I'm reviving this thread as I will slowly add to it, following the recent threads on Magical Industry
and A Brief History of Eels
Day 7: Vermin for fun and profit!
See Art & Academe p30 – the spell “A plague of frogs” adjusted to eels creates 1000 eels from a pool of water 1 base individual in size using CrAn 20. You could create mice from damp earth (very small bits of meat for desperation? Maybe with magic to kill you could get enough for food). You can get scorpions from dry earth for weapon or crunchy snack use. Overall, eels for smoking or preserving in jelly is probably the most edible. Creating bees sounds good, but as you have to use cattle corpses to create bees you might as well just create the beef in the first place.
You could turn plant matter into caterpillars – if you get silk moths, this could start your farm. Wikipedia says to get 1kg of silk, 104kg of mulberry leaves must be eaten by 3000 silkworms. (Thinking of silk from invertebrates, there’s also sea-silk, from Pinna nobilis, the pen shell – a bivalve that sometimes has pearls and is edible. It secretes a silky thread to anchor itself to rocks in the intertidal zone).
Sericulture was common across the Byzantine empire, in 1147 during the 2nd crusade Roger of Sicily attacks Corinth and Thebes and captures their weavers and equipment, and establishes silkworks in Palermo and Calabria. Sack of Constantinople in 1204 drives a lot of artisans to leave the city, many to Italy and some to Avignon.
Dies Irae has a section where some spider-obsessed magi weaponise this to create spiders from the air to attack covenants with. Another potential military usage would be creating scorpions from dry earth, although good luck to anyone in Hibernia or Loch Leglean trying to get the earth to be as dry as the North African deserts...