This American Roach
Reporter Alex Neeson explores her intense fear and disgust of American cockroaches through encounters with exterminators, an edible insect chef, and entomologists. Her journey takes an unexpected turn when she learns the American cockroach arrived in the U.S. on slave ships, forcing her to reckon with the deeper racial and social dimensions of pest hatred. The episode ultimately reframes the roach as a forest creature native to Africa, obscured by layers of human history and filth.
Summary
The episode opens with a Radiolab live show promotion for a multi-sensory experience at the Tribeca Film Festival. The main story follows reporter Alex Neeson, who recounts a birthday incident where she discovered a dying cockroach on her bathroom floor and responded with an elaborate, fear-driven extermination ritual involving rubber gloves, toilet bowl cleaner, and a shoe. This recurring overreaction prompted her, as a science reporter, to investigate the roots of her roach fear and find a way to manage it.
Alex first embeds herself with professional exterminators at the New York City Pest Expo and on the job. She follows Lakeisha Fulcher, who works at a public housing complex, and Cedric Simmons, who runs his own pest control company. Through these experiences — inspecting basements, identifying roach droppings, and watching chemical treatments kill entire populations including a pregnant roach — she begins to feel small glimmers of boldness. However, when she later encounters a roach in her own kitchen sink, her training evaporates and she retreats, asking a friend to handle it instead.
Seeking a more radical solution, Alex convinces edible insect ambassador Chef Joseph Yoon to cook American cockroaches for her and eight colleagues. After warm-up courses of crickets, ants, and mealworms, the group attempts fried dubia roaches, slurped Madagascar hissing cockroach innards, and finally sautéed American cockroaches with garlic and aromatics. The American cockroach fails spectacularly — even Joseph nearly spits it out, describing it as tasting like something you shouldn't eat, with a medicinal, foul, sour quality. The experiment backfires entirely.
Alex then encounters the book 'Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains' by science writer Bethany Brookshire, which proposes abolishing the category of 'pest' altogether. Brookshire argues that the word 'pest' strips animals of value and that humans hate any animal that succeeds at living near them without being domesticated. This intellectual reframe energizes Alex toward wanting to understand rather than simply eliminate roaches.
Entomologist Sammy Ramsey provides a deep dive into cockroach biology: they are as old as the dinosaurs, can survive decapitation for over a week, run three miles per hour, resist nuclear radiation, and are actually fastidious self-cleaners who spend significant time removing filth accumulated from human environments. Most strikingly, Ramsey reveals that the American cockroach is a misnomer — the species is native to Africa and arrived in the Americas aboard slave ships, with no choice in the matter.
This revelation forces Alex into a difficult reckoning. She consults author Angela Flournoy and reflects on the racist history of 'roach' as an anti-Black slur, the way racism forced Black people into housing conditions with greater roach exposure, and her own childhood memories of her mother's intense vigilance against roaches as a marker of socioeconomic respectability. She wrestles with whether sharing the slave ship origin story could reinforce racist associations between Black people and roaches. Bethany Brookshire reframes the roach as a symbol of failed social contracts — arriving through enslavement, persisting where racism and poverty leave people underserved.
The episode closes with a lyrical, naturalistic description of what the American cockroach actually is in its native habitat: a forest creature in the Congo Basin, a decomposer eating leaves and dead matter, a mother carefully incubating and depositing her egg case, whose 16 babies hatch in unison and scatter into the rainforest to begin their lives.
Key Insights
- Entomologist Sammy Ramsey argues that the American cockroach is actually native to Africa and arrived in the Americas aboard slave ships, making its common name a misnomer rooted in a history of forced migration.
- Bethany Brookshire argues that the label 'pest' strips animals of inherent value and that humans systematically hate any animal that succeeds at living near them without being domesticated or controlled.
- Chef Joseph Yoon, an edible insect advocate, found the American cockroach literally inedible even when sautéed with aromatics, and refused to cook with it precisely because roaches' bad reputation undermines broader efforts to normalize insect eating.
- Sammy Ramsey explains that cockroaches are actually fastidious self-cleaners, spending significant time removing bacteria and fungi from their own bodies — filth they acquired from human environments, not from themselves.
- Alex Neeson reflects that her mother's intense vigilance against roaches was tied to socioeconomic shame and respectability politics — the absence of roaches serving as proof of cleanliness and dignity despite financial hardship.
- Bethany Brookshire argues that cockroaches continue to thrive specifically where social contracts fail — in areas shaped by racism, poverty, and lack of opportunity — making them a symbol of systemic failure rather than personal failing.
- Alex Neeson found that practical pest control training with exterminators reduced her fear in professional settings but completely failed to override her instinctive revulsion when she encountered a roach in her own home.
- Author Angela Flournoy warned Alex that drawing a narrative of shared kinship between Black people and roaches based on the slave ship history plays directly into old, racist dehumanizing tropes, even when the intent is sympathetic.
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