The quartering meat meant for maggots’ breeding is coming from beef, sheep, calf and poultry. Pork is not used because its too fatty meat gives flabby maggots. They become practically unusable. Contrary to what we could suppose, the meat we’re using is not rotting. It’s fresh. Before being delivered, carcasses are crushed in a machine, ten tons a day are necessary. To preserve the surplus, the meat is stocked in cold store or in freezer by 50 kilos lumps. It allows an easier reckoning of the rations.  

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Once crushed, the meat is put into boxes, in small amounts in the dark, so that mother flies can lay in better conditions. Flies live in thousands in dark rooms. Each one of them shelter different species (Lucilia or Calliphora), that will father gozzers, pinkies … Mother flies are fed with sugar that we collect in a sweet factory and we give them something to drink on a damped gravel layer. The number of eggs laid by flies is determined by the amount of meat.

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In 36 hours, their growth is brought enough forward to be able to install maggots into big cement boxes where they will be fed several times a day. To obtain one litre of maggots, it takes around four kilos of meat a week.

To make the casters, we mostly use gozzers’ flies maggots which are obtained by a strict selection. They are kept praised in room temperature, the transformation takes its course and grubs develop their cocoons. To prevent them transforming into flies, we keep them cool. The harvest is made by filtering them in a hessian every three hours, day and night. That way casters already formed could be recovered.

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After one week, grubs are ripped. To separate them from scraps of meat, they are sift with gross stitches. Maggots fall through and scraps are voided in order to be eliminated.

The final stage : we suppress impurities by sifting in a hessian.

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Maggots are stocked into boxes in cool room, at 4°C in order to “freeze” the process of transformation. At this stage we add sawdust to purify maggots.
    
    To colour maggots, all we have to do is to make them gulp dye down in their food. Their appetite is insatiable, and even if colouring are not really what they prefer, a stratagem can go round their disgust : colouring is directly poured into the meat. In this way, maggots are coloured from the inside : in red, yellow and even in bronze ! This is the only valid manner to colour maggots. There is another very questionable way, used by some traders, which consist in soaking grubs into a colouring bath. This manner doesn’t keep the colour and some products are bad for health.