'Insect apocalypse' more complicated than thought
bbc.com
bbc.com
On the other hand denying a problem delays working on a solution.
Is it "70% of farming" by area of land? That doesn't sound so bad because most farmed land isn't all that great. Can we really say that 70% of the yield of high quality farming land is going to feed animals?
Raising animals for meat on meadowland, depending on the level of intervention used on that land, can actually be good for biodiversity although if those animal are excreting larvicides everywhere they go, it's not so good.
In the English context, the richest habitat with the best biodiversity is a complex mix between meadows, hedgerows, and woodland. The exact historical balance, especially between meadows and woods is hotly contested and an open research topic.
In any case what you say isn't even true: At my local supermarket cucumbers are £1.80/kg, while chicken starts at £1.95/kg for super-cheap chicken thighs with bone-in, up to nearly £20/kg ("Sainsbury's Norfolk Black Corn Fed Free Range Chicken Fillets" in case you want to know), the average being around £5/kg. There are no pork products at all below £4/kg.
As somebody who's also from the central EU, it feels like you are low-balling that price there. You would have to look really hard to find chicken breast as such a low kg price because the average is more like 5 €/kg usually higher [0].
Personally I wouldn't even buy such cheap poultry because with a price like that you can be very certain these animals must be farmed in rather "optimized" conditions. Just like with eggs or milk, these are items I'm willing to spend a bit of extra money to support better and more humane practices.
Trying to do the same with meat is very expensive, did it recently ordering turkey breast, ended up paying 8€ for 400g, thus I reserve it for special occasions.
In that context, your comparison between peppers and chicken breasts is also not that good. Peppers are a very bad vegetable source of proteins, to replace chicken breast one would eat something protein-rich, like beans and those happen to be dirt cheap pretty much everywhere, particularly when buying them in bulk and dried.
[0] https://www.supermarktcheck.de/sb-haehnchenbrustfilet-frisch...
* People are willing to pay x for a pepper
* People do not consume significantly more peppers if the price is lowered
* People are willing to pay y for a kg of chicken
* People buy significantly less chicken if the price goes up much higher
TL;DR it's about price vs volume vs profit margins, and I'm sure they continuously hover around an optimum for these products.
In the US, grain production (and actually farming in general) is highly subsidized, such that you can’t infer much about the cost of growing food from the prices you pay for it.
I don’t know where you are, but the answer is probably local to you.
But in some countries, fresh fruits and vegetables are considered a luxury item. It is especially apparent in Japan, where you are only able to buy top quality vegetables with a flawless appearance and a matching price. Everything else goes to the food processing industry.
Meat is inefficient for calories, but very efficient for nutrients. Food is more than cheap calories.
Everything originates from plants.
Where do you think the energy and the nutrients from plants come from? It comes from the sun and the soil. So if plants are a middleman, we might as well eat dirt and stay in the sun all day.
You're running anywhere from 5-12x the amount of plant calories (depending on the animal) through animals (that need to be fed water in addition to plants), to produce fractions of calories on the other end. It's highly inefficient and that by itself is a terrific argument for stopping the consumption of animal products. Not to mention all of the potent affects on climate change, and the water usage associated with producing meat. We're paving the rainforests to plant more crops to feed back to animals, despite having millions starving to death.
Go search for `animal agriculture inefficient` and read the metric ton of studies if you don't believe me. I can't fathom how you could think that spending 12,000,000 calories of plants to get 1,000,000 calories of beef is worth it "for the nutrients".
I'm curious as to what nutrients you think are so critical here, because literally every vital nutrient can be obtained from plants, and in the cases of Vitamin D and B12, they are both supplemented into animal feed as it is, and can easily be taken in pill form.
The science doesn't lie - you can thrive for a lifetime on only plants, but you won't get far on a lifetime of only meat.
You're right the science doesn't lie. There is no science that shows a lifetime of meat doesn't get you far (there are some that show you excel though). There are questionable questionnaire studies that show association with processed food (and for some reason they put meat in this, further confounding it) has a very small increase correlation with risk of cancer.
Meanwhile all those athletes "thriving" on plans actually saw their performance drop.
I stopped reading after that. No, we are not.
We have long intestines for lengthier breakdown of plant fibers. Not so dead animals can rot in it.
EDIT: Let me elaborate on this more, actually. Humans are omnivores in the sense that they can consume and not die from eating meat, but you will be void of fiber and other nutrients. Everything is not found in meat, no matter how much HN's god Shawn Baker says so.
You can absolutely thrive on a whole foods plant based diet, not destroy the planet, and not pay to support torturing animals, and that is where the fact that we "adapted to be omnivores" becomes irrelevant. We simply don't have to artificially breed billions of animals and feed them all the water and plants, just to survive. We can easily survive on plants alone, and would be much better off for it.
Or we can keep enslaving animals and breeding disease and stay quarantined forever. Whatever gives you five minutes of pleasure though, right?
We don't have the teeth of carnivores, but we don't have the teeth of herbivores either. That's because we evolved to use tools and fire, which meant we could predigest our food, which also allowed us btw to eat tubers. Thus comparisons with other animals is silly.
We aren't like cows, we cannot synthesize essential amino acids from grass, we don't have the gut or the gut flora for it and we don't stay around all day chewing leaves like gorillas. Our big brain evolved with foods high in calories and in paleolithic this meant animal fat and starch.
Yes, you can live on a whole plants based diet, with the proper supplements. Whether that's optimal or not is another question entirely and there are plenty of studies available from African countries showing that children could really benefit from more meat and dairy in their diet.
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> "We're paving the rainforests to plant more crops to feed back to animals, despite having millions starving to death."
References please.
While in the 19th century most of the human population lived in extreme poverty and suffered from malnutrition, the percent of people living in poverty and suffering from malnutrition has dropped to a historically low in 2015, afaik less than 10% of the world population. We are living in the best times of humanity, from all points of view, literally.
Therefore bringing starvation into this discussion, despite the absolutely amazing progress we've made since 1960 (which is around the time when meat consumption went up btw), shows ignorance.
I'm not denying that meat should be more expensive and reflect its actual cost to the environment, but really, stop it with the quackery.
Source: https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...
Two out of three 12-year olds have early signs of cholesterol disease. A meat and animal-product heavy diet, causing disease? Incredible.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2912430
And to address your initial comment, human-created wildfires have been on the rise to make room for grazing cattle and soy growth - to feed back to the cattle. A 3 second search will show you that. How else do you think animals are being fed?
Be honest - you want to eat meat because you like it. I understand, meat tastes good, but it doesn't justify this. A whole foods plant based diet is the only diet proven to reverse heart disease and chronic illness, period. Furthermore, it's bad for the planet and is the direct cause of these pandemics that have plaguing humans for ages, but particularly in the past 20 years.
I don't know where you're from, but where I grew up meat was an occasional food. The diet was mostly vegetables/fruits/grain, with meat from hens/ducks once a month or so, cows and pigs were slaughtered right before winter so there was more meat during winter but still for a family of 5-8 that's like a serving or two a week.
IIRC that's the standard diet for millennia - mostly plants but still occasional meat.
I don't think humans are made for vegan diets, but the current consumption of meat is absurd - we're eating better than kings and nobility used to.
How is it possible that meat can be cheaper than vegetables, it's rather ridiculous. Industrial farms are quite literally animal Auschwitz, yet people don't see the problem with that because they're "just animals"? Funny how that works.
I think slowly raising taxes on meat would gradually lower demand, and soon enough, production. Can't see us getting off meat completely, maybe lab grown will be successful.
I've been vegan for around 6 months now, and haven't dropped dead yet. If anything, I feel the same as I did before - on a vegetarian diet - and before that - on the standard Western diet.
As long as you eat a balanced diet with enough protein, fat, and carbs humans can thrive on a vegan diet just fine.
How many super overweight people do you know who eat all vegetables and whole grains?
There are always outliers but the cliche western 'bad diet' is too much meat, fat, processed carbs and dairy.
I'm a reluctant part-time vegetarian - pizza is my spirit animal. But I cannot ignore the cognitive dissonance I experience with a lot of the 'bargaining' style diets being pushed. My animal brain really wants to believe there is a healthy diet that lets me pile on the bacon and chorizo and still lose weight but the evidence just doesn't support it.
Too much refined sugars + animal products = fat population.
The only nutrients "missing" are B12 and D, which are easily supplemented and/or found in fortified foods (cereals, plant milks etc). And the funniest bit - they only exist in meat because they are supplemented into cow feed. That's right - you're already supplementing D and B12.
This kind of reminds me of the Soviet whaling program that almost wiped out entire species of whales for no reason other than the 5 year plan said that they needed to continue whaling.
We grow so many cucumbers that we can afford to throw away the worst-looking half and still have enough.
The problem is political and economical, not technical.
Or, in more tragic cases, the will to make certain some people can’t eat occasionally exists at the highest levels.
The current method of monoculture and cash crops makes that even worse since that means an area is susceptible to the same kind of weather problems, eg dry summers. If we planted more varied crops some of them can profit even if others fail.
Some pesticides have a flat rate per area, like for example herbicide.
Or less waste.
Certainly not the 0.8 billion undernourished, or the 3.5 million people who have died of hunger so far this year...
Nobody contests the use of pesticides and pesticide research, but we should also not underestimate the role and pervasiveness of these stuffs on much of our planets acreage and soil.
The chemical implicated in bees demise, neonicotinoids, sounds like it actually may have something to do with tobacco production though!
The pesticides also go into the surface water, where they found a link between higher surface-water concentrations of imidacloprid - a specific neonicotinoid - and a decline of birds that feed on insects.
Article in Dutch: https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/toxicoloog-tennekes-had-al-die-...
On the toxicity of exposure time: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03004...
On the decline of insectivorous birds: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13531
https://easac.eu/fileadmin/Reports/Easac_15_ES_web_complete_...
Most neonicotinoids are now banned for outdoor use in the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/pesticides/approval_active_s...
To me, the problem is that people do contest the use of pesticides and they also talk down on pesticide research.
There is a lot of emotion involved with this and although I think Earth Girl Arjuna is awesome, somebody has to put the pepperoni on the pizza.
this is a weird take to have which shuns all nuance and objectivity
Urbanization, i.e. people moving to larger cities? This doesn't seem to make sense and is inconsistent with every other report I read on this topic pointing out habitat loss and pollution from farming. I guess modern intensive farming methods correlate with small farmers moving away in favor of big industrial farmers, but concluding that urbanization kills natural habitats seems like a gross misrepresentation. Industrial farming can and should be reformed to weigh less heavily on nature without reversing urbanization.
The sterile garden type still exists, but has gotten very uncommon. And I have seen lots of europe in the last years. So it is really cheap, to target garden owning people, when you have large areas with monoculture and insect poison everywhere.
But even the most sterile looking garden with bushes and trees is far more insect friendly, than a dead field. Because tons of insects are living in the bushes and trees alone. A big tree can feed colonies of bees, when blooming, etc.
But I am of course also with you, that the fields need to get more small, with bushes between them and if possible, organic.
We need periodical lockdowns. The activity, traffic and pollution is way too intense in cities otherwise, not just for insects.
We need to rethink air-traffic too (mainly as individual choices, because I don't see politics going against it), as someone living near an international airport, it's a massive change currently. Almost all if not all flights are unnecessary
Every summer and spring we are visited in our garden house by bees and wasps and butterflies, praying mantis and hovering moths - all variety of other things, beetles and bugs galore. Our kids have learned to keep bees safe and how to safely shepherd a wasp out the window. We delight in the butterflies visiting our noses, and even in the last week witnessed our pear and cherry trees turn from flower to fruit bud with a little help from our friends.
Then there was a time I witnessed a mantis defending my outdoor shoe from my foot, only to discover its egg sac deeply embedded in the shoes depths, which I of course left alone until a thousand critters made their way into our garden.
It's hard to imagine there are places in the world were such delights are not so easily experienced.
I believe the modern world has done us all a disservice by breeding squeamish generations incapable of holding such critters in their hand, in wonder.
If you're a parent, teach yer kids to love bugs - with respect of course, we have not much use for ticks - and encourage experiments which show the world of insects and their life cycles to future generations.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/26...
That rate will slow down but population will still keep increasing.
More humans = more habitat loss for other species.
Still many countries are >2 but they're falling rapidly too. Its surprising to me to see Bangladesh at 2.1 and India at 2.2.
Places like S Korea 1.1, Italy 1.3, Japan 1.4 you can do the math yourself. (1.3/2)^N means without immigration their populations nearly disappear in 100 years.
Russia 1.6, China 1.6, Thailand 1.5 takes maybe 12 generations to do the same.
I looked at this source https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate which seems to imply that globally the number of children per woman is 2.5 so still much higher than the replacement rate (of course we'd have to talk about more than fertility rate to have a real discussion).
As far as I understand the projections about population stabilization are based on predictions of a reduction of children per woman in countries where this is still very high. It's possible that these predictions are right but they are just that, predictions.
As an aside, I think we should dedicate a bit more effort to try to understand the implications of both possibilities and a bit less to try to assert as certain what is just a prediction.
This is not obviously not only a reply to the parent's point, I just found myself writing a longer reply than expected ;)
For example. Let's say that while the majority of the population (Population A) is reducing its fertility rate a subpopulation (Population B) keeps it at a higher rate. Let's suppose that both populations maintain this behavior for several generations. In this case we would see an initial reduction in fertility rate not leading to a stabilization of the population
Will this happen?, I don't know. What I'm saying is that I feel in these discussions often people place too much faith on their preferred extrapolations ;)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/ [2] https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Pyr...
We can exists in parallel. Mostly. Mosquitos etc. we do not want to coexist in the same place. (at least the blood sucking type, most mosquitos actually do not suck blood)