No taxonomists? No progress

Abstract

Western societies currently show considerable interest in using insects as human food and/or as animal feed to reduce loss of habitats, use less energy to produce the food or feed in much smaller spaces, and to provide foods and feeds of high nutritional values. There appears to be emphasis on a small number of species for practical reasons: the domestic cricket, mealworms, and the black soldier fly seem to be the main species. There are most probably practical reasons for this emphasis including: the efficiency in building on established knowledge, the extensive use of model species in academic research, and, related to the two former reasons, the need for highly successful projects showing that insects indeed can be the food of the future. While practical reasons are often legitimate, the adoption of a small number of insect species as food and feed is contradictory to the concept that edible insect diversity will help feed the world. An emphasis on further building up knowledge of a small number of species will receive criticism that is very similar to the criticism on the use of a small number of vertebrate or plant species as food.