Children draw beetles, roaches, flies and slugs as food

Kebab of houseflies by Bailey


News reports of vegan outrage at Starbucks ingredients usually would be the last thing on my radar, but the fuss over extracts from a Peruvian beetle being used to make coffee foam look strawberry-tinted caught my eye.

We are in the process of scoring "Ever-Ready Bank Accounts" by Wole Soyinka. This is a poem about hunger and greed, written by a man in prison. It deals in gritty detail with the extremes of hunger that drive people to eat things like slugs, cockroaches, houseflies -- and beetles.

On Friday, May 18, Poetry Scores will hang work about this poem by some 50 artists at Mad Art Gallery. We like to involve children, because they are exciting to work with and famously adventurous as artists. We partner with SCOSAG, where I recently drew for an hour with a dozen children. I wrote phrases from the poem on the board, talked the kids through what the phrases meant, and then they drew whatever they wanted to draw.

I really wasn't sure how it was going to go with all the "bugs as food" stuff. But the children surprised me, as children typically do. No one acted totally grossed out, and everyone got the idea right away. I talked about hunger and starvation, very briefly, and said, "Would you eat a cockroach, or starve?"

"Eat a cockroach!" they all said decisively.

"Would you eat a slug, or starve?"

Everybody: "Eat a slug!"

"Would you eat a beetle, or starve?"

Everybody: "Eat a beetle!"

There may be a lesson in here for the vegan soy strawberry tinted frappe consumers of Planet Earth.

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Here are some of the bug food pictures these kids drew with me, placed in the order their titles appear in the flow of Soyinka's poem, as is our method.

Children slay the cockroach for a meal [detail]
Bailey

Cockroach
Grace

Kebab of houseflies [detail]
Leyla Fern

Leyla is my daughter and drew with me later at home. She seized on a more familiar domestic critter (the fly) that many of the children drew.

Kebab of houseflies
Penny

Kebab of houseflies
Dylan

Kebab of houseflies
Hannah

Beetles broiled
Emma

Beetles broiled in carapace
Bailey

Bailey was one of the more advanced artists in this group. He had a distinctive style of pairing two images from the poem, often in ways that show profound insight into the dual themes of hunger and greed -- like this beetle BBQ paired with a bank vault.

Slugs
Matthew

Slugs really spoke to Matthew as a subject. What poured forth from the boy was a veritable Matthew's Slug Variations.

Slugs (ii)
Matthew

Slugs (iii)
Matthew

This concludes the Matthew Ernst Slug Variations, but two more kids also drew terrific slugs

Slugs
Grace

Slugs are scientific stores of protein
Hannah

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This is only the second year we are working children's art into a Poetry Scores Art Invitational. We are going to try to do a better job with the model we introduced last year. We put one piece by each child artist into the "big people's show" with an opening bid of $5 each (it's a silent auction). The rest of the child art we put in a separate space at the gallery (actually, a jail cell; Mad Art is a former police station) for $1 each.

My daughter helped me pick a first draft of the children's art for the big people's "Ever-Ready Bank Accounts" show, previously posted; the images presented in this post in "[detail]" are from the big people's show.

YET MORE INFO

A copy of "Ever-Ready Bank Accounts" by Wole Soyinka with details on the May 18 Art Invitational

A superb piece of newspaper journalism in The Alton Telegraph about our larger project with Wole Soyinka