In the center of London, meters away from commuters and tourists, millions of black soldier flies are being farmed. How many flies is in that creek?

Probably, just from looking at it, there's maybe 2,000 or 3,000 in there at the moment.

They're fed on food waste to fatten them up.

They're five days old. They've grown quite considerably in that time. After about another five days, they've grown quite massively. They're definitely a lot more wiggly now as well.

They really are.

After another week or so, they've grown quite considerably, and they've reached their final size.

These guys are quite gross, and they're surprisingly stinky, but the people here think they could solve a massive environmental problem, because when they're this fat and juicy, you can feed them to chickens and pigs and fish in place of soy. And soy has a massive environmental impact.

Many farm animals in the UK are fed soy, which can cause deforestation in countries like Brazil. Because insects can be farmed locally, don't take up much space, and eat food waste, they're seen by companies like this as a good way of reducing the environmental impact of eating meat.

Replacing fish mill soy protein, an insect-based feed can have a massive environmental effect. Because remember, you are able to use food waste to feed them, not cut down more rainforest. We can do it locally, so we're guaranteeing supply chains to farmers. But then ultimately, it's a natural product for these animals. And most importantly, we need to produce more protein. We import about 80 to 90% of it. What happens if that gets suddenly taken away from us? We need that food security, and that's what insect protein can do.

Kieran's company is now developing the technology to farm insects on a massive scale. They've made machines to count tens of thousands of fly eggs in seconds, built robot arms to automate the process, and will have huge stacks of larvae growing at any one time. But how we make our food is strictly regulated, and some people say that regulation is slowing down progress in the insect industry.

What we need to do, which we've started to do, is to allow certain safe and properly researched and scientifically supported exceptions, and that's what's beginning to happen. In the EU, we have already had that law passed. We now are permitted at an EU level to feed insects to chickens and pigs, and we need to do that in the UK so that we don't continue to fall behind.

They might not look appealing to us, but these creepy crawlies could be fattening up your pork chops in the very near future. That's certainly what this industry is banking on. Mickey Carroll, Sky News.