The insectivore’s dilemma, and how to take the West out of it
By Ophélia Deroy, B. Reade, Charles Spence. 2015
247 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract A number of health and agricultural organizations have been encouraging Westerners to integrate insects into their diet, without success. Appealing to consumer’s reason and responsibility, as they do, is likely to reinforce a dilemma in the mind of consumers: many know that they can, in principle, eat insects, and perhaps that they should eat some, but very few are willing to eat them. Here we argue that current strategies are on the wrong track in identifying the key obstacle to overcome as a question of the negative representation of insects. Decades of laboratory research, as well as years of experience in gastronomy, suggest that people’s food choices are relatively immune to rational changes of representation, and instead tend to be driven by taste preferences and exposure. Here we suggest an alternative sensorially-driven strategy, which stands a much greater chance of making people eat insects on a regular basis. The turn – or better said return – to entomophagy in this sense, needs to be driven by a psychologically realistic motivation and gastronomic interest.
Subfields: Insect Science, Sensory Systems, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7de1ec9f5c5110ef2c4863a33dedbefcb80b5cc
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Citations in the corpus
- Review of Black Soldier Fly (Hermetia illucens) as Animal Feed and Human Food (2017, background): “The issues of flavor and texture do not get the attention they deserve in entomophagy texts: the assumption that insects will be accepted as meat substitutes once the taboos of eating insects are overcome ignores the problem that insects do not taste or feel like meat [156,173,180].”
- ‘Entomophagy’: an evolving terminology in need of review (2015, background): “Many insect species, due to their size and physiology, pose challenges to more conventional concepts of ‘meat’ and ‘livestock’ (Deroy et al. , 2015 Similarly, to what extent can insects be thought of as ‘livestock’?”
- Factors determining neophobia and neophilia with regard to new technologies applied to the food sector: A systematic review (2017, background): “…strongly linked to consumer trust as shown in studies of various food innovations (GMF, irradiation, additives and pesticides) as well as beyond the field of food (Hunt and Frewer, 2001; Jang, and Kim, 2015; Baker et al., 2016; Slovic, 1987; Deroy et al., 2015; Megido et al., 2014; Chen, 2007).”