This American Roach

0:00Hello, friends. We're doing something new and fun. A show not just for your ears, but also for your eyes and your skin and your tongues. That sounds a little weird. What we are doing is a live show where we give the full Radiolab treatment to other senses, not just hearing, but now taste and touch. We're taking the stage as part of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, one night only, June 9th, to explore pleasure. You're going to be literally tasting things and feeling things that hopefully you have never tasted or felt before. And with the help of friends, musicians, science writers, foodies, we're going to try to blow out your senses to give you a new understanding of how you taste and feel this world.

0:51We would love if you join us. Make us your Tuesday night date, June 9th at 6 p.m. in Tribeca. I love that it's Tuesday night. Like, we're not asking for a Friday night. We're not a Friday night date. Sure. But Tuesday night, you know, you can spare one of those. I love a Tuesday night date. You can buy your tickets at TribecaFilm.com slash audio. That's TribecaFilm.com slash audio. And we're going to give you a little discount code. So get your pen or your notes app ready. that's TF26 Radiolab that's it join us hope to see you there woo

1:34wait you're listening okay alright okay alright you're listening to Radiolab from WNYC C

1:52Okay, so I have to tell you a story. All right. And I think I'm... I'm Latv Nasser. This is Radiolab. I'm sitting with reporter Alex Nisa. So my birthday is in August. And a couple summers ago here in New York, we were in the middle of this very hot, very sticky heat wave. Okay. And I had like a nice day. didn't do too much. I think I went to my community garden. I remember spending some time there. There's a park near where I live that I like to go to. And so I'd been outside all day. And I came home and needed to take a shower. Okay.

2:39And I was getting out of the shower in this, like, cloud of steam, drying off. putting like moisturizer on my face and I went to leave the bathroom barefoot to go into my bedroom which is right next door to get dressed. Okay. And I lifted my foot to take a step into the hallway but right before it touched the floor I felt these Thready little legs On the bottom of my foot And I looked down And there, on its back Was a gigantic Roach Oh Wait, what? I thought you were going to say like a Serial killer You mean like a roach, like a cockroach? An American cockroach, yeah And this was like a big one Um And it was on its back like it was dying.

3:42Yeah, but with roaches, you just never know. Like it could look dead, but be just alive enough that it's going to flip back over and run at my leg. And with my foot hovering over this bug, I'm flooded with revulsion, but also terror. Like this bug has got to go now. And so I got back in the shower, scrubbed my foot, wrapped myself in a towel, ran to go find my cat, put her next to the roach, take a few steps back. And I wait. And she's looking at the roach and looking at me. And I'm like, do something! But she just walks away. So then I'm like, pull yourself together. Like, buck up. I have to square up against the roach.

4:37The dying or dead roach. Right. Okay. So I put on yellow rubber gloves and then I get a wad of paper towels, saturate it in water, grab toilet bowl cleaner, you know, like the blue gel. Okay. Squirt a bunch of it into the paper towel. And from like three feet away, toss it so that it lands gel down on top of the roach. And then I take a shoe and holding it like as far away from my body as I can get it. I'm just like, like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Okay, yeah. What? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then I get a trash bag, scoop it up and stick it in there, and then tie it up super tight.

5:23Wow. Then it goes into the trash chute. and standing there in rubber gloves next to the trash chute on my birthday I'm just like what is wrong with me like this is not the first time that this has happened every single time I see a roach I completely unravel like I just go nuts and I don't even hate bugs in general it's just something about this bug. I don't know. Like, I just snap. And for some reason, when it happened this time, I was like, I'm a whole adult person. I'm a science reporter. This has to stop. Okay. So is what we're doing here, like, it's like how Alex learned to stop worrying and love the roach?

6:11Not really. I'm not really trying to get cozy with roaches. I just want to figure out how to get to a place where I'm not terrified of them. And obviously, I know this is something that a lot of people are afraid of. And I wanted to figure out, you know, is there something I can do so that the next time I see one, I don't completely lose my mind. So I figured I'd go hang out with people who face basically the worst version of this every single day. Okay. Which is how I ended up at the after party. It's one of the finest expos in New York, probably in the nation. For the New York City Pest Expo.

6:53And we get top-notch pest control companies and exterminators from all over. There was like a roach ball? Yeah, it's like the social part. Like there's food, there's drinks, there was a DJ, like there's music. And also... Oh yeah, I've seen roaches drop off the ceiling. A ton of people who have been in straight up nightmare scenarios. I've knocked on doors and seen them running up and down the doors. Roaches were in everything from the record player to the TV to the bedhead. This place was literally, I'm telling you, Stephen King levels of roaches. And yet, no fear. We had to take care of the situation.

7:33How many insects do you have at home? Oh, I have about 4 ,000 or 5 ,000 bedbugs. Yeah. This is Lou Sorkin, an entomologist and pest control consultant. All the three cockroach species, millipede, centipede, spiders, a whip scorpion. And right next to him, he had this huge plastic tub of cockroaches. This is a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Oh, yes. Madagascar ones are huge, right? Yeah, like some of the biggest roaches in the world. And at one point, Lou just picked one up with his bare hands. They won't bother you. They're just, you know, sitting. They're tasting. You can see the palps come from the mouth down and touch my skin.

8:18I think I might have nightmares tonight. We'll see. And I was like, how are these people like that? Hi. Nice to meet you. And could I get like that? Well, let's go. Take a stroll. So I found some exterminators who agreed to let me follow them around. One named Lakeisha Fulcher. Here we have 11 buildings, all 16 stories. She works at a public housing complex on the Lower East Side. I go in your house, you have 300 roaches. I'm happy. Give me five days. Let's go. And also a guy named Cedric Simmons. He has his own company. So right now we're headed to North Bronx to a residential unit that has been having some issues with German roaches.

9:01And they just started showing me the ropes. Flashlight is the most essential piece of the toolkit. We went into basements and trash rooms. Watch on the whiteboard, of course. They're scattering. They're going to places like this. They showed me how to find signs that roaches were living there, even when they're hiding. So you'll be looking for marks like this. What look like pen tapping. It'll look like pepper, like stuck pepper on a wall. It's roach droppings. and, of course, how to kill them. There's one right back there, look. Oh, yeah. See it? Cedric takes me inside this house, and the first thing he does is take a look around the closet with his flashlight, and you can see the roaches perched up on the wall.

9:43Oh, there's two more up there. And then he goes to the kitchen sink, and he pulls out this jug, and it's this chemical, you know, it's basically industrial-strength raid. Yeah, it is pretty strong. It has a pretty good knockdown, too. knock down meaning how quick it reduces the population. The kind of stuff you need a license to buy. Like, you can't get this at Home Depot. So what does this actually do to them? So it attacks their nervous system and it disrupts it and it makes them basically just incapable and then it succumbs them. Is it painful for them? I don't know. I don't know. At some point, he pointed out a pregnant roach.

10:20That one back there has its egg sac about to come out. The one on the wall? Yeah, in the corner. Is that that little, like, that's protruding up? Yeah, that's a next eye. Oh, man. And then he started spraying them. And after about 10 minutes, they made their last twitches. I think that's definitely dead. How did you feel about that? Like, did you feel bad? Um, sort of. The sack is coming out. Damn. I was like, that sucks. For a second. Yeah. And then it's like I didn't think about it for the rest of the day. Oh, well. Sorry. Honestly, what I really felt were these little glimmers of confidence.

11:04Like you weren't afraid. Well, it's not that I wasn't afraid, but it was like my fear had shrunk just enough that I was starting to feel kind of bold. Like maybe I could kill these things too. So here we have roach activity and roodern activity. And then also that's the crying of the bait. Yeah. Okay. We saw one. I didn't freak out. Like, Cedric took me to Grand Central Station. And let's go for it. I was seeing fat roaches and acting like it was no big deal. Ooh, big one. Okay. I didn't like it. It's so tall. But it was nothing like before. So I can step on them or I can spray them. Um, I don't know.

11:48Stepping seems kind of old school. Maybe we do that. Oh! Wow. That was fun. Yeah.

12:01But then, one night, I was just sitting around my apartment. A friend was over. We were watching TV. Okay. And I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. And I saw something slightly moved in the sink. So I looked inside and I saw antenna. And I was like, nope. Walked straight out of the kitchen, got my friend, told him he needs to come deal with it. And then I stood behind him and squealed while I watched him kill it. Wait, what happened to all your training? I don't know. I just couldn't do it. What? I mean, first of all, Lakeisha and Cedric, nowhere to be found. Right. And second of all, I was seeing this roach in my house, in my sink, where I had just washed blueberries that morning.

12:56And I think it triggered some kind of survival instinct. And I just don't think any amount of pest control knowledge was going to override that. Basically, I was just like, okay, well, that didn't work. Back to square one, you know, I got to start over. And one day I was just Googling around and I stumbled across this guy. Hey, guys, I'm Chef Joseph Yoon, Edible Insect Ambassador at Brooklyn Bugs, and we're going to show you how to eat all these bugs. Yeah, I've seen this YouTube video of him doing like different dishes with bugs. Yeah, like gourmet dishes. Yeah. Bug appetit. The beautiful notes of cricket, umami and nuttiness.

13:42This is perfect. Oh, wait, but you're not going to. Well, I just thought if anyone could help me get over that revulsion I feel towards these bugs. This corpian literally adds so much labor. Maybe it's this guy. Like if I could just eat a roach, maybe it wouldn't be nasty anymore. It would just be a little snack. Okay. All right. And so I sent him an email and I was like, do you ever cook with roaches? And he wrote back to me and was like, absolutely not. I'm already having to do a lot of work to convince people that they should eat other bugs. Roaches have such a bad reputation. Like, roaches don't help my cause, basically.

14:23I love that it's a bridge too far for him. So I went back and forth with him being like, you're the only person I can possibly think of who could make me like eating a roach. And then finally— You bullied him into doing it. Like, I fear I might have. I fear I might have. Smells good. It does smell good. Fuck. Okay, so what happened? Let's do it. What's going on? Right. So me and eight of our colleagues. Joseph had like very, very generously invited us to his home in Queens. We're all going to try something really kind of unusual and weird. So obviously all of us are really nervous, including Joseph, because he's never actually eaten an American cockroach before.

15:12So we started with his usual dishes, crickets, ants, mealworms. This is the brood 19 cicadas, and it has a cricket tempura batter on it. Okay, so this is just a warm-up. Yeah. It's delicious. I love it. It's good. And the whole time, I'm looking over at the bowl of cockroaches on the counter out of the side of my eye. And by the way, they weren't like random roaches. These were food safe from a lab. Okay. good to know. And honestly, Lettiv, I was kind of in denial that any of this was about to happen. They're quite frightening.

15:52Maybe I'll pull the legs off of them. First up, dubia roaches. There might be innards that squirt in your mouth. Fried. I can't really taste anything which is ideal. Oh! Something... It's mental. Something poked the inside of my mouth. It's a leg? You think it's a leg? I, Lettiv, I don't know what it was, but I hated it.

16:15Next, Madagascar hissing cockroaches. And he had blanched these and done nothing else. You can dress a cockroach, but it's still a cockroach. He put them on a cutting board and sliced them so we could slurp the insides out like an oyster. It looks like cottage cheese. But this one was not that bad. It has like a really umami smell. Much better. It was like eggs. Huh. And then finally, my arch nemesis, the American cockroach. Oh. So he grabs some kind of cooking oil, throws it in a pan, and adds all these aromatics like garlic, red pepper, and then he throws in the roaches. You know what? It has kind of a chemise smell to it that the other two didn't have.

17:05It's kind of weird. But as he started to cook, everyone's faces, including Joseph's, just started to fall. Because no matter how long he was, like, sauteing these freaking roaches with all these aromatics, it just smelled off. But Joseph still grabbed a spoon. I think someone has to do it. Took a bite. What does it taste like? And the look on his face made me feel really guilty. I mean, I almost spit out what I ate. Terrestrials producer Alan Gifinski also tried it. Nervous.

17:49I mean, it doesn't... Oh, yeah, there it is.

17:56Well, initially it just kind of, I just was tasting sort of the garlic, like an onion. But that smell that you guys have been smelling is, it's also a taste. It tastes like something that you shouldn't eat. Yeah. What is the rochi smell smell like? Kind of like medicinal, but in like a foul, sour kind of way. So you did not eat it? No. Like, according to a bugs-ass food expert, the American cockroach is literally inedible. It's a warning sign to me. It's kind of like, don't eat me. I dare you to eat me. I'll kill you. Man, this is really not going well. Yeah. No, the whole thing completely backfired.

18:43Yeah. So we're going to take a quick break. Yeah. Cleanse our palates. Yeah. But after the break, things are going to get even messier. We'll be right back.

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22:35I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab back with reporter Alex Neeson, who has just faced her deep-seated fear of the roach in a number of unspeakable ways. Yes. But it backfired and she only managed to surface her maybe even more deep-seated disgust for them. Yeah, I didn't want them in my life, in my city, in my state, anywhere. Sure. On planet Earth. Yeah. I just hate them. This position is okay. And this boom likes to slide. Sort of amidst all of this, I came across this book called Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains by science writer. Can I cuss on this program? Yes. Bethany Brookshire.

23:14Alex Neason:So this squirrel is known as fucking Kevin. And this book, it was just on the front table at my neighborhood bookstore. But it turned out to be exactly what I needed. Because while the animal Bethany hates is a squirrel. And he lives in the maple tree in front of my house. Particularly the ones that she named Kevin. Fucking Kevin. Who were eating all of her tomatoes. Doesn't even eat it. Just one bite and then leaves it. So this is like personal. Yes, I really did contemplate a BB gun. Wow. But Kevin is one of the creatures that led me to this deep question of... The question the book was asking...

23:47Alex Neason:What is it that makes us hate animals? Yeah. I could sort of feel it elevating me out of my murder, murder, murder, kill, kill, kill, lizard brain to this idea that I could really get behind. Every time an animal has succeeded really well at living near us, we hate them. If we can't take it in, tame it, and put it in a little doggy sweater, we do not want it. That word pest takes an animal that is like a living, breathing creature that lives here on this planet with us and turns it into an object. We're saying that that animal has no value. We are saying that anything we need to do to get rid of that animal is worthwhile.

24:32Which is exactly how I feel about roaches. And she sort of proposes that we should do away with the category of pest altogether. Wait, that's fascinating. And, you know, the wheels in my head just like start spinning. And I just kept thinking, like, huh, this is how I want to be in the world. what I want my politic to be. Like, I'm going to make a t-shirt that says abolish pests and let people ask me about it. Like, I'm down. And I really want to not hate the roach. Yes.

25:01Alex Neason:But how? Well, so a lot of the way we respond to animals and the anger we feel and the frustration arises out of our own ignorance.

25:16Sounds like you need to, you know, walk a mile in their little weird, disgusting feet. I know. I think it's time to learn about these revolting, repulsive, nauseating, offensive, terrible animals.