page_title: Human interactions with insects
section_title: As food
hierarchical_section_title: Human interactions with insects / Practical uses / As food
caption_attribution_description: The witchetty grub, in the Australian outback
context_page_description: Human interactions with insects include both a wide variety of uses, whether practical such as for food, textiles, and dyestuffs, or symbolic, as in art, music, and literature, and negative interactions including serious damage to crops and extensive efforts to eliminate insect pests.
  Academically, the interaction of insects and society has been treated in part as cultural entomology, dealing mostly with "advanced" societies, and in part as ethnoentomology, dealing mostly with "primitive" societies, though the distinction is weak and not based on theory. Both academic disciplines explore the parallels, connections and influence of insects on human populations, and vice versa. They are rooted in anthropology and natural history, as well as entomology, the study of insects. Other cultural uses of insects, such as biomimicry, do not necessarily lie within these academic disciplines.
  More generally, people make a wide range of uses of insects, both practical and symbolic. On the other hand, attitudes to insects are often negative, and extensive efforts are made to kill them.
context_section_description: Entomophagy is the eating of insects. Many edible insects are considered a culinary delicacy in some societies around the world, and Frederick Simon Bodenheimer's Insects as Human Food (1951) drew attention to the scope and potential of entomophagy,  but the practice is uncommon and even taboo in other societies. Sometimes insects are considered suitable only for the poor in the third world, but in 1975 Victor Meyer-Rochow suggested that insects could help ease global future food shortages and advocated a change in western attitudes towards cultures in which insects were appreciated as a food item.  P. J. Gullan and P. S. Cranston felt that the remedy for this may be marketing of insect dishes as suitably exotic and costly to make them acceptable. They also note that some societies in sub-Saharan Africa prefer caterpillars to beef, while Chakravorty et al. (2011) point out that food insects (highly appreciated in North-East India) are more expensive than meat. The economics, i.e., the costs involved collecting food insects and the money earned through the sale of such insects, have been studied in a Laotian setting by Meyer-Rochow et al. (2008).  In Mexico, ant larvae and corixid water boatman eggs are sought out as a form of caviar by gastronomes. In Guangdong, water beetles fetch a high enough price for these insects to be farmed. Especially high prices are fetched in Thailand for the giant water bug Lethocerus indicus.
  Insects used in food include honey bee larvae and pupae, mopani worms, silkworms, Maguey worms, Witchetty grubs, crickets, grasshoppers and locusts. In Thailand, there are 20,000 farmers rearing crickets, producing some 7,500 tons per year.
caption: Witchetty grubs were prized as food by Australian aborigines.
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