Now that summer is here, we can look forward to picnics, vacations, baseball, days at the beach — and cockroaches.

This from The New York Times: “Some populations of cockroaches have evolved a simple, highly effective defense against sweet-tasting poison baits: They switched their internal chemistry around so that glucose, a form of sugar this is a sweet come-hither to countless forms of life, tastes bitter.”

So it’s going to be harder now to get rid of cockroaches. That’s good news for cockroach lovers, a population probably limited to other cockroaches. And that’s what I don’t understand.

Why do we loathe cockroaches? Has one ever insulted you, deceived you, or abused you?

Maybe we dislike cockroaches because they’re ugly. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and cockroaches may think we’re ugly, too.

Is it that cockroaches ignore us? Some people like to be the center of everyone’s attention, but I’m grateful when cockroaches ignore me.

I spent a semester in Nigeria a few years ago teaching theology to future priests. The climate in Nigeria is like summer in Alabama, only for 12 months a year. Cockroaches love it. They’re everywhere in Nigeria.

At first I wanted to eliminate them from my quarters in Nigeria. I asked about bug spray, but no one in Nigeria had ever heard of it. Then I realized it didn’t matter because if I sprayed bug-killing poison over every surface in my apartment, it would only kill a few hundred cockroaches (and then I’d have to sweep them up), but hundreds of their relatives would soon replace them.

So I negotiated an agreement with the cockroaches in my apartment. If they would vacate the premises when I entered the room or turned on a light, I’d give them the run of the place when I was away or asleep and unaware of my surroundings. They agreed and always kept their part of the bargain, scurrying into the walls the moment they detected my presence.

That proved a happy arrangement for all of us. I came to see the cockroaches as roommates of a sort, and as roommates go, I’ve had worse.

I have made the same agreement with the cockroaches in my home here in Fairhope. When my wife and I moved here in 1990, we were told it was impossible to get rid of cockroaches in south Alabama but that one could reach a truce with them.

Pam didn’t accept that at first. “How did they get in our house in the first place?” she asked.

“I think they were here before we were,” I replied. “When we cleared the land, poured concrete, and erected the walls of our house, we merely enclosed a space that had belonged for millennia to God’s creatures, including cockroaches. They didn’t invade our space. We invaded theirs and they probably feel we’re presumptuous to expect them to leave. Just let them be.”

Not everyone dislikes cockroaches. Do you remember that “La cucaracha” song we sang as kids? I didn’t know what a “cucaracha” was until I was in middle age, but I figured it was something cute because the song was cheerful and peppy. When I learned that “cucaracha” is Spanish for cockroach, I wondered whether people in Mexico kept them as pets. Well, why not? They’d be a lot less trouble than a dog.

But back to the article about cockroaches learning not to like sweets. It wasn’t a case of individual cockroaches acquiring the willpower to resist sugary foods. Nor did the species acquire a tolerance to the poison. It was an evolutionary adaptation, scientists said. What once had tasted good to the cockroaches now didn’t. They no longer liked sugar.

Here’s my question:

We’re supposed to be smarter than cockroaches, so if they can learn to change their taste buds, why can’t we? Why do we spend billions of dollars (usually unsuccessfully) on diet programs and try (usually unsuccessfully) to convince ourselves to eat healthful foods? When we know they’re bad for us, why do we continue to stuff ourselves with fast-food hamburgers, french fries, pizza, chicken nuggets, brownies, and sugary soft drinks? Why don’t we just change our taste buds as the cockroaches do?

Richard H. Schmidt is a retired Episcopal priest, editor and author who lives in Fairhope. He can be reached at courier@gulfcoastnewspapers.com.