ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the state of the art of research into the consumption of insects – or “entomophagy” – and has provoked a great deal of interest in the subject. There is a relative paucity of research into insects’ capacity for subjective experience or ability to feel pain. Vegetarianism is not a unified adherence to a fixed set of culinary, ethical, and other principles, but rather a fairly loose term indicating a diet with a broadly ethical inflection. The identification of an environmentally motivated form of vegetarianism that permits the consumption of some animal species is interesting, because it implies that animal welfare motivations are not shared by everyone who aims to reduce or eliminate meat from their diets, even if they self-define as vegetarian. Environmentally motivated vegetarianism seems to be anthropocentric in the sense that the ethical concern is primarily directed at humans, and the survival of the human species.
