History Article: We Have Always Eaten Bugs
We Have Always Eaten Bugs
The Worm’s Eye View
Bernadino de Sahagún arrived in Mexico in 1529, a mere 8 years after the collapse of the Aztec empire. From Veracruz he traveled to Mexico-Tenochtitlan; a city now in the midst of a furious reconstruction planned by Alonso Garcia Bravo. Much of the city had been rebuilt in the Spanish style, but portions of the old city still remained; the young friar must have walked in the ruins of the Templo Mayor, a colossal pagan temple, once ritually soaked in human blood. Something about this alien place enchanted the young friar: Sahagún commissioned a painting of the temple and spoke of it as “a thing very worthy of being seen.” Five hundred years later, a Spaniard might arrive in the same city and follow the same quadrangular streets, radiating from the National Palace out along what had once been the great Aztec causeways, and find something similarly puzzling: in the upscale markets and restaurants, the escamole, the nutty, buttery eggs of the Liometopum family of ants, for sale as a delicacy; with prices reaching well over $200 USD a kilo.
Escamole is not alone. Chinicuiles, chahuis, chapulines--caterpillars, beetles, and grasshoppers; among many others--are widely consumed seasonal delicacies, in demand across Mexico. Entomophagy, the practice of eating insects, is common here, and has been since long before Columbus paid a fateful visit to the Catholic monarchs. Do not picture malnourished children plucking spiders from the trunks of blighted trees; these insect dishes are true culinary works. They can be fried, dried, seasoned, simmered; they have proper pairings and seasons and a geographic terroir. These are not famine foods; and yet, the historical literature surrounding entomophagy has struggled to capture this cultural status. Instead, the practice has been discussed--if at all--in waves of misunderstanding, beginning with colonial-era revulsion and moving to a 20th-century condescension, where a complex and refined element of Mexican culture was degraded and treated as merely a symptom of poverty.
It was not malice, generally, that created this loss--it was a product of historical methods. The history of entomophagy in Mexico is, in miniscule, the history of method. The practice itself has never particularly waned; even through the colonial era, escamole remained a sought-after luxury, eaten by rural people of all social classes. It was only among the urban Spanish colonists and the Europhile mestizo middle class that entomophagy was not widely practiced. What has changed is how the colonial, and later Mexican, elites tried to codify their knowledge of the practice. Early primary sources were created by European minds who viewed insect-eating with revulsion or, later, condescension. Neither lens is able to capture the reality of insects as a refined choice; even an art. Only recently have historians been able to give this practice the defense it deserves; putting into writing what generations of Mexica have known and experienced.
This essay will examine how historians have moved from a dependence on traditional archival history to historic materialism, before embracing ethnography and social history to arrive at the understanding of entomophagy as the vital element of cultural heritage that it is. It will then apply each method to a single source, to draw out the strengths and highlight the blind spots of each. This will demonstrate the importance of historical methods and the conscientiousness required by a historian seeking to genuinely study the human past.
II. The Silence of the Crickets
We must not begin with Sahagún, despite temptation. His exhaustive history of Nahua society, now a cornerstone of Mexica studies, sat ignored in a royal archive for centuries; with the Codex’s first publication waiting until 1830. His serious, analytical approach is too humanistic to represent the colonial opinion of native customs; ironic, considering the missionary purpose of his work.
Instead, for centuries the practice was more or less ignored, both by legal and intellectual authorities. Colonial governors were deeply threatened by certain elements of the indigenous diet--corn and amaranth in particular--but had relatively little to say about the consumption of insects. Hernan Cortes makes no mention of it in his letters to Charles V, despite an awestruck list of goods available in Tenochtitlan marketplaces, one that cannot be called terse: describing fowl alone he records “a street for game, where they sell every sort of bird, such as chickens, partridges, quails, wild ducks, fly-catchers, widgeons, turtle-doves, pigeons, reed-birds, parrots, owls, eaglets, owlets, falcons, sparrow-hawks and kestrels.” There are no laws on record regulating or restricting the practice of insect-eating, though the Spanish viceroys often attempted to restrict amaranth and mezcal consumption. As an example: Pulque, an indigenous alcoholic drink made from the maguey plant, was once highly coveted in Aztec society, and experienced many regulations over the years from both the colonial and Mexican governments. Many modern works describe the ‘disgust’ the Spanish elite had for insect-eating: this is probably true, but few historical documents seem to attest to it. Instead, the Spanish preferred to import and lionize their own tastes, and allow endomophagy to linger in the colonial periphery.
The same is true for the academic world: In the 18th century, scholars would read Cortes’ lieutenant-cum-rival Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, compiled in 1568, as one of the only primary sources remarking on pre-Colonial Mexico. The aged conquistador makes no mention of insect consumption despite lurid passages describing human sacrifice and a lengthy description of the market of Tlatelolco: “But why do I waste so many words describing what was sold in the great plaza, for I shall not soon finish if I recount everything in detail!” he concludes after paragraphs of detail. There were few academic works touching on the subject, and what existed was limited in both quality and quantity. The best work was done by Catholic orders, drawing on their centuries of groundwork in Mexico. Even these have little to say about entomophagy: the practice is documented in Friar Juan de Torquemada’s colossus, Monarquia Indiana, which encompasses three volumes--described by D.A. Brading as “a remarkably dense text…rendered more wearisome by his editor’s garrulous commentary.” Insect-eating does finally appear in writing; but it is not discussed in any detail, not even disgust. Following Cortes and Diaz, he describes an Aztec marketplace in great detail in Libro 14, explicitly listing lombrices (earthworms), hormigas grandes tostadas (roasted ants), and later maguey, agave worms. This demonstrates that, to the academic circles who would read this tome, the practice was not unknown--it was merely ignored.
What accounts for this peculiar silence? Method.
In the 17th century, the academic world was still emerging from medieval scholastic traditions. Torquemada’s work represented the most encyclopedic and ambitious project in Mexican historiography, but it was fundamentally limited by his method: a reliance on written accounts, combined with an overtly Christian apologia. Both of these are artifacts of their era; each has certain advantages, but each brings weaknesses to the Franciscan’s effort.
The most straightforward weakness in Torquemada’s history is his sourcing. On the 40th page of the first volume Torquemada lists the scholars cited within: there are a few fellow Franciscans, but the list is dominated by names one mightn’t expect to see in a history of central America: Seneca, Suetonius, Avicenna, Averroes. Herodotus, of course. Torquemada cites nearly all of the canonical Greco-Roman scholars. There are a small handful of citations--a character called Tucio, “Stump” in Spanish--who could possibly be indigenous to the region, but each recognizable name is either Spanish or would seem more fitting for a text on Spanish, rather than Mexican, history.
There is no reason to suspect this was done maliciously; Torquemada clearly has great interest in the people and history of “New Spain.” But he studied in the academic method of his day, which depended heavily on written accounts, generally composed by either fellow clergymen or the letters and statements of “great men;” which in the case of Mexico meant almost exclusively conquistadors or native princes; such as the Tlaxcalan elite who retained power after 1521 as a reward for their service in Cortes’ coalition. There is of course nothing wrong with using such sources: the Franciscans were literate and left meticulous records, the conquistadors are naturally an important voice in the story of Mexico, and the Tlaxcalan elite are genuine indigenous leaders. A history of the Aztec empire that neglected Diaz and Cortes would be leaving valuable information on the table. A reliance on exclusively such accounts, however, consigns not just facts but entire worldviews to oblivion--as nearly occurred here. Torquemada’s colossal project recorded thousands of pages of city names, of the wars of the Mexican nations, and elaborate comparisons of the Aztec empire to the civilizations of the ancient near east--thus his extensive references to Mediterranean antiquity-- but was limited in its ability to capture the lives and lifestyles of the indigenous people of ‘New Spain.’ To the extent that Torquemada was able to capture indigenous stories, it was in the service of extolling the natural virtues that Christian education brought out of them.
The latter element is another obvious current running through his work: an insistence on the Christian character of the Mexican people. Torquemada wrote with an overt agenda. Mexican historian Antonio Rubial Garcia describes Torquemada’s work as “still imbued with the defense of the indigenous people that characterized the friar writers of the previous century.” He goes on to summarize the overarching purpose of Torquemada’s history: “Through (his) study, indigenous culture, particularly Nahuatl culture, was placed within the context of universal civilization, on par with Greece, Rome, or Egypt. This allowed for an explanation of the achievements of Christianity and revealed how the arrival of the Gospel was proclaimed in these lands during their pagan period.”
Torquemada’s work was fundamentally a defense of the Mexican people, in an age of intense religious chauvinism. As much as he worked to record the history of the Nahua, Tlaxcala, Mixtec, and other regional indigenous peoples, Torquemada had an overt goal: to demonstrate that Mexican history was comparable to that of the ancient near East; demonstrating that the Mexican people were not incapable of European-style civilization, but merely a few centuries behind, with souls and minds able to turn from bronze-age kingdoms to Christendom, as the great civilizations of the west had done. The stakes here are not low: while Juan de Torquemada reads as a deeply humane, curious mind, most Europeans likely recognize “Friar Torquemada” instead as the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada, “whose name has become synonymous with the Christian Inquisition’s horror, religious bigotry, and cruel fanaticism.” The Inquisition was very much in power in Spain, and the status of the native people of the New World was ever in flux. Torquemada was attempting to give legitimacy to pre-Colombian civilization, giving dignity to its descendants, armoring them against identification as savages.
This goal, noble though it may be, forced Torquemada to deliberately overlook elements of Mexican folk culture that did not lend itself to this message. It was one thing to list the consumption of strange and alien things in the markets of old Tenochtitlan; it would be wholly against his message to write of contemporary (at the time of his writing) Mexica continuing to engage with the practice--and so he doesn’t.
Such is a great drawback of all politically-motivated history: any culture is infested with enough complexity, enough unsavory elements, and enough particularity that attempting to commit any large group of people to a single message will inevitably have to elide elements, lest it be punctured by thorny contradictions. In Mexico, insects formed a vital, valuable part of the rural diet for huge numbers of its people; in Spain, the consumption of insects would be seen as revolting. (Even in 2023, a survey of Spanish university students found only 20% claiming they would be willing to eat insects at all; fewer than 5% claimed they would be willing if they “saw insects in their natural appearance,” as they are traditionally consumed in Mexico.) Torquemada sought to downplay the exotic and alien in Mexico; his goal was quite the opposite. Emphasizing distasteful (by European standards) folk practices in Mexico could only weaken his argument and risk endangering the position of the peasant class the Franciscans considered their foundation in New Spain. The Spanish crown could not expel the Mexican natives en masse as it had the Iberian Jewish population in 1492 or the Moriscos in the early 17th century, but it certainly had the power to diminish what few protections they had. (For a more mercenary motivation, the crown also had the power to suppress the influence of the Franciscans if it seemed they were failing to properly “civilize” their flock.)
It’s impossible to know if Torquemada’s omission was intentional or an unconscious bias, but the question is moot; ultimately, this history was written from above, and carried with it the intrinsic bias created when any people’s history is written by someone who is, fundamentally, from a different and more dominant social class. However, what would follow next would completely re-order the academic understanding of entomophagy, as Torquemada’s classical methodology was replaced by a modern, industrial approach to the production of knowledge, where the consumption of insects would be recognized--and instead of ignored, misunderstood.
III. Los Pobrecitos
In December 1943, trucks belonging to Mexico's Ministry of Public Health and Welfare carried medical doctors up winding dirt trails. They were headed into the Mezquital valley; only 75 miles from Mexico City but far deeper in its past. It was, and remains, one of the poorest places in the Americas. Windswept, sunbaked, arid; almost completely devoid of natural resources. The doctors were on a mission to record, as exhaustively as possible, the health of rural Mexican villagers. The subjects of this particular study were Otomi Indians, living without electricity or running water. There were at most two wells in each village, and lice infested 90-95% of the population. These facts, and many more, were recorded as these modern men applied rigorous medical tests to these villagers, examining everything from their gum health to their birthweights to the nutritional breakdown of their diets. A single sentence lurks in their observations: “A variety of worms and insects are also eaten with relish.” This is not examined further; the practice was unremarkable to the doctors. What does seem to surprise the researchers is that these people, some of the poorest in the world, show almost no nutritional deficits at all. Their overall health is not particularly good; but their diets are beyond these medical men’s ability to critique. The study concludes: “In spite of the barrenness and poverty of the region its inhabitants have through many centuries developed food habits and a way of life adapted thereto. Attempts at change would be a mistake until their economic and social conditions can be improved and something really better substituted.” It is a strikingly generous conclusion, from one angle; but it anticipated the next great wave of entomophagic interpretation: entomophagy as a nutritional necessity; a practice engaged in for crude survival, “until something really better substituted.”
The 20th century brought the first scientific analysis of indigenous Mexican diets, as part of a great wave of new academic enthusiasm for scientific and materialist approaches to what had once been the exclusive domain of the humanities. Anthropologists like Marvin Harris attempted to explain historical contingencies not as the products of the diplomatic maneuvers of states, but through previously-ignored environmental concerns; moving away from Thucydides and Leopold van Ranke towards a marriage of Karl Marx and Thomas Malthus. Most strikingly, he attempted to explain the origin of Aztec human sacrifice as a response to chronic protein deficits in their diet. Numerous studies similar to the 1946 survey followed, and trickled from the health services into the growing field of Mexican history. A new materialist conception took hold: the consumption of insects was indeed widespread and was motivated by the need to fill vital nutritional gaps; it was the product of poverty; it would, presumably, be replaced once better economic conditions allowed.
There are great advantages to a multidisciplinary approach to history; particularly one that incorporates scientific principles. The nutritional breakdown of the highland Otomi diet is remarkably useful; it allows historians to situate dietary practices in the chemical reality of the human body. It is one thing to read Cortes’ account of an Aztec market; it is another to have some evidence that the people of central Mexico were in fact eating as well as he made it seem. The work of Marvin Harris displays an elegant command of scientific facts that he attempts to support his theories with, down to estimates of the edible biomass available from lake Texcoco and how many people it could theoretically support. The combination of nutritional science, anthropological theories, and a willingness to engage in fieldwork opens vital doors that a purely archival history can never access.
And yet-- “A variety of worms and insects are also eaten with relish.” The learned doctors did not realize the importance of the statement; how could they? While they asked many questions about the specific elements of the Otomi diet, they had no interest in investigating the reason. They, like Harris, assumed the culture was downstream of the environment. This is a blind spot, one that lurks in the margins between the questions. Why did the Otomi eat “with relish?” Was it truly poverty alone? The questions were not asked; they were not part of the medical intention of the survey. And so no answers arose, and as before, it was possible that the learned world would once again look past this curious rural custom; once again see it and look straight through it. It is useful to read Sahlin’s response to Harris: it contains not only better mathematics, but also an entertaining footnote expounding on the nutritional value of cannibalism (underwhelming) and, most vitally, a refutation that should remind all aspiring theorists: no archival source, from Cortes’ to the Nahua codices, suggested that human flesh formed a major, reliable part of the Aztec diet; though cannibalism formed an element of ritual culture, there is no evidence whatsoever it was practiced on an agricultural scale. It was a conclusion reached entirely on specious math and broad assumptions about culture.
Meanwhile, Harris responds to the existence of entomophagy with utter disdain: “It is one thing to relish piquant morsels of witchety grubs and snails as a supplement to meat and fish, it is quite another to make such fare one’s primary source of animal flesh,” he writes, dismissing the concept with no investigation at all. Such is the profound limit of his method. Like the doctors, he wished to speak about the people he studied more than to them.
IV. The Worm Turns
All that was missing was a return to Sahagún. Specifically, to the combination of modern science with the friar’s prescient method, which drew heavily on a lifetime not only of archival research but lengthy interviews with the people he studied. In 1979, the Florentine Codex was reprinted in full, just as a new generation of scholars finally turned to the role of entomophagy in Mexican culture. These scholars worked to synthesize the best of academic history, scientific inquiry, and the then-burgeoning field of social history, buoyed by the continued success of such texts as Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson focused on the everyday life of people long ignored by history, with interest in culture and values of those not traditionally considered powerful. In Mexico, this led to the immediate realization that insects were a delicacy, not a famine food. Jumiles and escamoles each had local shrines, maintained by the locals since the 15th century. In Mexico, the work of Julia Ramos Elorduy established that not only did Mexico’s edible insects “”provide the necessary energy to achieve the activities and vital functions of our organism,” they did so with significantly greater energy efficiency than the traditional meat animals in the European diet. By combining social history and the voice of indigenous people with scientific and archival study, the practice of entomophagy could finally be given the attention it deserves, as a vital element of indigenous Mexican culture.
All of which returns us to the Florentine Codex. Sahagún’s work is exhaustive; the product of multiple lifetimes of work, and it provides enough depth to allow many methods of analysis. As an archival source, it is excellent; citing sources, organized by topic, carefully indexed. By including Spanish translations alongside the original Nahuatl, it remains accessible to modern scholars while preserving the source text. This helps correct for the inevitable omissions inherent in any translation-- despite Sahagún’s best effort, small deviations always emerge; unintentional but inherent due to the colonial structure of the project. The fragrant resin copal, for example, holds particular importance for indigenous Mexicans, burned ritually since pre-Colombian times, and yet it goes unnamed in the Spanish translation. Similarly, the Nahuatl is not entirely translated; with one prominent lacuna running from folio 192v to 197v; the columns are filled with illustrations instead. No explanation is provided, but these gaps suggest that even the best efforts at a colonial history will inevitably leave possibly-vital elements of indigenous cultures unstudied. Fortunately, the Codex allows for an elegant scientific analysis as well. It is not difficult to cross-reference Sahagún’s descriptions with modern biology, allowing historians to show specific insects mentioned within were seasonal delicacies, refuting the shallow materialist argument that consumption was indiscriminate and based on necessity. It is also easy to locate the most popularly-consumed insects, such as chapulines and escamole, in the Codex, corroborating the oral history of the practice. Conversely, the use of modern science can help limit some of the possible weaknesses of oral history: for example, on folio 89v the Codex gives space to an intelligent snake that lays aquatic traps for human beings; a page prior it described the iconic, biologically-impossible feathered serpent quetzalcoatl. Of course, a wise historian today understands these ‘creatures’ not as mere fabrications, or signs of Franciscan credulousness, but elements of indigenous culture, worthy of record even if their biological reality was unlikely. Properly read, using all the tools of modern historical method, the Codex becomes an even richer text than it was when Torquemada drew inspiration from it centuries ago.
V. The Food Remains the Same
It is possible there remain new and unexplored avenues in history; there are likely many elements of human culture and history that lurk in the margins of our records, cut out from proper record by the inability of historian’s methods to center them. Historians must always remember that their tools shape their work, and they must be conscious of the strengths and drawbacks of each.
The history of entomophagy is a microcosm of the evolution of historical method. For centuries, the practice was ignored or misunderstood, the victim of the colonial era’s political and cultural agenda, or the 20th century’s rigid historic materialism. The “silence of the crickets” finally ended with the conscientious historian’s willingness to synthesize the best of multiple approaches. The final shift demonstrates that the choice of method need not be passive; and in fact the best history comes from the active decision to value the voices and reality of the people being studied.
The food remains the same; only the method has allowed its truth to be written.
Bibliography
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