Some Canadians are willing to eat insect-based food — but conditions apply

A Concordia-led study reveals that curiosity drives entomophagy in adults, while disgust hinders it

Concordia University

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Nadezhda Velchovska, with Rassim Khelifa.

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Credit: Concordia University

Going to the grocery store these days can be a painful experience, with record-high price hikes biting into Canadian food budgets. However, as many societies around the world already know, a cheap, plentiful source of protein is literally at our feet: insects, especially crickets, grasshoppers, ants and beetles.

While entomophagy — the eating of insects — has lagged in the U.S. and Canada, a new study by Concordia researchers found that there is some interest in the dietary practice, with some demographic groups showing more openness than others.

Nadezhda Velchovska, an Honours undergraduate in the Department of Psychology, approached 252 adult visitors to the Montreal Insectarium between October 2024 and February 2025. She used a structured online questionnaire to evaluate participants’ willingness, motivation and barriers to trying insect-based food.

After analyzing the results, Velchovska and her supervisor Rassim Khelifa, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology, found 44 per cent of respondents reported being open to trying insects, though only 27 per cent were willing to include them in their regular diet.

Men were more willing than women to consume insect-based food and were more likely to have tried it in the past. Higher educational achievement was also a factor: participants with graduate degrees were found to be more likely to experiment with insect-based ingredients at home, and prior insect consumption among women increased with education. Age alone was not found to be a consistent predictor.

The paper was published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.

Powdered is better

Curiosity was the strongest motivator in getting people to try insect-based foods, accounting for almost 42 per cent of respondents. Other factors include perceived health and nutritional benefits, environmental sustainability and taste.

The biggest barrier was disgust, as noted by 70 per cent of respondents. It was followed by fear of the insects, uncertainty about safety and health concerns.

Presentation and packaging were also important: 87 per cent of respondents preferred products where the insect component was not visible. Two-thirds of respondents said they might or certainly would try eating baked goods made with cricket-based flour. Almost half would try a cricket protein bar and powdered cricket bread. On the other hand, 82 per cent said visible larvae in a muffin would make them less likely to eat it.

“The motivators and barriers reveal an interesting interplay,” Velchovska says. “If we want to encourage entomophagy, the best way would be to convince the public of the health benefits and sanitary conditions in which these insects are farmed. We should also emphasize the huge difference in the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced when farming insects versus raising livestock.”

Khelifa adds that farming insects can help upcycle the 40 per cent of food that goes to waste in Canada. The practice could also contribute to more sustainable agricultural production — including feed for farm animals.

“If we feed our food waste to insects, they will increase in body mass, giving us more insect protein and more insect excretions, which makes excellent fertilizer,” he says. “The protein would not even have to be for human consumption directly — it could be used as feed for chicken, pigs and aquaculture. Involving insects in our food system, either directly or indirectly, can yield enormous potential benefits.”

This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Read the cited paper: “Acceptance of entomophagy among Canadians at an insectarium”

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Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-026-35288-w 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Acceptance of entomophagy among Canadians at an insectarium

 

Major collaboration launched to protect Lake Erie and Rouge River

Wayne State University - Office of the Vice President for Research

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Wayne State and the Great Lakes Water Authority will work together to improve local water systems and provide critical training for Wayne State students to become experts in wastewater treatment and environmental protection. 

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Credit: Great Lakes Water Authority

DETROIT – A research team led by Wayne State University was awarded a $473,566, three-year grant from the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) for a major collaborative initiative focused on enhanced phosphorus removal at the nation’s largest single-site wastewater treatment facility.

The GLWA Water Resource Recovery Facility (WRRF) serves 77 communities — including Detroit — and manages flows from a nearly 1,000‑square‑mile sewer shed. The project aims to protect the Rouge River and Lake Erie by improving phosphorus removal efficiency and ensuring compliance with increasingly stringent environmental regulations designed to reduce harmful algal blooms.

“This project is critical for protecting the Great Lakes, which provide drinking water, food and recreation for many local communities,” said Dr. Shawn McElmurry, chair of Wayne State’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the James and Patricia Anderson College of Engineering. “Phosphorus enters our water systems through various ways like agricultural and urban runoff, sewage and waste, and when the amount entering the environment is too large, it can cause significant problems like algal blooms. It is critical that we continue to improve our ability to remove this nutrient to address these challenges.”

The research team will develop a comprehensive understanding of how phosphorus moves through the WRRF using advanced chemical analyses to identify and quantify phosphorus species. They will build bench-scale treatment systems that allow controlled, side-by-side testing of biological and chemical processes to enhance phosphorus removal. Moreover, they will create new predictive models to help water treatment facility operators optimize phosphorus removal in real-time, which will advance data-driven water management.

In addition to improving local water systems, the project will provide critical training for Wayne State students to become experts in wastewater treatment and environmental protection. 

“This collaboration with Wayne State University represents the kind of innovation-focused partnerships that strengthen our ability to protect the region’s water resources,” said Dr. John Norton, director of energy, research and innovation at GLWA. “Through this research, we will not only enhance our treatment capabilities at the WRRF but also help train the next generation of water professionals.”

“This collaboration is an excellent example of Wayne State’s Grand Challenges initiative, which aims to address increasingly complex problems and how we can deliver real-world solutions that impact our local communities and beyond,” said Dr. Ezemenari M. Obasi, vice president for research & innovation at Wayne State. “This project will aid in driving lifelong health and fostering sustainable environments — two of the major themes of our initiative — by creating discoveries that will improve lives and our critical environmental resources.”

The project team includes McElmurry; Dr. Timothy Dittrich (co-PI), associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, Wayne State; Brooke Ballard, MSESE student, GLWA; Norton; and Dr. Andrew Marcus, senior research engineer, GLWA.

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Wayne State University is one of the nation’s pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit research.wayne.edu.

 

How humans took over the planet

New ASU research shows the role cultural evolution played in our ability to inhabit nearly every corner of the world

Arizona State University

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Humans really do rule the world. We took over fast and far, more than any other wild vertebrates. We inhabit nearly every corner of the world, and can thrive in deserts, tropical rainforests and even extremely cold climates.

But how?

Scientists say we did it through not only biological evolution, but another system, cultural evolution. And that is what makes us so special.

New research from Arizona State University evolutionary anthropologist Charles Perreault measures just how important culture was relative to biology. He used empirical data to show human global dominance was predominately achieved through cultural evolution.

“As humans moved into new environments, they didn’t have to wait for genetic mutations to adapt to Arctic cold, tropical forests, deserts or high altitudes,” said Perreault, a research scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and an associate professor at ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

“Instead, humans adapted through culturally transmitted technologies, ecological knowledge and cooperative social norms. Innovations in clothing, shelter, hunting strategies, food processing and social organization could spread rapidly through social learning.”

The result, his research shows, is that humans encompass about 51 million square miles of land while the typical wild mammal species occupies about 64 square miles.

Perreault's work demonstrates that if humans were an average mammal that relied only on genetic evolution, achieving today’s geographic range would have required tens of millions of years, thousands of separate species and enormous differences in body size.

“This research helps put human uniqueness into a measurable evolutionary perspective,” Perreault said. “We often say that culture makes us different, but here we can estimate by how much. The results suggest that cultural evolution compressed what would normally require roughly 88 million years of biological diversification into about 300,000 years within a single species.”

“It reframes recent human history as a kind of adaptive radiation — but one powered by cultural diversification rather than speciation — and shows that adding a cultural inheritance system changes how quickly and extensively a lineage can expand.”

To quantify this, Perreault compiled geographic range maps for nearly 6,000 species of terrestrial mammals and aggregated them into genera, families and orders. Then he compared the size and ecological diversity of those ranges to the global human range.

Next, he modeled how range size relates to three indicators of evolutionary change: lineage age, number of species and body-mass variation. Those relationships allow us to estimate how much biological diversification a mammalian clade would typically need to achieve a range as large as ours.

Finally, he compared mammal species’ ranges to cultural group territories to test whether cultural evolution allows humans to specialize at finer spatial scales, showing that culture enables humans to be globally generalist as a species while locally specialized as cultural groups.

“This study is part of a broader effort to build a quantitative science of human macroevolution,” he said. “By combining large comparative datasets with evolutionary theory, we can begin to measure the distinctive role of culture in shaping our species’ trajectory in a way that would have been almost impossible before.”

The article, “Cultural evolution accelerated human range expansion by more than two orders of magnitude,” was published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2523038123 

Article Title

Cultural evolution accelerated human range expansion by more than two orders of magnitude

Article Publication Date

12-Mar-2026

 

Researcher to examine complex condition affecting many South Carolinians during pregnancy

Arnold School of Public Health

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Health promotion, education, and behavior assistant professor Leila Larson conducts her nutrition-focused maternal and child health research all over the world, and South Carolinians will soon benefit from her expertise. With funding from the USC Collaborative for Health Equity Research (CHEER), an equity-driven pilot project program recently established by the USC Office of the Provost, Larson has launched a new study focused on pica (i.e., the craving and consumption of non-food items, like ice, and sometimes earth, like clay or soil).

“Pica impacts pregnant women across the globe, including women in the U.S.  – particularly those in African American, Hispanic and rural populations,” says Larson. “Complications of prenatal pica include anemia, abnormal gestational weight gain, high blood pressure, negative birth outcomes, and other adverse effects, but despite these serious consequences, pica continues to be undiagnosed and underreported.” 

Though understudied and extremely complex, scientists and clinicians suspect that one of the primary causes of pica is the deficiency of certain micronutrients, such as iron. Ironically, individuals with pica experience an urge to consume non-food items (e.g., soil, clay, baking powder, soap, cornstarch, chalk, paper products), which often fail to fill the nutrient gaps while also worsening the deficiencies by reducing absorption of nutrients and exacerbating unwanted health outcomes by potentially introducing toxins, heavy metals, parasites, and other dangerous substances to both mother and fetus.

In many parts of the world, pica is common and expected as it has long been seen as a normal part of pregnancy. In other areas, however, women hesitate to report their pica cravings and behaviors due to feelings of shame and fear of being stigmatized.

Only two studies have examined pica in populations in the U.S. in the last 25 years. In California, researchers found that 51% of Hispanic women had the condition. North Carolina scientists discovered that 38% of rural women had pica during pregnancy, yet 75% of the participants had no documentation of the condition in their medical records.

“Pica is viewed as a cultural practice, as well as a biological response to nutritional deficiencies, infection or stress,” Larson says. “But with so little research on the topic, we just don’t know enough about its prevalence, causes or impacts on pregnant women and their babies.”

Building on her pica research in Malawi, which showed a reduction in consumption of earth when iron supplementation was provided, Larson’s new study will shed light on which South Carolinians are most impacted by pica, what primarily causes pica in these populations, and how pregnant people experience pica in their everyday lives. By understanding their behaviors, perspectives, and experiences, the research team’s long-term goal is to develop culturally relevant screening and treatment protocols that can be used by health care providers in the Palmetto state and beyond. 

Larson’s study brings together a team of clinical, community, and research experts to explore this ubiquitous yet poorly understood condition. Consistent engagement with the study’s Community Advisory Board will provide a much-needed perspective on the project’s research approaches, study materials, dissemination, and much more.

“The cultural roots and high prevalence of prenatal anemia in the Southern United States makes pica a critical public health issue for this region,” Larson says. “With this initial pilot project, we hope to lay the groundwork for a longer, more extensive study aimed at understanding the risk factors, behaviors, and clinical impacts associated with this condition, and how we might improve it using community-engaged research approaches.”