My name is Steve V Wagon, and it's a pleasure to welcome you here to the IUPUI Center for Translating Research into practice. Monthly conversation with one of our scholars of the month. I serve as the Associate Director to the Center, and I want to share with you just a few bits of information before we get started and dive into the conversation. So it's a pleasure to welcome our presenter today. And, let me get this moving. Our center was founded by Sandra Petronio, who is an Emeritus Professor of communication studies, and she is a translational scholar in the area of communication studies focused on working with privacy of information. And it was her idea that there should be opportunities within our campus to meet with scholars who have great ideas and talk about them and share information with one another. And so we're so delighted that we have this technology that allows us to do this today and share some great ideas with our community partners and see where we take ideas that make a difference in the community. Our executive director, who has just stepped down from that role is Chancellor Emeritus Charles Banz, who served our campus for a long time and is a strong supporter of commune engaged research and has been a sta and helping us think through, how do we make these things come to life? How do we find ideas? How do we support faculty? Students, staff, partners in the community and identifying ideas and making a difference in the lives of folks in our communities. Few reminders. We're all familiar Zoom, but during the brief presentation, we hope that you'll stay on mute, but you're welcome to keep your cameras on. And when we get to the discussion, we really do want you turn on the cameras and turn off turn on your microphones and be sure to join in the conversation. There will be an opportunity to answer a couple of poll questions, so we hope you'll take advantage of that as well. We are recording the session. So if you want others to see this afterwards, or you have people who weren't able to join, please know that, but if that makes a difference for you and wanting to be seen, know that we are recording it. We also are trying to have this shared on Facebook Live at the same time as a way to reach out to folks. And if that makes a difference on how you like to be seen, you can make your decisions that way. If you don't know, you are able to get continuing education credit for this series. And if you just go to expand dot U EDU, you'll be able to find the center for translating research into practice as a choice. We hope that you take advantage of that resource if you need to. You can follow us. Lots of ways. We hope that you'll find out about us and what's going on through the center. We try to make ourselves available through Facebook, through Instagram, through lots of different ways, Linked in, and we do have a YouTube channel where you can go and find any of the presentations that we are able to record for past. So please follow us along. There's lots of great things that are happening. And we have a couple of programs within the center that support research. So it's our chance to always encourage people if they have resources or ideas of who could support this kind of research? It does take dollars to make this happen. So you can scan this or share this with others as a way to let people help continue this work. This very important work as we go throughout the years. One of our positive connections is with the library, and we are able to connect with something called Scholar Works, which makes the academic publications of our scholars more easily available. So if you go to our page and you click on Christine's picture, you'll find some of her translational related works, right here, easily accessible. You can just click on the link and you'll be able to see the journal article or publication. And be able to learn more about her work from that perspective without having to go to the journal or to that website. You can go to the library Scholar work page and see this as well, and you can see her entire collection of works, as well as all the other translational scholars and folks at IUPUI to learn more about the work that they do. Next month, we're excited to bring Carolyn Gentle Genity to our monthly conversation, who will be talking about the importance of showing up for our students in the work that they do to make sure that successful. So please join us next month on August 25, same time, noon in Eastern Standard time, but today we are super excited to have with us, Christine Picard, who's professor of biology and director of the forensic and Investigative Science Program at the School of Science. And today, she's talking to us about nature's powerful allies and sustainability and justice. So it's a pleasure to have her here and her community partner. So I will unshare my screen. And invite Christine to share her screen and turn on her microphone and get a conversation. Welcome, Christine. Thank you. Everyone sees my PowerPoint. Everyone can hear. Excellent. Thank you so much for inviting me to talk about this work. And as you can probably tell, the title is changed. Not all insects are bad, but we are going to talk about insect as allies and sustainability and justice, which is essentially what my lab has been working on for the past 12 years. And just two disclaimers to get started off with. Number one, I'm not an entomologist. That means that I am not classically trained in insect science. I consider myself a molecular biologist who happens to work with insects. And number two, I'm not officially a professor until August 1. But that's coming up. So thank you all for joining me today. And let's make sure I can click through. Okay, real quick. What we're going to do today is we're going to talk a little bit about why insects. We'll talk about the research that we do in our lab, and then we're going to end with, you know, a call to action for you all, for the community members, for everyone who's associated with this Earth is who I'm calling out to. But before we get into that, We'd like to pose a few little test questions for you all. So so I think these are going to show up in the Zoom. So here's that first one. So what percentage of food here in the USA is sent to a landfill? Have you all submitted your answer? I can't see the poll question, so I can't tell. I'm ending it right now. Okay. Perfect. Now, we'll share the results. The results. So the majority of the people thought 40% of the food that is produced here in the US is sent to a landfill, and that is correct. But the answers, as you can see from the audience, ranged anywhere 50-75%. 40% is still a frightening answer. Next question. How many people globally are protein deficient? That means they don't have access to enough protein in their diets. Okay, so again, another range here, the answer right now is 1 billion. There's 1 billion people across the globe that do not have access to enough protein in their diets. And our final question. What proportion of the Earth's freshwater goes to agricultural processes? All right. The majority got it right this time. 69%. Yes. Almost 70% of the Earth's freshwater goes to existing agricultural processes at this moment. So, let me put this all into the context of what pstein have to close this. Click over here. All right. So let's talk about why. Why is this insects? Why am I asking you questions about water and protein and food waste? And the answer is insects to all of those questions. Number one, climates are changing. I mean, if you watch the news, we're all in heat under heat advisories, most of the US is, the ice caps are melting. I mean, the climates are changing. And what they're doing is they're actually impacting current agricultural processes in this vicious cycle, right? So if you have climate change that's occurring, that's impacting, say, crops being grown, then you need to clear more land in different areas in order to grow crops to make up for the shortfall that clears land that contributes to getting rid of really important carbon sinks that we have in our environment, whether it's for growing animals. So it's this terrible cycle that we're in as the climates continue to change. Secondly, is that so much of waste or so much of food that we actually produce doesn't even make it to our mouths. It gets wasted even before it comes to us. And that is, in some cases, it could be because there's some damage associated with the food product as it's produced. There could be disease. There could be many reasons why this doesn't happen, but already, we're wasting a lot of this food that we're trying to produce. And the final one is that, you know, populations are increasing. In fact, we're expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, give more take. And there quite simply is not enough protein to feed all these people. And we're already in a state where we're not feeding everybody sufficiently. And there's a lot of inequities associated with that. So this is like a one, two, three punch that is contributing to a major societal problem. And so here is a solution. In fact, and a little cartoon pictures up here of what these are, and it's the insects. And I'm going to try to convince you why insects are the solution. So Number one, insects are the most numerous organism on Earth. There's a lot of them. I think we can all agree. We all know this. But also, insects have been around for so long that they have maximized through evolutionary processes their growth. Like, they are optimized to be able to do the things that they do in the environment, which includes pretty much every single thing. So if you think about a human problem that we have, an insect has probably already solved that problem. Insects themselves to grow them require less water, less land per unit of kilogram protein produced, and often produce less greenhouse gas emission. So now already, we're addressing some of these other concerns associated with some of the resources that are needed in order to produce the protein. Insects are nutritious, both to humans. There's a large number of humans on earth that consume insects. They do it for protein, they do it for taste. And depending on what the insect was grown on, can have a very distinctive flavor. But they're also nutritious and healthy to animals as well. So chickens naturally eat insects. That is their natural diet. It's not corn and soy bean feed that we're currently feeding them. Insects recycle waste. This is a big one, depending on what the insects are, but this is part of their ecosystem processes. They take something that exists in the environment and they consume it. And through this consumption, they're producing more and more insects, which is actually more and more protein. And then the other flip side of that is that the waste that some of these insects produce themselves is beneficial. So if we talk about some of the insects that are currently being grown for this purpose, It's a cute little name for their waste. It's called Fast. That's insect poop, basically. But fast is a really good fertilizer for plants. And so we're starting to circularize or close some of these loops. So any leftover plant material can be eaten by the insect, produce protein, and then its waste can go back into the agricultural systems and provide some services there. And finally, insects are diverse, and they just they provide these diverse solutions. Again, they have solved many of these problems that exist right now. So this is just an overview of some of the benefits to insects as this part. So what I'm calling the climate superheroes. So these are the three main insects that right now are sort of dominating the space of insect agriculture, as it's being called. So it's this idea of producing insects on a mass scale in order to provide protein or other resources that include waste recycling. So you've got crickets, mealworm, soldier flies, and each has its own distinctive flavor, so to speak, both biologically, as well as gastronomically. And there's a variety of uses that are being developed for each of these. So, of course, crickets, I'm sure many of you have already had the standard chocolate cupboard crickets. That seems to be a really common sort of gateway food for insect agriculture. Meal worms, which are beetles. So they are not well named in this case, but this is just what they are. So they're beatles, and then soldier flies, which are also known as Black soldier flies, is becoming an emerging major insect species. But the reality is there's about 2000 more species that are either currently being harvested and eaten in various parts of the world. And so there's a lot of opportunities to diversify what you use, the insect sport within this system. So now, I'll get into a little bit of my research. And this is the justice side of things. But I go I start in forensic animology, and I'm not even going to be talking about anything forensic tomology related today. But the research that I do is delving into the genomes of these insects that are associated with recycling animal material, which is what they do. They take dead animals, which includes humans, which is the forensic context. They recycle all of that material. If they weren't around, we would be up to our who knows what in just dead animals. So they provide this really good ecosystem service, and of course, they eat the dead animals, and then they're eaten, so they become a meal for someone else, and so on. But the majority of my research has been focused on trying to understand growth rate variation in ages of the insects, because that's the forensic application to the work we do. If we can determine how old a meg it is, for example, then we can work backwards and get a what's called a post mortem interval or a time since death. And so I do that by trying to correlate different parts of the genome and how they exist across different populations and what influences each of those impacts. And this has helped informed another area of my research, which is using insects as biosensors. And that is, because the insects that are used in forensic etymology are known as flow flies. They're out there in the environment. They're sampling the environment. We can extract a lot of information from each of those individual flies to tell us something about what's happening in the environment. I won't really be discussing either one of these two topics. Instead, I'm going to talk today about insects as feed and food. But the idea is that I'm using the same methods, the same ideas that I apply in a forensic entomological context in this one, where I'm interested in development growth rate variation of these insects because industrially, that's really attractive to industry because they want to optimize growth. Even though these insects are pretty well optimized, can we as humans are well known for being able to do a lot more. And so it's just correlating some of the information in genomes of these insects to some of these particular traits. And that's like the basis of the work that I do. And it's rooted in nature based solutions. This idea that I have already said it twice that many natural systems have already figured out some of these answers to our big pressing problems. And so being able to employ nature based solutions gives us an opportunity in order to contribute to some of the major issues that we as humans are facing down right now with regards to climate. Okay, so how do we specifically do this in the lab? So we take an insect, and then these are all pretty standard methods. We extract DNA from these insects through a series of steps, which could be essentially attributed to assembling a puzzle. We assemble a geno for that individual species. And we can do it across different individuals, across different species, and then we can start doing some comparisons between them. And then the idea then is you take insects that vary or have different traits, and you try to find within the genome, whether or not there are correlations that are embedded in there that basically say, Oh, if you have this combination, then you will have a large insect, or if you have this combination and your insect is most likely to be small or more resilient or any of these different traits that are interesting. Now, it's not that simple where it's a single location in the genome that gives you that answer. It's a much more complex, interactive with even the environment and with various other factors in order to get to that. So, I wish I could say, Oh, yeah, we've done this, and we already know the answer. We don't. We are continuing to work, and more samples always helps provide the power in order to potentially find what is essentially a needle in a haystack in this situation. But then the idea is once we develop this toolbox, once we have this information, then you can take insects that you might that you can breed, like say, you have a male and a female insect, and you know exactly what their genomes look like and what traits will contribute to them in order to create, you know, a super strain, so to speak, or one that has everything that you desire in that particular case. And this is called genomic selection. So you actually select individuals based on what the structure of their genomes looks like. This is ongoing work in our lab. We've done some work with the meal worms. We're working with Black soldier flies. We're just starting to work with the cricket species now in order to start some of these investigations. And then from here, you can even dive in a little bit deeper. So generally, when we talk about a genome that gets produced for any organism, including humans, you have what's called a reference genome. So you assemble based on. Usually it's a single individual, and assembling a genome can take a long time because it is a puzzle and computationally and being able to verify all of these steps take some time. And then everything you do after that point, you're doing it in reference to that particular individual. And what is it that maybe is being missed here? Was recently highlighted with regards to the humans, and it's this idea of the pangenome. So You know, the human genome has been sequenced for 20 years now and this reference exists, and there's additional references so they keep building off each other. But very recently, what they did is they sequenced, I think it was 47 distinguished individuals, genetically distinguished individuals across the globe, and they discovered that they had missed 119 million base pairs in their reference genome. So there's all this additional data that exists out there, that's just part of variation that exists. And the insects are by no means an exception to that. There's a lot of variation that exists within the insects as well. So represented here on the slide is different colors. You can imagine that you can assemble each of those genomes individually. And then you can start doing these comparisons. Can everyone see my mouse moving? Okay, good. So if the reference genome say was missing this little chunk, and you didn't know it was missing because you didn't really do any of these additional assemblies, then it's unknown what part of the genome here is here, and what it's actually doing And so when you look at a variety of different individuals that are genetically distinct, so you don't want to be doing like full siblings or anything like that. You can start to fill in these different little holes here. And that gives you now even more power. And the reason we can do this is that technology has progressed, where this is now doesn't cost $1,000,000 to be able to do that. It's much more It's far easier to be able to do this type of work now because of existing technologies. And so why would we want to do that? Because now we're not missing parts anymore. We have a much more complete picture of the entire genomic landscape that would exist within that species as best as we can. And then we can start to associate some of these genotypes to phenotypes. And why would we want to do that? Well, of course, we might want to promote faster growth. Imagine industrially, if you can include one additional generation, that's economically quite a bit of money in that same time frame. Plus, not only are you essentially making money off of selling the product, but you're also recycling other materials at the same time. Maybe there's information for better resiliency of these individuals of these insects. One of the very first things that happens when you domesticate, which I'm putting in quotation marks here, but you bring insects into a living space, any animal, really, and you subject them to human based environments. One of the first things that happens is that they lose some ability to be resilient against disease. Because they don't need to be, right? Once they come in, that's not selected for it. Like in the natural environment, of course, they're constantly being challenged. And individuals that don't have those parts of the genomes that are functional that provides that information or provides that protection, they would die out in the real world, so to speak. But when you bring them inside and you control everything, they often lose that ability. So it's really important for us to be able to understand how that part or those parts of the genome work. Also different substrates. You know, that's a big question now. Some of these insects are maybe a little bit picky in terms of what they eat. But if we really want this to be a climate solution, we need insects that can consume anything that is organic in nature, right? You don't want to have to take tons of, you know, household garbage and sort through it so that it can only eat the things that it eats. So we want to be able to explore how these phenotypes are related to each other and how that's embedded into the genome. Finally, the idea of some designer bugs, so to speak. So this idea that you can maybe through breeding or through other genetic technologies, create insects that have a very specific function. Like, if ever you needed, hey, I need insect species that will just eat banana peels, for example, then you know, being able to have a really basic understanding of its genome, and how that correlates to different traits is how we're going to be able to do these types of things. So that's sort of a little bit of an overview on why understanding what the structure is of the ACs Gs and Ts, which is our DNA, right? Very simple building blocks. We humans and insects have the exact same ones. They're just organized differently. And how those are contributing to many of the different phenotypes or traits that we are seeing in our insects or that we desire to see in our insects. And so that brings me to one of the latest endeavors that I've been a part of, which is the center for Environmental Sustainability through insect farming. This is an NSF National Science Foundation funded Center, and its mission is to bring together industry and academia and bridge that gap that exists between our two silos that we exist in. That academia is always chasing down a question, right? We want knowledge. That's what we want. And sometimes that's useful to industry. Sometimes it's not useful to industry. And then industry, of course, is chasing down a product. And it's not that they don't care about the academic impacts that are being made, but sometimes it's not very useful. So this center brings us all together, where we talk about problems, where we design experiments, where we gain knowledge, where we train students in order to address these issues that exist. And we just finished up our second year of our center being formed. And at the moment, we have 16 companies that are part of the center. Many are the actual insect producing companies themselves. But then there are what might be considered insect consumer companies. So we've got Hill's pet food that is a member because they're interested in protein for pet food. 25% of protein produced in the United States goes to pet food. And so being able to have alternatives for that protein, and it's nutritious, goes a long way. Mars and Tyson, you know, they feed a lot of animals. And so the idea for incorporating these into animal feeding systems as a sustainable source, goes a long way. But I'm really thrilled to introduce and have Keith Driver, who is coming to us from Protex, one of our member companies, big supporter of the center to talk about what this research is and the insect ag space is from the industrial standpoint. And so I'm going to throw it to Keith, Keith. I'll push the slides through. Fx. Well, there we go. Thank you very much, everybody. Yeah. So what I wanted to do is provide an industrial context of what we do and the scale at which this is being done and some of the why we are so excited for CIF to be there and why this research is translating into activity in our sectors. So we've been around since 2009. Our vision is a food system balance with nature. I promise you we're based in Holland and Dutch that sentence is a bit more grammatically correct. And our mission is a low footprint product. So we focus on LCAs on our product. And so the more efficient we can produce it, given the energy involved, the better for us. So next slide, please. We align ourselves with three of the UN Sustainability goals, less fish for feed. So we're replacing fish meal as one of our big replacements, less land for food. We can produce more protein, 60,000 tons in a 400,000 square foot building. So ten acres, 60,000 tons of protein and circular nutrition. So we want to be able to upcycle as many low or undervalued feedstock streams. So the flexibility that these insects can have or that we can selectively breed for to allow us to move into lower and lower value feedstocks or currently valued feedstocks. Next slide. Is this what a facility looks like in the top left corner. You'll see a 150,000 square foot facility in a place called Bergenop Zoom in Jesta Rotterdam in the Netherlands. We grow, you see in the middle top is those little green bins. So they're palette sized bins. We'll do about 60,000 of those starting a day, and 60,000 of them harvesting a day on a six day cycle. So you can imagine it is a bit of a logistics business. The reason they're shaped like that is so that we can get air flow in. As you can imagine, we take in a couple hundred tons of feedstock a day, and that's a lot of calories going into a building. So you can see on top of the building, that's all HVAC. It's all about controlling the environment so that these insects can live in the optimal temperature, no matter what the weather's like, no matter what's going on, no matter what the inputs. You know, it's a hog barn on steroids and then shrunk down into a microscale. So we're the largest livestock owners in the world. We've got about 3 billion head under management at any given time. The epitome of all hat and no cattle, if you will, in terms of an expression for us, is what we do. We breed the insects. That's the chambers you see to the right. The little black strip just at the bottom of those is a honeycomb. We incent the ov position that the eggs to be laid. And then we process those ingredients into protein X, lipid X, and that fast products, which actually has some biopesticideal, biostimulant properties, although I can't officially claim that because we haven't got the trials all done, but I can tell you that it does stimulate response in plants that makes them more resilient to other insect infestations because they Kind of like a placebo not a placebo vacine, a vaccine, a dormant vaccine that you take, and the body responds. And so we've got to do a lot of research to figure that out. But that's where we're headed. So next slide, please. So this is what our factory looks like in the future, 400,000 square feet, full scale industrial. Now, imagine a 400,000 square foot building where our unit of production is a 130 milligrams at growth. I'm just going to send it a link in the chat. Why this work of CIF is so important to us. If you click on that link, you'll see a picture of three chickens, and I don't normally send out pictures of chickens. But in 1957, that chicken was 905 grams. Now that chicken is 4,200 grams. That's what we see the value of selective breeding and genetics doing for us. The size, the resilience. All the things that Christine was talking about, when you consider that this facility will have 1,012 billion insects in it at any given time, the genetics that we can propagate on a six day grow out cycle, the impact of that to us. O insects now produce three times as much protein as they did when we started this business ten years ago. We've just gotten started in the domestication of a species. The work Christine is doing, we'll accelerate what happened in chickens from being a 40, 50, 100 year process to being three years, and we can implement it like that. And that will increase our productivity or lower the cost of protein. It makes our products more accessible in the market, and it brings our price down below that of fish meal towards the price of other less digestible proteins like soybean meal. So, we are part of the alternative protein market. We're going to feed those billion people that don't have it. I mean, 1 billion people on the planet already relying on sex as a primary source protein. So, you know, we may all have an factor, but the things that feed the chickens that we want to eat, we need to cut some of those things out. Next slide, please. That's me on my soap box. So here's my contact information. More than happy to have a conversation about what that looks like and what the industrial component is. But I can tell you right now, I I was in biochar research about ten years ago, and I see the same thing in insects. The number of papers coming out every year is exponentially growing. And it's so exciting to be there to see this research and see it translate because in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is King, Kristine's got two eyes, so we're good, right? Like, that's the value of research at the scale of our business, and that's why we invest so much in the center. And in research we do ourselves. We need all those post docs to come out and move into industry. Some of them need to stay in academia, sure. We need to suck as many of them as we can in industry because we are literally innovating at a pace that is faster than we've ever seen in animal agriculture before. So I don't know if I have another slide. I think this is my last slide. Yeah. So I'll turn it back over. But I'm here to tell you from the industrial context that this research is crucial and has five X value to us of our current business today easily. Could be ten X. I could have said any number, but that's where we're at in terms of trying to pull this research out as fast as we can to help accelerate a multi billion dollar business. So thank you, C Kristine. I turned it back to you. And if your ego can fit in the screen, we have to shrink the screen. I know. Can I just meet with you every week? Thank you, Keith. So just to summarize here a little bit is that we are not saying that insect protein is going to replace existing protein sources. It's not. It can't. There's just too much demand. But it's the process, it's a sustainable solution to producing protein because we can recycle existing materials into higher value products. We can meet demand, and we can do so with the climate in mind. And so what we do in the lab here is, we just take our basic principles, our DNA, in attempts to link biology of these insects to production, to scale, to being this climate solution that we all want and desire. So then I'm going to end with, how can you help? Question mark? You can help. There's a few different ways you can help. And I'm not saying that you need to go and eat an insect right now. But what you can do is is try your very best, whether with yourself or with your children, the next generation is to lose lose the ech factor, this idea that insects are bad because insects are not bad. In fact, most insects are not bad. And so being able to treat insects as a positive in as many situations as you can. I'm sure the cockroaches and the bed bugs are not great. But there is so much out there that really is. You can look for products that contain insect based protein. One of the easiest ways to do this is with pet food. There's a couple different companies that produce pet food that has insect protein, and that helps the environment. And that helps drive the insect industry forward. And then, if you come across any of these insects, especially Black soldier flies in your compost heat, please contact me because I'm always looking for samples, so that is another way that you can help. And so you can find me anywhere here at IUPUI. I just want to end by thanking, of course, I UPI for all their support, the center, the National Science Foundation, as well as my colleagues at Mississippi State, and Texas A&M. It's the three of us. It's these three institutions that have formed the center for environmental sustainability, and the work's not possible without any of them. And that is it. I am happy to take questions or to have a discussion on what you think about insect agriculture. Well, thank you both for sharing this information and opening the door for some conversation. And so we have several folks already with their cameras on and we want to invite opportunity to raise a question, make a comment, so you can raise your hand, however you want to do it, but we'd love to hear from you. Well, I should say, Keith and Christine would love to hear from you or have a conversation. Any thoughts from our folks that are joining us today? Oh, go ahead, Kathy, you're raising your hand. So, Kathy, what would you like to say? I thought that was really interesting. So thanks to both of you. I was thinking about the C factor. And I'm wondering if there are other examples of organisms as food, you know, it used to be unpalatable, and now it's all the rage. And is there a science have people studied, I guess, probably from a psychological perspective, you know, how to reduce the C factor? How do you change people's minds? Yes. People have been studying how to change people's minds for a very long for a multitude of reasons. Okay, so to your first question, there's a classic example, and that's lobster. So lobster is, you know, the insect of the sea. It's an arthropod. It's part of that sort of basic family of the insects. And it was seen as being icky. I grew up in the East Coast of Canada, so I grew up around Lobster. I still think lobsters Ike. So I'm just not a lobster eater. But that's one way. And what it needed was to transform it into what is considered sort of a luxury or, you know, there's some chefs who came on board and took that and did something with it and changed people's minds because it always tasted good or if people like lobster, I guess, it tasted good. But it changed their minds around that. So, we actually, in our space, in the insect space, there are a couple chefs that are doing a lot of work, sort of this being ambassadors to this industry and trying to change people's minds by looking at insect agriculture different, including my own. I never ate any insects because I have my own internal fears and biases around it as well until just a few years ago. I think I'd already started the center, and then I tried an insect. I was blown away because it was the chef who was very good about including what the actual flavors and textures were of the insects and how it complimented the dishes. And now, my favorite thing now is black ants. I just want to put black ants on everything because it provides a little bit of a citrus like flavor. It's actually formic acid. That's what they produce. But it adds this new flavor profile to whatever food that you're eating. So I do think it's going to take some time. There are lots of there's a lot of researchers who are looking at what some of the sort of psychological barriers are Some recent research has shown that even though people themselves are unwilling to eat whole insects, they're willing to eat maybe a product that doesn't look like an insect, so in classic examples, cricket powder. I actually use that at home all the time. It's a good way to incorporate some protein into, like, baked goods and things like that. And feeding it to pets. Generally, people who don't want to eat insects are okay if their pets are eating insects. And, you know, this is antidotal evidence, but there is a member of SIF of our research then or one of the insect producers, and he said he's been feeding his dog, you know, Black soldier flies for a long time, and his dog is 18-years-old. So that might tell you something about some of the nutrition. Now, there's no replication on that study, nor was it designed in any way, but it's the possibility that exists. Yeah, I would say there's also some research. There's the North America NACIa, the Industry Association. There's some published works in that organization about public perception. And I think most people picture a salad with bugs sprinkled on top. And what I think you're going to see is protein as an ingredient. So you see things like cricket flour. They've got a great name. Black soldier fly larvae flour just doesn't roll off quite the same and mealworm flour. You know, there's opportunities there. So if we think about, you know, fortified pastas, if we think about particularly if we're thinking about social justice issues of ways to feed people, where you can inject nutrition. The big concern for me is that it becomes a social justice issue where we're feeding insects to the poor. And there's a anon conspiracy all about that that we're going to make the poor eat that while we eat steak. I just don't think that's the case. So we're battling not just the perception of taste. I can tell you, Black soldier flies all right off the dryer taste fantastic. They taste like peanut butter, rice crispies. The oil has all the flavor in it. And the powder itself, the protein powder would be like anything you'd put in a smoothie. It's just a protein, nondescript flavor, maybe slightly nutty. In pet food. The protein is hypolergenic, so that allows us there. There's kitin in it. So for shrimp, the synthesis of kitin biologically intense, and so there's a value there. And the oils we're seeing used in things like weaning of pigs as a palatan. So it's a functional ingredient. It's not a center of the plate state. We're not going to have a giant grasshopper in the middle of your plate. So we've got to get that perception out. Now, in Mexican cooking, you see it in tacos, and you do see it in Korea, you'd see it as street food. So there are opportunities, but those are definitely Niche. We're focused on functional ingredients going into compounded products like protein bars where people are focused on nutrition first. And then, you know, you know, the power bar. I mean, I can't tell you what the package looks like. I just eat it because it's supposed to be nutritious, and someone gives it to me. That's makes me think about the possibilities for folks that have trouble with nutrition kids who have certain dislikes of food. I mean, I think about my own kids and grandkids of, like, sneaking stuff into it. And then I think about others, maybe even the elderly population that begin to have trouble with foods. Is this a way to get them more nutritionally dense foods in the ways that you're talking about? Well, yes. And that's where we see it. It's not a zero sum game. We haven't hit maximum protein requirement. We've got 1 billion people who can't get protein. This is about we upcycle. The people who make the fruit trays that go into your supermarket. All that waste gets upcycled into protein. Like, this is the kind of solutions we have, you know, ethanol production, all that distillers grains, and waste distillers syrups. We can use those products and put them back into the feed chain, maybe into the food chain in future. So that's this value of upcycling, why we think it's It's there. It's just part of the puzzle. You got plant proteins, not necessarily all as nutritious as these proteins. They don't fish on that eat soybean proteins tend to get the runs and die in large scale agriculture. But on insects, they tend to thrive. Natural feed versus an introduced feed source of protein. So we're seeing that in place. And I think that there's a lots of opportunities for spin off research about both the societal and social issues, the social justice issues, psychological issues, those things, as well as the nutrition component of the same reason I great. Zucchini into my kids pasta sauce? Like, you know, that we've all snuck one in through the side door? This is the same thing we're doing here? How do we get more nutrition in the food to make the population healthier? Well, I do ahead, Bill. Yeah. I have a question regarding the nutritional value of your product as a function of how you go at the beginning and try to manipulate other things that are important from a production value, like rate of growth, size, preference for things that they're eat. Is there some way that you're keeping track of that may be compromising the nutritional value at the other side? So there's two answers to that question. The governing answer is yes. So two things happen when we grow the insect because they don't and correct me on this. I used to say the Black ster fly does not have mouth parts. They do not ingest food as flies. Therefore, their life cycles, they build protein, and then they start storing fat and then they pupate. And so we're looking at time of harvest to maximize the yield of protein and the digestibility of that protein along its life cycle. There's a maximum peak point where you get maximum protein yield less fats because for a lot of the applications, we're focused on proteins. So yes, we're looking at that nutritional profile. But we are early days, so early days. Like, looking at that from a scientific perspective. We're looking at it from an industrial perspective, where we have a six day grow cycle. I can't harvest to the minute to optimize it, but I'd love to know, you know, how I should be thinking about this. If it's in a 17 month grow out of a cow from birth to cow calf, as long as I don't go through industrial, maybe it's 14 months if they go to a feed lot, you can change things by a day and the system works. We can change it by an hour. So that's where this data is going to become so much more important to track that nutrition because, you know, the marss of the world, the Tysons of this world, they think about functional protein, the digestibility, the gut health. But all these things. It's not just they're buying a protein. I don't care what it is. It's a functional ingredient. And we've got to be able to understand that functional ingredient, to position it and price it to maximize its value. That's me as the industrial guy, but also to maximize the pull of that product into the market relative to incumbents that are, you know, we've been doing it for 100 years with feather meal or blood meal or whatever. So I'll sign you up for a study on that. You let me know where I send the research questions. Well, I want to pull us back before we have to close this formal portion to appreciate Kathy's question about the framing of this, because as I was thinking about, in my particular work with young children, it feels like a no brainer to me, because Kristine, you started saying, I'm going to convince you that this is a good idea, and you did. You provided a lot of data, et cetera, and yet we know there are barriers to making this happen. And I can bring data to policymakers to say $1 here saves a lot of dollar there for kids, and yet we don't do that. So there are lots of things that we have to do to make this happen. To take the very data elements that you're both proposing, but to make it like, that's another piece of this. How do we get people to really buy into this? So it sounds like some great ideas and a great start. And I love how that you have both of you talked about the translation piece about this, like the value, how we solve community problems at the same time of making growth a potential for others. But yet, you're also both pointing to the need for continued partnerships with our researchers, our community folks, getting our students involved to try to figure out what are the answers to all the questions to make this work better. So we can't thank both of you enough. Thank you, Christine. Thank you, Keith for joining us as a community partner. Sounds like there's more opportunity to have additional conversations. We do want to officially close this portion of our time because we know folks have things to do at the top of the hour. Yet, we also know that some of you might want to just continue the conversation for a bit. And so we will stay here, even though we're officially closing our time and ending our broadcast and recording. But if you want to hang out and talk a little bit more, if there's something else to think about, we will stay for a little bit. Please join us again in the next month in August to talk with Carolyn Gentle gente about kids and showing up for them to ensure their student success, follow us in all the ways that you can. Look for more information. If you want to know more about Christine and her colleagues work, go to our website, find her page and look at her publications and see what's going on it. Thank you both again, and we'll stay around and just have some more chat.