Foreword: Why a Journal of Insects as Food and Feed?

The use of insects as a food source by people in different continents was generally viewed by European explorers as a novelty or as an indication of food shortages. In 1885, Vincent Holt advocated that insects could alleviate hunger amongst the poor in his rather quaint publication Why not eat insects? Human entomophagy was put into global perspective in 1951 by F.S. Bodenheimer when he published his book Insects as human food. Advocacy for the use of insects as human food or as animal feed was taken up by Gene DeFoliart, both in the scientific literature (e.g. DeFoliart, 1999) and in his online bibliography (DeFoliart, 2002). More recently, momentum has increased with involvement of the UN FAO through the 2008 workshop Insects bite back in Thailand (Durst et al., 2010), the 2012 FAO meeting Assessing the potential of insects as food and feed in assuring food security in Rome, the release of the FAO report Edible insects: future prospects for food and feed security (Van Huis et al., 2013), culminating in the successful first international conference, Insects to feed the world, in May 2014. © 2015 Wageningen Academic Publishers.