From Maggots to Millions: Biomimicking the Fly to Feed Humanity from its Waste in the 21st Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘QUIET PLEASE: Flies are breeding’… reads the sign displayed on the factory breeding room. A female black soldier fly (BSF) is laying around 1500 tiny white eggs onto an industrially designed grid. Over 21 days, one kilogram of her eggs will hatch into eight tonnes of larvae, which will initiate a natural process of waste nutrient recycling as they feed on containers of organic consumer waste that would otherwise go to landfill. In a factory in one of Cape Town’s rapidly developing post-apartheid townships, larvae are thus recycling some 250 tonnes of ‘pre’ and ‘post’ consumer waste every day, transforming negative value waste products into highly valuable insect protein, an alternative to fishmeal – an unsustainably ocean sourced protein. Ethnographic research in this factory explored this biomimically inspired innovation, which uses nature’s purification agents – fly larvae – to revalorise a potentially harmful waste product into a critically important food source for the 21st Century. This paper argues that these industrially designed insect farms produce specific technologies and violent acts of reproductive enclosure. By incorporating debates about the role of naturally inspired solutions that use biological labour to accumulate value, it makes plain the ethical implications that emerge from mimicking and enclosing nature in this way. It contends that the ambition of the discipline of biomimicry to reunite human economies with natural ecologies is overshadowed by the logics of capitalism. While the outcomes of biomimicry may indeed be ecologically sustainable, capitalism’s drive to privatise and profit from the knowledge and labour of nonhuman life means not only controlling animals and their products, but also controlling the processes of life through a constellation of scientific, bureaucratic and legal techniques.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".