New Technologies Could Help Europe Get a Taste for Insects
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Experts predict that an upcoming ruling from the EU's European Food Safety Authority, in which the sale of insect-based food products will be liberalized, could see them finally hit the mainstream.
Accordingly, interest in mass rearing systems and technologies is growing. Within the SCALIBUR project, researchers are developing a new circular economy concept whereby flies are reared on food waste from restaurants, before being processed into food, feed and other products.
[...] Of the 90 million tons of food wasted each year in the EU, about 10 comes from food services, so called HORECA (hotels, restaurants, and cafes). This is a huge amount of still quite high-value organic substances which is going to waste. The black soldier fly (BSF) naturally feeds on these kinds of organic substrates.
UNIMORE has teamed up with Italian company Kour Energy to develop a start-to-end insect rearing process to obtain valuable products (protein, lipids and chitin) in a very efficient way, using high-tech chemical fractionation. We are merging biological knowledge for the best rearing practices, with chemical expertise for a high-yield extraction of products, and design and engineering practices to develop two pilot plants able to perform the whole transformation from waste to valuable materials.
[...] In the EU it is currently not allowed to use anything that is defined as 'waste' (including, by extension, insects reared on food waste) as feed for animals.
We expect the results of SCALIBUR will prove that it is possible to use insect larvae for effective and safe biowaste conversion, and then show the relevance of the technology for industrial scale use.
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