Entomophagy at India’s nutrition-sustainability nexus: biodiversity, nutritional evidence, food safety, regulatory gaps and a conceptual commercialization roadmap

Abstract

Abstract

India is among the most entomophagically diverse countries in the world. Peer-reviewed inventories document more than 300 edible insect species across at least 14 states, together with a documented but taxonomically separate tradition of arachnophagy in Nagaland and Manipur. Despite this biological resource, India has not converted its edible arthropod tradition into a regulated protein sector. This narrative review synthesizes literature published between 1997 and 2025, identified through structured searches of Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed and Google Scholar and supplemented by primary regulatory documents, across ethnographic surveys, proximate and amino acid analyses, food safety science, environmental assessment, entomotherapy, consumer research and regulatory analysis. Three major structural barriers are identified, namely taxonomic under-documentation outside the northeast, the absence of a species-specific FSSAI standard, and culturally mediated food neophobia. Compositional evidence remains concentrated in fewer than twenty species; documented values include 55.28% protein (dry weight) in Oecophylla smaragdina and 65.81% in Eupreponotus inflatus , and thermal processing trials in edible spiders indicate that roasting at 70–100 °C retains more protein than boiling. To our knowledge, no systematic microbiological, parasitological or pesticide-residue survey has been published for any India-consumed species, and the review therefore sets out the hazard entry points along the harvest-to-consumer chain that such surveillance must address, while distinguishing microbial detection from demonstrated foodborne disease and separating crude-extract bioactivity from characterized peptide activity. Environmental advantages reported for farmed insects relative to beef are large in published life-cycle assessments, but they derive from European and Southeast Asian production systems and have not been quantified under Indian conditions. Regulatory positions in the European Union, Singapore, Thailand and the United States are re-examined against current primary documents, and the FSSAI non-specified food approval route is identified as an existing, if untested, pathway. A four-phase roadmap is presented as a conceptual framework rather than a predictive implementation timeline. Its sequence is grounded in Indigenous knowledge protection, ecological monitoring, regulatory science and community enterprise.