Edible Insect Diversity for Food and Nutrition

Insects constitute a large part of the earth’s terrestrial biomass, with an estimated 10 quintillion individual insects alive at any given time. Insects make up approximately 1 million of the 1.5 million species of organisms currently catalogued and an estimated 2, 000 species have been identified as edible to date. Insect species reported as edible are not uniformly distributed across all geographic locations, with the majority of species reported from South America, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The practice of entomophagy is far from universal across all geographic locations, and insects constitute varying proportions of diets in the areas where they are consumed. Latin America is considered to have the highest recorded number of edible insect species, and the practice of entomophagy is widespread in both Central and South American countries, particularly in areas with tropical ecosystems. Asian countries also consume a wide range of insect diversity, with 170 species recorded in China and 164 species in Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.