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Comment by sampo | Hacker News Reader

> Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own?

All plants that, in the nature, tend to get eaten by insects, naturally produce pesticides against their pests. Humans have bred super-edible, non-pesticide plants for cultivation, and insects are happy to attack these. Now we are bringing back into crop plants some of the natural defenses that wild plants have always had against the insects.

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insect populations are declining rapidly and are also in need of protection. we're probably going to have to start eating bugs for survival when all the animals are dead, since bugs are one of the most efficient sources of protein, so i'd personally be wary of telling the bugs to fuck off just so we can save the crops.

If insect populations are dwindling and in need of protection, why would we suggest people eat them? Wouldn’t that accelerate their demise?

Also, most folks are not protein deficient, but they are not getting enough fiber. https://www.vox.com/2019/3/20/18214505/fiber-diet-weight-los...

i didn't say that we should eat bugs because insect populations are declining. i said we are going to have to start eating bugs anyway (e.g. there are no more wild fish), and also that insect populations are declining.

Understood. I think most people would start eating plants for protein before they resort to insects unless the insects are processed beyond recognition and relabelled. :)

If we start eating insects, we will start farming them. But most of the insects we’re talking about as food sources are not primary pollinators.

And that’s the important distinction that your question raises. Increasing the total biomass of insects won’t help with the pollination problem if we’re only boosting non-pollinator species. It will not help the situation with insecticides and plants.

We'll have the same problem that salmon farms and honeybee wranglers have now: so many parasites that they transfer to the wild populations.

I mean, I still think we should farm insects, but as a more natural substitute for corn for our omnivore meat sources.

Yeah, I haven’t looked into that but there’s no reason to expect otherwise. Speaking broadly, farming optimizes for output and disregards the ecosystems that the farms are a part of. For each farmer, this is okay; it works for them for now. Taken as a whole, it is not okay and contributes to bigger problems later (sometimes for earlier values of later).

A greater understanding of farming trade-offs when it comes to ecosystems would likely obviate the need for farming insects in the first place. High up on the list is eliminating factory farms, and IMO all livestock farms and massive monoculture plant farms will have to be deeply scrutinized.

A bunch of organic and permaculture people are discovering that you can feed food waste to chickens. They get a little veg, and then as the rest breaks down the food slowly turns into bugs and worms.

It's morally similar to pre-consumer paper recycling - you're sourcing materials from food services. As long and you can keep the carbon footprint of transportation down, it's something you can use to offset feed corn, which has a large footprint. One place corn wins out is the low moisture content. You're not trucking water back and forth. But the corn doesn't win out on nutrition or quality of life for the animals, nor from a host of environmental concerns.

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