What I saw in it

I sent Mo a text from work one Tuesday about the black soldier fly. We had been kicking around ideas for a while — he was thinking about mushrooms, I was thinking about a lot of things at once — and somewhere in the middle of a shift I read enough about BSF to know it was worth a real conversation. So I typed the message and hit send and waited.

What I saw in it then is mostly what I see in it now. A small animal that’s doing a job the planet badly needs done — turning food the modern world wastes back into something that can feed an exotic pet, a flock, a tank, a system. The animal is the lever. Everything else — the cultivation, the cleanliness, the consistency of a batch, the way a customer feels about opening the jar — is the part where two people who care can actually build something.

I’m a production person. I spend most of my days thinking about how a thing gets made and how it gets made the same way the next time. Cameras, lights, schedules, signal paths, the order operations have to go in for nothing to crash. So when Mo described the colony for the first time, what I heard underneath his story was a system. Inputs, throughput, harvest, repeat. And underneath the system, a guy with the patience and the affection to actually do it right.

The job, as I understood it that week, was to take the system and the guy and put a brand around them that didn’t dilute either one. That’s still the job.

So that’s what I saw in it. And I texted Mo, and he texted back, and here we are.

— Fabio