PHOTO: Black soldier fly, greatly enlarged.
Insects have the amazing ability to turn low-grade food waste into valuable high-end proteins and fats, and are the missing link in our food system…
— from the Protix website, May 2023.
A nine-acre insect farm opened its doors in Nesle, France last April, with plans to harvest 16,500 tons of black soldier fly larvae each year. That’s a heck of a lot of fly larvae.
The company is called Innova Feed. And the farm is really more like a factory. A black soldier fly factory.
I was not on a first-name basis with the black soldier fly before stumbling onto a series of articles about insect farms, but it turns out they are enterprising little flies that produce remarkably nutritious children.
If you treat them right.
The flies I’m familiar with — house flies, deer flies, horse flies, cluster flies — have never struck me as particularly appetizing.
Likewise, black soldier fly larvae, when I came across photos of them.
No offense meant, but as nutritious as they may be, they look like maggots.
Which I guess is what they are. Maggots.
But Innova Feed doesn’t expect to serve them up on a dinner plate; they are more clever than that. They’re making a (supposedly nourishing) oil from the maggots.
I found this video about Innova Feed, but French people talk too fast for me to understand much of anything.
From what I can gather, Innova Feed is mixing an oil made from the larvae into chicken feed, to replace soybean oil. Almost all soybeans nowadays are genetically modified, GMOs. The black soldier fly larvae, meanwhile, are completely organic, and if I were a chicken, I would certainly prefer organic.
One cool thing about black soldier fly larvae is, they love to eat food waste. The more wasted, the better. Nothing makes them happier.
So Innova Feed is killing two bugs with one stone: making a nutritious oil to feed to chickens, and keeping food waste out of the environment.
(I was going to write, “killing two birds with one stone”… but the black soldier fly oil is actually making the chickens healthier. According to Innova Feed.)
Innova Feed isn’t the only company growing black soldier fly larvae in a big factory.
An article by Nicolás Rivero in The Washington Post notes that the bug-growing company Ÿnsect is building its own 11-acre facility in Amiens, France… and Protix plans a similar size larvae factory in the U.S.
Protix recently announced a partnership with Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork. And maybe, someday, of maggots?
The Protix website notes that, in a recent study, cats and dogs found maggots to be just as delicious as other kinds of protein, if you mix the bugs into their food, and didn’t tell them what they were eating.
Protix referred to the pet food study outcome as “pawsitive news”.
I can see were this is going. And I bet you can, too.
First, they mix a little bit of bugs into our burgers. Then, a little bit more. Pretty soon, after we’re all accustomed to the flavor, they get rid of the beef entirely.
We might wonder how a black soldier fly feels about having her children made into protein. So far, I haven’t found any sources of information about that question. But apparently, black soldier flies have a rather boring life after they hatch into adulthood. Typically, they don’t even eat after they grow up. They just have sex and lay eggs.
It’s the maggots that really enjoy eating.
So the way I see it, these larvae factories are like huge, joyful restaurants.
With an unhappy ending.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.