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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Anybody can do a little bit to help insects. It ranges from planting a pot of some flowers, to building an insect hotel, to switching to a more natural lawn or talking to your city council to replace parts of the lawns in parks with more insect friendly meadows.

However, I don't see how I as consumer can choose agricultural products that are friendlier to insects. Organic agriculture also uses pesticides and monocultures. Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea, but other than that how can I judge the impact my food choices have on biodiversity?

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>...how can I judge the impact my food choices have on biodiversity?

You can't, and neither you nor anyone else in this thread has any idea what to do about the insect apocalypse. Seems like insecticides, but we really don't know! Has insecticide use really increased that much since the 80s across the west? Doesn't seem likely. Maybe it is one specific insecticide used in growing X? Maybe some other chemical? Could be monoculture, disease, something that's already in the environment we can do nothing about; maybe it's solar panels and windmills (seriously -it's possible, and it would be ironic), maybe it's a change in drainage patterns, suburbanization, some chemical now commonly used in housing (or for all we know, skincare), changes in automotive shapes (maybe streamlined cars are more lethal to bugs somehow), or maybe insects are all "eff you, stupid apes, we're leaving before the Vogon constructor fleet gets here."

As for individual choice; as difficult as it may be for people to believe after a century of "do your bit" propaganda starting from the first world war; your actions may have no bearing on the matter. Telling people what to do when you don't know doesn't help, and acts as a sort of psychological purity ritual. Like the recycling that ends up shipped to Indonesia and dumped into the ocean; you may be making things worse. FWIIW this kind of crap was often used to give people something to do and distract them from real problems: most of the WW-2 "scrap" campaigns for the war effort were useless.

FWIIW I'm pretty sure the insect apocalypse isn't happening in northern Spain. The last time I was driving around there, the number of bugs on my windshield reminded me of when I learned to drive in the 80s. It is anecdata, but it was striking enough to be worth looking into.

>> Seems like insecticides, but we really don't know! Has insecticide use really increased that much since the 80s across the west?

The amount of insecticides used doesn't need to increase, to cause a mass extinction. A constant dose is enough, if it kills more insects in a given period, than are born in the same period. Over time, this will cause the number of insects to decrease steadily.

Local councils in England are reducing the amount of grass cutting they do on verges of roads - so more flowers (presumably good for insects) and cheaper!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-48772448

More vegetation at the sides of roads also helps to hide all the litter.

Around here they only mow when there's an election upcoming, and every week for the last 6 weeks for some unknown reason.

> Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea

Actually, areas used for grazing usually have more diversity, more flowers and thereby more insects, compared to something like a similarly sized wheat field.

Unfortunately most meat does not come from grazing animals. And if we were to convert the whole meat industry into grazing we wouldn't be able to produce meat in the same quantity, which would mean exactly reduced meat intake for everyone.

That's definitely true. Factory farming is definitely an issue, and in more ways than one.

My point is that we need grazing cattle too, since we (as a species) took the liberty of wiping out most of the naturally occurring grazers and thereby wrecked the balance.

The "easy" way would be to limit the spread of humanity in order to reduce the load on the ecosystem, but that would result in numerous demographic issues instead. Fun times ahead!

Buying meat from animals that actually saw the sun before they were killed is usually a good way of drastically reducing your meat intake because it's much more expensive that what you usually find at your local supermarket.

It's not that difficult or expensive in Germany (and most of Europe), though.

Wouldn’t consuming dairy products still be a better choice than meat in that case? (atleast if we are talking about cows and sheep, since I don’t think more climate friendly meat like chickens and pigs adds that much to biodiversity)

Meat from grazing animals has a lot of additional positive effects re. biodiversity, and preventing desertification. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI (How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change | Allan Savory)

But how much meat comes from grazing? Factory farming livestock is a major consumer of monoculture crops.

A lot. Large parts of the world’s «farm area» is land used for grazing and may not be suitable for monoculture farming. I don’t know if this applies to the meat found in your particular neighbourhood, though.

That just means a high percentage of the area is used for grazing, but I believe OP was asking how much of the total meat produced (by weight?) comes from grazing.

You can feed ten times as many people with the wheat that grows on a similarly sized wheat field.

Or keep feeding just one person and turn the rest into a meadow with flowers, bushes, hedges and trees.

Imagine that.

For the ones interested, here's something in Wikipedia about this topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...

You can't, because "man cannot live off bread alone". Wheat lacks many basic nutrients that meat contains. Calories are not fungible - you can live off meat essentially indefinitely (especially if you eat the organ meat), but you'll rapidly a nasty case of iron deficiency and scurvy if you try to live off wheat.

I feel this fact is often omitted from naive assessments of food efficiency. It's not nitpicking, it's a fundamental law - bioaccumulating reasonable levels of nutrient density will always take more energy that just building up raw calories. Vegans need to eat fatty, nutrient-dense plants like nuts and avocados to survive - these foods invariably have a much worse environmental footprint to wheat. I'd be interested to see comparative estimates of the impact of a "careless vegan" who eats exotic, problematic foods versus a "conscientious meat eater", who only eats locally sourced pasture-raised livestock.

Given that chicken is reasonably good from a CO2/calorie viewpoint, my guess is that avocados flown in from the other side of the world are worse, but I'd also be interested in sources.

I'm very sorry to disagree, in my opinion this is nitpicking. Yes, you cannot live from wheat alone, insofar you are correct. But that was not the point of my reply.

The point of my reply - to flesh it out - was that you need only use about 10 percent of the area required for cattle if we instead consume these calories directly. That doesn't have to be wheat, it can be peas, beans, nuts, beets, potatoes, celery and on and on.

If you are concerned about nutrients, there's always chickens. Chickens are so vastly more efficient when it comes to land use than cattle, it's not even funny anymore. I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

Thanks for your reply!

Edit: I'm not a vegan, by the way. Not even a vegetarian. I enjoy the taste of meat and especially beef. But I'm convinced that the amount of resources we spend on meat - especially on beef - cannot be justified by anyone in good conscience.

>> I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please.

So I think that what you are proposing, in good will I have no doubt, is not a solution to the problem of feeding many people healthy and nutritious food. It's one more way to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps.

At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

> If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please.

Yeah, so what? The rich have always done as they pleased. This will only change when the revolution comes.

> [...] to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps.

Protein is protein. I happily eat heart and intestines and liver and brain and tongue and whatever parts of an animal there are. Just as almost all my ancestors (and yours, for that matter) did. As long as it's free of disease and contaminants, I'm fine with that.

You have to understand that this picking of choosing of "better" or "worse" food is only possible because of an incredible, unsustainable exploitation of our natural habitat. We are killing our own biological support system. This has to stop.

> At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

I don't propose we let any food go to waste. I propose we use more efficient means to produce enough calories for everyone on this planet, so we can all prosper without the predatory exploitation of the ecosystem that is required nowadays.

That said; beef and mutton and pig is way too cheap. How about we actually include all the externalized costs in the price and let the market work it out?

I'm sorry, I didn't understand your comment about my ancestors eating hearts and livers etc. I am Greek and we don't consider offal to be inedible, quite the contrary. For example, we make an absolutely heavely dish called kokoretsi that consists of the heart, lungs, liver and spleen of a lamb wrapped up in its long intestine. I've made a couple of them myself (although it's a bitch to clean the intestines properly because they're full of shit). We make soups from the same bits of the animal, and/or its stomachs, as well as a kind of sausage with its organs stuffed into its intestine, and so on.

We also eat snails, in a red sauce with garlic and parsley (but not any kind of insect).

All these are considered delicacies, to be enjoyed in special times (religious feasts and the like), and with some good wine to accompany them, it goes without saying.

Perhaps this is a reason why I see the matter differently than you do? My people are used to the idea of it not being right to throw out anything when we slaughter an animal to eat it. If (further) Westerners did the same, meat consumption would significantly improve in efficiency.

I also don't understand your comment about "the revolution". What revolution is that?

The comment about ancestry was mainly intended for perspective.

For most of humanities time on earth, we didn't have the luxury to throw away perfectly fine food. We'd eat offal and insects and everything that came our way just to get by. People nowadays tend to forget that.

I quite enjoy snails, although usually with french-style herbal sauce. I also like eating insects, although (I mentioned that before) they are much to expensive.

And they'll have to get cheaper if we want to feed any significant number of people with healthy protein. Because, let's be clear about that, we're not going to do that with beef or mutton or pig. There's not enough land to go around for that, if we want to keep any semblance of an intact ecosystem. Anywhere on earth.

Feeding the whole planet with beef or mutton or pig would mean to strip down every last acre of forest and turn it into pasture or giant monocultures for feeding livestock. And that's not how ecosystems work.

All in all, I don't actually think that we see things that differently.

Have fun!

Edit: Ah, yes. The Revolution bit was a reference/joke with regards to "The Rich". ;)

I'm not poor and I think crickets are tasty. I've had them fried I've had them as flour and I've had them on pizza. All they really need is their Impossible Burger moment to go viral because it's not the taste it's the idea of eating bugs that's unattractive here.

Sorry. I eat crustaceans, which are basically sea insects. But, crickets? Yew.

That said, I've seen some insects that are traditionally eaten. I seem to remember a kind of big, fat, white grub that is eaten in Mexico? Pictures I saw looked quite appetising.

But, crickets? Yew. They're like cockroaches with little violins. No thanks.

Well, that's very similar to what most people thing about eating liver or lung or snails!

I tried fried crickets at a local agricultural fair and I got to say they're not half bad as snacks. As an actual food source, well, I think we need to find other ways of eating them than just eating them fried with various spices.

The day someone creates some kind of mince-meat substitute using insects will be the day insects end up on the menu of the general populace in developed countries. We do love our burgers! :)

I'll just drop this here...

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-think-we-should-star...

I'm having trouble squaring the received wisdom on this with the numbers on this[1] page. Beef is 6 times less efficient than wheat, yes. But it's up to half as efficient as soybeans. Pork is actually a more efficient use of land than soybeans (and almost identical to celery[2], while containing vastly more nutrition). Chicken's nothing special.

[1] http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Calories_per_acre_for_vario...

[2] ((1/(6 inch)) * (1/ (2 foot)) plants/m^2) * (8 stalks / plant) * (64 grams / stalk) * (17kcal / 110 grams) = 3.448 million kcal / acre; planting guidelines from https://harvesttotable.com/vegetable_crop_yields_plants_p/ and nutrition information from https://recipeland.com/ingredients/celery-stalks-13931

Maybe the unsourced numbers on the page you linked to are plain wrong? I know, it's the first hit when you google, but let's do some more "research". I raise you a Wikipedia!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_protein_per_unit_area_o...

According to these numbers, soy beans produce about 16 times(!) as much protein for a given plot of land compared to beef. That's quite a difference.

Thanks for the reply!

Edit: I hope this doesn't sound condescending or suchalike. I'm really interested what the real numbers are, but the page you linked to (while honestly very intersting; permaculture! No-till-agriculture) is somewhat lacking in credibility. I hope we can find a tabulation that satisfies our curiosity and our purpose.

Oh, it's not condescending - like you say I just googled quickly and the beef one seemed close enough to be plausible, so I took a gamble that they were roughly right - To be honest I did the numbers manually on the celery first, then I got impatient. Thanks for the Wikipedia link - although it bears noting that edible protein is distinct from calories, and a good example of the complexity that calorie-focused "bioefficiency" metrics miss.

Glad I didn't offend!

And thanks for the nice exchange - much appreciated!

I generally agree with you - I don't think that you can survive well on just plants. At the same time I think that modern people eat way more meat than people used to eat in any other period of history, and probably much more than is necessary.

For example, the way I understand it, how people used to eat where I'm from (Greece) in the past is that they fed themselves very well on pulses, legumes, vegetables, fruit, plenty of fish, metric shittons of olive oil, and then only ate red meat in religious feasts, where a lamb or an ox would be sacrificed in ancient times, or just roasted on a spit and eaten whole, offal and all, in more modern times.

To be sure, I wasn't saying it was impossible to survive well on just plants (though it's certainly a bit more challenging and risky). It's just that naive comparisons of food efficiency don't tell the whole story. You need a lot of trace vitamins which you can only obtain by 1) taking a lot of a low-density source and concentrating it (like cooking an entire bag of spinach into a souffle to get iron), or 2) eating something which has done the concentrating for you, usually over a period of time. Either way, living off plants is considerably less efficient than "meat vs wheat" would suggest.

"Plenty of fish" is a problematic addition to the diet you describe - that's meat, plain and simple, with all of the bioefficiency loss and ecosystem disruption that entails. It's just less visible because it's underwater.

Depends where you are. What organic allows varies a fair bit around the world. UK's Soil Association is still stricter than the EU. I think US has one of the loosest. Not certain of how they all differ though.

I know Soil Assoc try to promote interculture (two crops at once), field margins and what not, but have know way to know how that translates to reality or just pretty words on a website entirely ignored by the farmers, though I can probably guess. Pesticide use does come with limits on what and how often so they can legally keep saying low pesticides.

I think that's about as low impact as it gets unless you have a decent sized garden as just about nowhere does it the old way any more.

Beyond that I just don't know, which is frustrating for all shopping - we're given no idea of the impact of choices so have to basically guess. It needs to be on labels, but producers would fight that tooth and nail.

I am fortunate in that I have a few acres in a tiny town in Central Europe and I don't need a financial return from the land. I now keep the back lot as a meadow garden instead of the giant cut lawn that it used to be. I made sure that the surrounding farmers were cool with it as I was worried they would hate a "pest farm" on my land, but they understand.

I own an additional 6 acres of farmland which I currently let a neighbor grow wheat on, but they spray all the normal ag-chems. I am looking at options for what to do with that as far as co2 mitigation and pro-bug land. My brother suggested that he could buy trees to plant as a carbon offset for every flight he takes out here. Maybe I could put the land in a trust, and open the tree purchasing to other folks that are looking for carbon offsets?

A large meadow and growing the forest seem like the best options at this point. I would love to hear any other suggestions.

> buy trees to plant as a carbon offset

I know you mean well, but unless you mean planting saplings - isn't buying trees just pushing around carbon offsets to change local figures while worsening global figures due to the cost of moving them?

Yes, sorry, that’s more or less what I mean. I was thinking of getting a few dozen 4-6 foot tall trees to start. But I really need to do a lot of research here and consult some people who are educated in this domain.

Try to create some wetland - a pond, or if there is a stream dam it and flood some of the land.

Unfortunately I don't think that's too much of an option. This is all on a decent grade and pretty dry.

dig a hole and line it to capture water? Honestly, from my anecdotal observations this single intervention will drive insect populations north fast.

You could plant some fast growing trees, turn them to charcoal and bury it. That's good for the soil and captures the carbon for a few millennia.

Why not directly buy the charcoal? It's not that expensive and you can get it done quicker than waiting for trees to grow.

Is there an advantage to turning it to charcoal? I mean the process would expel co2, right? Does charcoal sequester co2 better than raw dead wood?

The USDA publishes their list of approved chemicals.

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1...

I don't understand how reducing meat intake benefits insects. Is there a connection?

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