Edible insects: future of human food – a review

The practice of eating insects is known as entomophagy. Many animals, such as spiders, lizards and birds, are entomophagous, as are many insects. People throughout the world have been eating insects as a regular part of their diets for millennia. As people in rural areas suffer from under nutrition, especially protein-energy malnutrition (PEM) in Africa, Latin America and Asia, alternative nutritional food sources are needed. From ants to beetle larvae – eaten by tribes in Africa and Australia as part of their subsistence diets – to the popular, crispy-fried locusts and beetles enjoyed in Thailand, it is estimated that insect-eating is practised regularly by at least 2 billion people worldwide. More than 1900 insect species have been documented in literature as edible, most of them in tropical countries. The most commonly eaten insect groups are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, cicadas, leaf and plant hoppers, scale insects and true bugs, termites, dragonflies and flies. The purpose of the present review is to determine the status of present research in the context of the potentiality of insects as alternative food source to cope up with the emerging problem of global food crisis