Invertebrate Welfare — January 2021

Rethink Priorities is currently hiring an entomologist or insect ethologist in a consulting, full-, or part-time capacity to provide guidance on ongoing projects, and to conduct literature reviews on topics in insect welfare. If you’re interested, check out the job advertisement.

Insects raised for food and feed

• In major news, the European Union’s European Food Safety Authority released its first safety evaluation of an insect-derived product under a novel food law that came into effect in 2018.

  • The EFSA found dried mealworms to be safe for several proposed uses, which include snack foods and protein powder.

  • While the approval was only for mealworms in human foods, insect producers see it as a major step forward for the industry in Europe.

  • Bloomberg noted that several industry experts see this as a positive indicator for the industry, and believe the report will increase the availability of venture capital for the space. If so, it would add to the hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed into the industry over the last year, enabling its growth.

  • Notably, many of the insect producing companies that celebrated this approval as a step forward don’t actually intend to manufacture mealworms for human consumption. Ÿnsect, for example, is primarily focused on growing mealworms for animal feed and for pet food. This suggests that these producers might see this approval as paving the road to broader approval of insect products for animal feed.

  • The approval is also notable because it is a significant pivot from an opinion that the EFSA released in 2015 that argued that using insects as food and feed ran the risk of causing prion-caused diseases, or risked introducing chemical contaminants from rearing substrates and other biological hazards caused by production practices.

• In Decatur, Illinois, InnovaFeed is building the world’s largest insect protein plant.

  • The project is a partnership with major food processor Archer-Daniels-Midland.

  • The facility aims to produce 60,000 tonnes of insectmeal made from black soldier flies annually.

  • A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that this would require killing 780B to 1.6T black soldier fly larvae annually, resulting in 12T to 30T days of black soldier fly lives on farms every year.

  • Note that it will likely take several years for the facility to reach full production capacity, assuming demand for insectmeal is there to meet it.

• A new plant-based alternative shrimp company just completed an 18 million dollar funding round.

• Wired covered the potential of feeding waste from livestock to black soldier flies in order to produce livestock feed.

  • The article focused on the work of Insect Technology Group, formerly known as AgriProtein, which is building a massive black soldier fly production facility in South Africa to provide feed for farmed vertebrates.

  • Agriprotein is focused particularly on developing feed for the pork and chicken industries, a divergence from many large businesses in the space which are primarily focused on replacing fishmeal fed to farmed fish.

  • It appears to be critical to the cost-effectiveness of insectmeal grain feed replacements that the insects be fed on food or other waste products.

    • It is extremely difficult to raise insects fed on grains, as is common in commercial settings, in a way that is cost-competitive with simply feeding livestock grain feed directly.

    • My current belief is that unless the industry develops better technology to scale food-waste processing for black soldier fly production, it is unlikely that insect based proteins will replace a significant portion of the grain feed market. Insectmeal replacing a percentage of fishmeal seems more likely with current technology. 

    • If so, the current trends insect advocates should be most focused on are the use of insects as a fishmeal alternative, and the efforts of companies like Insect Technology Group to feed black soldier flies on waste.

    • Because black soldier flies seem to be the insects with the most potential to be fed on waste successfully, and because they are being raised as a replacement to fishmeal, they might be the most important target for species-focused advocacy to improve farmed insect welfare 

      • One notable reason to doubt this narrative — in the 2015 EFSA risk profile of insect farming mentioned above, the group found that the risk of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (so called Mad Cow Disease) and some other prion related diseases might be lower if insects are not fed animal manure.

Invertebrate sentience

• David Baracchi and Luigi Baciadonna argue in a new article published in Animal Sentience that the precautionary principle ought to lead us to develop guidelines for managing the wellbeing of invertebrates in experimental research, and to continue studying invertebrate sentience.