There’s a fly in my waffle! Scientists experiment with larva fat to replace butter

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...ve-butter-cakes

Yum yum
Fat from fly larvae to replace butter
I can hardly wait!

I love it. Eat more insects is our future.

I cannot see this going over well. Not eating insects in general: I'm fine with that, and I understand cricket flour is the new cornbread

But larva: that's a hard sell.

So what they're claiming is that this three step process, using two pieces of higher tech electrical equipment to obtain a fake "butter" to replace no more than 1/4 of the real butter in a recipe is somehow better than how butter has always been made.

I remember watching my mother make butter when I was a little kid - she only needed one tool - a spoon, which she used to skim the cream off the milk. She then used her kitchen stand mixer to churn the butter because she happened to have a mixer for other cooking uses, so it was more convenient than a hand churn, but the churning step could have been accomplished using a hand operated churn, with no electrical power consumed at all.

But they've gotta try to reinvent the wheel in the most complicated way possible, don't they?


Not that I have anything in particular against eating insects, even though we don't generally do it in western countries. In many countries, it's an integral part of their diet though, and an important source of protein. This is not remotely how those countries incorporate insects into their diet though. This is just making yet another a high tech product (with many of the nutrients removed) to replace a completely natural product.


Larvae butter is going to be a really tough sell in Western Countries. How is 1/4 insect fat going to be deemed acceptable, when insects or insect parts are considered to be food contaminants? They've spent decades inspecting our food to assure than as few insect parts as possible are found in manufactured products. Too many insect parts contaminating the flour, and the flour can't even be sold.

I'm with Caliana. To create larva butter at scale would take massive high-tech industrial equipment, and a "farm" source of black flies to boot. What do black flies eat? Something offal!

We'd do better just eating insects and larvae fresh off the "farm" for both protein and fat. Sell that.

Yeah, good luck selling that! I know people who are so squeamish about any kind of insects that no matter how long the shelf life is on a non-perishable (such as flour) might be, they won't keep it around after they've completed their current project, because it might attract insects. I have one friend who has such an aversion to "bugs" of any kind that if she ever sees one in her her apartment, she insists the only acceptable solution will be to move to get away from it. She'll NEVER accept a product like butter made with larvae fat - and while most people don't have quite that much aversion to insects, most are not going to accept using a food made from something like larvae fat.


Although my guess is that they'd never identify the fat source as coming from larvae - they'll come up with some cutesy, innocuous name for it - "NuButter, made with Flarvfat!"

I'm not so sure that the process described is so different from how butter is mass-produced these days. This actually looks like a very low level of processing, compared to what soy or even olive oil goes through.

I think if you can get bugs with better feed conversion than say pork or chicken, then you've got something. They always compare to feed lot beef--because that's the easiest one to beat, when it comes to feed efficiency and water use. Last time I checked, crickets didn't look any better than chickens on that front.

Dairy using water--well, milk is mostly water. It's sort of the point. With oat or almond "milk" do we count the water in the end product? We'll have to factor that in when larva milk hits the market.

I wonder about feed efficiency--intentionally breeding more muscular, less fat animals for leaner cuts of meat doesn't sound like it would improve feed efficiency. And how much pork and beef fat is trimmed and wasted, as is?

I'm not against eating bugs. But I don't know that they're as resource-friendly as claimed, I sort of wonder why some of our less squeamish ancestors didn't farm them on a larger scale.

I won't be their customer for purely cultural yuck-factor-ness. Besides which with the current plant food popularity they might make more profits off something more vegan, which insects aren't. Speaking of plant food popularity, I saw this slick ad for a new product called plant butter. Huh? When was a kid they had this stuff. It was called margarine.

You can't herd them easily, for one thing

All of the grain, bean, and nut "milk" requires a lot of water to grow, then even more water to soak out the milky looking substance that they're calling "milk". Almonds require a tremendous amount of water to grow - it's not like you can grow any of the others without a lot of water either, and when it's time that the grains and beans should be harvested, you need to have them as dried out as possible. Unfortunately, that's usually also the time of year when the rains intensify, so all that water is completely wasted, while the farmer hopes and prays for enough dry weather to complete harvesting adequately dry grains/beans, before freezing weather ruins the too-wet crop.


Cattle on the other hand - as long as they're not being raised on a feed lot, and barring a drought, water should not need to be piped in for them. They need a good bit of water to drink, but some small rain retention pools or ponds are usually adequate (My FIL had enough water for his cattle simply by digging small ponds in the pastures on the side of the mountain. They were naturally filled by rain water, and in the wintertime, he used a sledge hammer to break the ice so they'd have water to drink) Cattle also... emit... a good bit of the fluid they drink too, which helps to replenish fluid consumed as they eat the grass. This is how it should work.




They need to feed hogs a much lower carb diet in order to create the very lean pork we have today - rooting for their food, eating their natural diet results in a much fattier (tastier) meat. So yeah, feeding what is an unnatural diet for them is not an efficient use of of food either, because it requires growing food specifically for them to eat.

The poor bugs . . . . . . . . . I'm starting a new organization called PETI on their behalf.

Yes indeed. I was at the grocery story a few months ago and saw a huge display for Country Crock *plant butter*. But not only Country Crock, almost all the brands were calling themselves plant butter. I was totally dumbfounded as it was the first time I had seen that.

At one time, I'm pretty sure most margarine brands had at least a little bit of milk in them - not sure why, since from what I understand the original margarine didn't have any dairy in it at all, but I remember my mother looking through the margarines at the store, trying to find a margarine that didn't have any milk in it, because even the least little bit of dairy upset her stomach so much.



Of course the whole idea of calling it plant butter is to catch the eye of the vegan customer, but we had plant butters long before the wide use of margarine: peanut butter and apple butter come to mind as long time plant butters. Funny thing though, my one grandmother would put a tiny bit of real butter in her apple butter. Apparently she insisted that because it was called apple butter, it had to have some butter in it.

Protect the bugs! If we allow them to exploit fly larvae for a butter substitute, next thing you know, they'll be exploiting Stink Bugs for a cilantro substitute! How many more bugs must be exploited for their butter, or smell?



If we don't stand up for the insects, who will???!?