“We at Ethical Markets cover the growing market for insect-based feed, human food ingredients and many other uses in our Green Transition Scoreboard:” transitioning to Science-Based Investing: 2019-2020″ (free download at www.ethicalmarkets.com ) Black soldier flies are indeed super, as in this article from new Scientist!
Dr. Hazel Henderson, Editor”
By David Adam
BZZZZZZZ. Most people would find working next to the noise of thousands of flies a little irritating, and perhaps reach for a rolled-up newspaper. But to Keiran Whitaker, it is the soundtrack of a more sustainable future. That, and the promise of hard cash: Whitaker’s company Entocycle is farming the flies in a specialised lab a short walk from Tower Bridge in central London. Within a year, he wants to be shipping them around the country. As food.
These are no ordinary insects. They are bigger than the average housefly but far more sluggish. They don’t eat anything, so they don’t need mouths or digestive systems, which means they can’t bite. They aren’t pests and they can’t carry disease. And as flies go, they don’t even fly that much. When they do, it is like they can’t really be bothered. It is easy to reach out and just grab one.
They are black soldier flies. And if they sound amazing – which they are – then wait until you meet the kids.
The larvae of these flies are the next big thing in sustainability. They can be dried and fed to pets. They can replace fishmeal in the diet of farmed fish and animals, and so help protect the oceans from over-exploitation. They can be swapped for the mountain of soya used in animal feed, so saving the rainforests. They can digest all manner of human wastes without generating a lot of greenhouse gases. They can be processed into a kind of plastic. They have been baked into bread and biscuits and mixed into ice cream. They taste, if you were wondering, a bit like peanuts.
[Keiran Whitaker]
Keiran Whitaker of Entocycle loves his hipster soldier flies
David Stock for New Scientist
“These are the most hipster insects in the world,” says Whitaker, referring to their diet, as he shows me around. As larvae, his flies dine on only the finest leftovers from a local microbrewery and the neighbouring coffee shops. While trains rumble in and out of London Bridge station overhead, the insects are busy in a computer-controlled environment that counts them and works out how much food they need. Which, as it happens, is an awful lot.
You might have seen a viral video of a scrum of maggots devouring a pizza<https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/watch-maggot-fountain-devour-pizza-2-hours> – it is quite something. Those are black soldier fly larvae, doing what they do best, eating what we throw away. And they do so in a fascinating, if admittedly grotesque, way by forming a living fountain in which those larvae that have temporarily had their fill are pushed up and away by hungry replacements. Because the adult flies don’t eat, the larvae need to stock up on food before they pupate, an intermediate stage to their final form. That means, after less than two solid weeks of munching, each larva has grown to 2.5 centimetres long and weighs more than 200 milligrams. Almost a third of that is fat and more than 40 per cent is protein. That makes them a valuable commodity.
“I think we are going to see insect farming on a massive scale,” says Åsa Berggren of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala. “It has lots of things going for it compared with how we get protein today.”
Global demand for protein is soaring<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5532560/> and could double by 2050. Yet much of what we produce at the moment we don’t eat<https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831761-900-meat-substitutes-arent-perfect-but-they-are-worth-a-try>, at least not directly. We feed it to farmed animals instead. By weight, about a quarter of all wild fish caught globally are made into fishmeal<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/faf.12209>. For soya – a crop long blamed for driving deforestation in the tropics – some 80 per cent goes to animal feed<http://wwf.panda.org/our_work/food/sustainable_production/soy.cfm>. Most protein for animal food is sourced from the cheapest providers internationally. That means the farmed salmon you buy in a UK or US supermarket probably ate soya grown in Brazil, while the chickens were raised on ground-up anchovies hoovered from the seas off Peru.
“Food production is the most destructive industry ever invented,” says Whitaker. “And most people have two ways to make change: who you vote for and what you buy.”
Pet owners are among the first to have an insect-based choice. In January this year, UK start-up Yora started to mix black soldier fly larvae into its dry dog food. It can do so because regulations on pet food are fairly loose. It is a different story for feeding animals destined for human consumption, especially in places like Europe where the BSE scandal of the 1980s focused attention on what protein animals were eating<https://www.newscientist.com/article/2118418-many-more-people-could-still-die-from-mad-cow-disease-in-the-uk/>. Insect protein was caught in the subsequent bans, but those laws are starting to change.
In 2017, the European Union said fish farmers could use insect protein, and by 2020 it is expected to allow it in food for chickens and pigs. The US is moving too: late last year, the Food and Drug Administration signalled its approval for the use of insects in chicken feed. There are no restrictions on the use of fat from insects, which is already mixed into pig food made by a company called Protix in the Netherlands – which also supplies black soldier fly protein for Yora dog food.
Elaine Fitches, an applied entomologist at Durham University, UK, who wrote a report on insect protein sources for the EU in 2016, says companies are queuing up to take advantage of the revised laws. “Everywhere you look, there are investments in this area,” she says. “It is now moving from start-up to transition to commercial scale.”
US firm EnviroFlight opened a large-scale black soldier fly farm in Kentucky in November. And South Africa-based AgriProtein<https://agriprotein.com/>, which farms maggots reared on food waste, raised $100 million last year to fund expansion. France has already said it wants to be a world leader in the production of protein by 2030, and sees massive insect farms as one way to achieve that. And it isn’t just focusing on the black soldier fly. French firm Ynsect is building a factory in Amiens that it says will rear enough mealworm beetles to produce 20,000 tonnes of larval protein a year, mostly for fish farming. “That is a hell of a lot of little maggots,” Fitches says.
Is it all as good as it sounds? Berggren says would-be insect farmers should remember they are often using non-native species. The black soldier fly, for example, isn’t yet settled in the UK. It is probably too cold for any that escape. Entocycle’s London lab is kept at 30°C. But Berggren says species tend to find a way. “We really don’t know enough to be sure what would happen.”
[Black soldier flies]
David Stock for New Scientist
The picture is clearer when it comes to sustainability. Alexander Mathys at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has just finished a full life-cycle assessment of the environmental impact of Protix’s pilot plant in Dongen, the Netherlands, which grows its black soldier fly larvae on waste from the food industry. By measuring land and water use, energy demand and greenhouse gas production, he found that insect fats and proteins for both animal fodder and human consumption were more sustainable than animal-based sources<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2019.01.042>, and that, while vegetable fodder still scored better overall, insect farming had the edge when it came to water and land use.
One way to make insect fat and protein a more sustainable food ingredient is for us to eat more of it directly – instead of feeding it first to fish, chickens and pigs. “I tried to convince the Swiss chocolate industry to replace palm oil with oil made from black soldier fly larvae,” says Mathys. “They didn’t like it.” (One South African company, Gourmet Grubb<https://gourmetgrubb.com/>, has taken the plunge and uses fat from the insects in its ice cream.)
Despite the strict rules on what animals in the human food chain eat, there are few controls on using protein from insects in food we eat directly, and insect-based snacks are appearing on supermarket shelves. Food scientists have baked insect flour from black soldier fly larvae, mealworms and even cockroaches into bread. The results, they say, can be dense and a bit chewy – and some give off an unpleasant smell during baking – but taste pretty similar to a regular loaf. Already, a Finnish bakery in Helsinki has started to sell bread made with flour from ground-up crickets. Customers say they don’t notice the difference, although each loaf is about 50 per cent more expensive.
Whitaker says Entocycle is aiming beyond animal feed too: “I didn’t start this to feed animals. I started it to feed people.” He is a vegan, but is happy to tuck into a shared plate of his dried whole larvae. It is ethical, he says, because insects don’t have feelings. His business plan is to license farmers to install rows of hundreds of automated trays to fatten up the larvae, which he would then reclaim, separate into protein and fat, and sell as premium ingredients. Several farmers, keen to diversify their production to stay in business, are already on the waiting list, he says. Just don’t use the M-word. “We don’t like to use the word maggot. We call it a larva. We call it what it is.”
It might sound yucky to some, but then most of us – including vegetarians and vegans – unknowingly eat fats and proteins from insects all the time, because the animals are collected when crops are harvested. Under FDA rules, frozen broccoli can include up to 60 whole aphids or mites per 100g and the same amount of chocolate is allowed to contain up to 60 insect fragments. An average can of tinned tomatoes? One fruit fly maggot allowed.
Food for maggots
[maggots]
Shutterstock
Fitches says the easiest way to make foods processed with insect ingredients more sustainable is to expand what the larvae themselves are allowed to eat. If destined for farm animals, regulations in many developed countries restrict the menu to what is called pre-consumer waste – the byproducts of existing food production – and no meat. That is why Whitaker’s black soldier flies get the brewing and coffee leftovers. There is only so much of that to go around, though, so truly sustainable insect farming on a massive scale requires finding something else to feed them.
Something like that pizza in the video, perhaps. Colossal amounts of food are thrown away every day – which wastes valuable resources and generates the powerful greenhouse gas methane as it rots in compost and landfill sites. By some estimates, if food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third biggest carbon emitter, behind only the US and China. Black soldier flies<http://www.fao.org/3/a-bb144e.pdf> and other insects have already proved themselves adept at breaking down everything from dead fish (another hit video worthy of your time<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhR2jDS2IJI>) and surplus fruit and vegetables from supermarkets, to the mess left behind by Ugandan bootleggers who make a gin-like drink called waragi by distilling ingredients including molasses.
And the larvae do so without producing methane – they convert the carbon in the feedstock into the proteins and oils of their wriggly bodies, with some released as carbon dioxide. An assessment by Swiss scientists late last year showed that, when disposing of organic matter, black soldier flies produce greenhouse gas emissions 47 times lower than composting does<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2018.11.040>.
Organic matter doesn’t have to mean food waste, though. “To me using manure [to farm insects] is a no-brainer,” says Fitches. “Some people don’t like the idea but we buy farmed mushrooms and they’re covered in manure.”
To use flies to turn excrement into fat and protein for our food would require quite a shift in thinking in many societies – and significant changes to regulations. But even if the work of the flies doesn’t ultimately produce food, it could still steer us to a more sustainable future. At one end of the life cycle of what we consume, these insects can help us dispose of what we throw away with less impact on the environment – the Swiss analysis was of a dedicated insect-biowaste treatment plant in Indonesia. At the other, the protein and especially the fat they contain can be put to good use elsewhere (see “On the fly”, page 40). As studies show that insects are disappearing from the natural world, it could be that we realise we need them more than ever.
“This is a really exciting time to work in this science as the results are immediately relevant to industry and that’s really cool,” says Mathys. “The topic is really flying.”
ON THE FLY
Black soldier flies have a range of uses beyond food.
Biofuel The energy-rich fat from soldier fly maggots can be squeezed out, chemically modified and blended with standard diesel. Tests show that diesel engines can cope with fuel that is 20 per cent fly, which can improve performance and reduce emissions.
Plastics Take the protein of the larvae, add glycerol to make it more flexible and you get a substance that can be compressed into sheets of a rigid plastic substitute. A team in Sweden did this by feeding the larvae dog food and human faeces. The material, they suggest, could be used for electrical switch covers or a nice lamp shade. Just don’t get it wet – the result would be a soggy mess.
Sewage The fly larvae aren’t fussy eaters. Feed them heavily polluted wastes, including industrial sewage in China loaded with heavy metals including lead, cadmium and mercury, and they barely flinch.
Cosmetics Take away the protein and fat from the larvae and what’s left? Chitin, a useful long-chain polysaccharide that has stabilising properties in a range of products. It’s already obtained from other sources such as crab shells and used in your toothpaste, shampoo and expensive anti-ageing cream, but the flies can provide more.