Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Insects as food


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. There is no consensus about whether this topic is redundant to Entomophagy. Editors can still try to find consensus about how to cover these topics on the talk page(s).  Sandstein  10:21, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Insects as food

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Procedural nomination of a declined CSD A10 (duplicate article). I'm not myself quite seeing the distinction between the two topics (entomophagy is the other one), but its creator is strongly defending it, so it probably needs a wider discussion here. SpinningSpark 22:00, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep After reading the contested deletion and both articles, I tend to agree with the page creator. They really are two separate topics, albeit related, in the same way that Vegetarian cuisine is distinct from Vegetarianism. The article is well-sourced and the subject meets WP:GNG. PohranicniStraze (talk) 00:01, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Absolutely! One is about edible insects as food items. The other about the process of eating these edible insects in a cultural framework (ethical issues, taboo in Western cultures etc.). To write about both topics in one article would be like writing about the nutritional value of soy beans in the article veganism. --AlienFood (talk) 05:42, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, there is in fact a large and detailed Vegan diet § Nutrients subsection in veganism, including a full paragraph and then some on the nutritional aspects of soy protein, as well as a Veganism subsection. Wikipedia articles often have this kind of wide-ranging mix of perspectives from different fields on important concepts. FourViolas (talk) 00:28, 9 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete as WP:FORK, redirecting to Entomophagy, which means the eating of insects, i.e. the use of insects as human food. There is no wedge to be driven between these terms, used indifferently to describe the practice; it is not true that either of the two more particularly means 'cuisine' or '-ism', as both terms cover both those things. Since 1954 they have converged in popularity, reaching roughly equal frequency. --Chiswick Chap (talk) 00:20, 25 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Redirect As it is, simply redirect it to entomophagy and create a new section. Insects as food and eating insects aren’t grammatically the same thing.Trillfendi (talk) 02:06, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Food and drink-related deletion discussions.  Kpg  jhp  jm  03:52, 25 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep (and redirect Edible insects to this page). This is not a duplicate article:
 * Entomophagy describes the process of eating insects by humans (and animals), this is connected to certain cultural aspects, such as a certain country-specific cuisine, acceptance, taboo etc.
 * Edible insects (insects as food) in difference to that are certain insect species that can be used for human consumption, or processed into insect-based food products (insect burgers, insect bread, insect pasta). Example: A mealworm is an edible insect, a house cricket is an edible insect. They are food such as soy, minced meat, etc., have certain nutritional profiles, ways of production, legal framework (e.g.: cricket, mealworm and locust are authorized as food in Switzerland).

The first is a culture-related article, the second is an article based on nutritional science, food production and food law. For the first article you would search for scientific literature in the area of cultural studies, psychology, anthropology. For the latter you would search for scientific literature in the area of nutritional and food science, food technology, agricultural technology, etc.

To develop the whole topic under an article focused on the culture and process of eating insects is just misleading. We need a second article Insects as food (with Edible insects redirecting to it), just describing the food aspects (nutritional profile, farming/production, authorization). This article should stay, both have to be developed seperated from another. AlienFood (talk) 05:38, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep Another page in this general area is insectivore. Any merger or restructuring should not involve deletion, per WP:PRESERVE.  Note that the OED does not recognise entomophagy and so it is a neologism which is less likely to be understood by readers than a title in plain English like insects as food. Andrew D. (talk) 08:42, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Agree! Please also note that entomophagy describes the consumption of insects by animals in general (humans included). We could also discuss to merge Entomophagy and Insectivore and add a section Entomophagy in human cultures. All food-related/insect-focused information could go over to the Insects as food article. AlienFood (talk) 12:54, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * 'Insects as food' also describes the consumption of insects by non-humans. Unless food means something only eaten by humans, which leaves me wondering what the manufacturers of 'cat food' think they are doing. Its an interesting point that "entomophagy"

is not on the OED; is it in Websters or Collins??. This makes me think that the proper article title is Insects as human food or similar and that both "entomophagy" and "Insects as food should redirect to thisTheLongTone (talk) 13:11, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * It's not in the OED online, but it is in Oxford Dictionaries elsewhere, and also in Collins and Merriam-Webster, see here. It gets a lot of hits on scholar, and on gbooks so despite the strange omission from the OED it does not seem to be a rarely used neoligism (the earliest use I saw was 1988). SpinningSpark 14:17, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * The terms dog food and cat food are definitely exceptions, as both are considered very close to humans. In all other cases you would speak of feed. By the way, Insects as feed is a big, big topic currently discussed, definitely also interesting for an encyclopedia, there are masses of literature on that AlienFood (talk) 14:55, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Could you do that quick search on the term edible insects too. This might be the right lemma for this article after all. AlienFood (talk) 14:57, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * See the N-gram for those terms. SpinningSpark 17:37, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Clearer N-gram with more smoothing. Spinning<b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 17:41, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you! Seeing this, I would suggest we keep the article, but put it under the lemma Edible insects and redirect Insects as food to it. Entomophagy can stay seperately with it's focus on societal and cultural aspects (cultural tradition, cuisine, taboo/prohibition). --AlienFood (talk) 10:22, 26 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Redirect we shouldn't even need an AFD for a new user who is clearly creating a CFORK without consensus. power~enwiki ( π,  ν ) 18:37, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * This is a classical argumentum ad hominem. Please stay factual and add to the discussion. --AlienFood (talk) 23:50, 25 October 2018 (UTC)


 *  comment The creator, has put up a whole lot of work as i see, i think we should try and keep it.... It also sounds interesting, i wonder who would wanna search this, but perharps the creator would like to make this a subpage, rather than a mainspace article? B. N .D  |  ✉  08:18, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Subpages cannot be created in mainspace by policy and technical limitation. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 11:44, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

<div class="xfd_relist" style="border-top: 1px solid #AAA; border-bottom: 1px solid #AAA; padding: 0px 25px;"> Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Keep - This is a well-written and well-referenced article and the contents is sufficiently different from Entomophagy as to warrant a stand alone article in my opinion. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 13:21, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   10:18, 1 November 2018 (UTC) <div class="xfd_relist" style="border-top: 1px solid #AAA; border-bottom: 1px solid #AAA; padding: 0px 25px;"> Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * I'll stick to it: I vote for keeping the article! It has a different approach than the compared article on Entomophagy. Entomophagy is a biological term describing the process of eating insects among animals, partly it is used to describe this practice among humans. The article insects as food – and I suggest to redirect the lemma edible insects to it, or make edible insects the main lemma – fully focuses on edible insects as food items, i.e. the species that are considered for mass rearing, the production, nutritional information, as well as the regulatory framework. This information is culturally unbound, e.g., crickets are produced in Europe, the US, as well as South-East Asia (Thailand) for human consumption. Cultural aspects (acceptance, taboo, history) are (and should be) dealt with in the article entomophagy. Aspects regarding food safety should be transferred completely to the article insects as food. As the topic of edible insects has high economic and media awareness currently, I see that the article insects as food will develop fast. Economic institutes assume that the global market value for edible insects will increase from 406 million US dollars (2018) to 1.2 billion US dollars until 2023 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/882321/edible-insects-market-size-global/). I am asking you: How would you want to depict and document this development under the entomophagy article. --AlienFood (talk) 17:19, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, w umbolo   ^^^  13:04, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
 * <small class="delsort-notice">Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Animal-related deletion discussions. North America1000 22:11, 8 November 2018 (UTC)


 * I appreciate the hard work that's gone into this, and generally prefer to defer to content creators' preference on organization, but I think a merge is necessary. The distinction between the practical realities of insect farming and consumption on the one hand, and the cultural significance of this on the other, leaves a lot of messy grey areas: governmental regulation is obviously influenced by both, for example. There are several specific sections that appear to be direct forks: e.g.
 * Entomophagy and Insects_as_food;
 * Entomophagy and Insects_as_food; and
 * Entomophagy and Insects_as_food (here, the former is a tendentious version of the latter).
 * Importantly, it's not clear for any of these whether the "right" place to put them is in a "what & how" article or a "whether & why" article. Rather, it seems like the best way to give readers complete information with full background is to make a large article with clearly labeled sections that separate cultural and practical issues when possible. FourViolas (talk) 00:22, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you for highlighting these three areas with some minor overlaps/duplicate elements. From my point of view, parts of these three sections should be transferred from Entomophagy to the article Insects as food where they belong. Links could be set, if necessary. --AlienFood (talk) 22:17, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.