Entomophagy is the technical term for consumption of insects as food. It works, but it isn't friendly or welcoming word, and there's much discussion among entomophagists about whether it's the best word to be using, or even a particularly good one.
Here at Gastrobug, we think it isn't. As a word to describe something people do, it's oddly formal. It's non-intuitive, and lots of people who eat bugs are confused by it. It sounds like something you might contract, and if we want to be getting people comfortable with the idea of eating insects for food, making them uncomfortable with the word describing the practice isn't the best idea.
So we here at Gastrobug would like to humbly offer our own suggestion, and a portmanteau, and logos for each.
If you're talking about eating insects, we recommend just saying "Entomo."
This works if you're talking about the kind of eating you're doing, as well as if you're talking about the person doing the eating. Look:
This dish is Entomo.
I'm eating Entomo.
I'm an Entomo.
It's friendly, it makes sense linguistically, and shouldn't turn anyone off.
But what if you want to go further? What if you want to talk about someone whose only source of meat is insects, and doesn't use any other animal products? For that we're recommending "Entomovegan."
Entomovegan refers to food, or the eating of food, where the only meat products are insects: other than that, the food is vegan. This means no animal byproducts, either: no dairy, no eggs, no gelatin... none of that stuff. This is a nice, efficient way to describe what you're doing, and fits in with the tradition of dietary modifiers, such as Pescetarian (vegetarian but eats fish), Ovo-Vegetarian (vegetarian but eats eggs), and the like.
I only eat Entomovegan food.
I'm an Entomovegan!
Entomovegan is the only way to eat.
Plus, we made a really cool insect/leaf logo for it.
These are terms we're going to be using here at Gastrobug, and we hope that they'll gain some traction because they're nice and friendly, and fairly obvious in meaning. So we encourage everyone reading this to use the terms to. The hope is that by using a friendly name for the practice, we can help move the conversation about eating insects forward.
But wait, there's more!
In addition to just giving out terms to use, we've created a package containing the Entomo and Entomovegan icons, both in Bitmap and Vector formats, with some visual options, in case anyone else wants to use them.
- Do you sell cricket bars? Use one of these logos!
- Do you own a restaurant that cooks insects? Use one of these logos!
- Do you want to talk about insects as food in any way that includes visuals? Use one of these logos!
We're putting no restrictions on the use of these logos: you can download them, reproduce them however you like, put them on your website, print them on packages, in brochures, on billboards; the sky's the limit.
If you do use these icons for anything, please let us know: we'd love to see!
This work by Gastrobug is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://www.gastrobug.com/.
