Chickens and Hogs naturally eat insects.

Grasshoppers, crickets, cockroaches, termites, lice, stink bugs, cicadas, aphids, scale insects, psyllids, beetles, caterpillars, flies, fleas, bees, wasps and ants have all been used as complementary food sources for poultry (Ravindran and Blair, 1993)

Have we forced chickens, hogs, and farmed fish to stray away from a part of their natural diet? Probably.

Here’s the thing. Cows cannot eat insects. Ruminant animals are magical animals that can somehow, with the help of a special bacteria in some of their 4 stomachs, convert cellulose from grass into pure protein. There are pretty much no other animals on the face of this Earth that can also do such a magnificent thing. We are left with pigs, who have very similar gastrointestinal systems to humans, and chickens who have an even simpler gastrointestinal tract. Pigs and chickens are omnivores, scavengers, by design. They can digest both flesh and plants. It makes sense, therefore, to feed them what they have been accustomed to eating for centuries prior to their domestication. Tidier-Boichard et al., 2011, found in an archaeological study, that the ancestor species Gallus gallus was also an omnivore that commonly must have fed on small invertebrates.

Therefore, have humans in animal agriculture done a huge disservice to their farm animals by eliminating a familiar and natural source of protein from their diet?

Since 1981, Bondari et al. found just how beneficial the cultivation of soldier flies as fish feed could aid in fish production. Firstly, these incredible members of the Diptera order contain bacteria in their gut that are resistant to most pathogens (Bondari et al. 1981). This resistance allows them to eat post-consumer waste. Companies such as Enterra in Vancouver, feed their own soldier flies pre-consumed waste from grocery stores. They are equally as capable of eating compost, though, and would biodegrade compost materials into fertilizer and larvae, suitable for fish, chicken, and pig consumption (Bondari et al. 1981).

Bondari, K., & Sheppard, D. C. (1981). Soldier fly larvae as feed in commercial fish production. Aquaculture, 24, 103-109.

Ravindran, V., & Blair, R. (1993). Feed resources for poultry production in Asia and the Pacific. III. Animal protein sources. World’s Poultry Science Journal, 49(03), 219-235.

Tixier-Boichard, M., Bed’hom, B., & Rognon, X. (2011). Chicken domestication: From archeology to genomics. Comptes rendus biologies, 334(3), 197-204.