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Crickets For Christmas

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Getting people in the West to eat insects is, on paper, a brilliant idea. But would you swap a Christmas turkey for Christmas crickets?

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, a reluctance to eat novel foods (‘food neophobia’) and also their current state of hunger.

According to the data collected, 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.

Photo: SN

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Date: 16 December 2022
Credits Publisher: Spiritual News

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