True story, also posted to https://substack.com/home/post/p-181423349

CW: farming and eating animals.

I was twenty in the year twenty-twenty. It was high summer and high covid; in the UK, we were pretty much banned from meeting up with anyone. I'd spent the months since March stuck with my parents and frantically texting a girl with whom I had a feelings-deeply-repressed-but-once-did-hook-up-friendship.

I hadn't heard from my university professors in months, but one of my coursemates had been offered two summer jobs. One was remote-work data analysis on domestic dog genomes. The other was hands-on fly farming. She took the first.

"I can't believe you turned down the fly farm!"

"I don't want to work on a fly farm!"

"I do, hang on, can you put him in touch with me?"

So for two and a half weeks, I worked on a fly farm. It was run by a guy I'll call Harry (not his real name) who was amusing but prone to stress, and his fiancée. They were in their mid twenties I think.^[1]

They were black soldier flies. Not native to the UK, but 'naturalized' meaning that they don't really cause any trouble. The Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Report assigns them a moral weight of 1/77 of a human. Flies are not valuable produce. Adult flies are only valuable insofar as they are needed to produce larvae.

The Black Soldier Fly: the star of insect farming — They're quite handsome animals. They don't buzz around your food like fruit flies or bluebottles.

There are two or three valuable things you can do with larvae. Primarily, they're sold as pet food for birds and lizards. They're more nutritious and easier to work with than the more standard mealworms. Mealworms need to be dusted with nutrient powder before being used as pet food, and they produce dust which is harmful to the farm workers.

The second use is waste disposal. Harry was able to get their feedstock for free: it was mouldy oranges from a local food distribution centre. Once or twice a week, we would take Harry's pickup truck and stack it and the trailer with rejected cardboard boxes. Most palettes had only one or two bad oranges, Harry told me he usually ate the rest. The oranges were a major boon because the farm mostly just smelled or oranges, rather than fly.

Rethink Priorities does not provide a moral weight for these larvae. The closest thing may be silkworms, which are rated at 1/500 of a human.

My days mirrored the lives of the larvae. First, I went to The Fly Rooms. These were...

On Animals