The Locust Inspector
by Jeffrey Greene
We were children when the drought began, and about to marry when the locusts came — the first plague in living memory — from out of the west and across the farm belt, eating everyone’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The world looked up from its wars over oil, water, land, God, and saw that the insects had groomed a new champion for the Age of Scarcity: larger and hungrier than its extinct precursor, with the inborn strength to traverse a continent in search of food and breeding grounds.
And then, Love, you died — ever the anachronist, in childbirth — taking our one thin chance for happiness with you, while the drought was still in its first youth and mine was already waning. Again, and then again, the four-inch long, dappled gray-brown harbinger of harder times came on its thousand-mile wings in ravenous black clouds and, having nothing left to hope for, I enlisted as a soldier in the war against that new/old enemy.
The Giant Western Valley Locust cunningly bred in remote places all but impossible to reach, laying its eggs in the rocky soil of secret valleys surrounded by mountainous forest. They were so resistant to pesticides that farmers fought them in futile, epic battles with fire, guns, shovels and brooms, killing thousands while billions ate their fill — a locust the size of an aircraft carrier, if you could glue one swarm together — on every stalk, stem, blossom and blade of corn, wheat, barley, rye, oats, alfalfa, soybeans, ornamental flowers, and feed grass for a hundred miles around.
Then they flew on and ate more, flew on and ate more, until they had devoured a fifth of the human food supply and all of human complacency. And with all our knowledge, resources, and fear, we fought them. We are fighting them still.
— from The Eighth Plague, by Fisher Odin Brill
* * *
But how quaint and long ago all that seems now.
They finally kicked him upstairs, from front-line USDA field officer, a position he’d aged out of, to Plague Policy Supervisor, the best-paying job in the field and the one nobody wanted. It was supposed to be a gift of financial security for helping to formulate the then-textbook strategy of Starving the Swarm.
Like any other army, the locust travels on its stomach, and a scorched-earth policy, starting at the leading edge of its eastward flight, though economically and politically costly, had proven the most effective way to stop it or, at least, weaken it.
Farmers hated the policy, of course, and especially hated its enforcer, the face — though a seamed and self-effacing one — of Federal power, handing down its bankrupting edicts from Washington, that may be good for the greatest number but ruinous for the family seeing its hundred acres of corn burned to the roots.
The Plague Policy Supervisor would repeat to any half-sympathetic ear: “I understand; I’d hate me, too. But we do give fair compensation to the affected farmers, and sacrifices are always necessary in war. Some people still refuse to believe that the human species could ever find itself in a losing battle with a grasshopper.”
But the changes kept coming, move and counter-move, and as they evolved, we evolved new strategies to defeat them. It was brute genetic power versus the hundred billion neurons of the human brain, the six-legged locust against the two-legged locust, and the world’s breadbaskets were the prize.
They were slowly starving, but so were we, and a new, mutant strain laid eggs that could lie dormant in the earth for years, waiting for a banner growing season, to emerge, swarm and devour. We weren’t winning, the President made bold to say in his State of the Union address. It was barely a stalemate.
But we were predators long before we were farmers. Wasn’t the solution to the problem written in bold, red letters all around us? Nature is one great mouth, and the Human Mouth is Leviathan, devouring all the other beasts put together. Our only serious rival is the Insect Mandible. We have always defeated our enemies by eating them.
The great powers collectively agreed to abandon the Starving the Swarm policy. The locust would henceforth be raised domestically and fattened for slaughter. The northern and temperate countries would learn to do what many people in the tropics had always done for sustenance: eat the locust. High in protein, cheap and abundant, its genes manipulated to grow as large as a buffalo, the locust became our cash crop, our manna, our salvation. And as the big vegetable farmers moved east of the Mississippi, the Giant Western Valley Locust, like its ancestor, began to diminish, its numbers no longer reaching the critical threshold that produces swarming behavior.
In one of his annual field reports, the Plague Policy man, now demoted at his own request to Locust Inspector, writes:
On both industrial and family farms in the Midwest, the monocrop is no longer corn, but giant locusts. Cattle disappeared from the plains along with the feed corn grown to fatten them, and the grass and weeds on which they no longer graze goes into those thousand-pound insect bodies, bred to stay wingless and docile.
The insects are ‘finished’ on pellets of a highly concentrated and nutritious vat-grown algae, which sweetens the meat and gives it a more appetizing color. Food locusts grow five times faster than cows, are less subject to disease and produce a brood of thirty to sixty eggs a year, ninety percent of which, thanks to the controlled conditions of modern agriculture, grow to maturity. The tender meat is easily processed and preserved, and the dried, ground-up exoskeleton makes a fine mulch.
This tone of brisk, professional optimism does not extend to the Locust Inspector’s personal life. Approaching retirement age, he has the look of a man separated from the one thing that could have made him happy by a one-way, mirrored wall, through which he can always see his happiness aging alongside him, and forgetting him, too.
His job pays well, with all the benefits and headaches of working for the Feds, and he excels at it, but thoughts of suicide are never out of whispering distance. Why, when so many others are out of work, struggling just to survive, much less to save, is he so close to despair?
In the glare of midday, he bounces over corrugated dirt roads in his sand-colored, government-issue pickup truck, both windows open, a water-stained paperback copy of The Eighth Plague on the dashboard, having its pages thumbed and rethumbed by the hot summer wind. These days, the farmers in his jurisdiction aren’t as openly hostile as they were in his Plague Policy years, seeing him less as a USDA hitman than a nitpicker.
Most have admirably adapted to their six-legged cash crop, and those cowboy romantics who couldn’t adapt have long since left the business. State fairs award prizes for the biggest locust grown each season, and no one is complaining about profit margins, since grass seed is inexpensive, the finishing pellets affordable, and weeds as free as they’ve always been, excising the corporate seed gangsters from the equation. And locust meat has become the number one agricultural export in the U.S. farm belt.
But there are always those who will cut corners in sanitation, worker safety, environmental guidelines, and humane practices of husbandry and slaughter, though this last is, at best, laxly enforced. Protesters against cruelty to insects find little sympathy from the public, especially since everyone over a certain age remembers the bad old days of near-starvation when the wild locusts had us all on C-rations. A bug’s a bug, the Congressmen of farm districts are too fond of saying as they vote ‘no’ for stricter controls on current farming methods.
Growth hormones are unnecessary for the fast-growing locust, which matures in three months, but some will try it anyway, and the Locust Inspector is once more forced into the role of policeman, a uniform even more ill-fitting, now that he is old and melancholy.
In the morning, he inspects a large industrial farm where — it is early summer now — the Saint-Bernard sized grasshoppers, their numbers obviously exceeding federal limits on insects per acre, crawl and tumble over each other as they quickly devour a big field of high grass and weeds. Contained inside a ten-foot high electrified fence, they create an appalling din as they masticate and jostle about, pushing and scraping against one another with their powerful, serrated back legs, fighting over still-lush patches of turf.
When they’ve exhausted one field, they are herded through tunnels constructed out of PVC into a fresh field. Soil erosion from over-grazing locusts is a chronic problem here, for which this farm has already been cited. Later in the summer, the grasshoppers will be transferred to tight holding pens in the one-story, half-mile long “bughouses” reminiscent of poultry farming, their back legs pinned together with steel clips to keep them from trying to escape while they are fattened on algae pellets.
As a form of defense, grasshoppers regurgitate a sticky, brown, obnoxious-smelling liquid, composed of stomach contents, phenols, and digestive fluid, which the farmers call “spitting tobacco juice.” The stink is hardly noticeable in a two-inch insect but is overwhelming in a half-ton specimen, and the smell inside these immense feeding houses is far worse than anything that cattle, pigs and chickens ever produced.
Although he has never admitted this to anyone, the sight of these thousands of unnatural creatures gorging themselves day and night as they spit and defecate, makes the Locust Inspector’s skin crawl and his stomach turn over. While benefitting from it monetarily, he has never wholly reconciled himself to the new paradigm, feeling that the so-called victory trumpeted by the President in a quite recent speech was too dearly bought, and that by turning the hated locust into its principal food source, the human species has, in a sense, become its own adversary.
These thoughts, of course, cannot be shared either with his colleagues or the farmers who have embraced the new reality far more gracefully than he has. This makes him feel like a liar as well as a hypocrite as he cites infractions and makes his reports, and he is ever more grateful to be near retirement age.
He arrives at the family farm of Albert and Bettina Hillinger around twelve-thirty in the afternoon, as promised, honoring their friendly tradition that his official visits coincide with lunch. The Hillingers run one of the most successful family locust farms in the district, having all but cornered the specialty gourmet market with their hybrid cross of the Giant Western Valley Locust and the huge Lubber Grasshopper of the American South. Food writers claim that Hillinger Farm’s Fresh and Smoked Locust Meat is the finest and most delicately flavored in the U.S., and their products are in continuous demand in upscale restaurants all over the country.
On this subject, the Locust Inspector is noncommittal. His most carefully guarded secret is that he loathes all insect meat and eats it only when he has to, like today when, to ensure continued good relations and ready compliance among the farmers in his district, he will sit at the Hillingers’ table and break locust bread with them. At home, he keeps a basement freezer full of absurdly expensive beef, pork, lamb, and poultry, which are still produced by small boutique farms on the Eastern Seaboard.
Today, however, he will be dining on a home-cooked meal proudly prepared by Mrs. Hillinger, and he will eat every bite, praising her cuisine just enough, but not too much, lest he make her suspicious. Bettina is, in fact, a very good cook and, if anyone could make the stuff palatable, it is she. He blames himself for his bone-deep prejudice against insect meat, and he has learned to eat and smile and suppress the gag response so artfully that, over the last five years, he has almost singlehandedly changed local opinion of the Feds, from undying hatred to cynical tolerance. The Hillingers even pretend to like him.
The sumptuously horrific meal ends on a pleasant note with Mrs. Hillinger’s excellent hot cherry pie with homemade ice cream, a dessert blessedly devoid of insect by-products, which helps to placate his dangerously unsettled stomach. The Hillingers’ timing, as always, is artful. They’ve wined and dined him, he has accepted and smoked one of Albert’s fine cigars, and now he must don his duty cap and inspect the farm.
As he and Albert ride around together in the farmer’s truck, it is tacitly understood that the Locust Inspector has not been bribed by a meal to overlook a few minor violations. He will do his job, smiling all the while as he cites Albert for one over-grazed field, insufficient tree and shrub planting on the banks of the creek running through his property, to minimize waste contamination of an important watershed, and several unmucked holding pens. But these are easily-corrected problems, which Albert assures him will be attended to well before his next visit and, in the end, as always, Hillinger Farms receives a Satisfactory rating.
In the Hillingers’ bughouse, emulating his host, he has refused a gas mask, and silently struggles to keep his lunch down as Albert leads him to a pen that barely contains a gigantic black-and-yellow grasshopper with shriveled, rudimentary wings colored a delicate shade of pink with black spots. Its obsidian-black, compound eyes are the size of dinner plates.
Albert reaches through the bars and grips an antenna as big around as the thin end of a baseball bat. “Josie, say hi to the nice government inspector,” he says. “Josie here is a shoo-in to take first prize at the State Fair this year. Eleven hundred pounds and barely half grown. Biggest goddamn bug I’ve ever seen.”
“You have to wonder what the upper size limit is,” the Locust Inspector says, breathing through his mouth. The sound of all that tonnage of locusts chewing algae pellets in the vast room, extending almost to the vanishing point in both directions, is like a hailstorm of eggs. He thinks: This is what overpopulation sounds like. Smells like. Tastes like.
“If her egg production matches her growth potential, we could be looking at the future of locust farming,” Albert says. As the farmer walks him out to his truck, he says, “Bettina wanted to give you some leftovers to take with you, but I reminded her that it’s against the law to offer gifts to the Locust Inspector.” His lopsided smile is grimly sarcastic.
“True, sad to say,” the Inspector says, affecting a regretful smile. “But Bettina knows how much I look forward to her lunches. That cherry pie was the high point of my day.”
“I’ll be sure and tell her that. No amount of praise seems to be enough for a woman who’s had to learn fifty ways to cook bug meat.”
They shake hands, and as he turns to leave, Albert stares hard at him and smiles. “You hate it, don’t you?”
“What’s that?”
“Bug meat.”
“Hate it? No, I wouldn’t say—”
“Oh, yeah. It’s written all over your face. Looking at them, smelling them, that yellowy-brown mush on your plate: makes you want to throw up. It’s all right; I feel the same way.”
“You? That must be awkward.”
“You have no idea,” Albert says. “Well, maybe you do, at that. But walking through the bughouse the other day, something hit me, something I hadn’t realized until that moment: if we didn’t have bug meat, what do you think we’d be eating?”
Staring at him, the Locust Inspector felt an ominous rumble in his stomach, a chilly sweat breaking out on his face.
“How long do you think the old taboo would hold up, if more than half of us began to starve?”
“I don’t think I want to know,” the Inspector replies.
“I do. Which is why more and bigger bugs is the answer. My answer, anyway.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Albert. I’m just glad to be on the way out.”
An hour later, in his hotel room, the Locust Inspector loses his lovingly prepared lunch of locust egg soup, fried baby locust antennae, squash, onion and locust casserole, and grilled back leg meat, after which he feels much better. He always brings a supply of crostini, oil-cured olives and some hard Italian Piave cheese on these trips, which he washes down with a good Rosso di Montalcino.
He has two more family farms, and five more industrial farms to inspect, before he flies back to St. Louis on Friday. But unlike the family farms, the big combines are mostly run by men who don’t mind letting him know they’d rather spit on his shadow than feed him lunch, and he finds that now, so late in his career, he prefers it that way, Government and Big Agriculture smiling insincerely at each other across a bare formica table, drinking bad coffee and talking about the weather, while probing for weaknesses.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
