ABSTRACT
Prescribing diet development methodology is difficult because few scientists who have developed successful diets have explained the scientific or technological basis for their contributions. Inclusion of the rationale for use of various procedures and materials in papers on diets has not been encouraged and, in fact, has been generally discouraged by editors vigilant to reduce printing costs (Cohen, 2001). Review of hundreds of papers on artificial diets for insects reveals amazingly little about how the diets were formulated or the rationale for improvements in materials or methods. The lack of stated rationale and methodology is unfortunate because it forces all other researchers to start from scratch to develop methodologies, repeating the same mistakes that their predecessors had made. This chapter is an effort to reconstruct the implicit and explicit rationale behind the development of insect diets.
