A friend of mine is strongly against the idea of eating prawns and other crustaceans since they are “sea insects”. I’ve never asked him about the recent trend for eating insects, but I imagine a similar level of disgust – especially as he’s since turned vegan. To show how my friend’s perspective is nothing new, the lexical list tablet today contains the terms “locust, large locust, locust of the sea”, with “locust of the sea” translated as crustacean. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
So while there is a resurgence in culinary use of insects, quite apart from the long history of crushed cochineal beetles as carmine red food colouring (E120), it’s anything but a new trend. The Mesopotamians had a fermented sauce called siqqu, which could be made of fish, shellfish, or locusts. It was probably similar to garum, a fermented fish sauce treasured by the Greeks and Romans. To make this relatable to the modern palate, the closest comparison is probably somewhere between the intense salty fishiness of Vietnamese nuoc mam or Thai nam pla, and the funky spice of Lee & Perrins.
Locusts, then as now, can be a serious problem for farmers. After the biblical plague of locusts described in Exodus 10 “nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt”, and just in the past few days there have been reports of a huge plague of desert locusts affecting Iran, Pakistan, Yemen and other middle-eastern countries.
The Mesopotamian swarms of locusts were collected alive and stored in clay jars or reed cages, as we know from their inclusion in records of the slaughter of food deliveries to the royal court in Mari. Only if the numbers were just too high to hope to gather them alive would they be killed there in the fields. It served an important function, because without gathering them up, the locusts would have destroyed the harvests.
So what to do with a surfeit of locusts? They could be roasted on skewers, as seen on slabs found in the ruins of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh. But why not prepare a siqqum-sauce?
The idea of fermented locust sauce is not the most appetising to us these days. Downright disgusting to many. Which raises the question, what is it that makes certain foodstuffs trigger that disgust reaction? I think the concept of acquired tastes is relevant here and worth exploring. It’s not at all uncommon to dislike something the first time you try it. Olives, blue cheese, beer, to name a few (all of which are products of fermentation, by the way). But over time these frequently ascend to become a person’s favourite flavour experiences. So what’s going on here? Do we not eat things because they are objectively disgusting? Or do we find them disgusting because we don’t eat them?
An interesting aside is that the strength of a person’s disgust reaction predicts whether they are conservative or liberal, with conservatives consistently found to have stronger reactions. The disgust reaction is thought have developed in response to avoiding contagion and poisoning, whether from bodily excretions, unfamiliar foods, or strangers from other places carrying diseases to which locals had no immunity. Some have even hypothesised that this explains why Trump supporters in the USA have had lower than expected rates of COVID19 infection, after controlling for the effects of income, age, and population density: they may have inherited a greater fear of contagion, whether by nature or nurture.
But let’s leave the politics aside. I think the important lesson here is what are you going to do if life sends you locusts? Ferment those suckers!
