This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Do people eat insects when there is nothing else to eat? Are insects really "food for the poor" or famine food?
In the West, insects weren't considered food but rather vermin, crop pests, vectors of disease or sources of unpleasant bites, while other societies learned to live with them, as ethnobiologist Darrell Posey noted in 1978 about Amazonian people. When we look at attitudes toward eating insects on an international scale, Europe and North America are actually exceptions compared with Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, where more than 2,000 species are consumed by hundreds of millions of people. Publications from the first half of the 20th century that described insect consumption, particularly those by colonial doctor Émile Bergier or entomologist Friedrich Bodenheimer, presented eating insects as an exotic practice, unique to "primitive tribes." Nevertheless, Bodenheimer noted insects' nutritional value at the time.
This nutritional value was confirmed in 2013 in a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on edible insects. The researchers commissioned by the FAO also explored the potential of these foods for alleviating hunger around the world. Analyses of insects' nutritional value show that their protein levels are higher than those of other animals and that they are also rich in vitamins, minerals and unsaturated fatty acids.
Are insect consumers necessarily aware of this nutritional contribution? Could this be what leads them to eat insects? To answer this question, let's start by looking at what we mean by insects.
Western biologists classify insects, along with arachnids, myriapods and crustaceans, as arthropods, invertebrate animals with segmented bodies and jointed legs. In Latin, insectum refers to what is cut and segmented. Insects are defined as animals whose bodies are divided into three parts and that have six legs and a pair of antennae.
They are usually winged and undergo molting and metamorphosis. The morphology of the other groups differs: Spiders, arachnids sometimes mistaken for insects (while they feed on them), have four pairs of legs and no wings or antennae. But this way of categorizing insects differs in many societies.
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