Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan, Rockefeller Center from New Stance Studios. Not joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. She is on an aeroplane. But uh I am joined uh with uh John, Customer Service Extraordinaire.
How are you doing? Doing great. Right? Stas is on an airplane right now? I believe so, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, traveling to fancy far away countries. Fancy far away countries. Uh buy me a ticket on an aeroplane. We do have Joe Hazen rocking the panels here.
How you doing? I'm doing great. Great to see you, sir. Yeah, anything good happened this week? Anything good, anything bad, anything indifferent?
Oh, not much. Um uh my son is kicking ass right now, and yeah, I'm all about it's all about the praise for him. Nice about to turn five months. Five months. Uh now you have to refresh me.
So five months, the smarts aren't uh the smiles aren't fart smiles anymore. They're real smiles at this point. They're real smiles right now. Nice. And he's just learning to give kisses too, which is amazing.
Oh, nice. Yeah. I love it. Uh where where are you in the in uh where have people settled on solid food? It changes every uh every ten seconds what people are supposed to do with their with their kids.
We're moving into solid foods or a uh medley of a mix of formula and then uh like you know, uh a pseudo-liquid food in about six months. Well, I like pseudo-liquid. Yeah. Well, it's you know, slightly viscous, it's not really you know, sludge. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. You know, uh you know how like sometimes people buy uh quote unquote like greens. They used to buy greens and then juice the hell hell out of them to give them to their kids, and then they would give their kids nitrate poisoning. Yeah. More E.
coli. Listen, for those of you that are that are that are just having kids, I'll give you some stuff that I've I'm 51. I got two kids. Like they're, you know, two 20 and 17, and I've seen plenty of people raise kids. There are no right answers.
Just try not to feel guilty. There are no right answers. Uh you know, just do your best and don't feel guilty about it. Would you agree? Absolutely.
We're trying our hardest here. We're making it up as we go along. All right. All right. And uh we got Jackie Molecules who's uh along with John is running the Discord uh right now and if you're a Patreon uh person you can listen live or else you know wait till Friday but uh Jack how you doing?
I'm good hanging in LA. Oh you're back in LA the other day because I uh I don't know yeah yeah I had a had a weird urge to make jambalaya for some reason. Really? And um you know needed like yeah I only needed like a little bit of tomato paste didn't have a tube opened that can when I was done like now what? Well the good news about tomato paste the good news about tomato paste Jack is tomato paste lasts for a a decent amount of time.
You know what the main problem with tomato paste is what well when you wrap it you're gonna get some nasty dehydration on the tomato on the inside of the can above the area where you scooped it out with a spoon and it looks really bad and then when you scoop that out that crusty black part doesn't really mix in as easily as the rest of it and so it's gonna make you think that everything in the world has gone bad but it hasn't two things you could do you could push that's exactly what happened yeah I know dude I'm telling you man again 51 I've been I've been down this road a long time. So like uh you know push you can push plastic wrap down onto the top of it all the way in to kind of prevent that but the the people who uh the good people who designed the tomato paste can did not make it uh do you know what I I uh again I told you I I make most of my recipes so that they take a whole can of tomato paste just for this reason. And uh I like that I I'm an open on both ends and push the sucker out like it's cranberry jelly kind of a fellow, if that makes sense to you. Ooh. Yeah, I like that.
I'm a two end open. But now in the days of uh I started doing that way back when no one ever recycled anything, and so now it does leave sharp edges if you don't have one of those things. So I do worry that someone in a sorting plant somewhere is going to. But I guess they deal with cans all day, so probably it's not gonna, I'm probably not gonna be the thing that drives them over the edge. All right.
So I'm glad we got to have that little conversation, Jack. But today we have uh special guest uh on the radio, Oliver Milman. Now, Millman 1L, not like so not how how you doing? I'm I'm well, yeah. How are you?
Uh I meant to ask you before we're on the air because it's not what I usually ask about. But is is is Millman like uh similar to Miller in terms of where the where the name comes from? Like does it derive from milling or is it entirely unrelated? Uh unknown provenance. I always assumed yes, and we just uh became pretentious and dropped one of the L's at some point uh along the line.
But yeah, no actual milling experience in my or my family's history as far as I'm aware. Yeah, well, and I just want to say uh I don't you know most of you who hear this are listening at some way later date, but it is for you an extremely busy news day, and I am uh not related to what we're talking about today, but uh d today last night is the night and you're covering this for The Guardian, uh that the uh was Alito, right? His uh his stuff was leaked on Roe versus Wade. So thank you for coming with us on this extremely busy news day for you. No, not at all.
Um it's good to hop from one crisis to another. Yeah. Well, so like uh so do you normally cover both like so you're the quote unquote environmental reporter for The Guardian. Yeah. Uh but do you also normally do podcasts or is this just uh No, uh I I kind of we uh we're on kind of rotors, so I was on the 7 a.m.
shift this morning, and once you're on that shift, it's a kind of like a black hole of you just get assigned whatever's going on. So of course, once that news broke last night, I knew okay, I'm gonna be writing about abortion in the morning, which you know it's obviously a delicate area to to write about. Um different from from the environmental stuff I usually cover, but uh certainly interesting to dive into those kind of things. But yeah, normally my bread bread and butter is uh the environment, climate change, funny animal stuff, right? That kind of thing.
Yeah. Yeah, so well anyway. Um do they know who leaked it? Because that's crazy. Yeah, there's two competing theories, isn't there?
There's the the kind of liberal justice clerk who wanted to kind of warn the world of this impending thing happening, or the conservative side to kind of uh get us all ready for this to get the outrage out of the way before the actual judgment comes down. So yeah, there's these two competing narratives. I have no idea which one it is. I'm sure by the time people listen to this, they're it may be maybe a bit more clear because there's an investigation underway into looking into what happened. Yeah.
All right. So you are here for uh the book that you recently came out with, by the way, same publishers, Norton. Right, yeah. Good old Norton. Yeah, yeah, employee-owned Norton.
Yeah, that's right. Good guys, uh really hands-on, helpful publishers. Yeah, can't say many good uh too many good things about them. True. I also enjoy them, although I owe them a book, so you know, there's that.
So the book is The Insect Crisis, the fall of the tiny empires uh that run the World. And if you have any questions uh for Oliver, call in to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. And if you'd like to know how to call in and listen live, uh go to our Patreon, right, John? Yep, exactly.
Uh patreon.com slash cooking issues. Uh so before we talk about uh stuff in in general, uh, when you're reading the the book, it's actually something that uh apparently everyone knew about, but I I I didn't. You start with kind of a si a silent spring style of what the world would look like with it with a dearth of insects, actually with no insects, right? Uh and uh and so you want to talk like it's about that and then about this kind of which I didn't realize huge until I thought about what you wrote and like thought about my own observations. Again, as I said, 51, so I've lived through a big chunk of the depredations that you're talking about.
Uh so you want to talk a little bit about a world without insects and then the kind of the more recent knowledge that a lot of people are coming to that there's been a huge crash in insect populations. Yeah, sure. So I was thinking about how to kind of open the book and uh uh kind of thought we could kind of dive right into the science, all these kind of scientific warnings about happening to insects. But I thought before you you start going into those things, you've got to get people to care. And it's been one of the kind of challenges of climate change journalism, frankly, over the last kind of decade or so.
Is this you know, uh, you know, a lot of people think it's a kind of far-off problem affecting people in the Pacific Islands or polar bears. And you've got to kind of show that it's a here and now issue and uh it's gonna affect us all in some way. So I thought the kind of starkist way to do that was to kind of illustrate a world without insects at all. That's the prologue of the book. Um, it's kind of taken a little bit like you say, inspiration from Silent Spring, this idea of a quartined world, a kind of nature that's been stripped of any kind of life uh of it.
And also the uh the kind of the work and the insights of E.O. Wilson, this kind of biologist, he passed away uh earlier on this year. I didn't know he finally died. Yeah, he did. He was old as dirt though.
Yeah, 92, 93. I I interviewed him last year, and um yeah, he was I mean he was still quite kind of articulate, and but you know, he's he was he was getting on. You know, the the rule that what they say now is that the more you keep act uh what's it called, exercising your mind as you get older, the sharper you stay. Right. Or can.
Yes. If you're lucky. Yeah, uh, I think he he still he still kind of was involved in scientific. Had he made it through kind of the some of the crazy controversy that he kind of went through, I don't know, was it 10 or 15 years ago on some of his evolutionary thoughts? And some of that kind of resurfaced after he died.
There was this kind of like backlash to the to the praise he was getting about his views around evolution and so on. I think that's a kind of open question. Well, his his book uh The Ants with Hold Holb Dobs, Hol I can never pronounce the guy's name, Holb Dobler. The other guy Wilson's so easy, he totally shafted the other guy. Hold on I can't even remember, I can't remember.
But that's that is one of my the classic books of all time. Yeah, it just happens to be on ants. When was the last time a book on ants won the Pulitzer? I know. I mean, incredible skill as a writer.
I mean, a lot of scientists are kind of deathly dull uh and terrible writers, but he's actually a very accomplished writer. Um, and he kind of looked at this issue uh a little while ago, looking at what would happen in a world without insects. And um it was kind of really striking to me. It was kind of well, we'd last about three or four months, maybe. Um, you know, there would be mass starvation, uh, you know, the world would kind of crumble around us in terms of ecosystem collapse and so on.
It would be a pretty grim place. I tried to kind of illustrate that uh in the book, um, showing us exactly what we would lose and maybe touching on some things that people really do care about. Like there's this tiny midge that pollinates the cacao plant that gives us chocolate. So this hundred billion dollar a year industry relies on this tiny little midge. No one thinks about that when they're eating chocolate.
Um, but they'll be gone. Um ice cream will be under threat, uh, all the kind of lovely fruits and vegetables we like to eat would be under threat. So I wanted to kind of show what's was at stake first, first up. That was the kind of first job of the book, I think. Right.
Speaking about uh chocolate and the flies, you know, one of the things about the book is you interview a lot of scientists, and these these entomologists are kind of nutty, which is kind of they're kind of fun, right? Like so uh I wrote I wrote down uh uh her name. Erica McAllister is your chocolate and and fly person, and you have her dressed as a fly on a go-kart chasing someone dressed as poop. Yeah, those entomologists they like to have fun, don't they? Yeah.
Yeah. Um, yeah, I think appropriately the uh fly did catch the poop in the in the race. Well that makes sense. Yeah. I I have uh this I want to make this shirt that like I haven't figured out exactly what the wording's gonna be, but it's gonna be a fly, and it's gonna say something like, Hey, my last stop was poop, but don't worry, I brought you some.
You know what I mean? Delicious, delicious poo. Yum yum. Yeah, although it's so funny because it's cultural, right? I mean, nobody likes to see a lot of flies on food, but you don't shun food at a picnic that a single fly has touched.
Right. I mean, like at least I don't, not cultural. It's something swarming with flies, yeah. And and in and culturally a lot of places, it's their norm, and so it's just kind of ignored, and who knows whether it's better or worse. But there's a whole theater around what particular people in particular cultures find repellent and disgusting.
That's not always linked to any sort of truth. It's really just culturally determined. Yeah, it's numbers, isn't it? You see one fly in the sandwich, you can shoe it away, you tell yourself it's fine. Yeah.
If there's like a thousand on there, probably stay clear. But I mean that was one of the most interesting aspects of this book for me writing was the cultural aspect. The cultural aspect in terms of how we view uh insects and how that's completely out of kilto with their importance to the world. I mean we we can revile them or we think they're pointless a lot of the time when they're actually you know imperative to life on earth. And also the kind of cultural difference between kind of Western cultures and uh those in kind of Asia and and Africa, South America where you know they've been eating insects for a long time.
They have a different kind of relationship with insects to us. We we kind of find them a bit bitch a lot of the time. Yeah I was gonna bring I forgot uh to bring it because I'm I'm dummy but uh I was gonna bring actually because we all eat we all eat honey a lot of us those who eat honey eat honey let's put it that way uh which no one seems to mind being processed through uh through a bee, right? So somehow it's like again we don't even consider it. Right.
It's not even a problem. But there's a ve there's a rare honey, uh rare ish out of uh where is it Austrian I think that you can get you can go online and the Saratoga Tea and Honey Company, which is run by Haley Stevens, one of my friends who I used to work with at the French Culinary Institute in Saratoga Springs, and she stocks this black forest honey that is uh where the the honeybees actually collect the honeydew from aphids. So the aphids suck out the plant juice, concentrate the plant juice into a sugar rich thing which is as as uh high value enough for the bees to gather as nectar would be. And so they can get a pretty much, you know, single varietal of this concentrated like tree thing from or leaf thing out of it. It's cool.
I was gonna have you taste it, but you know what? I forgot. Oh, damn. Isn't that stupid? I I really want that now.
Yeah, I know. I know. But yeah, it's it's incredible, isn't it? We were what the only species that drinks another species milk. Uh we're the only species that you know eats uh the vomit of a of a bee on on mass.
So yeah, it is strange what we see acceptable and what isn't. I mean, that is the wrapped up in the whole kind of cultural element, isn't it, of how we view interact with animals in the world. Oh, well, so let's get it out of the way at the very beginning. A lot of people, because this is a food show, are going to assume that that uh we had you on to talk about eating insects as food. That's not what this book is about.
This book is more about um kind of what's going on with insects in the world today and uh kind of what a nightmare it is and how why we should care about it and a little bit about what we should do to I mean, a lot about, but you know, difficult answers, let's say, on how to fix these problems. Um you want to let's just get the eating right out of the way. What do you think about it? I did you you don't really you go into it a little bit, but like the eating the eating insects things, like it's uh you want to talk about it now? Let's get it out of the way.
Yeah, sure, let's get it out of the way. I mean, there's a little bit in the book on that. Um the bit the time I got to that part, it was kind of the midst of the pandemic, so I couldn't actually travel anywhere to go to some of these restaurants that are set up around the world uh and in the US uh that offer insects. Um I didn't even need to get to a kind of cricket protein bar. I'm a vegetarian.
I don't know if that's a gray area. It's probably not. I don't know. So you eat bugs for research, but not in general? Yeah, I mean, I was kind of like, that's a kind of ethical kind of, I don't know, morass that I wasn't sure what how to cut into.
I mean, I wouldn't have I don't think it would have bothered me that much eating insects for the for research purposes, but um, you know, in terms of crunchy kind of crickets covered in chili or ants dipped in lemon or something, yeah. I you know, I was like, oh, that's that's clearly an animal, and I don't eat those, so that would have been a bit strange. But the interesting thing about ants is they often bring their own acid. That's one of the nice things. Tangy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like 2,000 species of insects that people eat around the world. Um, like I was saying before, it's culturally kind of acceptable, good source of protein, uh, vitamins, zinc, so on. Um, and uh, I think the point I wanted to make on that in the book in relation to the loss of insects and the impact of that in a wide environment is ironically, it might be a good thing for us to eat more insects because raising insects in terms of their impact on the environment is far less than uh meat, for example. So um, just in terms of what it's involved, in terms of water, air pollution, land use, you don't have to deforest a huge area, for example, to to raise a pasture f of uh of insects, you can just do it in a shipping container and raise, you know, how many million uh crickets you want.
So um that could be a small part of the solution to what sort of the kind of bigger issues that are kind of looked at in the book. But it's not something I kind of dwelled on hugely. Yeah, I mean uh I don't know. Anytime someone in the food sector says they're gonna save the world with X, Y, or Z, A M skeptical. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh let's just uh put it that way. Um And how do you get how do you get people to suddenly eat lots of insects as well? I mean that that takes a shift. I did think about those lobsters, you know, lobsters used to be seen as these disgusting bottom feeders, didn't they?
And I think in the early days of uh following the establishment of the United States of America, um uh farmers would crush them up and put them on fields as fertilizer because they're seeing these kind of worthless bottom feeders. And now what you can go around the corner here and get a $30 lobster roll, can't you? Um so attitudes do shift. I mean, sushi is the attitude to shoot sushi has shifted in my lifetime. It's now one of the most popular foods around.
So maybe one day we will want to uh eat insects, but it's not gonna happen overnight. Well it's so funny, like it's uh a lot of it's really about kind of scarcity and what people are kind of forced to eat or not forced to eat, and when things become expensive or not, you know, and a lot of things that used to be uh foods of necessity are now the most expensive things in the world, like like certain hams. You know what I mean? Uh I mean it's like all of these things become uh it isn't it is an interesting is an interesting subject. But what what I think will never change is if somebody thinks that they can make a buck by saying that they're gonna save the world, they will say it.
Yeah, of course. Yeah, you know what I mean? And everybody greenwashing. Yeah, you put that on your product, this is gonna save you know X, Y, and Z. I mean it's it's very common now.
I think a lot of it is comes from a kind of a good place. Everyone wants to save the world. You know, especially, you know, everyone wants to think that they're doing something good. Right. So I don't think it's it's not always from a no uh what's it called, a uh a bad place.
Yeah, there's no silver bullet on this, unfortunately. Yeah. So John, we had a question about uh insect farming. You wanna you want to hit that one? Absolutely.
From Jared Johnston. I'd be interested to hear uh Oliver's thoughts on how to get started farming insects for personal consumption. Wow. Uh uh again, that isn't something I got into in the in the book, but I mean there are kind of uh terrariums you can get and raise insects quite easily. Uh, like I was saying, you don't need much space uh to raise a lot of insects.
That is their strength evolution in terms of evolution, they're able to reproduce in huge numbers uh and repopulate. So um in terms of in terms of doing that, um there are lots of um websites I'm sure you can go to to find terrariums to do that, or if you have a kind of uh spare plot in the backyard you can you can raise them there. They're uh bee hotels you can you can um you can buy now. Not that you want to eat bees, but there are lots of different things now you can buy where insects will gather together. Um you know it's it's legal now in New York to it has been for maybe 10-15 years to have uh beehives here.
Right. Yeah, but it's relatively recent that you're allowed to kind of do it on on rooftops. Yeah. It's kind of cool. Yeah.
Yeah, this this craze of urban geek beekeeping now, isn't it? You see that, you know, it's become a bit of a hipster thing to kind of um a beekeeper. Yeah, what's his name? Zeke Freeman, right? That's his name.
I think started a lot of that stuff back maybe 15 years ago here in New York, and there's a number of people all over. But then of course in Paris they've always had the you know, like a a couple of hives that they made very fancy honey from. I think the Queen has her own honey and all that other stuff, you know what I mean? It's like nice. Have you as uh someone from the UK have you been following the Queen's uh food craziness that's going on?
Her ketchup? Yeah, and how she eats a banana as well. Have you seen that? No. But have you tasted her ketchup?
No, I haven't tasted her ketchup. I'm only only I've only eaten Heinz ketchup. What's up with a ketchup? I don't know. She's coming out with a ketchup.
Oh, is she? Yeah, two varieties. And uh she's also coming out with a sparkling wine, which I think might have been grown in Kent because of global warming. Right, yeah. They can now grow grapes again in Kent.
And so I mean, Kent is an amazing place. Yeah, yeah, the Garden of England. Yeah, it is. The Brogdale's an amazing place. Okay, so back to uh where we're going.
We had another question on uh insects and allergies, actually. Uh forget maybe that came in on Twitter. I did a little bit of research. There's not I couldn't find a lot of uh stuff on people having allergic reactions to insects as food. Of course, people have allergic uh reactions to insects in their environment, especially asthma with things like cockroaches, which we'll get into uh later.
But I I don't know, I forget whether that's known, whether that's the bug itself or just the stuff that comes with it. But uh do you know? Yeah, it's um they they release pheromones and they kind of kick up dust and stuff, which can trigger people's um allergies. If you've got asthma, it might not be good to have cockroaches around. But in general, cockroaches are far less harmful to us than we think they are.
I mean, we kind of despise them, don't we? Oh, yeah. But um uh their actual their actual threat to us is minuscule. Right. Yeah.
Okay, so we're listening we're gonna get to food, but just not about insects necessarily as food. We're we're now concluding the insects as food portion. Let's draw a line under it. Of the yeah, of the thing, right? So now for people that don't uh know and uh count me as one of them, how much of a crash has there been?
So you like we'll talk about like the German study that you got uh released and also that that guy, what's his name? I wrote it down, uh Muller, who uh drives cars to see how many bugs have hit his windshield and has done for the past 20 something years. You want to talk about the relatively recent uh evidence on how much of a crash has been in insect populations? Yeah, sure. I mean, I would say that kind of if somebody told me kind of four or five years ago my first book would be on insects, I would have laughed at them.
I think I've always been drawn to the kind of um the big flashy things in the environmental world, the kind of polar bears, the Amazon rainforests, you know, I've been on the Great Barry Reef in Australia, that kind of thing. All of that kind of stuff is very sexy. But it it occurred to me around kind of 2017, 2018 that there were these all these studies coming out, uh kind of one after the other, like a kind of avalanche of research coming out showing these quite incredible insect declines. And and we weren't really talking about it in terms of the big conservation challenges of our times. We're still kind of thinking about orangutans and rhinos.
So I kind of thought the public really kind of needed to know more about this. So I started digging into it and yeah the the the kind of losses are astronomical. I mean you mentioned the German study they uh they crunched all this data going back to 1989 um from nature reserves in Germany not not industrial areas or agricultural uh areas nature reserves they found that three quarters of the flying insects had disappeared since since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany's lost three quarters of his flying insects. You you mentioned that other study in Denmark uh and as Papi Moller quite an eccentric guy um noticed that um birds had seen when he disappear from the area of countryside in Denmark where he was raised and he thought maybe it's due to insect loss.
So the way he decided to experiment uh this was to get a a beat up old 1960s Ford Anglia and drive up and down the same stretch of road in Denmark and he's done that every summer since 1997 and then counted the bugs that were squished on his windshield. I mean that's that's I think the good shorthand for a lot of people to recognise this, because we don't we often think of insects as being everywhere, and what of course there wouldn't be a shortage of them. They're just annoying and they're all over me. But I think when you think about it, you can maybe people of a certain age at least would think, oh yeah, I remember when I was a kid driving cross-country on vacation, and we had to stop to scrape the wit the bugs off the windshield. Or when we got there, there were bugs everywhere.
And now it's just less and less of a thing. I was in Montana last year, most you know, most sparsely populated state in in the US driving around for a week, not a single bug hitting the hitting the windshield, driving through these kind of like r really remote areas, nothing. It was kind of really kind of shocking when you think about it like that. Yeah, I mean, I have to say, like this is the part of the book that really kind of hit me the hardest was and you you bring it up um in relation to something that we've all many of us seen before because we know how fish populations have been uh kind of destroyed. Uh the baseline shift.
This idea of baseline shift and of kind of uh and again coming back to my age again, 51. Yeah, I remember like, you know, the car, it'd be like, especially like near in the morning or at dusk, it's like dragonflies smacking into you, like big bugs, juicy bugs would hit your windshield, like on the constant. Yeah. Like, you know, nowadays you just use the windshield wiper fluid for like uh with salt spray or you're maybe you know, dust on the road. But you you used to need really good stuff just to get the bugs off.
Yeah, that's right. And and I think that I mean you speak to people in Texas and they know that uh they talk quite sadly about the fact they they don't have your fireflies around. You know, they used to remember the kind of the night sky being kind of dotted up with uh with fireflies, uh lightning bugs or whatever you want to call them. Um which are you? What do you call them?
Uh fireflies, although they're beetles, so it's very confusing. Yeah, yeah. So many different things. They are uh they are one of the coolest animals. I've always felt real sad for people uh on the other side of the Rockies who their their fireflies don't light up even in good.
I know what a loss. What a loss. Yeah. And but you also mentioned, thankfully, that we in New York, even though we have all of our bright lights on, have like a species of firefly that doesn't care whether there's ambient light around. Yeah.
That's part of the light pollution section of your book of things we can do to fix fireflies. We've got like the equivalent of the kind of uh indestructible rat, you know, that we have in New York. You know, they will survive any environmental conditions. Love it. That's it.
We've got the firefly version of that. I love it because like it's one of the few things like you're like in a densely urban environment, any patch of grass on the right on the right night, and you know, you you'll see a whole bunch of fireflies and it just makes you feel good. Yeah, I know. Imagine that, you'll your bum lighting up like that. Incredible.
Yeah. Um so yeah, there is that mournful element, I think, and it's happening so quickly that people can remember it. And you mentioned shifting baseline syndrome, um, and the kind of classic example of that is the study done down in the Florida Keys where uh they looked at pictures of uh people catching fish over the years and um you know, in the nineteen fifties the fish they were caught were as big as them, uh and go current current day and they're kind of like maybe a foot. Uh uh but the the people's smiles are just the same. People are just as delighted as they ever were because they don't remember what it was like.
The insect crisis is happening so quickly that um uh we can recall what insect abundance was like in our childhoods. It's not the it kind of feels strange. I mean, to lose kind of ninety eight percent of insects like it did in in Denmark, uh Puerto Rico, and that was uh rainforest, 98% decline since the nineteen seventies. I mean, these are astronomical losses in short periods of time. Like we may have lost ninety-five percent of the world's tigers, for example, but we've done that over kind of hundred, hundred and fifty years, you know, hunted them to that point.
Um we we're losing insects at that rate over, you know, since uh since last last time people were wearing fled fled uh pants, you know. Right, but it's also the straight numbers and species. I mean, one of the other things in the book I thought was striking, one of the things that you bring up is um people be like, yeah, right, look, I I have all of these bugs all the time that I have to contend with that I'm trying to kill on the constant, and I can't kill them. And you're like, no, the point is is that we'll still have a whole bunch of insects. It'll just be the three or four ones you hate.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've been on quite a few radio phone-ins in um uh especially in like Louisiana, Texas, places like that. And they're the all the kind of calls are about which I don't blame people for. It's like, how do I get rid of termites?
I hate these fire ants. Yeah. You know, what do we get rid of them? Yeah, yeah. And and I think there's the assumption that I want to save all termites and fire ants and it's not it's not that.
I mean, of course, like some insects you don't want around. But we've kind of ordered our world to the extent that we've pushed nature, including insects, especially insects, to the margins of our lives away from us. And um that's been extremely detrimental to the things we do want to hang around, the bees, the butterflies, things like that. Right. And so in the book, and we're slowly making it back to food people, so don't worry.
But it's so like in in the book, the other thing that you kind of i i what's interesting is you you what I like is you don't want to come down firmly. You realize that there's nuance in kind of all all of these, all of these positions, right? Um so you're like, listen, one of the tensions is like, why save this? For our own benefit? Or because it's the right thing to do, even if it doesn't necessarily benefit us directly.
You also point out a lot of quote unquote sexy bugs like this giant walking stick from Australia, this walking stick bug that's like I looked it up on the internet and it was just like it's bananas or like that giant burrowing cockroach that as you say looks like an armadillo. It's so big and armored looking that it almost isn't you can almost see it as some sort of space creature and not think of it as a bug anymore. It's bananas. It weighs an ounce, people, it weighs over 30 grams. Some people keep it as a pet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh so you know, you show these as means of trying to pique people's interest in hey, licks and we're losing a lot of cool stuff, right? And you have a whole chapter on monarchs, everyone's favorite fluttering thing, right? Right. And I remember what they're like.
Remember people, don't eat monarchs. Not all I I can't ever remember whether they themselves are poisonous or if it's just the milkweed that the caterpillars eat that make them bitter and poisonous. Yeah, the milkweed has this poisonous property that they embody and then birds know to stay clear of them. Right. Every time though, like that you have a chapter or a section on a cool or interesting bug, it seems like you feel kind of bad because it's like you're like, listen, the whole point is we shouldn't only save things that are cool.
Yeah. Yeah, that was a kind of constant tension through the book is like, do we just look at from a purely selfish point of view? It's like what's useful for us? Okay, bees are useful uh because they pollinate, you know, a third of the food we eat. Um, you know, butterflies, less so in terms of pollination, but they're beautiful, they're pretty.
We like seeing them fluttering around. You know, beetles do some kind of interesting things to to help cycle nutrients through the soils and stuff. So maybe we'll keep those around. But there's like a million named species. There may be five million, ten million out there, we don't know, 30 million named uh species of insect.
Uh the rest of them are a bit pointless, we don't have to worry about them. So you could make it a very kind of selfish kind of human-centric thing. Um, but I think that would miss the kind of broader story of insects. Uh their intrinsic importance, obviously. They they deserve to be on this planet just like us.
They were here before us, they're probably going to be here after us. They were here before dinosaurs, they're off they survived the extinction of the dinosaurs as well as four other mass extinctions of this world. So yeah, I I did kind of had to straddle those two kind of points of, you know, you know, we they're really cool and we, you know, they they do important things, they have their own value though, and uh, you know, we we can't be motivated to save them for selfish reasons, but hopefully we'll uh we'll we'll act for for more altruistic reasons on that too. So getting to bees, right? And you deal a lot with the problems with bees and bee crashes and uh but the bee itself is also problematic in the sense that most of a lot of the places it doesn't belong where it is, and it completely screws with local pollinators.
I don't know if anyone still reads. I remember years ago I read a book called uh what is it called? The Forgotten Pollinators. I don't know if anyone still reads it or if it made a splash, but it was the first book that was like it's in 1996 or something, that was like P.S. We all love bees, but uh it's wiped out like a bunch of pollinators because it's so freaking good at just taking whatever nectar is around that like you know, this little species of uh solitary bee can't compete with it and it just nukes it.
Honey bees, let's be clear, honey bees about yeah, yeah. European honeybees, yeah, European. Not like not like you know, melopona bees or anything like European honeybees, yeah. That's right. Yeah, again, that's a kind of double-edged sword because a lot of the kind of campaigns to save insects have been based on what people know.
What do people know? They know bees, and what do bees look like? They've got uh black and uh yellow stripes on them, they make honey and they buzz around and they live in hives, and beekeepers dressed in funny white outfits look after them. Those are honey bees and they're kind of an imported species, they're not native to the US. Uh, and they're essentially using that as an agricultural input in the US.
I mean, a beekeeper used to be this kind of hobby, right? It used to be this thing where you kept a couple of hives, you made some honey, smeared on your toast. A lot of fun. Now most beekeepers are kind of contractors, they're contract workers who have to kind of take bees around the country polluting blueberries and almonds and citrus and all that kind of thing. Just to keep the to keep the the agricultural system running.
Food security in the US is dependent on honey bees. Um so it's they're very important, um, but they have humans to look after them, uh, to artificially keep their numbers up. And like you say, they have detrimental impacts. When we were talking before about this kind of craze of urban beekeeping, people think they can help by kind of getting a honey bee hive, putting it in an urban environment. Um, I mean, you can do that, but all that's going to do is vacuum up all the kind of food around around you because there's you know 40, 50,000 bees in a hive, uh leaving nothing for all the wild native bees, bumblebees, there's only maybe 30, 40 in a nest.
There's lots of solitary b bees, there's thousands of species of bees. Most of them are solitary bees like mason bees, these kind of leaf cutter bees that um live by themselves. Uh, they're left with no food because honey bees strip that all from the environment. So we it's not it's not hugely helpful to kind of just boost honey bee numbers, just to keep honey bees. It's not uh it's not doing it's not doing much for the kind of broader ecology of uh of the country.
Right. Well, uh, that's what I got out of your book. There is no big win. No. I know.
I'm sorry. I know we're we're in kind of times where there's not a shortage of problems, and I'm sorry to lay another one on us, but yeah, there's no quick, there's no quick way out of it. Hey Dave, I'm curious, you know, to ask, um, uh do we lend a hand in those African wasps that are been killing the uh the honey bees? The ones that have been I guess what they do is they they they they look and resemble uh honey bees, but they're not, and they vibrate and attack them, I think four or five at a time to kill the bees. Do you know about these?
Yes, yes, they were kind of uh they came in via shipping, didn't they? They're another kind of invasive speech. I mean, do does does do humans like help to eradicate this wasp to let the honey bees uh uh live, or do we let the nature take its course? Uh I mean, I guess for our own kind of uh food security and our own imperatives, we're gonna intervene on that. And I can see that that's you know, sensible.
Uh the same with uh the um uh the murder hornet, so-called murder hornet that's popped up in Washington State and British Columbia and Canada, um, which they they behead bees, and there's a kind of huge effort kind of being mobilized there to find and eradicate these nests. And I I like I can I can understand that. I can understand that effort is being made, it makes sense on certain levels. Uh I only wish that we made such an effort to protect all the all the other species of bees that actually um that help us uh that actually help hold aloft life. You could tell when you read the book that uh Oliver is a great lover of the bumblebee.
I love a bumblebee, yeah. They're great. What are those giant ones? You ever see that we used to get when I was a kid, we used to get that you can't even believe that they can fly. They look like they're giant.
They look like a child's drawing of a bee. They're huge. In a big furry coat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I know nothing about them except for like I was never worried about them. They never really like the big kind of cuddly bears of the insect world, don't they? Yeah. I mean, I stayed away from them.
I didn't like go and try to get one. Yeah. But I wasn't like, oh my God. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.
They don't they don't engender panic like a wasp does or something. No, I gotta hit them. No, I'm not supposed to. Yeah, no. I hate them.
Yeah, no, no, I understand. But yeah, Bumblebees are great. I mean, they're very intelligent as well. They can be taught to play soccer. They can uh understand the concept of zero, they can't.
That's saying something more about soccer, isn't it? I'm just kidding. I'm just messing with uh okay. So when we're talking about um pollination, there's a a lot of stuff that impacts us directly when we lose pollinators. It isn't just is it alternative forms, human-led forms of trying to get rid of pollination and 'cause part of the thing that you deal with is that you're like, hey, listen, I realize that we have billions and billions of people to feed.
Yeah. And that uh this problem's only getting worse, and that nobody says that the answer is, well, what we need to do is let a whole bunch of people die, right? Because some people will say that. I think they're crazy people, but some people will say, yeah, the answer is it's a whole bunch of people are gonna die in the next couple of decades. Right.
You know what I mean? Darwinian response. Yeah, right. I don't think that's an appropriate response to have when we're talking about people. Uh but you know, a lot of people will say that.
So you you know, you're not s saying that you realize that these are problems. Um, and then you go to try to kind of suss out all the stuff. You're like, look it. There's been a bunch of studies that if you pollinate something uh via a mechanism that was int intended by the evolutionary biology of the of the plant with its particular pollinator, your yields are often much higher than when you try to either handsex something uh or as you you know, tongue in cheek, too well not tongue in cheek, they're really trying it like robot bees. Yeah.
Which is kind of just bananas. Yeah. I mean, I love the idea that I can build a robot bee. Yeah. But I mean, the idea that that's going to be the solution is kind of Yeah, it's kind of hubris, isn't it?
It's human kind of like, yeah, we can do you we can do what you've been doing for 200 million years, no problems. Let's let's build a little robot. They'll do it. Yes, you're not gonna do it. Do you want to talk a little bit about like how this a lot of these technological ways to try to increase yield, which is important and vital, have actually decreased yield in certain ways and eventually might cause crashes in yield.
Yeah, sure. So, like you mentioned, um we've kind of settled on one type of bee to kind of pollinate everything, which is the honey bee, because there's so many of them in a hive, you can move them around pretty easily. Uh uh, they're not the best pollinators of a lot of things, like tomatoes, for example. I love them. I love tomatoes.
Tomatoes, bumblebees do do that. So shake their booty, right? That's the whole thing. Yeah, they've got the big hefty booty and they can vibrate really quickly. That's why vibrators, if uh, we can mention such a thing, have been used on on uh tomatoes to to pollinate.
Like ones that were intended for humans. But for for human use. Yeah. All right. Um I did not know that.
Wild, yeah. Yeah. Uh but they they discovered even with I gotta think about that for a second. Yeah, I know. So sorry to bring the tone down.
I mean, I'm talking about this in a agriculture or up depending on your thing, if that's your thing. Fruit and vibrators, that might be your thing. But um, they found even that didn't couldn't really fully replicate what not even a vibrator. Well what I know is that a vibrator can't actually replicate the real thing. Is that what you're saying on my own?
Oh man. So yeah, we we've settled on the uh a kind of bee that can't do it all. Um we've also decided to douse our agricultural land in lots of chemicals, which kills not just the pests but everything else. Uh and we've decided on a model of farming that is this kind of monocultural one crop in a field, nothing else there, no bordering plants, no hedgerows, uh for kind of financial reasons and for the interests of large agricultural companies. Even in the UK, the hedgerow isn't what it used to be.
They've lost half of their hedgerows in the last kind of sixty years. That used to just be a symbol of the whole country, right? Yeah. I mean, there's our effort now to bring them back and field size in Europe and UK is generally much smaller than in the US. The US has kind of uh engineered this model of huge vast agricultural farm farming, right?
You had these huge sweeping fields in Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest. Anyone that's looked out of the window of their airplane has seen it when they're flying. You know what I mean? It's it's it's a ma it's crazy and amazing and perhaps horrifying. Yeah, but it's all of those things, you know what I mean?
But well to bring that like um to bring that back, right? You know, like a lot of the solution for i i it's like look, you're like, listen, our urban sprawl has ruined a lot of things because we don't put a lot of places for a variety of insects to kind of survive. And one of your other points I think is making it it actually doesn't take as much intervention as we would think to make things a little bit better. Right. You know what I mean?
That's we can get back to that in a second, right? But I uh you know, I gather that the majority of the problem is really all of the farmland that we put over to uh use in a way that is completely inhospitable. And so two of them are and and you point out that like a lot of people's methods to try to increase diversity by like saying, okay, you have to grow three different crops over the course of however many years ain't really cutting it. It's not real. Yeah, it's not real diversity.
It's still just, you know, three different kinds of potato chip instead of just instead of uh uh you know a balanced diet, if you want to use the metaphor of of different plants as as diet for um so in a f in a farmland situation, right? I mean, aside from the pesticides, which we'll get to in a minute, which I think is really interesting, uh you know, this this idea that you can keep your yields as high uh because we need to feed so many billions of people. It's like most of the studies, it seems where they have positive outcomes by increasing biodiversity are done in areas that grow high value crops on smaller plots of land and not on places that grow a billion acres of wheat for to feed a billion people. And it i where where where can those two ideas kind of meet and what's the kind of solution for like these massive farms where we have to literally, you know, three or four countries provide the grain output that feeds everybody. And we're locked into a world where we need, you know, a huge amount of soy and wheat and uh uh corn and rice, right?
I mean, we we that's the kind of basis of a lot of our diets and um uh what we're just used to. So those kind of large at scale um farms do have a place, but they've kind of stripped out everything at the margins that would support insect life and actually help them. I mean, diversity is a good thing in farmland because it avoids a single catastrophic event wiping everything out, right? You have one disease that goes through and it kills your one crop, that's it, you're done. Um and it's the same with insects.
Insects um, you know, we a lot of farmers seem see them just as pests, and they obviously are pests, they're aphids and so on. But um, but a lot of insects around farmland are actually hugely beneficial because they eat the pests and they also help um replenish the soils, they kind of do a lot of good for farmland. So a lot of work has been done in Europe, for example, having these kind of wildlife corridors that go through agricultural land. So you say to farmers, look, okay, you want to plant that one thing, grow that, okay. But at the at the edges, well, you're not really doing anything but weeding, especially in the circular guys, right?
Yeah, you can have wildflowers, you can even grow like herbs and spices. Some of the work they'd be doing in North Africa now is is encouraging former farmers to grow herbs and spices at the borders of the fields, because then that's another form of income for them, isn't it? And it encourages insects back. And once you get insects back, you can um use less pesticide because you've got natural predators of the pests, and you have a more vibrant kind of um environment, and you have crucially that kind of pathway for insects to kind of go through the landscape. Because at the moment, if you're a bee, you're looking out over land, it's kind of like a desert.
Uh, and when you do go to try and eat something, it's kind of poisoned. Um, one one of the scientists told me it's a bit like um, you know, there's nothing to eat but chips, you know. Even if you don't eat chips, you're allergic to chips, all you've got is chips. Um uh to go back to your chip anal analogy with the channel. Well, I got it from you.
Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. But yeah, they um uh it doesn't take much, is what I'm saying, to kind of just ameliorate slightly the the impacts of this kind of monocultural farming model. I mean, it'd be great if that was broken down entirely and we kind of went back a little bit to more diversified farms, but you can do a little bit around the margins just to make things a little bit more friendly. Right. So uh and you uh you know, you get that point.
It's like let's let's do the inner in like the interventions that we can, right? But then on the other hand, like a lot of the huge interventions are like they backfire, right? So, like, you know, Joe, you were asking about like trying to kill a particular thing that once it's once it's in, it's like most of our broad brush kind of interventions tend to be uh have unintended consequences, yeah, shall we say? Yeah, yeah. You think about um how Australia had that outbreak of beetles who were eating through all the um sugar cane there and they decided to import a type of frog from South America that apparently would eat the beetle, didn't eat the beetle, just spread across the whole country eating everything else.
That cane toad movie is one of the great if people, if you have not seen the original cane toad movie, yeah. Uh I forget what it's called. Maybe it's called cane toad. I don't know. But like it remember, yeah.
It it's like from the eighties, I want to say this movie. Yeah. But it's great. Like like it's people who love the cane toad, people who hate the cane toad, yeah, people whose dogs were poisoned by the cane toad. Anyway, but it's great for unintended consequences.
It is, isn't it? And it's also instructive and illustrative of that human desire to go, oh, it's the cane toast fault. I hate the cane toast. Like, who brought the cane toad here? Yeah.
Well they cane toad was just doing what it was gonna do. Farmers do it. Yeah, cane told you, yeah, you can't hate on the cane toad. No, uh, then they have some lovers of the cane toad in the movie. It's a little bit of a spoiler.
Can I give a little bit of spoiler, John on the movie? Go for it. All right. So there's a guy, uh, I don't know, it's probably a defender, but some jeep like some jeep like vehicle. And you're in the passenger can you're in the c you know, the front cabin with him and you s and you s and he's talking, right?
And you could tell that the the vehicle's kind of swerving. You know what I mean? As he's talking, the vehicle's just swerving. And you're like, Wait, wait, what's going on? You know, what what?
And you know what I mean? And then it pans back and you see that he's swerving on the road to pop cane toads as he's going down the the street. He's like a he's like a cane toad murderer. Like a horrible version of Marica or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Great movie. Uh yeah. People play golf with him and stuff. I mean, I don't think I mean I think the numbers need to be controlled.
You don't need to be cruel to cane toads though. They're just doing their thing. You know, yeah. Yeah. You can kill them humanely.
Yeah. Well, Australia is so interesting because, you know, it was uh physically isolated for so many millions of years, and then you know, it's just depredation after depredation of things that were brought. Of course, we have our own here in the US, right? Like the uh all of our trees are gonna die. We're losing all of our ashes now.
We're losing uh losing our hemlocks, we're losing our, you know, we've lost our elms years ago, we lost our chestnuts. It's like Yeah, you've got feral hogs down in the south. You've got those are at least delicious. Asian carp coming up on the Really? Are they they yummy?
All pigs are good. Uh if you don't uh well, you don't eat them, so it doesn't matter to you. No, but do feral hogs taste different to regular uh I think it depends on exactly when they're like, you know, uh uh there's a thing called bore taint. Right. Right from the uh the in uh but uh I've never been a hunter of I've never I've never hunted them, so I don't know how to avoid bore taint.
But uh many people I know who uh eat wild boar love it. Oh okay. Yeah. Well there you go. They're also apparently very challenging to uh hunt because if you if you miss one or don't actually like knock it down, they don't not fight back.
Oh, they'll come for you. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. They'll get revenge. Yeah. That's why I don't know if it's still the case, but like a lot of uh in the movies, if you ever watch movies about people that hunt wild boar, they they used to in the movies like Robert Mitchum did when he carried a uh uh uh he would carry a handgun with him in case he got rushed by a boar because you know once they're rushing at you your long gun's not going to be very right helpful.
You're gonna have to get down the dirty with this thing. In close. Yeah. I think they shoot them for helicopters too, don't you though which would uh reduce the risk. Oh I never thought about yeah I don't know.
Yeah. Uh all right so back back to this uh b back to what we're talking about. Um all right so another interesting thing I think uh in terms of food solution is i uh i is i hopeful maybe one of the hopeful things is is you say even conservative people in places like I think it was Bavaria in 2019, cons very, very conservative people uh are passing environmentally friendly uh laws that restrict what they can do, which is unusual for a conservative group of people to do, because they realize that this is the only way for them to keep in other words, the long term is becoming short term in a way that even people who are acting only in their immediate self interest are acting on. Would you say that's accurate? Right, yeah.
They they could see the long little long-term view and what would actually happen if these declines continued. I mean, this was in the wake of the German study that showed three quarters of the internet's gone. So uh that kind of rational side of the brain kicked in for you know, do we want to go another 30 years and see what happens then? Uh the way with things are going, or should we change things? And they held this referendum and yeah, they agreed to kind of give over about a third of the land to organic farming, which is quite a quite a kind of bold move for like you say, such a kind of conservative pharma-led kind of place.
Yeah. Okay. Now, pesticides. So this is something that I didn't realize. I mean, everyone everyone talks about pesticides.
And most of the stuff in my world that you hear about is kind of uh people buy organic, right? And most of the people I think are worried about the pesticides in terms of their own health, right? Uh that's a lot of what I hear people worried about the pesticides effect on their own body. Uh and then, you know, in the 80s and 70s, you used to hear a lot about runoff, right, into streams and kind of the damage of uh fish and fish eggs and whatnot. Uh what I didn't realize is the intense ubiquity of them, even in other words, like buying organic ain't stopping the pesticides from affecting you.
There's there's kind of everywhere in the way that if you set off a nuclear weapon, the radiation goes everywhere and you can't you can't help it. Yeah. So uh you want to talk a little bit about neonicotinoids, which is a great word, which you shorten to neonic eventually because you just got sick of, I guess, writing all of those letters. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
So they're they're based on uh nicotine, natural pesticide in in tobacco. But you want to just talk about like the immense ubiquity of them and kind of what they can do in non and here's what I didn't know, what the effect of them is in non-lethal quantities. Sure. So this is a kind of class of about six different kind of chemicals that are used as insecticides really. Uh and they you are right to say they're kind of widespread uh in American agriculture and increasingly around the world too.
Um the problem is they um layer in their toxicity in the the land. They're kind of marketed as this this wonderfully um you know successful and effective uh way of getting rid of pests, and in a way they are because they kill everything. Yeah, but you have to keep reapplying. So they're not they don't remain effective. So there has to be this continual kind of layering of pesticides, which is done year after year, to the extent now that uh American agricultural land is 48 times more toxic than it was 25 years ago because of this build-up of toxins.
But cause even though they reapply have to reapply it, it doesn't actually go away. So unlike, and I know you're not a fan and no one is right now of uh Roundup glyphosate, like uh at least that stuff degrades. They say it degrades anyway. But uh and uh again, let's knock it into but this stuff doesn't degrade in that same way. Yeah, yeah.
And yet it's still constantly reapplied. Yeah, and I think the frustration for a lot of scientists who study this is it it doesn't even do the job that well. So neonics, um, they're typically now they're sprayed on places, but more and more now they're coated on the seeds that are sold to farmers. And a lot of the times the farmers don't really know what they're getting. Uh but if they do know, they've been quite heavily marketed to by uh big egg to say, look, you need this, because if you don't have uh these chemicals right from the start point of your your plant, whatever you're growing, corn or whatever it is, um, then you'll have this outbreak of pests.
Um and so uh the neonics are in there right from the beginning, the plant begins to grow. Um the thing the trouble is they're water soluble. As soon as it rains, they're kind of leaches out into the soils into waterways where all kinds of other creatures are. Which is why they have to keep applying it to keep the levels up. But it's leached away, but it doesn't break down.
Right. And the planting season uh uh happens, they leach away. By the time the actual pests arrive in summer, most of the chemical is gone. Right. So they use preposterous amounts to keep the level high enough for the when the actual pests show up.
Yeah, it doesn't match. The peak of the pesticide doesn't match the peak of the pest, uh, which is like insanely annoying to entomologists. They kind of like it's the most annoying thing in the world to them because it's like it's not we're not even having a benefit here. And there's so many studies showing that yields haven't like drastically increased because of the huge use of these chemicals. In some uh some places they've actually declined.
It would actually be better not to use them at all. So there is even in intensive farming. Yeah, even intensive farming. There's little evidence that the chemicals, these chemicals being used in the quantities they are. I think in certain uh instances they are appropriate.
Um, but the levels and quantities they're being used at is uh is not helping anyone. It's not helping us in terms it's not helping farmers in terms of their yield, it's not helping um uh insects and other wildlife, particularly because they're being poisoned. Birds pick this up. There's declines in bird numbers being recorded now because of uh neonics they're ingesting. But let's talk about like microdosing uh neonicotinoids and bees and how it makes them like high and stupid.
Yeah, that's right. So if it doesn't, if it doesn't kill you, it will send you mad, basically. Um they scramble bees' brains, essentially. And uh bees are incredible. Uh sorry to bang on about how good they are again, but they have these amazing logistical abilities, and they go between flower and flower and know where their hive is, fly long distances.
Um and it messes with all that. Bees can't find their way back to the hive. Um they can't um collect pollen and nectar as well as they would do normally. Um they've actually kind of tested this in in labs where they've sliced into bees' brains and analyzed them and um give them little doses and tested them between other bees that didn't have doses of them, and it's quite clear that they um they basically uh become a bit stupid, uh, really, uh, and ineffective, and they may as well be dead really for the roles they're meant to be performing. All right.
So if you want f food, and especially if you want a variety of food, not like monoculture and like robot food. Yeah, uh, we need to do something about the crashing. That's the that's the point. We need to at least pay attention to the problem, even if there are no easy solutions. Yes.
You wanna uh we're we're gonna run out of time, but I want you to talk a little bit about um kind of ways that help that aren't necessarily they're not gonna change the the whole world, but we can help even in places like New York. You want to talk about King Kingsland wildflowers and Newtemps Newton Creek? Yeah. Newtown Creek. So this is the industrial area in uh Green Point uh in Brooklyn, um, where the kind of oil industry had a big foothold, you know, a century ago, uh polluted the hell out of the whole area, of course, but now it's kind of looking to regenerate itself and on top of a former kind of factory, you've got this wildflower meadow, which is incredible.
It's kind of this kind of steel and brick and grey everywhere, and suddenly it's this shock of green on the top of this building, is basically where um this environmental group um has put put this kind of wildflower and it's meadow and it's incredible. It's just long grasses, plants. There's insects kind of humming everywhere. They hit you on the legs and the face, and it's an incredible place to be. And the diversity has kind of come back, right?
Yes, right. You can bring back diversity even in urban environments. It shows that. Right. So just leave connected plots or easily connected plots of a little bit of wild, unkempt stuff at the edges of your farmland, at the edges.
Don't don't put microdosing levels of pesticides to wipe everything out. Uh John, any food questions I'm missing on the way out? Nope, that's everything. All right, so one more one last thing. I'm gonna throw a political bomb at you on the way out.
Even though we're not a political show. One of the interesting things is you say Brexit might have actually helped some of these things because countries who are in the EU sometimes have problems with their own rules getting stepped on by well-meaning but not necessarily good EU general rules. You want to talk about that a little bit on the way out? You're oh god, a Brexit question. Yeah, I mean, Brexit's a pretty much a disaster around, I feel, but they're at least now farmers are able to experiment with different ways of farming rather than set in a in a kind of set way of doing things.
So I think if farming more generally could think more innovatively about how they use the land rather than just in the set model of how things are, that's a good thing. Right. So not all things that are necessary not all things are all but good or all bad. That's right. There's nuance there, for sure.
All right, well, listen, uh uh Oliver, thank you for coming on. Uh go get the book, The Insect Crisis. Is it gonna is it in that kitchen or no? We have it. I don't think so, no yet.
I don't know. We'll see what's going on. Uh and Patreon questions that were non-insect related. We'll get to them uh next week, right, Todd? Next week.
No tangent Tuesday, yep. No tangent Tuesday next week on cooking issues. Thanks for coming in, Oliver. Thanks so much. Good to be with you.
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