After years of studying worms, Tracy Chong begins to wonder if they might hold the key to alleviating hunger.
Tracy Chong found her passion working with invertebrates as a graduate student at the University of Illinois. She studied the development and regeneration of the reproductive system in the planarian, a free-living flatworm. She is currently part of a team at the Morgridge Institute for Research studying parasitic worms that causes the debilitating disease, Schistosomiasis. Aside from worms and science, Tracy is passionate about entrepreneurship and food. Combining her formal training as a scientist, with her culinary interest and hands-on business experience, Tracy’s vision is to provide a sustainable and affordable source of protein to meet the world’s growing global nutritional demands.
This story originally aired on August 10, 2018 in an episode titled “Bright Ideas.”
Story Transcript
I live in a tiny 150-square foot studio. Not by myself, but with over five thousand roommates. At night, I don’t need a white noise machine to fall asleep because I can hear them rustling and crawling around, but maybe I do need some noise-cancelling headphones instead.
So this is not my first encounter with the sound of creatures rustling around at night. In southern Illinois, there's a very special road in the Shawnee National Forest. Twice a year, a mass migration happens, a mass migration of snakes, reptiles and amphibians as they cross this very unique country road from cliffs and bluffs to the vast swamps as the seasons change.
So what was I doing in Snake Road? Yes. This road is actually named Snake Road and my business in Snake Road was not to study snakes but to study worms. My first formal encounter with worms was with freshwater planarians, the masters of regeneration. Some of you might know them from biology class where, like in Game of Thrones, beheadings happen rather frequently. But in this case, it is not followed by a bloody death. Instead, they just re-grow a new head all without breaking a sweat.
When I was a graduate student, I helped with a comparative study to find out why some planarians can regenerate better than others. As it turns out, one of the most difficult parts of this project was to find those elusive worms. Unfortunately, we couldn’t just order them off the internet so I actually had to go on worm-hunting adventures to find these worms in the wild.
My colleague James and I, over the span of two years, made multiple trips to Snake Road. And Snake Road is very special because this is one of the places in Illinois where we can find these worms. Sometimes we went by ourselves, sometimes we were joined by curious and helpful lab mates.
We spent days turning over thousands of pea-sized rocks in the stream often encountering many other different species of worms before encountering the rare planarians that we came for. They were very good at hiding.
At best, it was Zen-like and calming. I would glance at the beautiful cliffs and listen to the gentle sounds of the stream. At worst, it was mind numbing and frustrating, especially when the conditions were extreme, being bitten by swarms of mosquitoes in the hot, humid summer and dipping our hands in cold, freezing water for hours during the winter months. At the start of each trip we would wish so hard that today would be the lucky day where the worms would just be hanging out, but of course this was never the case.
Once, amidst the peace and quiet, I heard a soft rumbling sound. James and I locked eyes and he said with a very straight face, “A wild boar?”
Shit! The image of a wild boar rushing straight at me flashed before my eyes. I went through the different scenarios in my head. Should I climb a tree? Wait, could I even do that? Should I run? To where? Fight? Hmmm.
Then I heard some laughing and he confessed that it was his stomach rumbling. Oh, yeah, feeling hungry during those long afternoons was pretty common.
Then there was the fear of poisonous snakes. They are cottonmouths also known as water moccasins in southern Illinois. I remember reading how they are poisonous, producing toxins that can disrupt blood clotting and destroy tissues and cells. Such a scary thought.
But the scariest part, though, was when I had to pee. Imagine being this close to the ground covered with long grass, branches, fallen leaves, not knowing what’s hiding underneath but knowing that there's probably a snake, maybe a poisonous one, lurking somewhere in there.
I remember my routine rather clearly. I would use my feet and a stick to sweep the ground before squatting down. Even then, my legs would be shaking and even the slightest rustle would cause my heart to skip a beat. But when I was done, though, it was such a relief in more ways than one.
Finally, we collected enough worms and brought them back to the lab to investigate with the polarity which end is which in the animal is important when it comes to regenerating a new body part.
Then my next adventure, my next worm adventure brought me to the Bay Area. It was a great time, exciting science, gorgeous weather, there were mountains to climb and hills to hike. I was in a very tight budget, though, so this meant that I rarely ate out. And when I did, it was very special and I would pack my leftovers for my next meal.
One night, after a lovely dinner with my best friend Nick, I headed home happy and full. At the station, a homeless man, clearly hungry, asked me if I needed my leftovers. At that time, my leftovers were very precious to me so I said, “Yes, I need them.”
The moment those words left my mouth, I felt like the most horrible, selfish person. There I was able to go and have a nice meal, able to go home and fall asleep in a nice, cozy, warm bed and yet I could not give my leftovers to someone who really needed them. At that moment I made a simple promise to myself that for as long as I could afford it, if I had leftovers and met someone who needed them, I would give them away.
From that incident, though, I've always wanted to do even more to alleviate hunger and food shortage. Well, as it turns out, the answer had been in front of right along. After years of working with gentle and harmless flatworms and roundworms, I now work in a lab that studies parasitic worms.
One of these parasites, the tapeworm, has a rather complicated life cycle that involves developing inside an insect, a beetle. And the larval stage of this beetle is known as the mealworm. Many mornings, I would watch my colleague Edward tending to his mealworms. And once we joked how delicious and yummy these mealworms would be. Actually, it was more like me joking and Edward, well, he looked rather grossed out at the thought of eating his mealworms.
I've always known that people ate insects but, at the same time, I was starting to hear more and more about using insects as a potential source of protein. The more I read, the more convinced I was that using insects as food could be a sustainable solution to the problem of food and nutrition shortage, especially as our population increases both in the U.S. and in the rest of the world.
Well, of course I had to test this out for myself, first. The first insect I ate was beondegi. Beondegi Is silkworm larva. It’s a South Korean street food and it’s often found boiled and served in paper cups. We found our beondegi at a Korean grocery store in a can. With much hesitation and trepidation I tasted my first beondegi with a Korean friend, and it was so bad. I had tears streaming down my face trying not to gag. I couldn’t decide if I should swallow it and be done with it or spit it out because it was mushy and it tasted like wet wood.
I then had the brilliant idea of roasting it because I thought, oh, roasting it will make it taste better. But that, again, was a horrible, terrible mistake. Because roasting the beondegi caused the whole place to smell like rotting, wet wood. The smell was so bad and, fortunately, my friends were understanding.
At this point I was very, very worried. How would my idea of using insects as a sustainable food source work if I hated the taste of insects? Well, fortunately, the next bugs that I tried were the mealworms. I can still remember how relieved I felt when I took my first bite of a roasted mealworm. It was delicious. It was crunchy. It had a mild nutty flavor. I could eat lots of this. So as it turns out, mealworms have a great potential as a food source because they have high protein content and they are easy to raise.
So yes, my 5,000 roommates who keep me company at night are my mealworms. But rest assured these mealworms come from my happy farm and they have not been in contact with a parasite in lab.
So now I work with what I love, cooking and worms. And feeding my friends and colleagues who thankfully are quite open to being food testers. Even Edward has been convinced to try a mealworm. Of all my adventures and challenges with worms, I have a feeling that the best but maybe most difficult challenge is yet to come. I have to convince all of you that mealworms are delicious and nutritious. Thank you.