This is Farm 432. It’s sorta like an ant farm. But the bugs aren’t doing the farming. You’re farming the bugs.

It’s a house to raise black soldier flies so that you can eat their larvae.

But the relatively gross idea has been packaged as a convenient consumer product.

The flies use the bubble area to live. They lay their eggs in the blue funnels. The eggs hatch into larvae, which fall into food scraps. And eventually, the larvae climb their way out…

…to end up here.

It’s a convenient tray for cooking.

Through the process, 1 gram of black soldier fly eggs becomes 2.4 kilograms of larvae protein.

It’s an incredible ecological savings compared to beef.

Here’s the whole process.

And here’s how it ends!

A Kit To Grow Bugs At Home, To Eat!

Don’t think of it as eating bug babies. Think of it as protein gardening.

As the population grows, so, too, will its hunger for meat. By 2050, meat production will need to surge by 50% to quell demand. The only problem is, producing so much (red) meat is already an environmental nightmare. And we simply might not have the resources to scale.

Meanwhile, Katharina Unger is planning to invite her friends over to an insect barbecue. (Really.) The University of Applied Arts Vienna grad has built a pretty impressive domestic insect-breeding concept called Farm 432. Over the course of 432 hours, with just a few food scraps, she can coax 1 gram of black soldier fly eggs into 2.4 kilograms of larvae protein. And if you listen to Unger long enough, her arguments are pretty convincing as to why we should all be growing fly larvae at home.

"Black soldier flies themselves do not eat, they just drink. And they do not transmit any disease to humans," Unger explains. "Unlike normal house flies they usually do not sit on food and they do not sting or bite, either. They also fly very slowly, so in case one should escape it is easy to catch them."

Over their eight-day lifecycle, soldier flies need space to fly around, mate, and lay eggs. In response, Farm 432 has a bulbous sphere at the end, connected to the "fly fun park" nozzles. These nozzles were designed after insect-attracting plants like the Rafflesia, and serve several functions. They waft in food waste from another chamber, convincing the flies that this will be a safe place for their offspring to thrive. And they provide a spot to lay eggs. Eventually, when the larvae hatch inside, they’ll fall through a hole to the food source below.

"There they feed on biowaste or whatever you feed them on and wriggle around for around 14 days," Unger explains. "They then want to clean themselves and find a dry and secure place to pupate, that’s why they climb up the migration ramp. This is when they fall into the collection bucket for harvest."


"With my design I am proposing a new lifestyle," she says. "It’s about a potential new Western culture of insect eating and breeding. It’s about making people aware that there is a great variety of food on our planet that we rarely consider."

Read more here.

[Hat tip: Tuvie]

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  • John Loty

    Unfertilized ovum don't sound that great but we got used to them (eggs).

    So who knows we might be having bugs with our eggs instead of pig.

  • KatharinaU

     Follow my website link in the article and you will see me eating bugs, yes!

  • Barrie May

    This is a real win-win solution.  Food waste produces 1.6 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per tonne of waste while cows produce around 12 tonnes of emissions per tonne of beef produced.  Using food waste to grow protein makes absolute sense.

    I remember eating BBQ'd withcety grubs (beetle lavae) as a kid.  They were delicious.  I would certainly try these tasty treats.  We just need to get over our fear of bugs!