**Rocco Roma 1, Giovanni Ottomano Palmisano <sup>2</sup> and Annalisa De Boni 1,\***


Received: 28 February 2020; Accepted: 17 March 2020; Published: 27 March 2020

**Abstract:** In Western societies, the unfamiliarity with insect-based food is a hindrance for consumption and market development. This may depend on neophobia and reactions of disgust, individual characteristics and socio-cultural background, and risk-perceptions for health and production technologies. In addition, in many European countries, the sale of insects for human consumption is still illegal, although European Union (EU) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) are developing regulatory frameworks and environmental and quality standards. This research aims to advance the knowledge on entomophagy, providing insights to improve consumer acceptance in Italy. This is done by carrying out the characterization of a sample of consumers according to their willingness to taste several types of insect-based food and taking into account the connections among the consumers' features. Thus, the dominance-based rough set approach is applied using the data collected from 310 Italian consumers. This approach provided 206 certain decision rules characterizing the consumers into five groups, showing the consumers' features determining their specific classification. Although many Italian consumers are willing to accept only insects in the form of feed stuffs or supplements, this choice is a first step towards entomophagy. Conversely, young Italian people are a niche market, but they can play a role in changing trends.

**Keywords:** entomophagy; consumer analysis; DRSA

#### **1. Introduction**

In Western societies the practice of eating insects, also known as entomophagy, is not usual in traditional diets, so that insects are rarely considered as edible [1]. However, insects can become a possible alternative to animal protein source thanks to their richness in protein, fat, minerals and vitamins [2], lower request of land and water [3], lower environmental impacts in terms of fewer greenhouse gases emissions and ammonia production [4], and also due to their more efficient feed conversion rate with respect to conventional meats [5,6]. In spite of the growing interest towards these benefits and the subsequent debate around the theme of insects as food, most of Western consumers still have reactions of disgust and rejection against them [7]. Generally, the main obstacles for consumers' acceptance of novel food (defined by EU Commission as "food that had not been consumed to a significant degree by humans in the EU before 15 May 1997") are food taboos and socio-cultural and psychological barriers, so that the aspect of a food can cause a disgust-based food rejection [8,9]. Indeed, the evident references of a food's origin to an animal (i.e., its "animalness") are strong determiners of a disgust response [10,11]. Moreover, food neophobia, defined as aversion to eating new and unfamiliar food, plays a key role in the acceptance of novel food [12,13].

As a consequence, the unfamiliarity with insects as food may represent also a hindrance for consumption and market development, especially in cultures where insects' consumption is not usual [11]. In particular, neophobia and organoleptic features of edible insects in comparison with the features of other well known food (e.g., meat and legumes) is seen as a decisive obstacle to consumers' acceptance [9,14–17]. In order to tackle these issues, previous studies suggested to integrate invisible insects in food preparation and/or to associate them with attractive flavors [7,18]. Furthermore, many authors underlined how the food product preparation affects the willingness to eat insects [9,11,19]. For instance, adding insects to familiar preparations (e.g., bread or pasta) or incorporating minced or powdered insects into ready-to-eat preparations, seemed to effectively increase the liking and willingness to try this kind of food in comparison to adding visible insects to meals or proposing them in their "whole form" [20–23]. Other authors highlight how consumers may show different behaviors towards the quality and presentation of insect-based food according to their own individual features and socio-cultural background [11,20,24,25], and also in relation to their risk-perceptions in terms of worries for health and production technologies [26,27]. Therefore, it is clear that consumer acceptance of insect-based food may depend on the amount, quality and source of information they receive and provide [26,28,29].

Moving the focus from research to policymaking, in many European countries, the sale of insects for human consumption is still illegal, even though the EU Commission is developing regulatory frameworks, environmental and quality standards to prevent risks for consumers from the consumption of novel food [30]. Specifically, the EU "Novel Food Regulation no. 2015/2283", in effect since 1st January 2018, allows to request the authorization for the commercialization of novel food [6] and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is working on an evaluation of the risk profile related to the production and consumption of insects as food and feed [31]. However, only some EU countries (e.g., Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland and Germany) have adopted their own internal regulations for the trading of insect-based food, and this affects the spread of retailers selling insect products and their availability on the market, and at the same time, may cause concerns in consumers about safety and healthiness of these food products.

In the light of this complex scenario, the use of a comprehensive consumer-oriented approach is crucial to simultaneously analyze the factors influencing entomophagy and thus to provide overall insights for its diffusion [6,32]. Therefore, this research aims to advance the knowledge on entomophagy by supplying information to improve consumer acceptance in Italy. This is done by carrying out the characterization of a sample of consumers according to their willingness to taste several types of insect-based food and by taking into account the direct connections among the consumers' features.

Thus, a multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA) approach is applied here, starting from the data gathered from direct consumer questionnaires. MCDA is an umbrella term describing a collection of formal approaches, which take into account multiple criteria in helping individuals or groups to explore decisions that matter [33]. A decision can be tackled through MCDA when there are different choices or alternatives to be judged as more desirable than others by means of criteria that may be in conflict to a substantial extent [34]. Specifically, the applied MCDA approach is called the dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA) because it is based on the rough sets theory and seeks to characterize the groups of consumers by means of simple "*If* ... *then* ... " decision rules [35].

Indeed, the decision rules inform about the relationships between conditions and decisions; in this way, the rules enable traceability of the decision support process and give understandable justifications for the decision to be made, so that the resulting preference model constitutes a 'glass box' [36]. Then, DRSA has been successfully applied in a variety of fields such as medical diagnosis, engineering reliability, empirical studies of material data, airline market and evaluation of bankruptcy risk [36,37]. On the other hand, applications on food science with focus on consumer analysis are still scarce [38,39]. Moreover, despite a growing interest towards entomophagy both by civil society and scholars, this topic is rather unexplored, showing a knowledge gap between curiosity-driven tasting and actual acceptance [20], which should be filled by applying discovering approaches [40]. For all these reasons, DRSA is considered suitable to explore the topic of entomophagy and to provide in depth analysis of consumers' attitude towards insect-based food.

The paper is organized as follows. After describing the methodology for the data collection, the DRSA is illustrated both from the theoretical and the empirical perspectives (Section 2). Then, Section 3 shows the results of the descriptive statistics of the sample and the DRSA application. Section 4 provides a detailed discussion of the results with a focus on those obtained from DRSA. Finally, the concluding remarks are reported in Section 5.
