How come caviar is SOOO COOL, yet baby flies lack the same foodie cachet? Icelandic design dude Búi Bjarmar Aðalsteinsson wants to change that with his insect larvae pâté. Aðalsteinsson has created The Fly Factory, a contraption to help restaurants harvest black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens). The larvae can then be used in a bevy of tasty recipes as a chicken substitute or in a kid-approved coconut-chocolate pudding.
As Aðalsteinsson told Dezeen:
“They taste like chicken,” he says. “There is no distinct taste. It depends on how you spice them and how you prepare them.”
Yum?
DezeenA delicious buggy dessert.
The Fly Factory houses a refrigerator to store the larvae as well as a fly boudoir (sorry, breeding area) that harvests insect poop to repurpose as compost. And if you’re squeamish, black soldier flies are really clean. They’re known for carrying fewer diseases than other bugs, because adult black soldier flies don’t have a mouth. They don’t even look for food — they just want sex. (Priorities.)
Aðalsteinsson was inspired by reports that insects could provide us with the protein we need at a much lower environmental cost than beef or chicken:
“Larvae are similar to meat when it comes to protein, fat and nutrients,” he adds. “But larvae need 5 to 10 times less feed to produce the same amount of growth.”
In the Fly Factory, the larvae are fed food scraps, making it a zero-waste system. What about that doesn’t sound delicious?
