Insects are not ‘the new sushi’: theories of practice and the acceptance of novel foods

Jonas House

doi:10.1080/14649365.2018.1440320

Abstract

Food geographies have long grappled with the interplay between production and consumption. Theories of practice offer productive new ways of conceptualising the mutual implication of supply and demand in shaping food consumption, yet little work has approached the subject of novel foods from this perspective. This paper applies practice-theoretic analysis to two novel foods, aiming to demonstrate the utility of the approach for a number of substantive areas and to extend conceptual and theoretical debates within food geographies. The paper compares sushi (a novel food successfully established in the US in the 1960s) and insects (a novel ‘sustainable’ protein source for Western markets, which to date has been relatively unsuccessful). Many accounts portray sushi’s success as the result of marketing efforts and the role of a ‘gateway dish’, arguing that insects – as ‘the new sushi’ – can follow this model to achieve widespread acceptance. It is argued that sushi’s initial Western establishment was instead due to pre-existent practices ‘carried’ to a new location, where the practices’ relevant constituent elements were also present. Conversely, European food insects are not clearly assimilable within pre-existing practices; instead, integration into existing food practices has been attempted. Such efforts are demonstrably problematic.

Highlights

In the context of climate change and a rapidly increasing global population, eforts are underway across Europe and North America (‘the West’) to increase the‘sustainability’ of the current agri-food system
Chickens, yet are argued to be considerably less resource-intensive to produce than those species.The FAO report sparked a considerable amount of interest in the subject in academia, business and the popular media, and a number of insectbased food products have since appeared on Western markets (e.g. Bugsolutely, 2017)
Sushi is provided as an example of a food which until relatively recently the majority of Westerners did not want to eat because it generally involves the consumption of raw ish and other culturally unusual ingredients such as seaweed, but which has undergone a remarkable repositioning and is widely enjoyed

Summary

Introduction

In the context of climate change and a rapidly increasing global population, eforts are underway across Europe and North America (‘the West’) to increase the‘sustainability’ of the current agri-food system. Becoming more common in this respect is the proposal that insect consumption (‘entomophagy’) be adopted by Western populations, of which a deining example is the report published on the subject in 2013 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (van Huis et al, 2013). This argument is based chiely on the manifold perceived beneits of insects relative to conventional food animals: for example, insects have comparable levels of protein and nutrients to cows, pigs. The notion that sushi provides a model for the introduction of insects as food is relected, albeit not always as explicitly, in some academic sources (e.g. Dunkel & Payne, 2016)

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Discussion

Conclusion