House-fly larvae are different, in that they exude a ton of ammonia-y urine, a gag-inducer for me, too. Some of our members relish that flavor, but it's way down at the bottom of my raw bucket list.

The beauty of BSFL is the mature fly itself - short life-span, doesn't eat or bite... just mates and dies - so you don't have any nuisance flies around the operation. Plus, the larvae crawl out of the compost as they are about to pupate, on a little ramp that you set up, so they are "self-harvesting."

The compost part is an urban homestead project I'm doing with my granddaughters. It's cool for kids - they can see the insects' cycle from egg, to larvae, to pupae, to adult. They can see the composting cycle really well, better than worm composting. The residue from the bsfl is quickly ready to be tossed in the worm pile for further decomposition.

This would be a cool business, too. You get paid as a commercial composting service, and the fly larvae product has high value as a livestock feed and fish meal ingredient. Unlike tropical crickets and grasshoppers, these flies thrive in more temperate climates. BSFL can also be fed with animal poop and the insects fed back to the livestock.

Insects! They've been on my raw bucket list for years now. In my own non-scientific mind, crab = spider and shrimp = grubs (larvae), so I've balked about trying insects because of my mental block about raw shrimp and crab. However, I've recently decided to overcome this blockage with insects.

My underlying reason to learn to eat insects is that I think insects would be a perfect survival food for any future SHTF. Survivalist city folks mostly think about food storage, so they seal up 55-gallon drums filled with dehydrated foods. The flaw in their thinking is that there will be a second STHF, when they run out of their stockpiled rations. Insects are a logical option in many scenarios, if one only learns the insect-scavenging and insect-rearing options that would work in one's climate.

I started thinking that scavenging would make sense - there are supposedly insects all over the place - so I went out one morning to scoop up a fingertip-ful of aphids from the rose bushes. Murphy's Law: the one time I go to eat them, the aphids were absent. Then, I looked around and found some tiny larvae munching on a rotting orange, but they were the tiniest pinhead size, so I looked some more - under rocks, in the top layer of dirt. Nothing! I even remember thinking, "It's June, and I haven't seen a single June bug this month!" I couldn't find a single insect in my entire 25' x 25' urban backyard! I came back in the house, found a small fly on the wall, grabbed and caught him, and SQUISH! I finally ate my first live insect!

What followed was some obsessive research about collecting and raising insects, and I decided to incorporated a small black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) farm as a combination composting/insect-rearing project in my backyard. The project yielded its first tiny crop today. I put a few prepupal larvae in a bowl, added some water to rinse off their tiny bodies, and ate them with a crunch. My judgment is that, one-at-a-time, they are flavorless. My mouth felt no perceivable wiggling in the moment before I bit down. There is a little chewing involved with the exoskeleton, but that part could be swallowed without chewing - I was merely exploring the texture as I chewed it. As an insanely good source of protein, these would definitely make a great food for every day or for a quick-crop survival protein. I plan to eat as many larvae and I collect from my composting farm. I believe that the taste is so unobjectionable that my whole family would be willing to eat bugs when the shtf.

About rinsing before eating, I wonder whether if I would receive any probiotic value if I eat a bit of the compost's bacteria that clings to the bsfl's body.

My next insect will be the ant. Drop a crumb of ant-food in the center of a bowl of a spoon, leave the spoon on the patio, eat the ants that gather on the spoon. After that: termites collected in my homemade termite collection apparatus. Maybe, after a while with bugs, raw shrimp and raw crab will deserve another try.

My insect selection is good for my climate, all three of these insects are native in my region. Witchetty grubs sound more gourmet, but I don't have any Witchetty bushes handy.

And, here's how I overcame the "wiggly" fear factor with live bugs: Imagine that the SHTF. I think, "There's no more food in the markets. Agribusiness is gone. No trucks are on the roads. Bandits have stolen anything worth eating. I'm hungry." Another victory for Mind over Matter!

This little child sounds interesting. Are you close enough to your cousin's family to know how this situation came about? Usually, there are three broad possible explanations for a child's strange feeding patterns: (1) ignorant and neglectful parents who don't feed the right foods, (2) the child has hypersensitive taste buds and things do actually taste wrong in her mouth, and (3) some children have a more "contrary" personality than others and they do these things in defiance of some of their parents' wishes, just for the joy of feeling powerful.

If you think about what's going on to cause her behavior, you might find a useful strategy. I have a 6-year old granddaughter who wants only blueberries and grilled-cheese sandwiches. I think she is a little of #2 (hypersensitive taste buds) and a lot of #3 (defiant child). I've done things like let her dip a food in a dish of water to "wash off some of the taste." Yes, it's a ploy, but it works sometimes, along with a whole bunch of other tricks. My underlying strategy, though, is to accept and validate her pickiness so as not to increase her defiance, and give her lots of power when it comes to making other choices.

Let us know how it's going.

I definitely think stress is a big one. I believe stress, emotional distress, raging emotions, etc. can be a huge contributor to increasing heat created toxin production internally, and probably also decrease detoxification.

Also: trying to avoid stress can be stressful. Example: worrying about environmental toxins when you live in a city.

I'm guessing that the stress quotient of not worrying about something is a mere fraction of the stress quotient of not worrying about anything at all.
Application:

• AGES toxins from eating cooked food in a social situation = 2 "I'm-going-crazy" dollars
• Emotional toxins from worrying about "food issues" in social situations when you intend to eat raw = 186.8 "I'm-going-crazy" dollars.

Hakuna matata.

Except that this whole innovation ultimately comes from the US......

...but that[/-i] particular innovation is from the descendants of the original anti-touch Brits. General lack of interest among most US cultures must have been the reason that the idea had to be shipped back to England.

The OP is referring to a recent scandal highlighted by 2 DM articles.

Exactly. This happens in other places, too. In my city, they downsized the residential garbage bins so that residents have to scramble to find empty space in the bins for a week's-worth of household garbage. If the lid does not close completely, you're liable to get skipped for the trash pick-up and get a letter of admonishment instead explaining that the bin must not be overfilled. A lot of people respond by taking their garbage to work and dumping it there; others solve the problem by joining the Tiny Trash movement.

BSFL farming lets you turn compostable garbage into edible insect larvae. Tasty and tidy.

Hi!
So.. I have been feeding whole raw bones to pregnant sow

I think she is swallowing them whole

Must i be careful on that?

Thanks!

I read about a study that might be relevant here: subjects swallowed small rodents whole, bones and all. What came out in the poop was all digested, no bone fragments.

Assuming that we're we talking about small-ish bones that can be swallowed, and considering that pigs and human digestive tracts have similar components, I don't see why the pig couldn't handle the bones. You could do an experiment and swallow one yourself to see what happens....

I am also not exactly convinced of the so-called "intelligence" of any ethnic group on this planet.

TD, that's because you are not using the Two-Story Structure IQ Test.

GS, every group, whether it be religious, ethnic, racial, you-name-it, thinks itself superior. In behavioral science, is it called self-deception, and it is considered a norm of human behavior. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-deception

Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument. Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth (or lack of truth)....

GS, once you learn why self-deception is so important to the human thought process, you can stop claiming that your personal self-deception is true. NOBODY's personal self-deception is true.

My shopping options are similar to yours, as I'm in the SF Bay area. I detest the taste of the grass-fed beef liver that is available here. It tastes like bitter (old) blood. It's factory-sliced very thinly and frozen into easy-to-handle "tiles" that thaw and cook swiftly.

I switched to lamb, which I buy at independent halal meat departments in Persian or Lebanese markets, even though it's not my culture. I like to know where my meat comes from, and the halal markets always seem to know the ranch and its feeding practices. You might even find a good ranch (visit eatwild.com) and buy a whole lamb direct. I keep my meat prices under $10 pound this way.

I have sourced seafood, too, by finding a good wholesaler that sells direct to the public or venturing into the Korean or Vietnamese fish departments in my area. Keep your eyes open in those markets for other delightful surprises, like one Korean market that had photos of a particular farm, which turned out to be the exclusive organic grower for this two-market chain, and they carry all sorts of delicious vegetables that I've never seen before. This farm-to-market practice results in produce that is as fresh as a farm stand. You'd better believe that WF warehouses their "fresh" produce in temperature- and humidity-controlled settings for you'll-never-know-how-long because they trim off the wilting parts.

As far as beef fat goes, most of what I eat is on the meat I buy. I just have to make sure that the butcher doesn't trim the fat. I also ask for extra trim from the back fat, my favorite fat. My other favorite fats in beef is pericardial fat, bone marrow, and oxtail fat. I never eat the caul fat.

Intestinal parasites don't wiggle around a lot so that you feel them. As Dario explained, they live where they are useful in your body. If they are in your intestines, they lay eggs, hatch, live, and die where they find the kind of "food" that they like to ingest.

If you want to brag that you actually had this or that parasite, go get a microscopic identification of your species. If you don't want a diagnosis, you can consider one of your broad-spectrum vermifuges and see if you feel much better afterwards.

That's a waste of time, though, if you don't address the cause of parasites. So, don't forget to heal your leaky gut, if that's the problem that the parasites are attracted to. (Visualize parasites increasing their population to thrive on the undigested food molecules that cause leaky gut. If you kill the parasites, more of the undigested food gets into your bloodstream... until the parasites repopulate to enjoy their feast. They'll only go away if you stop feeding them.)

My philosophy has been to eat clean, pure, unprocessed food and let my own body determine what "clean" means. I prefer this approach because, in the final analysis, I want to maintain my health effortlessly and cheaply. I hated the years of tiring and costly searches for something that would make me feel better. Build a good foundation with diet and you won't find yourself searching anymore.

Tyler do you think adding just oily raw seeds in small amounts would be worse than letting them roam free?

Google info about feeding chickens fly maggots, where you breed maggots in suspended buckets that contain some rotting meat, and the maggots drop to the ground when they get plump. Free food for your chickens.

It takes enough experience/wisdom to know a good plan to begin with.

That sounds like an excuse to avoid taking action.

I prefer the "Fail Better" model:

Ever tried, ever failed.
No matter!
Try again, fail again...
Fail better!