Maggots: A taste of food’s future

Black soldier flies at the Evo Conversion Systems facility in College Station, Tex., will eventually be harvested and sold as food for exotic pets. (Loren Elliott for The Washington Post).

The black soldier fly’s remarkable ability to transform nearly any kind of organic waste into protein could revolutionize global food supplies.

In one year, a single acre of black soldier fly larvae can produce more protein than 3,000 acres of cattle or 130 acres of soybeans. Such yields, combined with the need to find cheap, reliable protein for a global population projected to jump 30 percent, to 9.8 billion by 2050, present big opportunity for the black soldier fly. The United Nations, which already warns that animal-rich diets cannot stretch that far long term, is encouraging governments and businesses to turn to insects to fulfill the planet’s protein needs.

People who’ve seen what black soldier fly larvae can do often speak of them in evangelical tones. Jeff Tomberlin, a professor of entomology at Texas A&M University, said the bug industry could “save lives, stabilize economies, create jobs and protect the environment.”

The adult flies resemble small black wasps, minus a stinger, and are generally harmless to humans. After they’ve mated, the females deposit clutches of several hundred eggs into small pieces of corrugated cardboard. Evo employees collect the cardboard and deposit them into glass Mason jars to incubate. Several days later, a brood of maggots — each no bigger than a speck of pepper — hatches.

A black soldier fly larva can consume twice its weight in food each day. On its 14-day journey from hatchling to pupa, a single larva will grow nearly an inch long and increase its weight by a factor of 10,000. That’s akin to an eight-pound baby swelling to the size of a 40-ton humpback whale. They binge eat to store up nutrients for their two-week life span as adults, when they typically don’t eat anything at all.

When the grubs reach full size, they’re harvested, dried in industrial ovens and processed into a protein-rich meal and oil. The technology is moving so quickly, however, that regulators are having difficulty keeping up.

The U.N. agrees: It forecast in a 2013 report that insect farming would have to play a key role — both as animal feed and to feed people — if the world is going to be fed sustainably in coming decades.

source : https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/07/03/maggots-could-revolutionize-global-food-supply-heres-how/