How Edible Bugs Can Make Food More Climate-Friendly

In a nondescript warehouse in Maysville, Kentucky, a worker loads food waste into one of the thousands of custom-designed trays stacked in climate-controlled rooms. Each tray is home to masses of writhing larvae.

"Those larvae grow for the appropriate period of time and then they are processed into our black soldier fly larvae ingredients," Liz Koutsos told Newsweek. Koutsos is president of EnviroFlight, one of the many companies in the emerging industry of insect agriculture, and the first company in the U.S. to commercially produce black soldier fly larvae as a food source.

The black soldier is a widespread fly that resembles a wasp, although it does not sting, bite, carry disease or even make that much noise. But the buzz is growing about them and other insects acting as six-legged solutions for sustainable agriculture.

The flies are incredibly fecund—each mating female can lay 500 to 900 eggs—and highly efficient at producing protein. "We can make more protein on an acre of land than traditional plant- or animal-based protein sources," Koutsos said.

EnviroFlight is betting big on black soldier fly larvae—or BSFL, as it's known in the business—in hopes of making this insect part of the diet of pigs, poultry, pets and more, while also taking a bite out of the food waste problem.

"It's really neat to leverage the superpower that this insect has," Koutsos said. "Black soldier fly larvae can upcycle byproducts from the food and feed industry that may have little or no value."

Food for the flies could include post-consumer food scraps or—because EnviroFlight is based in Kentucky, after all—the leftover grain from bourbon distilleries. Putting that waste to productive use is the first of the fly's benefits. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 30 to 40 percent of the country's food supply is wasted, and that waste is roughly a fifth of what's in city landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency calculates that the greenhouse gases from wasted food equal a year of emissions from 42 coal-fired power plants.

Just a few weeks after the black soldier fly eggs hatch, the company gets several products, including the whole, dried larvae, protein meal from crushed larvae and fatty oil from pressed larvae. Koutsos said most of those products have won regulatory approval as animal feed and could help meet the growing demand for meat as the global population pushes toward 9 billion by mid-century.

Feeding Our Food

Arnold van Huis, a professor emeritus at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, is the chief editor of the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed, which tracks the progress of this emerging industry.

"Everything is new. You have to invent everything from scratch," he said of the needed research into insect genetics, the automation of production and testing to determine which types of insects are best suited to feed which animals.

Van Huis is a proponent of direct human consumption of insects, either whole or ground into other ingredients, but he admits the cultural barrier is high. Consumer surveys in Europe and the U.S. show a strong "ick" response to eating insects or even products with insect ingredients.

That leaves pet food and livestock feed as the likeliest large-scale markets in the near term. You might not want to eat bugs, but if you eat beef, pork, chicken or fish, there are many reasons that you might want your food to eat insects.

Just growing food for livestock uses about a third of the world's cropland, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and there are associated harms from erosion, deforestation, water use and the nutrient runoff from farms into rivers and estuaries.

Farmed insects can be more than a hundred times more efficient in producing protein than the major crop for livestock, soybeans. Soybean demand can contribute to tropical deforestation, as has happened in Brazil, which surpassed the U.S. as the world's top soy producer in the last decade. Research published in Science shows that about a fifth of the soy from Brazil's Amazon and Cerrado regions is tied to illegal deforestation, and the main demand for that soy was to feed livestock.

Insect protein could also benefit the oceans, van Huis explained, by replacing fishmeal in aquaculture.

"Fishmeal is of course a problem, especially if it is from marine fishing," he told Newsweek.

For example, millions of oily Atlantic fish called menhaden are scooped up along the U.S. coast and ground into fishmeal to feed farmed fish such as salmon and trout. But marine wildlife, such as puffins and porpoises, also depend on menhaden, and scientists and sports fishermen have long complained that the menhaden fishery robs this part of the coastal food web.

"More and more research is going into insect meal for farmed fish," van Huis said. Academic interest in the industry as a whole has soared in the past five years, he said, and investment in the European Union alone could hit $3 billion by 2025 as companies aim to scale up production and bring down costs.

New Industry Taking Flight

"We expect this will follow a similar path to sushi," Aaron Hobbs told Newsweek about the insect industry. Hobbs is the executive director of the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture, which represents about 60 companies in the U.S., Canada and Mexico which are growing insects for food or animal feed. Hobbs said insects might trigger disgust among consumers now, but so did sushi when it was first introduced to Western diners. Now, of course, sushi is swimming in the mainstream of American cuisine.

"Over time, people get more adventurous and then interested," he said. Companies in his coalition are already marketing products such as insect-flour cookies and high-protein powders and bars for athletes.

The insect-derived pet food market is growing, Hobbs said, as more consumers are willing to pay a bit more for a product with a better environmental paw print, and demand for insect feed for livestock and aquaculture is apparently strong.

"We have significant interest from people feeding large amounts of animals across the food chain," he said, and more insect products are going through the regulatory process. "As we get approvals, sometimes the purchase orders are already written because there is such anticipation."

The insect industry still faces high costs, a skeptical consumer base and regulatory hurdles, but proponents like Hobbs and van Huis think insects will play a much larger role in global agriculture within this decade.

You might say the insect farming industry is in its larval stage: not much to look at now, maybe, but poised to emerge into something that can really take flight.