Living with the Uncomfortable: Dino Martins Wants You to Respect Parasites

By Andy — 2026-08-13 — Literary News

I watched someone recoil at the lettuce counter yesterday. Actually, that's not quite right—I watched someone photograph the label. Checking origin. Dino Martins appeared on the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast in August to talk about why we should stop hating parasites. The timing felt cruel. Lettuce was becoming the enemy.

Since May 2026, the CDC has recorded nearly 14,000 confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis linked to produce, much of it from a single supplier. People got genuinely ill. Some still are. So the question Martins poses—that parasites deserve our curiosity instead of our contempt—sits awkwardly in the same room as a woman wondering if salad is safe.

Martins is an entomologist based in Kenya, now at Stony Brook University. His new book is Hidden Creatures: Luscious Leeches, Bashful Botflies, and the Wondrous, History-Shaping World of Parasites. It was published in July, which means Martins spent years researching a love letter to creatures most of us want fumigated.

The book isn't cheerleading. That's what caught me. In the podcast, Martins talks about Cyclospora as a specialized parasite, one that has to invade the cells of your intestinal lining to survive. It's related to the parasite that causes malaria. He doesn't romanticize it. "Even I would be pressed to call it cute," he says. But he respects it.

What matters is the question he asks after.

Why are we seeing a resurgence? Martins suggests we look at what we've done. Our farming methods. Our waste disposal. The way we've overwhelmed the ecological processes that would naturally balance or filter things. We deployed antibiotics, antiparasitic drugs, pesticides. We thought we'd won. We haven't. The parasites are making a comeback—"really coming to get you," as Martins puts it, dryly.

There's a chapter on screwworms, those fly larvae that develop in living flesh, that create festering open wounds. They're horrifying. Genuinely. But here's the thing Martins keeps circling back to: we didn't defeat them with brilliance alone. We beat them back with the sterile insect technique—release billions of sterilized males, they mate, no offspring. It worked. For a while. Now they're returning to Texas cattle ranches.

Nature isn't defeated. It's patient.

This is where Martins loses the people who want simple answers. He's not saying don't worry. He's saying: your worry reveals something about yourself, not about the parasite. These organisms have driven evolution, shaped civilizations. A tapeworm can grow 120 feet inside a whale. That's not adorable or monstrous. That's engineering.

The hard part—and I think this is what Martins actually wants us to sit with—is that we can't think our way out of this with more chemicals or more technology alone. We have to change how we farm. How we manage waste. How we treat the environment as something separate from ourselves rather than a place we live inside.

When I think about someone photographing the lettuce label, I think about her fear being real and her fear also being a signal. Not of parasite failure, but of our failure to live differently.