Insect feeds in salmon aquaculture: sociotechnical imagination and responsible story-telling

Abstract

Salmon aquaculture is a growing industry with increasing challenges of feed sustainability and availability. This global sustainability issue has led to calls for novel feeds. Aquafly, a Norwegian research project, has performed small-scale tests using the black soldier fly as an ingredient in salmon diet. However, in order for insect feeds to become a reality on the industrial scale, workable scientific, technical and political solutions have to be envisioned in tandem. In this study, we studied, elicited and assessed sociotechnical imaginaries in the Aquafly research consortium, using the approaches of concomitant ELSA research, the Ethical Matrix and Quantitative Story-Telling. We show how the sociotechnical imaginaries develop together with the scientific trajectory of the project, and how this also affects the assessment of the ethical and environmental impacts of the technology, including issues of food and feed safety and security, fish health and welfare, pollution and efficient use of waste streams. We show how there are intrinsic challenges when dealing with global sustainability issues in the research project. For instance, overcoming the problem of salmon feed scarcity may aggravate the challenges caused by intensive aquaculture. We report the results of a Quantitative Story-Telling exercise that indicates that Aquafly can be seen as part of a larger economy of technological promise, and discuss if and how this critique can be employed and integrated into scientific and technical imagination in a research project, contributing to Responsible Research and Innovation.