Lovely Grub: Are Insects the Future of Food?
They had run smack into what may be the biggest hurdle in expanding insect cuisine: getting people to eat it. Some foods, like chocolate, sell themselves. Insects are not one of those foods. “Insects,” says Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “are disgusting. Things that are disgusting are offensive because of what they are. It’s not that insects taste bad. It’s that the idea of an insect is upsetting to people.”
Rozin, who is known as ‘the father of disgust in psychology’, has come to the conference in Ede to present his work on consumer attitudes toward insects, and he outlines the challenges that entomophagic entrepreneurs will face. At one point during his talk, he clicks forward to a slide that displays two photos, side by side: a cockroach and Adolf Hitler. “In my research on disgust,” he tells the audience, “these are my two best stimuli. Because they reliably produce negativity.”
Insects are so repellent that most Americans, at least, don’t want to consume anything that bugs have ever touched. In the 1980s, Rozin conducted a study in which he invited volunteers to try two different kinds of juice and rate them on a 200-point scale. Then, he briefly submerged a dried, sterilized cockroach in one of the glasses of juice and a birthday candle holder in the other. The participants were asked to evaluate each juice again; their ratings of the ‘cockroached’ juice plummeted, by 102 points on average. The candleholder, by contrast, produced a ratings drop of a measly three points.
Why do we find insects so disgusting? The answer, Rozin says, is simple: because they’re animals. As a general rule, most of the foods that humans find disgusting are animal products and most animal products are disgusting; even the most insatiable carnivores eat only a small fraction of the species that exist on the planet. In some ways, roaches are no different to gorillas, gerbils or iguanas, or any other creatures that we don’t routinely eat. In other ways, though, they’re much worse. Many insect species are found on, in or around waste, and they’re commonly associated with dirt, decay, and disease, all of which can significantly up the yuck factor.