How Cultural Perceptions and Food Preparation Affect Westerners View of Insects as Food

There has been a recent push to encourage westerners to introduce insects into their diets. Traditional arguments that stress environmental and nutritional benefits have been largely unsuccessful. This not because people simply find insects distasteful; what people view as an acceptable food choice is culturally dependent, and foods made from novel and unfamiliar ingredients or tools are met with apprehension. What is less known is why insects are viewed as an unacceptable food source in western society. It has been suggested that westerners disgust towards insects is that insects are perceived of as contaminants and as vectors of disease. If westerners are unwilling to eat insects, or food prepared with insects because they are viewed as unhygienic, then we should expect individuals who are less concerned with hygiene to be more willing to eat insects, or food prepared with insects. When surveyed on their hygiene and their willingness to try food prepared using insects, participants that were less concerned with personal hygiene were more willing to eat food made with insects. In order to convince people to introduce insects into their diet one must know why people are so uneager to consume insects

A pseudo-planar, periodic-box formalism for modelling the outer evolution of structure in spherically expanding stellar winds

We present an efficient technique to study the 1D evolution of instability-generated structure in winds of hot stars out to very large distances (more than 1000 stellar radii). This technique makes use of our previous finding that external forces play little role in the outer evolution of structure. Rather than evolving the entire wind, as is traditionally done, the technique focuses on a representative portion of the structure and follows it as it moves out with the flow. This requires the problem to be formulated in a moving reference frame. The lack of Galilean invariance of the spherical equations of hydrodynamics is circumvented by recasting them in a pseudo-planar form. By applying the technique to a number of problems we show that it is fast and accurate, and has considerable conceptual advantages. It is particularly useful to test the dependence of solutions on the Galilean frame in which they were obtained. As an illustration, we show that, in a one-dimensional approximation, the wind can remain structured out to distances of more than 1300 stellar radii from the central star.Comment: submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics, 12 pages, 13 figure