ENTOMOTION

BACKGROUND

Since the Industrial Revolution, food abundance in the West has generated nutritional and environmental challenges that require global changes in production and consumption patterns. Entomophagy, or the consumption of insects, appears to be a promising solution for sustainable nutrition, but its acceptability remains low due to cognitive, emotional, and socio-cultural barriers. Until now, studies have identified certain factors influencing this rejection, such as insect presentation modes and individual consumer traits, but none have yet precisely evaluated the specific characteristics of insects (physical, sensory, emotional) responsible for their rejection as food.

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GOING FURTHER WITH THE SUPPORT OF LabEx CerCoG

The EntoMotion project aims to analyze the perception of a wide variety of insects across numerous cognitive, emotional, and motivational dimensions in order to identify the causes of food rejection. A lexical database comprising 90 insect names and 185 non-insect animal names is being evaluated by 1,650 to 2,000 representative participants via an online questionnaire. Each word is rated in an ecological and dietary context on dimensions such as perceived toxicity, emotions, action tendency, or sensory experiences. Once the data is collected (by the end of March 2025), the analysis will focus on the perception of insects compared to other animals, differences between insect types, predictive characteristics of their acceptability, and the effect of context. This project will pave the way for future physiological and brain analyses and contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive levers needed to promote entomophagy and dietary behavior modification, with potential applications in communication, marketing, and packaging.