Insects as food: a cross-cultural comparison of consumers' intention and behaviour

Abstract

Albeit the benefits of switching to an insects’ based diet are set up on nutritional, environmental, economic and ecological benefits, the potential growth of insects as everyday food is still unclear. This work relies on three different papers who share the main objective of exploring consumer behavior towards edible insects, using both direct and indirect methods (computer questionnaires and more daring techniques such as IAT), while linking two European countries that share little in terms of eating habits, Denmark and Italy. - In “The effect of communication and implicit associations on consuming insects: an experiment in Denmark and Italy.” it was examined the influence of the type and message of communication upon the behavior and intention to perform the behavior of eating insects, while exploring the role of implicit associations. - In the second work instead, “Understanding Westerners’ disgust for the eating of insects: the role of food neophobia and implicit associations.” it was investigated the impact of food neo-phobia and disgust on the intention to eat insect-based food, and how disgust is related to implicit attitude towards insects. - In the third study, lastly, “Assessing the role of Food Related Lifestyle in predicting intention towards edible insects: a case study” a tentative of market segmentation was performed via lifestyles in order to predict consumers’ behaviour towards edible insects. Furthermore, the role of perceived behavioural control was analysed.