We need bugs to produce food, but our food system is killing them
In praise of wood ants and giraffe-necked weevils.
This week, on the day I was scheduled to talk to Vicki Hird about her new book, Rebugging the Planet, the perfect study landed in my inbox.
On November 2, researchers at Purdue University published the results of a four-year experiment in which they compared commercial-scale fields planted with a rotation of corn and watermelon. Some fields were planted using conventional methods, with corn seeds coated in neonicotinoids, systemic insecticides known for harming beneficial insects. Others were planted and monitored using a system called Integrated Pest Management (IPM), which utilizes natural and biological controls to combat pests before (or in the best case scenario, without) resorting to insecticides.
The results were fascinating: In the IPM fields, insecticide use went down 95 percent. And while chemical companies love to say farmers need neonicotinoids to protect corn crops, the lack of a seed treatment didn’t affect yields at all. What it did do was contribute to a 26 percent higher watermelon yield, because flower visitation by pollinators—specifically wild bees—increased by more than 100 percent. The study draws an incredible throughline: get rid of neonics and reduce use of other insecticides, produce more (not less!) healthy food, and give wild bees, which are terribly threatened, a boost. (It’s one study, sure, but a body of research backs up the fact that neonics aren’t necessary as seed treatments on commodity crops and that when they are used, they kill bees and many other things throughout the ecosystem.)
Hird would call this one example of how beneficial “rebugging” can be. In the book, she writes about the wonders of insects and how our modern world threatens them on endless fronts. But she’s most passionate about the many things that can be done to bring them back and support their survival, on a political, economic, and personal level.
You probably won’t ever be as jazzed up as she is about wood ants, but that’s not necessary. (And don’t worry, this isn’t a techy call to start putting cricket protein in your smoothies.) Where it starts, Hird says, is simply with “rebugging our attitudes.”
“The automatic assumption is that bugs are bad or dirty or they're going to sting you; Actually, there's only a very small number of bugs that are problematic. We shouldn't be revolted or horrified by the presence of a bug in our house or garden…and certainly not transferring that fear to children,” she said. “Children start off very curious and excited by these creatures that so don't look like us.”
I know, easier said than done when you’ve got roaches in your kitchen, but here’s Hird’s case for a new relationship with bugs, based on how they impact what’s on your plate (and vice versa).
Unwrapped
At the most basic level, in the context of food, why do we need bugs? Well, directly, about 40 percent of the food that we eat is only here because insects pollinate the crops and allow us to produce the fruit or the vegetables or the grains. So, they’re really directly responsible for making sure we can get those foods, but they’re also indirectly responsible. Insects, but also things like worms and springtails, create the soil conditions that allow us to grow the rest of the food. So it would be critically damaging to our food supply if we lost more insects than we already have lost. They're actually utterly critical for us in terms of our food supply, and they’re also responsible for seed dispersal and ensuring water gets to plant roots through the soil system. I talk in the book about the critical things like chocolate and coffee. Those things, you know, are pollinated by tiny flies.
Chocolate and coffee are very critical in my mind. Exactly, yes, and an awful lot of fruit and vegetables that are critical for a good healthy diet, too. And then, you know, they move the microbes around the soil, and we're just beginning to realize how critical the microbes in the soil and in our food are for our gut.
So bugs are contributing to the production of our food, and at the same time, the food system is contributing to some of the declines in insect populations that you talk about in the book. Would you say the food system is one of the main drivers of that decline? Yes, I would. There are some insects and invertebrates that thrive on the kind of monocrops that we've created across the globe...but that's a very tiny amount of bugs. The reality is it's critically important that we have diversity and a good number of bugs, and our food system has created such a hostile environment for...a whole range of bugs. They're harmed by the chemicals that are used and by the monocultures or uniformity of crops that we've created in our food system, because...they need a diverse environment, a diversity of crops with diversity of plants and diversity of habitats. And the other big way...is through taking away habitats like the hedge rows, woodlands, the scrubby bits, and the rainforests across the globe. And then finally, climate change threatens them...and the food system is responsible for about 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally. So, unfortunately, it's quite a long litany of problems. It's a bit dire, really.
We just need to feed ourselves differently in order to protect the insects that allow us to feed ourselves.
Okay, I think the easiest connection for people to wrap their heads around is pesticides. Insecticides are designed to kill bugs. Is shifting to more organic production, then, one of the best strategies for rebugging? Yes, absolutely. There are several ways you can rebug your diet, but eating organic or produce that has not been grown using chemicals like insecticides or artificial fertilizers—so it could be produce you've grown yourself or are buying from farmers that you know—is one brilliant way. There are other ways. Having more fresh produce, less junk food, and eating less meat, and good meat.
What does eating less meat have to do with saving bugs? Meat uses so much of the landmass that we use for food, both directly through grazing animals, but more critically through growing crops for feeding animals in the factory farm system. So it's a huge land take, and as we've already said, that land often is without any biodiversity. It's uniform. So feeding animals is critically harmful and we need to move away from the amount of meat that we eat. It's actually the volume of meat that we're consuming now that is a big part of the problem. The sheer amount of land that is used for producing the amount of meat and dairy that we are now eating in affluent societies is totally unsustainable. And there's a really clear link to be made between land use and invertebrates’ survival.
I try to only eat really well-produced meat raised on biodiverse, rich pastures. And if you do want pigs and poultry, try to choose those that...are possibly fed on waste products, not only on crops, so they become part of a circular food system rather than being incredibly extractive. That's probably one of the biggest things you can do is eating less and better meat, in order to take pressure off the land.
What about IPM? You don’t hear a lot about it but it seems like a great tool for farms where organic production is difficult; is it an underutilized tool? That's what I studied a long time ago when I was an academic. Really good IPM can be fantastic. One of the ways in which it’s “good IPM” is if chemicals are always the last resort, used only when everything else has failed or you know people are going to starve. Good IPM uses nature and natural systems to control pests and to create healthy crops or livestock. When livestock or crops are healthy and not stressed, they're more able to withstand disease or bug attacks. And there are all sorts of other...biological controls. So wasps or beetles that will eat the bugs that are damaging your crop, you can make sure they've got the habitat they need. There are loads of ways IPM can be really helpful and also create good biodiversity automatically. But sometimes I hear IPM talked about by some chemical companies, and it’s a little bit less on the effective side. We need to differentiate between good IPM and maybe “fake” IPM.
One thing I like about the book is your descriptions of bugs throughout. Most people don't like bugs as much as you do, so it makes sense to try to get people to see them differently. Do you have a favorite bug? I've often talked about something called a cockchafer that has very many names. It's a quite large bumbling beetle with the most gorgeous, feathery antennae. I just think it's really beautiful.
But I've got a lot of bugs that I love. For instance, the giraffe-necked weevil. I think it's amazing…so much so that I had one tattooed on my shoulder. And you know, when when I was writing this book, every time I came across a new example of insect or an invertebrate doing something which was new to me…I ended up falling in love with a bug. Like the wood ant. I did some research on the wood ant because it very much is what we call a “keystone species.” Its impact in the local environment and the local ecology is far greater than you’d expect given its size. I talked about that in the context of how you don't always know until you remove that species what the impact is going to be. Wood ants live in covered forests, and [researchers] studied the activities they have that are so critical to the forest environment for the worms, the other species…But when they did a test removing the wood ant, you end up getting a completely unbalanced system and a invasion of a pest species, which is a real problem in a forest environment.
It was a real pleasure to be able to do a little sketches of some of the things invertebrates were doing and what they do so well. So when I'm talking about feeding ourselves, I talk about how some of the invertebrates feed themselves, even their offspring. And then talking about defending ourselves, and they defend themselves in ways which are really clever, particularly the social insects, working together to defend the colony. There are so many examples of how they live better on this planet that I kept trying to draw out throughout the book.
Still hungry?
War on drugs. I’ve been covering how the routine overuse of medically important antibiotics in animal agriculture contributes to antibiotic resistance, a global health threat, from many different angles. This week, for FoodPrint, I wrote about farms, companies, and countries that have already figured out how to reduce or eliminate those drugs while still producing plenty of meat. The takeaway: it is possible for meat companies to make the necessary changes, even though they often argue it’s not.
A side of policy
Climate COP out? Speaking of meat, you’ve probably heard that the super critical global climate change conference COP26 is happening right now. One thing a lot of people are talking about is methane, which you might remember I recently wrote about for Civil Eats. This week, world leaders unveiled the Global Methane Pledge, and many countries are committing to cutting methane emissions, which is very good thing. However, the pledge primarily focuses on emissions from the oil and gas industry, when this is the place where agriculture is a significant contributor.
“It's encouraging that governments have promised to act on methane, but disappointing that they are ignoring the biggest polluters: the meat and dairy industry,” said Nusa Urbancic, Campaigns Director at the Changing Markets Foundation. “This isn’t about individual farmers, but about regulating an industry dominated by a handful of multi-billion-dollar companies that are doing next to nothing to cut their methane emissions. Big Meat is no different to Big Oil and governments should not be giving them a free pass on climate action.”
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