1What I would like to address in the following pages are some facets of the issue of entomophagy. As is often the case, the reasons leading me to address this topic, I confess, are personal. I would never be able to eat insects myself. Does this make me backward? Irrational? Eurocentric? Contemplating these questions—beyond the boutade of starting from one’s own personal experience—led me to think about the extent to which prohibitions, shared feelings (such as disgust), and legal norms are dependent on and at the same time productive of that special shared sensibility, typical of every cultural community, that we define as common sense (see Lorusso 2022).
2In fact, I do not believe my negative reaction to insect-based food to be incomprehensible. That is, I do not think we can treat with condescension or contempt those who express disgust at the practice of entomophagy. Beyond all the rational reasons why insects are not only edible but would also be an appropriate addition to our diet (for nutritional and economic-ecological reasons), it is evident that they are not part of our contemporary culture.
3This point brings to mind a splendid essay by Vincent M. Holt, dated 1885 but not coincidentally reprinted in 2001, entitled Why not Eat insects? in which the author, displaying full Victorian conformism, tries to explain that many insects are vegetarian, healthy, tasty (unlike snails, oysters, or lobsters that eat the earth’s waste—he notes), and that we should therefore strive to welcome them into our menus and become accustomed to them, because the disgust we feel has no rational basis. More than 130 years later, however, and we are at almost the same point…
4In considering our contemporary times, I would like to point out at least two elements: a legal one and a linguistic one. Regarding the legal dimension: the production and marketing of insect-based foods was banned in Europe, but a process of gradual inclusion has been underway since 2015, the last act of which dates back to January 2023. In 2015, we arrived at a first fundamental step: the European EC Regulation No. 2015/2283 on novel foods, which explicitly includes insects among the possible foods. The reasons why insects have become a plausible food are interesting:
Article 8 -The scope of this Regulation should in principle remain the same as that of Regulation (EC) No 258/97. However, given the scientific and technological developments since 1997, the categories of foods that constitute novel foods should be reviewed, clarified and updated. These categories should include whole insects and their parts [my emphasis].
5Accepting insect-based food is a matter of adapting to “scientific and technological developments”, and there is, on the contrary, no mention of “cultural adaptation” to other countries, i.e. to food regimes already widely practiced in other cultural contexts. Here, it is science and technology that legitimize insects as food.
6However, this inclusion (which under this regulation would have become operational as of January 1, 2018) retained broad contours of discretionality and judgment; a “special” permit was and still is required to market insect products. The result was (and to some degree still is) that insect-based foods cannot be found in our supermarkets, and there has therefore been no effective normalization of this food. It was not until 2021 that the sale of a certain type of insect-based food was allowed. The last “opening” was in January 2023: the European Union has in fact consented to the entry on the market of new foods in the context of the Community legislation on novel foods.
7For a 5-year trial period, after the lesser mealworm larvae (Alphitobius diaperinus), we saw the arrival of the house cricket (Acheta domesticus). They can be frozen, dried and powdered, and are making their way onto tables in a series of foods such as bread, sandwiches, crackers, breadsticks, cereal bars, pasta, pizza or chocolate-based products, but also in preparations based on meat, as meat substitute products and in soups.
8Products containing these novel foods will be labeled to warn of any potential allergic reaction. I point out this legal dimension of the problem because, from the point of view of the cultural operation of meaning, it is always very interesting to look at the system of law. Law, in a semiotic perspective, is a great modeling system (to use a concept from the Tartu School theory of culture—see Lotman 1977) that mediates between the evolution of society and the need to order and give shape to the new, to “the new that progresses”. Law speaks of our needs and of what we are ready to accept.
9In this first EU legislation, we see all the cultural difficulties surrounding insect-based food: the graduality in including and authorizing insect-based food speaks to a background of impossibility (otherwise, no authorizations would be necessary: we eat snails without problem) but also to a changing world, characterized by both technological and scientific progress (as mentioned in the EU resolution quoted above) and by an emerging cultural need as well (FAO, for example, strongly encourages the inclusion of insects in food); at the same time, some popular reactions—in Italy, at least—have expressed a certain leeriness of this resolution. We are witnessing a moment in which the law seeks to take a small step beyond the boundaries of the “edible”, making acceptable foods that were previously not acceptable but also asserting modeling systems not always in agreement with common sense. Such models often serve to guide and shape common sense (as seen with literary or religious models), and that is what is happening in this case as well.
- 1 Regarding the lexicon, see Evans et al. (2015).
10In addition to the fact that such a recent legal authorization speaks to us of something controversial that we are trying to regulate but that is not yet settled, I would also like to highlight a linguistic element: the term “entomophagy”. We only use words formed in this way to indicate oral consumption practices that are abnormal: coprophagy, anthropophagy, aerophagy, … We do not use the morpheme /-phagia/ to say that we eat meat, fish or flour. Humans are carnivores, not carniphagic. As a morpheme, therefore, it is a mark of anomaly.1
11In short, two large impersonal systems of cultural modeling—law and language—tell us that there is nothing normal about eating insects or, more accurately, nothing normal about it today, in Europe. This framing depends, as mentioned earlier, on the common sense of a culture. In a semiotic perspective, common sense refers to the forms of life through which individuals express themselves and are able to express themselves while remaining within a certain community of feeling and interpretation of the world.
12Indeed, common sense displays an interesting two-fold nature: it has a social character and genealogy, but it also has a strongly individual rootedness that ends up conditioning the perceptual level of an individual’s being in the world. While it is not a purely cognitive or sensory disposition, common sense does certainly perform a cognitive function because it is fundamental to our interpretation of the world. It modalizes sensory elements, justifying somatic reactions of taste/disgust or embarrassment/comfort: reactions that have to do with the body.
13In this light, we can say—indeed, we must acknowledge—that the common sense of a great deal of European culture still predisposes us to view (i.e. perceive) insect-based food as abnormal.
14Take for example the case of the Italian Foundation Barilla (the foundation of the leading pasta manufacturer), which posted an online video in October 2022 featuring a successful actor promoting the “thinkability” of using insects in cooking. The video was very direct (extremely simple, almost amateurish in its visuals), with the male figure positioned according to an American shot, in direct dialogue with the viewer, set against a neutral background, suggesting that “pasta alla carbonara” (one of the most representative dishes of traditional Roman cuisine) could be made by cutting out the cream and adding some insects instead (“there is even one that looks like guanciale”). The “proposal” of a “carbonara pasta” with insects is part of an ironic comment on the fact that in Holland and Denmark, they alter the Carbonara recipe by using cooking cream (unlike in the original dish, which instead uses eggs), so we might as well alter it with insects (which are already approved for human consumption in those countries) instead of the bacon. But this is not the point: in my opinion, the strong communicative point (and the disruptive one in terms of controversy) was precisely associating the use of insects (the “new”, the “foreign” par excellence) with one of the most typical of Tradition and Italianity.
15The video ended with text addressed to the viewer: “Insects have also become of interest in Europe, as a source of high-quality, environmentally friendly protein. What do you think?”
16In short, the text first proposed a kind of provocation (replacing cream and bacon with insects), then switched to an open, more reflective question on the basis of which it is clear that insects are not yet plausible food in Europe but “have become of interest”.
17What happened? Barilla (and Barilla as a company, without differentiating between the company and the Foundation) was hit by a storm of irritated and disgusted reactions, with such negative feedback that after only a day, it deleted the video, which has since become untraceable. I quote only one of the comments that appeared on YouTube because it clearly raises the issue of common sense, that is, of what is perceived as normal or abnormal in a culture: “The puzzling thing, that Barilla’s incredible content is evidently directed at achieving, is that they want to pass off as normal the use, alongside normal pasta, of products derived from filthy insects instead of completely prohibiting their use as food” (my translation). Evidently the writer of this comment did not know that there is nothing puzzling about the use of insects as food, and that this practice is completely normal in many countries. The commenter takes something that is abnormal for us and holds it up as an absolute, as something impossible for anyone to appreciate, by citing the disgust-provoking appearance of “filthy insects”.
18It is clear from these observations that the perspective I take on food is fundamentally symbolic, in the tradition of studies such as those of Lévi-Strauss (1964) and Mary Douglas (1966). In other words, I do not think, as a more materialistic perspective believes (think of Marvin Harris 1985), that food choices can be explained only in terms of ecological and health reasons. As Douglas first showed us in Purity and Danger (1966) but also in later contributions (see Douglas & Gross 1981), the organization of taboos (which are not only sexual, but also dietary, —like the one we are dealing with here—the insect taboo) has above all symbolic reasons: it confirms a form of world order. The reasons underlying the various prohibitions that distinguish the pure from the impure, the dirty and the contaminated from the clean and the healthy cannot be traced back to actual hygienic reasons. According to Douglas, the system of taboos deriving from impurity is instead linked to the need to classify reality and social life, distinguishing what is acceptable from what is not. Thus, through a symbolic system, a moral order of society is strengthened.
- 2 Among the semiotic outcomes of the group based in the University of Palermo: Marrone (2014a, 2014b, (...)
- 3 This is the title of an important book edited by the historian Massimo Montanari (2020), which incl (...)
19The case of food based on insects fully confirms this approach, and the semiotic perspective that has greatly developed around food and gastronomy over the last fifteen years naturally finds its foundations in these beliefs. Gianfranco Marrone (who in Italy has developed a highly structured research group around these topics, from which various publications have emerged)2 spoke explicitly of “political cuisine”3, focusing not only on the “world order” that the systems and food practices define and reinforce, but also on the theme of the control of the body that the food system ends up exercising. Fundamental, in this regard, are all the reflections on dietary regimes, which reflect and condition models of the body, of health, of prowess…
20The omnivore’s dilemma, then (to refer to a fundamental book on these topics, that of Pollan, 2006, which in turn cites a 1976 essay by Rozin), highlights even more the paradoxicality of many human food choices that are not moved by Cartesian rationality, but on the contrary, by much unawareness and many discursive manipulations which, if examined in depth, reveal the “good to eat” as something highly constructed. Suffice it to cite Pollan’s reflections on the “industrial organic”, which holds together the myth of nature and at the same time a globalization and a productive efficiency that have nothing spontaneous.
21As a semiotician, in line with this type of approach, in the face of the skeptical, or negative attitude towards insect-based food, I wondered how we might be able to “manage” this evolution in our eating habits: how it is possible to redefine the boundaries of taste and disgust, which govern the rejection of insect-based food; in other words, how we can stretch common sense enough to accommodate this heterogeneous divergence from the customary normality of common sense.
- 4 Among semiotic scholars, Simona Stano in particular has focused on cultural translation practices i (...)
22In his theory of the semiosphere, semiotician Juri Lotman (1984) focused on cultural translations and accommodation processes from a semiotic perspective, an approach quite different from “traditional” translation studies (see Venuti 1995). Lotman combines attention to the semiotic negotiation of meaning with attention to the temporality of processes (see in particular Lotman 1992). When something new is introduced into a cultural sphere, it can happen via violent irruption (the conquistadors who arrived in South America introduced a series of new elements d’emblée, without gradualness or forewarning) or through gradual “accommodations”, accompanied by a series of domesticating discourses.4
23For the purposes of this argument, I have turned to marketing discourses, examined as a kind of valuable mediating discourse currently in charge of introducing, making acceptable and promoting insect-based food. To do this, such discourses must convince us that these foods are a good thing: they must therefore, as we say in semiotics but understood here in a literal sense, valorize them in the sense of constructing insect-based food as a good thing; as good to eat and good to think (to quote the destined-for-fame expression used in Lévi-Strauss 1962).
24Before starting, I would like to clarify a few points about the corpus.
- 5 I would like to add an excusatio non petita. I have rarely found myself working on such a controver (...)
25Naturally, this is not a corpus that claims to be exhaustive, but to be exemplary. I chose to examine European online shopping sites for insect-based products (thus excluding the sites—very few in any case — aimed at providing information only, such as https://www.entonote.com/). From the comments found online, attention converges upon a limited number of important sites, which however have changed slightly over time (between the first elaboration of my contribution and the current, final, draft).5
- 6 In the following pages I provide quotes and images from these commercial websites. All of the quote (...)
26Certainly, three sites remain central: https://21bites.it/; https://www.micronutris.com/; and https://www.thailandunique.com/. It must be noted that https://multivores.com (which I have included in my analysis) is no longer online, but was an important site and was indicated on the web to be among the fundamental ones. More recently, two other sites have emerged as relevant, and in my opinion interesting: https://delibugs.nl/ and https://www.futurefoodshop.com/. This is why I found myself updating the corpus, with some notes that include these last two online shops.6
27First of all, here is a quick look at the packaging of some insect-based products. As in these examples, the packaging often adopts a clear strategy: a strategy of disguising.
Figure 1.
Snacks made of insects.
28The companies disguise the unusual nature of their products with highly familiar packaging. They offer a viewing “window” to enable ocular verification of the product, but as part of a package that through its verbal labels (“Apéro” and “Crick-elle”, a name reminiscent of “Crack-ers”) definitely suggests something good and familiar, thereby putting us at ease.
29Another very interesting case is that of Delibugs. On the one hand, as often happens on these sites, we find a product that, in its shape and appearance, is completely familiar to products we are used to.
Figure 2.
Lollipops including insect larvae.
(https://delibugs.com)
30On the other hand, however, when the mouse passes over the image of the lollipop, an automatic zoom shows the detail, i.e. the larvae.
Figure 3.
What we see automatically through the zoom on the lollipops represented in Fig. 2.
31We are therefore faced with a strategy not far from the previous ones, which are more “traditional” in a certain sense: to make the product appear similar to usual foods, while allowing a focus, a window, on its actual composition.
32In both cases, it is as if awareness were traced back to a problem of attention: the company hides nothing, keeps nothing silent, but you can only see if you linger a bit. It is a form of involvement and empowerment of the recipient which is widespread and transversal with this type of product.
33Let us move on, however, to the websites of the main insect product e-commerce companies. 21 Bites is an Italian company, perhaps the only one in Italy, and the website (https://21bites.it) uses a familiarizing strategy.7 The visual language is used to present insect-based food as no different from the food we are used to: it features tortelli, biscuits, and mousses with exactly the same appearance as traditional dishes and also provides the recipes so they can be cooked at home, treating the insect product as a normal ingredient.
Figure 4.
Recipes for traditional Italian dishes made with insects.
(https://21bites.it/)
34If we move from the page above, devoted to recipes, to the various individual products based on insects, we see how, in order to create familiarity, to each scene is added an element that is commonplace but actually incongruous with respect to the context: a balloon, a toy car, pet accessories… The meaning effect is: insect food is to be found in “normal” homes, for normal people, even normal kids. Nothing different from ordinary life.
Figure 5.
Insect-based food or snacks alongside familiar elements of Western homes.
(https://21bites.it/)
35In addition to making this food familiar (rather than foreign) and not “scary” or disgusting, this company also seeks to assign it a positive value, something distinctive, by invoking the idea of the future: insect-based food is the food of the future.
- 8 When I examined the website for this study back in 2022, the text from the homepage ended with a qu (...)
21bites: 21 Century Foods!
New ideas for food, new ideas for wellness and fitness, new ideas for the environment.
Experience the most exciting foods of the future. Join the revolution! Are you ready for the taste of tomorrow?8
- 9 Aspectuality is a dimension of linguistic derivation relating first and foremost to verbs (in ancie (...)
36In this case, semiotics, which studies aspectuality, i.e. the different possible ways to observe temporal articulation within the process described,9 would say that this particular future (I have underlined the isotopic redundancy of this semantic element in the quote above) is observed from its beginning, a beginning that has just begun and is thus inchoative: the future has begun and it is revolutionary — join it. The only possible issue is whether you are ready or not (as the last question points out). Presented this way, eating insect-based foods becomes a challenge, a challenge of the future in relation to which people must prove that they are capable.
- 10 All the sentences presented in quotes are taken from the website.
37One last aspect that I would underline in this communication strategy is its national character. Implicitly anticipating an objection (other people eat insects, not us), the company asserts that insects are food for Italians: “we have Italian hearts and palates”, “we like to combine tradition and innovation”, “we travel around Europe to discover new foods, the foods of the future”.10
38In short, therefore, 21 Bites tells us that insect-based food:
-
is not strange;
-
does not betray our tastes and our traditions as Italians;
-
is the food of the future.
39But we have to be ready. Therein lies the challenge. The rhetorical strategy of manipulation is thus based on challenge and projection into a future with which consumers are invited to keep up; at the same time, however, this involves no betrayal and no significant deviation from our ordinary life today. We will continue to eat tortellini, but with an insect filling…
40Let us now move on to another case, a French company: https://www.micronutris.com/fr/accueil. Here, the insects are shown for what they are: alive, in a natural context, albeit not in a disturbing way of course. The visual dimension is very referential, and it seems that it is precisely by presenting the insects for what they are that their specificity can be grasped: they are healthy, natural, and local; in short, they are ecological. Insects also reduce the problem of waste. In a way, this natural valorization—presenting the insects just as they are—serves to highlight their ecological sustainability as well.
Figure 6.
The qualities of insect-based food.
(https://www.micronutris.com/fr/accueil)
41We see the insect in its “pure state”, but explained. The only “bridge” with our daily experience is represented by a page on the website dedicated to cooking titled “À table !”: how to cook insects. In this section of the site, we find more reassuring images (familiar-looking velvety casseroles) but, as is evident in the examples below, the insects are inserted in a way that makes them morphologically recognizable.
Figure 7.
Traditional dishes made with insects.
(https://www.micronutris.com/fr/recettes/#ici)
42To continue my survey, another company, Multivores, which was online when I started this research (and definitely until May 2022) but is now no longer active, displayed another strategy. This latter approach is very interesting in my opinion because it focuses on the exclusivity of a somewhat strange experience (one that borders on luxury).
43The name of the company in itself was interesting: “multivore” precisely avoids the morpheme /- phage/ I was talking about at the beginning. We are carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores, but we also seem called upon to be entomophages, like anthropophages… On the contrary, this website also included insects in the world of normal “voracity” (from the 16th-century theme vorare, “to devour”) and talked not about omnivores, but multivores, thus invoking multiculturalism.
44It is in the framework of this “openness” to difference that the company included insects, flowers and exotic meat (snake and crocodile), all of them put on a same footing.
45To eat insects was defined on the website as “an experience-through”—a sort of passage, a tool for passage and discovery…. Therefore, as in the first case examined, here, the point is once again about being ready: willing and ready, like Astronauts (who, for many people, have embodied one of the most appealing narrative thematic roles ever since childhood). From the website (no longer available):
Have we had enough of candy without surprise? Enough of eating the same thing that others eat? Do you want to give new movement to your taste experience? If the answer is yes; we will help you. Candies that burn in the mouth, lollipops - entomological lollipops or “Astronaut Food” [my translation].
46Among the companies that base their manipulation strategy on exploration, openness to the Other, I would also mention Future Food (https://www.futurefoodshop.com/). This company (which we want to mention anyway, because it is very interesting for its “inclusive” philosophy, which today we find with some variations in a company like “Grub Kitchen”: https://www.thebugfarm.co.uk/about-us/grub-kitchen/) differs from the others in that it not only sells insect-based food, but also vegan or gluten-free products (foods of the future… or of a rapidly evolving present). Within this range of products, it proposes a sort of typology of buyers and, as can be seen from the image below, insect-based food is associated with an “explorer” lifestyle.
Figure 8.
The alternative lifestyles associated to the four kinds of products available.
(https://www.futurefoodshop.com)
47The leverage of the purchase is therefore based on curiosity and on the openness to new worlds: here, it is not a health or ecological matter; the point is radically cultural.
48The last case I would like to comment on is an English company with Thai origins, at least in its name: Thailand Unique (https://www.thailandunique.com/). In this case as well (as in the second case I presented), insects are shown for what they are, without hiding their nature and their appearance; without adaptations or particular framing (such as the “experience-through” frame from the last website). Here, everything is shown and based on rationality, reviewing all the reasons for eating insects. The reasons—says the company—are health-related, environmental and livelihood-based (economic and social factors). It is not a cultural matter, a challenge, or a curiosity; insect-based food is proving the best option based on a technical and scientific examination of the state of the world. What is interesting, however, is that alongside this apparent hyper-exposure of insects and all the “rational reasons” (forgive the redundant expression) for choosing insects, we find images like the following that reference the Wealthy West (the bottle here clearly refers to Absolut Vodka) and, in the blog, even an image like that of Fig. 10 plainly reaffirms the values of luxury, seduction, and the West…
Figure 10.
Remake of a famous pin-up type photo, with the variant of eating a giant waterbug.
(https://www.thailandunique.com/blog/what-will-take-western-countries-eating-insects/)
49Throughout this excursus into various strategies for accommodating the foreignness of insect-based food, it seems to me that we could conclude by drawing attention to two points: one has to do with the category of nature, the other has to do with the tension between ethical and exotic-adventurous dimensions of this kind of food.
50Regarding the category of nature: there are clearly very different strategies in our corpus (some being more “motivational”, based on the future; others more rational, and others more seductive…), but it is as if they all converge in giving us a renovated idea of nature (different from the usual, standard, or naïve one). While nature is normally associated with naturalness, spontaneity, tradition, and harmony, …, here we find a radically natural element to be introduced into our diet (insects) that is, however, associated with the future, progress, acceleration, luxury, and development: that is to say, culture. In other words, we have a type of food that has assumed the paradox of naturalness, which requires culture to be valued, pursued, chosen: choosing insects means choosing nature, but on the basis of highly cultural values: progress, openness to the Other, distinction (of Bourdesian memory).
51Clearly, insect-based food subverts many of the oppositional pairings that have structured Western thought: nature vs. culture, tradition vs. innovation, local vs. global (and perhaps, we might guess, it is because of this radical conceptual subversion that insect-based food is struggling to take off in Italy).
- 11 I am also referring here to a very insightful essay by Gianfranco Marrone (2016).
52Among the dichotomies subverted by insect-based food, there is also the slow vs. fast food opposition11 that has been very powerful and structuring in the last decade, at least in Italy.
53As an expression of modernity (indeed, it would be more accurate to say avant-garde) and as a way of meeting a practical need (the need for food that is nutritionally rich but not expensive or pollution-heavy in terms of production), insect-based food lies more on the side of modern and functionalist food. However, by respecting the cycle of nature (its production emits considerably fewer greenhouse gases, insects can be fed on organic waste streams, etc.), insect-based food is certainly ecological. It is thus positioned within the cycle of nature but also within the progress of industrial modernization.
54Therefore, this type of food brings us face to face with an idea of nature that is finally less naïve than the traditional one: nature is not spontaneous; nature must be cultivated, nurtured, managed, valorized, and promoted, thus making it an eco-logical choice—a highly culturalized and rationalized nature. And perhaps it also presents us with a different idea of “opportunity”, something that engages ethics (it is an ethical food that even poor countries can afford), ecology, fashion, exclusivity, and luxury…
55Besides this complexification generated by discourses about insect-based food, however, there is an ideological discourse we must recognize as well. The idea that insect-based food would, in the name of a shared experience, unite Europe and the United States (the Western world) with the countries of Asia, South America or Africa where insects are eaten normally is genuinely ideological.
56As we have seen, in Europe, insects remain a very rare food, probably reserved for educated, wealthy people who would like to do something exotic, exclusive, and also responsible in terms of behavior. This has nothing to do with the type of consumption practiced in other countries, where insects are often a poor person’s food.
57This equation of “Rich Western Countries like Poor Countries” thus constitutes a true ideological discourse in the sense of Umberto Eco’s (1976) definition of ideology: a discourse that hides the contradiction of its underlying premises. The same practice—eating insects—is justified in Western countries and poor countries in completely different ways: the conclusion is the same (insect food is a good thing) but the premises are different.
- 12 I have addressed Eco’s interpretation of the category of ideology and its heuristicity in greater d (...)
58Ideological discourse, according to Eco, relies on surreptitious code-switching:12 it can support a value that is part of other worlds, pretending to share it (in our case, eating insects like in poor countries; in Eco’s case, also related to food issues: eating healthy food as part of a diet) but arriving at this supposed sharing via another trajectory of meanings and by employing a different selection of arguments (in our case: moving from an argument based on the low cost of insects, as in Asia, to a discourse based on exclusivity and exoticism; in Eco’s case: moving from an argument based on thinness to an argument based on health).
59This is how the discourse becomes ideological: it is not “just” about asserting a partisan discourse (eating insects is a good thing) but about arguing this discourse as if it were being made for the same reasons and in the same way as in other contexts: us, like them—in a sort of overlap that is such because there are no other possibilities. This only creates a kind of optical illusion: it maintains the appearance of one discourse (insect food is good) and suggests that only that particular discourse is possible even while actually advancing the claims of another, very different discourse (eating insects is modern, it is strange, it is exotic, it is cool…).
60It seems to me, from exploring the sites that sell these products, that there is an ideological component in the promotion of food based on insects: an ethical responsibility is often evoked which does not only concern ecology but also the fact that our First World rejected consumption that, out of necessity, the Second and Third Worlds normalized. Insects, therefore, would not only be a food that does not harm the ecological balance, but would also be a choice that “makes us equal” to other worlds. In short, it is very interesting to see how the ethical dimension is stimulated on several fronts by insect-based food (in the internal pages of the websites I observed). But then, above all on a visual level or in the pay-offs (therefore in the more evident parts), the key to manipulative rhetoric is essentially seductive: eating insects is modern, it is avant-garde, it is adventure, it is a sign of distinction. And all this has little to do with ethical commitment…
61The case of insect-based food is an extremely interesting one for those concerned with common sense, to see how the strategies of adjustment and modification of this form of collective sensibility take place concretely. In this case, we see in some ways (regarding the issue of nature) the signs of a heightened awareness, a phase that goes beyond the naiveté of thinking of nature as given and spontaneous (versus a culture shaped by men); on the other hand, however, we also see how nature and ecological discourse become the lever (the acceptable value for common sense) to “justify” an experience that is simply seductive, being anomalous, or adventurous, or even avant-garde. To force common sense, it is necessary to resort to an ethical value (ecologism, the First World complex pretending to conform to the Third); without that, disgust would probably still prevail and seduction would be not enough.
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