Maggots tearing leftovers such as vegetables, fruits, and meat could help China in eliminating a mountain of food waste.

According to experts, maggots can consume garbage daily double their weight. A farm in Sichuan province uses maggots' feces into an organic fertilizer and as a high-protein animal feed. Farm Manager near Pengshan, Hu Rong, explains that these bugs are not actually disgusting since they could manage food waste, people just have to look for another angle.

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There will be no grub shortage for the larvae, as each person reportedly throws 30 kilos of food every year in China, a country with about 1.4 billion people. Hu said that one kilo of maggots can consume two kilos of trash within four hours.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) stated that one-third of the food manufactured worldwide for human consumption gets wasted each year, while approximately 870 million people are hungry.

Food waste also increases the problems in pollution. FAO stated in a report in 2011 that if food waste will become a country, it will likely stand after China and United States for greenhouse gas emissions. China produces 40 million tons of food waste every year, similar to the weight of 110 Empire State Buildings.

There are also cultural reasons regarding the food waste issue, Wu noted. For instance, when people eat at a restaurant with someone, the custom is to order more foods to show hospitality, but inevitably leads to being wasted, but maggots will fly over the trash to consume leftovers.

When already filled, larvae are marketed dried or live to provide food for animals like fish, turtles, and chickens because they possess a nutritious composition of 36 percent lipids and 63 percent protein. Agriculture industry also uses larval feces as organic fertilizer.

Countries that legalized feed poultry and fish with insects include South Africa, China, Canada, and Australia, while it is restricted in the European Union and the United States, according to the secretary general of the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed,  Christophe Derrien.