The question that I get asked the most is: How did you become interested in starting a project about eating insects? I don’t think it was necessarily a single moment for me, but rather an accumulation of things—surging food movements, exposure to cultural practices through personal travels and various media outlets, self-reflection, and my personal [...]

In 1984, famed entomologist E.O. Wilson popularized the term biophilia, which he defined as “the innate tendency [in humans] to focus on life and lifelike processes.” [1] Expanding on this theory in a later publication, Wilson argued that biophilia and its inverse - biophobia - each provoke an emotional response. [2] He also maintained that [...]

Contemporary zoos are cultural constructions that confine, catalog, domesticate, and translate the natural world. These institutions are not reflections of nature - they are reflections of Western society’s ever-changing conception of nature. For this reason, zoos should be recognized as tangible records of the shifting meanings that have shaped human-animal and human-environment relations for hundreds [...]

The method of organization embodied and shaped by the curiosity cabinet was also prevalent in the emerging natural history museums of the late nineteenth century. With their glass front cases, bottles, and drawers, cabinets and museums both employed a system of understanding that “represented a shift from delighting in the world’s strange offerings and the [...]

Enthusiasm for the acquisition and display of natural and man-made objects proliferated throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These collections, as well as the medieval treasuries and church repositories that preceded them, are considered by many to be direct ancestors of the modern natural history museum. [1]