A Theory About Cockroaches

Bugs are bite-sized. And as such are the living analogs of food.

They naturally proffer themselves as things that could easily fit in our mouths, and that is one of the vital reasons many insects disgust us, most especially the cockroach. The cockroach is bite-sized.

We only become roundly disgusted when the insect approaches the size of dung, such as the cockroach. The cockroach is at once dung-sized and bite-sized, making it catastrophically disgusting. Granted the cockroach represents a small dung, but a dung nevertheless.

I have seen dungs of my own that are about the size of a cockroach—while I rarely see dungs of my own that are the size of wasps. It would be a rare dung of mine that is the width of a wasp.

Our feelings for insects are therefore delimited by two borders of disgust: that of something we could put inside our mouths and that of something that could come out the other end. We are generally confused on this point. It is only insects far too large to be feces—such as crabs, lobsters, and prawns—that we consider edible. WhatÕs more, my theory maintains that the prawn, which is dung-sized, is not met with the same disgust as a landbased prawn might be, because the prawn, by dint of its watery habitat, resembles a flushed dung, and is thus scatologically mitigated. A flushed dung is a dung in its appropriate environment, unlike a dung that is crawling across our plate, as an insect might.