Tackling food neophobia could encourage people to eat more insects

It might be too much to expect people to swap a Christmas turkey for Christmas crickets. But getting people in the West to eat insects is, on paper, a brilliant idea. Insects are sustainable to farm, and they're healthy. Many are a rich source of not just cholesterol-free protein but also fats, calcium and zinc. The problem, of course, is that while billions of people in the world do eat insects, many Westerners — including those who would happily peel and munch on a prawn — find the idea of it disgusting.

Various teams have sought to better understand why we feel this way, and how to address it. Now Kaitlyn P. White at the University of Colorado and colleagues identify one possible solution in a paper in Personality and Individual Differences: encourage people to become more adventurous eaters.

The team looked at how a willingness to eat insects might vary according to individual differences in three things: disgust sensitivity (some people are much more readily disgusted than others), a reluctance to eat novel foods ('food neophobia') and also their current state of hunger.

In their first study, 241 US-based students completed online assessments of each of these three variables. Then they indicated how willing they would be to eat insects, in the form of roasted crickets, fried worms and insect-based protein bars. Both higher scores on the food neophobia and disgust sensitivity scales — but not the hunger measure — were linked to reduced willingness to consume these items. But would this translate into being less likely to actually eat them?

To investigate this, the team recruited a fresh group of 103 students. After completing those same scales in the lab, they were told that roasted crickets are not only safe to eat but that some people readily consume them. Then they were presented with a roasted cricket. The team noted who ate it, and who didn't, and their analysis showed that only food neophobia (not disgust sensitivity or hunger) was linked to actual consumption. In fact, food neophobia scores were a pretty good predictor of who would eat the cricket.

So, looking at data across the two studies, while people who scored lower on disgust sensitivity said they would be more willing to eat insects, when it came to it, they weren't. And in both studies, variations in hunger made no difference.

There are some limitations to the work, and one relates to the hunger findings. The participants had not been asked to fast before taking part in the studies, so it was unlikely that they were very, or even moderately, hungry. Even if mild hunger doesn't influence a willingness to eat insects, stronger hunger might.

Also, as the researchers note, their participants were WEIRD. While WEIRD people may constitute a good chunk of the global population that doesn't currently consume insects routinely, these new results may not apply to other cultures.

Still, the work does suggest that tackling food neophobia could be the most important route to encouraging Western populations to consider insects as food. This would mean finding ways to give people positive experiences of actually eating them. The team suggests incorporating insects or insect protein into popular foods, such as pasta or snacks. These products might then act as gateway foods to more hard-core insect meals — even a Christmas cricket dinner.

"Because of the ecological, ethical and health benefits of eating insects compared to traditional meat sources, understanding the various factors involved in people's willingness to eat insects may become increasingly important for the health of humans, the wellbeing of other sentient creatures, and the environment," the team concludes.

It would be remiss, however, not to note that there are, of course, alternative routes to achieving these benefits, and they're hardly radical — becoming not an insect-eater, but vegetarian or vegan.