<b>Acceptance of entomophagy among Canadians: Insights from Visitors to the Montreal Insectarium</b>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As global food systems face mounting sustainability pressures, insects are gaining attention as a promising alternative protein source. Yet, entomophagy remains culturally unfamiliar or stigmatized in many Western countries, including Canada. This study investigates attitudes toward insect consumption among 252 adult visitors to the Montreal Insectarium—a public institution promoting insect education and biodiversity awareness. Participants completed a structured questionnaire evaluating willingness to consume various insect-based foods, motivations and barriers, and demographic predictors of acceptance. Overall, 44% of participants reported openness to eating insects, though fewer were willing to include them in their regular diet (27%) or prepare them at home (17%). Acceptance was highest for products where insect content was less visible, such as baked goods made with cricket flour. Key motivators included curiosity, perceived health benefits, and environmental concern, while major deterrents were disgust, food safety concerns, and insect-related fears. Ordinal logistic regression analyses revealed consistent gender effects, with men significantly more willing than women to consume a variety of insect-based foods. Men also showed greater prior experience with insect consumption and were more likely to include insects in their diets or try them in restaurants. Age alone was not a consistent predictor, but significant interactions with gender revealed contrasting trends. Moreover, participants with graduate degrees showed greater openness to experimenting with insect-based ingredients when cooking, and were more likely to accept insect-based cheese. Strong positive correlations were found between willingness to include insects in one’s diet and prior insect consumption, as well as with willingness to cook them at home. A weaker but still significant correlation also linked dietary inclusion of insects with general openness to culinary innovation. Together, these findings underscore the complex interplay of gender, age, and education in shaping entomophagy acceptance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".