is that I did-- A latitude lot, because it's completely arbitrary. One to 10, 10 to 20, I mixed up my lots. I did one to nine, 10 to 18. I did one to 11 and a half, and like to 21. And so I just, I kept mixing up how I made my lots and that's why there's so many paired lots here, because I kept changing how I defined those boundaries. And so what I found is that of the 30 tests of adjacent lots  So if I haven't convinced you to try edible insects, I do say that don't knock it, until you try it.  So, we're all here, we're all in America. We're all westerners, we all have been raised with this idea of they are gross, and even me, like I've had to make myself eat bugs. So I got into this as a completely academic pursuit and then I've been convinced by the data of the FAO and the sustainability, and so it's like when I did first six years of my research, I never ate a bug, and then it turned into, I should probably eat some bugs. If I'm going to promote this, I should probably start trying it. And so every day, if I try a new bug, so I eat a lot of crickets, I eat a lot of meal worms, I now eat a lot of termites when I'm in the field, but if somebody gives me something new, I tried June bugs this past summer, or something like that. Every new bug, I have to like, gear up for. But the thing I really try to promote is that we have our biases, but our kids don't actually have those yet and so if we can just let our kids try it, figure it out for themselves, that's going to be how we see this change occur in the world. And it's them that's going to need to save water, and re-think how to use land. They're the ones that are going to be really fighting the resource crises that we see on the horizon. And so you don't have to try it but try to not pass on that stigma and let people make the decision for themselves. So we have edible insects for you to try. There are some chocolate covered crickets, but then there are also other crickets that look more like crickets. And then there's some meal worms. If you have any severe allergies, it's always probably smart to not try something that's very outside the box, however, reminder, we do eat a bunch of insect parts all the time in any processed food, so you are eating some bugs in your diet at all times. But shellfish allergies, they're all arthropods, they all have exoskeletons and chitin and all the proteins that bind up in that exoskeleton and so severe shellfish allergies could be triggered by eating the exoskeleton of a cricket so I do like to point that out. But thank you so much for your attention. This was a lot of fun and I'm happy to take as many questions as you have. (audience applauds)