VoE - Jeffery Cohen 10.14.2023_podcast: The Scholarly side of Eating Grasshoppers
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David Staley: [00:00:00] Well, I said I was going to, have this conversation with you with a little bit of trepidation because, I should tell our audience, you actually have a bag of dried grasshoppers and 

~I, ~

I think you're going to open them and I think we're going to try some.

Is that what's going to happen here? 

Jeffrey Cohen: Right. So, Doug kindly left me a bag of these to share with you. 

David Staley: That's Doug Dangler, the producer of Voices. 

Jeffrey Cohen: See, that mostly what you have is the thorax, and they're, they're fine. 

David Staley: What do I do? 

Jeffrey Cohen: Just pop it in your mouth. It tastes like a Red Hot. ,

Jen Farmer: From the heart of The Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff with departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent [00:01:00] materials and mathematics and languages, among many others. The college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now.



David Staley: Joining me today in the ASC Marketing and Communications Studio is Jeffrey Cohen, Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on three areas: migration, development, and nutrition. Dr. Cohen, welcome to Voices. 

Jeffrey Cohen: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. 

David Staley: I'd like to begin our conversation by talking about Project Panchavati, for which you were recognized as a Community Engaged Scholar by the Office of Outreach and Engagement in 2022. What was this project? 

Jeffrey Cohen: Project Panchavati was an effort by myself and colleagues in the School of Social Work, colleagues from the National Institutes for Health, and some other folks at other campuses, plus the Bhutanese community of Central Ohio.

It was a project generated around what the Bhutanese community [00:02:00] was concerned coming out of the pandemic, which was how to really bridge the digital divide, and the digital divide is this idea that information, while it may be readily accessible online on places like, you know, the World Wide Web or Facebook or something, it's not necessarily easily digestible, or people may not have the technology to bring it into their homes. And we began with this question, how do we bridge that divide, and bridging that divide for most places means putting in the kind of support systems that will allow the technology to work. So, you'll have a cell phone that has the speed to download the information, or you have access to a computer that's linked to the web at a speed that will allow you to download the [00:03:00] material in an effective way.

What we discovered was that for a large portion of the Bhutanese community, and this is a community of folks who were settled in the U. S. following decades of living in refugee camps in Nepal and India, the community largely had access. Access wasn't necessarily an issue; what was a challenge was making that access understandable. So, it was not simply translating details, information, how to get to the doctor, it wasn't necessarily translating that to Nepali, which is the language that's spoken; it was translating it into a framework that makes sense for the population, that really speaks to their own worldview, and that was really hard to do. 

David Staley: How did you do it? What was the intervention like? 

Jeffrey Cohen: So, the intervention was [00:04:00] largely based around working with the Bhutanese community to address their needs, to move the information into a framework that people could understand, and part of this meant training folks in the community to understand what was apocryphal because there was a lot of bad information online, and understanding how to judge that, but also how to translate information not really into Nepali as much as into understandable bites, because a lot of the folks that we were working with, just putting something in the Nepali script in front of them didn't make sense. There were some issues with reading that script, you had to have that information. And so, from a very small group of older women, working with them to understand what they could do with their cell [00:05:00] phones, for example, each one of them kind of carries that out, so.

David Staley: What was the origin of this project? Did you reach out to the Bhutanese community? Did they reach out to you? 

Jeffrey Cohen: So, the project began well before in some of the most horrendous days around the start of the pandemic. For those of us in anthropological research, one of the things that happened really quickly was the door was closed to doing research abroad.

David Staley: Right. 

Jeffrey Cohen: Or even here, because all of our work is ethnographic. We're working one on one or in communities, and if someone says you can't travel, you can't be in contact, you have to stay six feet away and wear a mask; all these things complicate trying to do ethnography, and of course, the fear was so much higher as the pandemic was starting, that we really needed to be careful.

So, it was incredibly hard to do the work that most of us had been doing. In conversations with one of my colleagues, Taku Suzuki, who's a PhD, [00:06:00] he teaches at Denison, we came up with this idea. We had both been in contact with a friend and former student who was part of the BCCO, which is the Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio, and together, the three of us started to chart out a project. We actually started it a couple of years before this formal project began, but it grew. We brought in additional folks into the project and it just began to work. The community itself is really engaged in promoting best practices of care, health, confronting challenges to the community head on, and doing it in a way that will lead to real outcomes, real world benefits.

And so honestly, it's so hard to remember who called who first, but know we all got on the page quickly because it was such an exciting moment and such [00:07:00] a neat opportunity. 

David Staley: You're talking about the COVID pandemic, and I know that year in 2020, you published, you were one of the editors of _COVID-19 and Migration: Understanding the Pandemic and Human Mobility_. Tell us about this collection. 

Jeffrey Cohen: Sure. Thanks. So, that collection really developed, I was a co-editor with my colleague Ibrahim Sirkeci, a migration scholar in the UK. He called me, and we spent a lot of time together; the pandemic meant we didn't see each other for about three years, which was just horrible.

He figured out a way we could do something, which was we could work on this. This was very early in the pandemic, in the spring of 2020. He suggested that we find leaders in the study of migration and ask them what they think is going to happen, what they're seeing on the ground, and what might be positive directions for research. Part of our [00:08:00] motivation was the assumption that migration rates were going to drop very rapidly. 

David Staley: That would have been my assumption. 

Jeffrey Cohen: They dropped in the immediate aftermath of the announcement of the pandemic, but they rose rapidly after. While a lot of folks were able to continue their work, working remotely or online or something, for a lot of people, they were challenged, how are they going to work, what jobs were available? Across the world, markets were closing, businesses were closing, people were losing their jobs, and there were lots of places where there were not opportunities put in place by the government to support folks.

And then the other piece is in, you know, I work with a largely rural poor, who are migrating from Southern Mexico into the United States. These are people who lack resources to begin with. When the pandemic hit, those resources were hit even harder. One of the [00:09:00] challenges for us, and one of the things we tried to do in this book, was to talk about what are the challenges that are going to confront different populations, whether they're migrating from the Middle East or Southeast Asia into Europe, what are the challenges that these groups are going to be confronted with that are tied to the pandemic, and what are some of the solutions?

David Staley: So you mentioned migration, and I introduced you as a scholar of migration: give us a sense of what that research looks like, or what are the questions that you're asking? 

Jeffrey Cohen: It's a really complicated question because it's such a dynamic process, right? Migration has changed so much. I began work on the subject in, I hate to say how long ago it was, but it was the early 1990s. That was a moment when migration from Mexico to the United States was spiking. I was working in Southern Mexico and this was one of the regions that saw an absolute explosion in the rate of people leaving.

It was amazing. We were working in [00:10:00] communities throughout the next, eight or so years where we were seeing upwards of 60 percent of a community's households with somebody missing, somebody who had spent time as a migrant and mostly people from this part of southern Mexico, Oaxaca. Still in the United States, today, the rates of migration are much lower, and we don't see nearly as much, of a flow as we saw 30 years ago. What we see a lot more of today are families who have actually set up in the United States going back to Mexico.

And that's something that's maintained itself for almost a decade, and then the rate of people coming to the United States, we see the Mexican population replaced by Central Americans, particularly people from Honduras and Guatemala. We see many more international migrants organizing themselves at the border, whether it's a Haitian population or a West African population or Chinese population. It's really interesting, it's how the pattern has changed. [00:11:00] The Migration Policy Institute, which is a wonderful online source, just released a summary and it talks about a shift. While we still see the largest percentage of migrants coming from Latin America into the United States, we see a growing number of Southeast Asians and West Africans coming in as well. It's really interesting to look at these changes, and the other shift is one from a kind of economic migration, which doesn't represent everybody, but shifting from a lot of economic movers to a lot of environmental refugee movers, and that's something that we don't have a good grip on yet. We're just beginning to figure that part out. 

David Staley: So, the project you're working on now is called " Eating Grasshoppers", and I ask this with a certain amount of trepidation, for reasons that will be clearer, I think, in a moment.

Tell us about this book, "Eating Grasshoppers". 

Jeffrey Cohen: So one of the real joys of being an anthropologist is you get to spend a long time in [00:12:00] a place and you get to know it. Working in Southern Mexico, one of the things I learned a lot about was food and what people ate, and one of the delicacies that shows up every spring with the rains in Oaxaca are grasshoppers. People find them, prepare them, cook them, and sell them,~ ~they're called chapulín, they're toasted, they're delicious. 

David Staley: You've had these?

Jeffrey Cohen: Yes, I've eaten them pretty regularly.

I can't do work on them if I don't eat them, right? They're not the only insect, there's another, actually an even more coveted insect, there's a flying ant that's called a chicatana and it shows up literally for two days. The rain hit, they show up and then they're gone. The rain come again, they show up and everybody kind of fills up.

After that, they're just gone. They don't show up for very long. These are two really important delicacies. I think we did our first stint looking at the consumption of grasshoppers in [00:13:00] 2007, and one of the reasons I was interested was, as a migration scholar, the grasshoppers people were making, were showing up in the United States.

They were being shipped, cooked and shipped. One of the things that's really important to understand is that it was completely legal. Shipping dangerous grasshoppers that could jump away or, I don't know. But they were cooked, prepared, you can get them in lots of little tiendas, you can get them here in Columbus 

David Staley: Tiendas, like a store?

Jeffrey Cohen: Yeah, like a tienda is like a little Mexican store. We just kind of started looking at them, people talked about them as the taste of Oaxaca, one of the kind of cute sayings, if you eat one, you'll always come back, or you'll never leave.

And for the migrants from Oaxaca who are set up here, and we're into third and fourth generation children who are U. S. citizens growing up, who's parents, grandparents, or great grandparents are Oaxacan, they'll covet these things. They would just wait for grandma to [00:14:00] bring them or grandpa to go get them.

Through a couple of years, I started working on trying to understand their place in the diet. There were a couple of different questions: one was their place in the diet, another was the role that they played for the women who were producing them. I refer to the women who produce them as chapulineras.

It's not a term that they use, but it's easier than saying the women that cook grasshoppers. What they meant for the chauplineras, and then what really motivated me was demand. I'm trying to understand demand, because I didn't see a lot. You would go to Oaxaca, you would go into Mexico, and you wouldn't see a lot of tourists, including lots of gringos eating insects. They might have one, they might have two, they might have a taste, but they weren't consuming these things, and at the same time, people were telling me that they were making really nice living selling them. So, I wanted to figure out where this fit, and one of the most interesting things that we learned is that not only are [00:15:00] women making really good livings by selling these grasshoppers on the market, they're actually making a kind of living that they can decide not to migrate.

It comes kind of full circle back to the research that I'd been doing into why would you stay? Because the assumption is there's nothing to stay for, and for these women, the incomes that they can earn.... some of these women are earning, they're selling just hundreds of kilos, over the course of a season and making a very good living.

David Staley: So, what is the place of grasshoppers in the diet? 

Jeffrey Cohen: It's a small place. Definitely a niche food and a specialty. Every spring, everybody gets excited when the chapulín start to show up. There are three different kinds of grasshoppers that they eat.

They eat them right as they're emerging; they don't follow a full metamorphic process, they do a series of molts, and the little ones as they emerge, and grasshoppers tend to put egg sacks in the [00:16:00] ground, so as they begin to emerge, they're small, and probably the most coveted of the grasshoppers because they're sweet. I know it sounds very strange. As they mature and molt, they become larger until they reach adulthood.

You have the small babies, nene as they call them sometimes, the young adults, and then you have the full adults. The three really set up very different kinds of foods. The little ones tend to be sweeter, and it's in part because they're largely coming out of alfalfa fields, and alfalfa is a sweet kind of feed.

They'll come off of those fields tasting like the alfalfa.The older chapulín will migrate from the alfalfa to maize, to corn. The corn is bitter, so the adults will be more bitter. You can taste the difference, and theres sometimes a difference in quality and price, the small are more [00:17:00] expensive, but tastier, the larger are less expensive, but more filling. The women who cook them will visit fields, or they'll contract with farmers, and they'll go to the field with nets, like butterfly nets.

David Staley: Right. 

Jeffrey Cohen: They have to collect a lot, and then they'll very quickly process them. This will take place at very set times; they'll do it early in the season to get the little ones, and then throughout the season as the adults grow and develop. Right now is about the end of the season, it'll taper off here in October, because it actually does get a little chilly down there, it's way up in the mountains. And so that'll be the a point where, the last of the season, they're not nearly as tasty as in the beginning of the season. But one of the things that we also found is that there are women actually storing the grasshoppers to sell them after the season's over.

They'll take boxes of grasshoppers that are alive, they'll put them aside, keep [00:18:00] those grasshoppers alive. Once they're cooked, they don't last particularly long, they can spoil very quickly. But they'll keep them alive and sell them at a premium once the season is over. 

David Staley: Well, I said I was going to have this conversation with you with a little bit of trepidation because, I should tell our audience, you actually have a bag of dried grasshoppers and I, think you're going to open them and I think we're going to try some.

Is that what's going to happen here? 

Jeffrey Cohen: Doug kindly left me a bag of these to share with you. 

David Staley: That's Doug Dangler, the producer of Voices. 

Jeffrey Cohen: And these are Plazita Gourmet, con sabor Oaxaqueño. These are chapulín with the flavor of Oaxaca. They are marinated in lemon, salt, and garlic.

These are marinated with a little bit of chili, some of the women that we work with describe these as pintado, they've been painted with flavor. These are freeze dried, these are not as good as freshly cooked, but they are still pretty good. See, that mostly what you have is the [00:19:00] thorax, and they're, they're fine. 

David Staley: What do I do? 

Jeffrey Cohen: Just pop it in your mouth. It tastes like a Red Hot. 

David Staley: It is, it's got... you know, the chilis. 

Jeffrey Cohen: You can taste the chili in it. These are actually not too bad. 

David Staley: They're crunchy.

Jeffrey Cohen: One of the best ways you can use these is you can put them in salads, and they're a really lovely crunch element that will add a cool dimension of flavor.

And I will tell you one of the funniest things that we've heard is a lot of North Americans think that these are crickets.

David Staley: I don't know if I can tell the difference if I'm being honest. 

Jeffrey Cohen: Believe it or not, you could tell the difference in an instant. One of the things I was really interested in was like, how did this story that they're crickets get started? The story that they're crickets got started because of North American companies that are processing crickets.

Crickets are much easier to grow than grasshoppers. Crickets taste horrible. You can tell, if you bite into a cricket, you know immediately. Crickets taste like metal. They have a very metallic taste. 

David Staley: I'm glad Doug didn't bring us [00:20:00] crickets then. 

Jeffrey Cohen: They're not good. They're not nearly as tasty as these things.

We started asking chapulineras if they could tell us why they don't cook other insects, and then we asked specifically why they didn't cook crickets, and they looked at us like we were insane. They were like, why would anybody eat a cricket? There's an important lesson there. 

There are people in the U.S. and in Western Europe who are really pushing for an insect based diet. One of the things that's amazing about these things is that this is about 70 percent protein. 

David Staley: I've heard that about insects. And to be clear, it's not just simply in Mexico, that people around the world consume insects. 

Jeffrey Cohen: No, 2 billion people a day are eating insects globally. So, a lot of people eating insects. 

David Staley: What's the likelihood now, this is the first time I've ever had, an insect - what's the likelihood, do you think, that people in the United States will be consuming insects at some stage?

Jeffrey Cohen: It's a interesting question, and I think the answer is they're [00:21:00] never gonna be consuming them, because... 

David Staley: Even if they're nicely prepared like these?

Jeffrey Cohen: I think they're just too off putting. We don't have the bandwidth to put them in. We have a lot of foods that we eat not because they necessarily taste good, but because we know them and we've learned to love them. 

David Staley: Brussels sprouts. 

Jeffrey Cohen: Yeah, that would be a good example. You know, there are a lot of foods that I could eat, they're probably not nutritionally or in terms of your diet the best things you could eat, but we eat a lot, you know, we eat this stuff because we've learned to eat it, we've learned to love it, and it fits into really interesting categories. Insects for North Americans fit into the category of filth. 

David Staley: Yeah. 

Jeffrey Cohen: There's actually a semi scientific reference, which is the yuck factor. The yuck factor means that we can't eat insects, really. We just won't. One of the things that you'll see in the literature are people who will say, just, eat past the yuck factor, and you'll learn to like it. I don't think anybody's going to learn to like it.

David Staley: I confess, I had to [00:22:00] overcome some yuck factor here, but I'm very glad I did this. 

Jeffrey Cohen: It's a very powerful emotional response. 

David Staley: It truly is. 

Jeffrey Cohen: Yeah. 

David Staley: I had a colleague who wrote a history years ago of White Castle, of hamburgers, and hamburgers, we sometimes forget had a kind of yuck factor to it.

It was a disreputable sort of street food and, you know, horrible, but now hamburgers are simply part of the American diet. 

Jeffrey Cohen: Sure. I don't think these will be part of our diet. They really are pretty good for you.

They're very high in lots of micronutrients, and then they're very low in fat. These things basically don't have fat. 

David Staley: Cholesterol or other sorts of things like that.

Jeffrey Cohen: Yeah, they're just a really good protein. But again, I don't think people are going to be eating them. They are showing up in feed, like animal feed, and so forth.

But they're not showing up in pet food, because I think people would have the same sort of response, which is, I'm not going to feed my pets garbage, and that's what these must be. So they exist in this world of, I'll try it once to [00:23:00] tell you that I ate one.

That's kind of what happens where we're doing this research, and the women that we work with, they're really happy to sell to tourists, but they also were very clear that they're not making money off of that, right? So, a tourist comes... so a kilo of these things, so about two and a half pounds, that's a lot of grasshoppers.

They will cost about 300 pesos. If it's about 20 pesos to a dollar, it's about 15 dollars for a kilo or something. That's actually not cheap if you think about it. But if you sell to a person who's visiting from the United States or from Europe, they might spend 50 pesos for a handful, but if you're gonna be making an income that you can live on, that's not going to be the focus of what you do.

David Staley: Yeah, the bag we have it says here is like a little over an ounce or 30 grams. So, it's really quite small. 



Jeffrey Cohen: We did work on what's in them, the nutritional value, and how would this fit into a diet.

They tend to be [00:24:00] pretty clean, they can become contaminated depending on how they're prepared. They can be dangerous in terms of lead; some of this stuff is disappearing, but probably not quick enough. There's a clay pot that can be dangerous, but if they're from a source that you know is safe, we tested from all over the valley and found that most everything was safe.

The lead showed up in some of the cooking. But in those places, you were looking at a protein source that if you were going to eat, it sounds like a lot, if you're going to eat about like half pound, that was protein for a couple of days. So, it's a lot of protein. 

David Staley: Why are you an anthropologist as opposed to, a physicist or anything else?

Was it to eat insects? 

Jeffrey Cohen: It's definitely to eat insects. So I have two answers. There's the silly answer and then there's the real answer. The silly answer is that I'm an anthropologist because I just want to make twenty thousand dollars less than a sociologist would doing my [00:25:00] job.

The real answer is, as a kid, I was lucky enough, my father spent, a year and took the whole family, we went to Israel for a year and I just fell in love with archeology. The thing I can remember just so clearly is looking at these archeological sites where you could look into history every foot farther down, it was another era and I just thought, wow, that is just awesome. That ignited my love of anthropology. As I started my career in the university, it really became clear to me that I liked talking to people rather than looking at their stuff, so I shifted from archeology to cultural anthropology and I'm still here. I joke about, where I sit with other social sciences, but it's the greatest. It's really a wonderful thing to do. In part, you get to spend enough time to learn that grasshoppers are delicious, that they're a critical ingredient in the life of a community.

You get to go to amazing places. My career has taken [00:26:00] me around the world to do work, meet people, and to lecture. I don't know if there would be other opportunities, so I feel very blessed to be able to do this. 

David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research. 

Jeffrey Cohen: There are a lot of questions still to answer about chapulín, about these grasshoppers, so that's part of what we're doing. The book that goes with this project will be out in the spring. It's called, _Eating Grasshoppers: Chapulín and the Women Who Make Them,_ and that will be coming from the University of Texas Press.

That has led me to another project, which is a project on entomophagy. So entomophagy is eating insects. 

David Staley: Oh, okay. 

Jeffrey Cohen: It's not been given a lot of attention in the literature. 

David Staley: Even though 2 billion people a day? 

Jeffrey Cohen: Even though 2 billion people a day eat it. Part of that has to do with the yuck factor, in the sense that this is not something that we really want to invest a lot of time in, but there's been, over the last decade, really fascinating work [00:27:00] in human evolution, looking at the role eating insects, things like entomophagy, the role it played in our evolution, and it's very clear that it's played a really important role in the development of our species. There's been incredible work in archaeology, in part because our technology is getting better all the time, so that we know where populations in the past were eating these.

There's ample room for a good story about how we go from historical, prehistorical practices to the present, and the role that eating insects plays in all three phases, not as something that's weird, but as something central to our story as humans; that's part of what I'm doing. In other things, I just keep working on migration. I'll be going to Turkey for a big conference in February. Part of what I'm doing with my colleague Ibrahim is rethinking some of these models that are getting a little [00:28:00] dated and trying to update them, because the migration flows have changed.

So, we'll be doing some of that work too. And always looking for great students to do it with us. 

David Staley: Jeffrey Cohen. Thank you. 

Jeffrey Cohen: It was a pleasure. 

David Staley: And delicious! 

Jeffrey Cohen: Yeah. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.