The Ick Factor: The Resignification of the Grasshopper

This paper offers a theory of cultural innovation derived from engagement with Saussurian semiotics, Sahlins’s analysis of Western industrial food production, and Judith Butler’s performativity of gender. Marshall Sahlins (1978) set out to turn historical materialism on its head by demonstrating that the industrial complex of meat and protein production is organized around the cultural logic(s) of the edible, around understandings of humanness and cultural proscriptions such as the incest and cannibalism taboos. “Edibility is inversely related to humanity,” he argued. Particular animals such as horses and dogs, and the internal organs of edible animals, are closely associated with humanness, and the idea of consuming them precipitates feelings of disgust and betrayal. Sahlins was right that edibility is related to understandings of humanness. However, in addition to symbolic proximity, too much symbolic distance, such as in the case of the grasshopper, may also produce feelings of revulsion and disgust. In this paper I develop a theory of cultural innovation, whereby objects associated with disgust may be transformed into objects connoting nourishment, pleasure, even succulence. An insect on an American dinner plate, except in rare and select places, represents “matter out of place” and will produce a ritual cleansing of the plate. Variable across time and culture, the signifier of the grasshopper has been associated with pestilence and filth. Nonetheless, efforts to resignify these creatures are currently taking place. The challenge is overcoming “the ick factor – the eyes, the wings, the legs… people won’t accept it beyond novelty,” one proponent, or agent of resignification, states. Building on the above as well as on Douglas and Durkheim, I examine contemporary efforts to place bugs and grubs on American and Western European dinner plates, or to turn these creatures into “mini-livestocks,” ones that are interpreted as not merely edible but as desirable.