From the Series
Jason Drew is a serial entrepreneur who, having retired early after two heart attacks became a passionate environmentalist. He’s lived in South Africa for about 10 years now and recently published The Protein Crunch, which he co-wrote with David Lorimer.
We live in a world where an exploding population is over exploiting our ecosystems. Every day there are 100 million acts of sexual intercourse, 370 000 children are born and 170 000 of us die. That means that every evening 200 000 more of us sit down for supper than had breakfast that morning. As more demand meets less supply from our damaged ecosystems, prices rise causing civil unrest – as we have seen across the world in recent years – causing state failure in the horn of Africa, and regime change in the Middle East. Wars over the ability to produce food may underline our uncertain future as humans. Food insecurity has led China and Saudi Arabia to buy more farmland in Africa than exists in France. With 1 billion people obese or overweight and a further billion people hungry or starving, something is not working. We have the intellect and ability to destroy the planet on which we all depend and also the skills to fix what we have broken.
We have a choice. One of those will be to recycle our waste nutrients. Chickens in farmyards and fish in streams, which humans have been eating for millennia, naturally eat flies, their larvae and all manner of insects. Brilliant sustainable businesses like www.agriprotein.com are using flies and their larvae to recycle abattoir waste into natural and sustainable animal feeds. It may well be that the humble fly could save our civilisation.
