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 newsstands studios, not joined as usual we just asked you to hammer Lopez she's on an aeroplane, but I am joined with John customer service extraordinaire How you doing? Doing great right stars on an airplane

right now? I believe so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Traveling to fancy faraway countries,

fancy faraway countries. Buy me a ticket on an aeroplane we do have Joe Hasan 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 in different?

Oh, no much. My son is kicking ass right now. And yeah, all about it's all about the praise for him. Now. I got to turn five months,

five months. Now you have to refresh me. So five months. The smarts aren't the smiles aren't fart smiles anymore. They're real smiles at this point.

They're real smiles are now nice. It's just learning to give kisses to which is amazing.

Oh, nice. Yeah, no, I love it. Where are you in the in? Where have people settled on solid food? It changes every year, every 10 seconds what people are supposed to do with their with their kids. We're moving

into solid foods or a medley of a mix of formula. And then, like, you know, a pseudo liquid food in about six months. Like pseudo liquid? Yeah. Well, it's, you know, slightly viscous. It's not really. Yeah, yeah. Sludge. Yeah,

yeah. Yeah. You know, you know how like, sometimes people buy quote, unquote, like greens. They used to buy greens and then juice the hell out of them to give them to their kids. And then they would give their kids nitrate poisoning. Yeah, 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, 20 and 17. I've seen plenty people raise kids. There are no right answers. Just try not to feel guilty. There are no right answers. 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 we got Jackie molecule's who's along with John is running the discord right now. And if you're a Patreon person, you can listen live or else you know, wait till Friday. But Jack, how you doing?

Good. Hanging in LA? Oh, you're back? Because I don't know. Yeah, I had a weird urge to make jumble. If for some reason, really. And you don't even like yeah, I only needed like a little bit of tomato paste. Didn't have to open that can when I was done. Like now what

are the good news about tomato combo. The good news about tomato paste Jack is tomato paste lasts for 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 going to make you think that everything in the world has gone bad, but it hasn't. Two things you could do, you could put exactly what happened. I know. I'm Tony when again, 51. I've been I've been down this road a long time. So like, 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 people who are the good people who designed the tomato paste can did not make it. Do you want to? Again, I told you I make most of my recipe so they take a whole can of tomato paste you for this reason. And 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. Oh, yeah, like a two and open. But now in the days of 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, I do worry that someone in a sorting plant somewhere is going to I guess they deal with cans all day. So so probably is not going to I'm probably not going to be the thing that drives them over the edge. All right. So I'm glad you got to have that little conversation Jack. But today we have a special guest on the radio. Oliver Millman now Millman one l not like so not how're you doing?

On? Well, yeah, how are you?

I meant to ask you before we're on the air because it's not what I usually ask about. But it is Milman like, similar to Miller in terms of where the where the name comes from, like does it derive from milling or is it entirely unrelated?

Unknown provenance. I always assumed Yes. And we just became pretentious and dropped to one of the hills at some point 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, I don't know most of you who hear this are listening at some way later date but it is for you and extremely busy news day and I am not related to what we're talking about today. But today last night is the night and you're recovering this for The Guardian. That the was Alito right. His his stuff was leaked on Roe vs. Wade. So thank you for coming with us on this extremely busy news day for you.

No, not at all. It's good to hop from one crisis to another. Yeah, chat to you, Father.

Let go. So do you normally cover both like so you're the quote unquote, environmental reporter for The Guardian? Yeah. But do you also normally do politics? Or is this just a?

No, I kind of we were on kind of rotors. So I was on the 7am shift this morning. And once you're on that shift, it's 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 going to be writing about abortion in the morning, which you know, is obviously, a delicate area to write about. Different from from the romance or stuff I usually cover, but certainly interesting to dive into those kind of things. But yeah, normally my bread and butter is the environment, climate change. Funny Animal stuff, rare, that kind of thing.

Yeah, so well, anyway. Do they know who leaked it? Because that's crazy.

Yeah, there's two competing theories isn't there? There's 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 get us all ready for this to get the outrage out 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, there may be maybe a bit more clear, because there's an investigation underway into looking into what happened.

All right. So you are here for the book that you recently came out with, by the way, St. Publishers Norton, right? Yeah. Good old Norton. Yeah, yeah. employee. Oh, Norton. Yeah,

that's right. Good guys. Really, hands on helpful publishers. Yeah, can't say many, too many good things about him

true. I also enjoy them, although I owe them a book. So you know, there's that. So the book is The inset crisis, the fall of the tiny empires that run the world. And if you have any questions 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, go to our Patreon, right? Yep, exactly. patreon.com/cooking issues. So before we talk about stuff in general, when you're reading the book, it's actually something that apparently everyone knew about, but I didn't you start with kind of a sight a Silent Spring style of what the world would look like, with it with a dearth of insects, we actually would know insects, right. And so you want to, it's about that. And then about this kind of which I didn't realize huge into, I thought about what you wrote in 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. 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 kind of thoughts, we could kind of dive right into the science or these kinds of scientific warnings, what's happening to insects by thought, kind of before you, you start going to those things, you've got to get people to care. And it's been one of the kinds of challenges of climate change journalism, frankly, over the last kind of decade or so is the, you know, 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 here and now issue and it's gonna affect us all in some way. So I thought the kind of stock is way to do that was to kind of illustrate a world without insects at all. That's the prologue of the book is kind of taken a little bit like you say, inspiration from Silent Spring, this idea of a quietened world kind of nature that has been stripped of any kind of life of it. And also the kind of the work and the insights of EO Wilson this kind of biologist he passed away. Earlier on this year. I didn't know he finally died. Yeah, he did. He was old as dirt though. Yeah. 9293. I interviewed him last year and yeah, he was I mean, he was still quite kind of articulate and but you know, he was guilty getting on

you know, the rule that what they say now is that the more you keep act, what's it called exercising your mind as you get older, the sharper You stay right? Or can yes, if you're lucky.

Yeah. I think he's still he's still kind of was involved in science. He made it

through kind of the some of the crazy controversies that he kind of went through, I don't know, was it 10 or 15 years ago on some of his evolutionary

and someone 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, here's his work. The ants withhold hope, which hope I can never pronounce the guy's name hold Dobler the other guy Wilson so easy. A totally shafted the other guy. Oh, hold Yeah, I can't even remember. I can't remember. But that is that is one of my class. thick books of all time. Yeah, it just happens to be on ants. What 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 definitely dull and terrible writers, but he does actually a very accomplished writer. And he kind of looked at this issue a little while ago, looking at what would happen in a world without insects. And it was kind of really striking to me, it was kind of, well, we'd lost about three or four months, maybe, you know, there would be mass starvation. You know, the world would kind of crumble around us in terms of ecosystem collapse, and so on. And it would be a pretty grim place. I tried to kind of illustrate that in the book, showing exactly what we'd lose and maybe touching on some things that people really do care about. Like there's this tiny image that pollinates, the CaCO plant that gives us chocolate, so these 100 billion dollar a year industry relies on this tiny little image. No one thinks about that when they're eating chocolate, but they will be gone. Ice cream will be under threat. All the kind of lovely fruits and vegetables we like to eat will be under threat. So I wanted to kind of show what was at stake first. First up, that was the kind of first job of a book I think,

right speaking about chocolate in the flyers. 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 their kind of fun, right? Like so. I wrote I wrote down her name, Erica McAllister is your chocolate and fly person. And you have her dressed as a fly on a go kart chasing someone dressed as poop.

Yeah. Those entomologists? Yeah, it's a fun day. Yeah. Yeah, I think appropriately, the fly did catch the poop in the in the race. So that

makes sense. Yeah, I have this, I want to make this shirt that, like, I haven't figured out exactly what the wording is going to be. But it's going to be a fly. And it's going to say something like, Hey, my last stop was poop. But don't worry. I brought you some. You know, and I mean, delicious. Delicious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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, missed, I don't that culturally, something swarming with flies, and culturally, a lot of places. It's the 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 discussing 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 sounds, you can shoot away to yourself, it's fine. If there's like 1000 on there probably steer 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 insects and how that's completely out of kilter with their importance to the world, don't we, we can revile them or we think they're pointless a lot of the time when they're actually imperative to life on Earth. And also the kind of cultural difference between kind of Western cultures and those include of Asian 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 kind of find them a bit bit achy a lot of the time. Yeah, I

was gonna bring I forgot to bring it because I'm dummy but 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. which no one seems to mind being processed through 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 there's a rare honey rare ish out of Austria and I think that you can get you can go online and to Saratoga tea and honey company, which is run by Haley Stevens, one of my friends who used to work with the French Culinary Institute in Saratoga Springs. And she stalks his black forest honey. That is where the honey bees actually collect the honey do from aphids. So the aphids suck out the plant juice, concentrate, trade the plant juice into a sugar rich thing, which is as as high value enough for the bees to gather as nectar would be. And so they can get a pretty much you know, single varietals of this concentrated, like, tree thing for a leaf thing out of it's cool. I was gonna have you taste it, but you know what? I forgot? Oh, damn, that stupid.

I really want that now. Yeah. And I'm thinking about that for the rest of this time. I know. But yeah, he's incredible, isn't it? We were the only species that drinks and other species milk. We're the only species that you know, eats the vomit of of a B on on mass. So yeah, it is strange what we see acceptable and what isn't. I mean, that is wrapped up in the whole kind of cultural elements, 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, we're going to assume that that we had you on to talk about eating insects as food. That's not what this book is about. This book is more about 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 really, you know, difficult answers, let's say, on how to fix these problems. So you want to do, let's get the eating right out of the way. What do you think about it? Did you don't really you go into a little bit but like the eating, eating insects, things like it's, you want to talk about it. Now? Let's get out of the way. Yeah,

sure. Just get out of the way. I mean, there's a little bit in the book on that. The bit, the time I got to that part, it was going to miss the pandemic, so can actually travel anywhere to go to some of these restaurants that are set up around the world. And in the US, that offer insects. I didn't even need to get to a kind of cricket protein bar. I am a vegetarian. I don't know if it'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 the kind of ethical kind of I don't know. morass that I wasn't sure what how to get into I mean, I wouldn't I don't think it would have bothered me that much eating insects for the for research purposes. But you know, in terms of crunchy kind of crickets covered in chili or ants dipped in lemon or something. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's, that's clearly an animal. And I don't need those sir, would have been a bit strange. But

the interesting about answers, they often bring their own acid. That's one of the nice things

tangy, yeah, I mean, there's like 2000 species of insects that people eat around the world. Like I was saying before, it's culturally kind of acceptable, good source of protein, vitamin zinc, so on. And 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 the wild environment is, ironically, you 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 meat for examples. So just in terms of what is involved in terms of water, air pollution, land use, you don't have to deforest huge area, for example, to to raise a patch of, of insects, you can just do it in a shipping container and raise, you know, how many million crickets you want. So that could be a small part of the solution to what? So the kind of bigger issues that I kind of looked at in the book, but it's not something I kind of dwelled on hugely. Yeah,

I mean, anytime someone in the food sector says they're going to save the world with X, Y, or Z. I am skeptical. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just put it that way.

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 though, lobsters you know, lobsters used to be seen as these disgusting bottom feeders in they now think in the early days of following the establishment United States of America. Farmers would crush them up and put them on fields as fertilizer, because they've seen 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? So attitudes do shift. I mean, sushi is the attitude to shoot, Sushi has shifted in my lifetime. Now one of the most probably foods around so maybe one day, we will want to eat insects, so it's not gonna happen overnight.

So funny. Like it's 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 foods of necessity are now the most expensive things in the world. Like, like certain hams. You know what I mean? I mean, it's like all of these things become. It is an interesting is an interesting subject. But what I think will never change is if somebody thinks that they can make a buck by saying that they're going to save the world, they will say it, you have you know what I mean?

And everybody greenwashing Yeah, you put that on your product, this is gonna save, you know, XY 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 No, what's it called a bad place?

It's this nice civil billet on this, unfortunately.

So, John, we had a question about insect farming. You want to you want to hit that one?

Absolutely. From Jared Johnston, I'd be interested to hear all of his thoughts on how to get started farming insects for personal consumption.

Wow, I again, that isn't something I've got into in the in the book but I mean, there are kind of two areas you can get to raise insects quite easily. Like I was saying you don't need much space to raise a lot of insects that is their strength evolute in terms of evolution, they are able to reproduce in huge numbers. repopulate so in terms of in terms of doing that. There are lots of websites, I'm sure you can go to, to find terrarium to do that. Or if you have a kind of spare plot in the backyard, you can you can raise them there there be hotels you can you can you can buy now not that you want to eat bees, but there are lots of different things that you can buy where insects will gather together

you know, it's it's legal now in New York to it has been for maybe 1015 years to have beehives here. Right? Yeah. But it's relatively recent that you're allowed to kind of do it on rooftops. Yeah, it's kind of cool.

Yeah. Yeah, this this crazy verb and keep beekeeping now isn't a you see that? You know, it's become a bit of a hipster thing to kind of. I'm 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 that, you know, like a couple of hives that they may very fancy honey from. I think the Queen has her own honey and their stuff. You know what I mean? It's like, nice. Have you, as a sign from the UK will follow me in the Queen's food craziness that's going on her ketchup.

Yeah. And how she eats a banana as well. Have you seen that now?

But have you tasted her ketchup? No.

I haven't tasted a catch Harmonix ad. I've only seen Heinz ketchup now. Well, so were there ketchup as she's

coming out with the ketchup. Oh, is she? Yeah, two varieties. And she's also coming out with a sparkling wine, which I think might have been grown and can't net because of global warming. I can now grow grapes again and can't and so, I mean, Kent is an amazing place. Yeah, yeah. The Garden of England. Yeah, there's no, brogdale is an amazing place. All right. So back to where we go. We had another question on insects and allergies actually forget maybe they came in on Twitter, I did a little bit of research. There's not I couldn't find a lot of stuff on people having allergic reactions to insects as food, of course, people have allergic reactions to insects in their environment, especially asthma with things like cockroaches, which we'll get into later. But 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 do you know,

yeah, it's they released pheromones, and they kind of kick up dust and stuff, which can trigger people's 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 when we kind of despise them that way. But their actual, their actual threat to us is minuscule. Yeah.

Okay, so listen, we're gonna get to food, but just not about insects necessarily as food, we were now concluding the insects as food portion. Let's draw a line under of the Yeah, of the thing right over. So now, for people that don't know, and count me as one of them. How much of a crash has there been? So like, we'll talk about like the German study that you got released? And also that that guy, what's his name? I wrote it down. Muller, who 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 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 the big, flashy things in environmental world that kind of polar bears the Amazon rainforest, you know, I've been on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, that kind of thing. All that kind of stuff is very sexy. But it occurred to me around kind of 2017 2018. With these, all these studies coming out, kind of one after the other. I couldn't come I have a large research coming out showing these quite incredible insect clients. 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 orangutangs and rhinos. So I kind of thought the public really kind of needs to know more about this. So I started digging into it. And yeah, that the kind of losses are astronomical. I mean, you mentioned the Germans study, they, they crunched all this data going back to 1989. From nature reserves in Germany, not not industrial areas, or agricultural areas, nature reserves, they found that three quarters of flying insects have disappeared since since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany's last three quarters of his flying insects. You mentioned the other study in Denmark. And as pappy Mahler quite an eccentric guy, notice that birds had seemingly disappeared from the air 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, this was to get 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. And I mean, that's, that's, I think, the good shorthand for a lot of people to recognize this because we don't we often think of insects of being everywhere. And 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 and vacation and we had to stop to scrape the with 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 of you know most sparsely populated state in in us driving around for a week, not a single bug, hitting the hitting the windshield driving through these kind of like really remote areas. Nothing. It was kind of really kind of shocking when you think about 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 bring it up in relation, something that we've all many of us seen before, because we know how fish populations have been kind of destroyed. The baseline shift is this idea of baseline shift and of kind of, 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 dragonfly smacking into you like big bug juicy bugs would hit your windshield, like on the constant. Yeah, like, you know, nowadays, you just use the windshield wiper fluid for like, with salt spray, or maybe, you know, dust on the road. But 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 they talk quite sadly about the fact they they don't have the fireflies around. You know, they used to remember the kind of the night sky being kind of dotted up with with fireflies, lightning bugs or whatever you want to call. Which are you What do you call them? Fireflies? Although they're beetles, so it's very confusing. Yeah. So

they are one of the coolest and I've always felt real sad for people on the other side of the Rockies who their their fireflies Don't wait up even in good. Monday. Or last you want to last Yeah. 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 a light around. Yes, part of the light pollution section of your book of things you can do to fireflies.

We've got like the equivalent of the kind of indestructible rat. We have in New York. Yeah, they will survive any environmental conditions rather than say, we've got the Firefly version.

I love it. Because like it's one of the few things here like in a densely urban environment, any patch of grass on the right on the right night. And you know, you'll see a whole bunch of fireflies and it just makes you feel good.

Yeah. And I imagine that you you've been lighting up by that incredible. Yeah. 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. And the kind of classic example of that is the study done down in the Florida Keys where they looked at pictures of people catching fish over the years. And, you know, in the 1950s, the fish they were caught are as big as them and go, current day in they're kind of like maybe a foot. But 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 we can recall what insect abundance was like in our childhoods. It's not the kind of feels strange, I mean, to lose kind of 90% of insects like it did in in Denmark, Puerto Rico knows over rainforests 98% decline since the 1970s. I mean, these are astronomical losses in short periods of time, like, we may have lost 95% of the world's tigers, for example. But we've done that over kind of 100 150 years, you know, hunted them to that point, we were losing insects at that rate over, you know, since since the last time people were wearing fled, fled their pants in Rome,

but it's also the straight numbers and species. I mean, one of the other things in the book, I thought it was striking, one of the things that you bring up is people be like, yeah, right. Look, I have all of these bugs all the time that I have to contend with. And I'm trying to kill on the constant and I can't kill them. 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 especially like Louisiana, Texas, places like that. And they're, they're all the kind of calls are about, which I don't blame people for. It's like, how to get rid of termites. I hate these fire ants. You know what? Yeah. 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, there's some insects you don't want around. But we've kind of ordered our world to the extent that we've pushed nature, including and especially in sex, to the margins of our lives away from us. And that's been extremely detrimental to the things we do want to hang around the bees, the butterflies, things like that. And so

in the book, and we're slowly making it back to food people, so don't worry, but it's like in the book. The other thing that you kind of what's interesting is, what I like is you don't want to come down firmly, you realize that there's nuance in kind of all of these, all of these positions, right? So you're like, listen, one of the tensions is like, why I'd say 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's just like, It's bananas or like that giant Burling 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 weighs over 30 grams, so people keep it as a pet. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you show these as means of trying to pique people's interest in Hey, looks and we're losing a lot of cool stuff. Right? And you have a whole chapter on marks everyone's favorite fluttering thing, right? And I remember what they're like, remember, people don't eat monarchs? Not Oh, 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 steer clear of them.

Right? Every time though, like 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 it from a purely selfish point of view is like what's useful for us? Okay, bees are useful. Because they pollinate, you know, a third of the food, we, 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 help cycle nutrients through the soils and stuff. So maybe we'll keep those around. But it's like a million named species, there may be 5 million 10 million out there, we don't know 30 million name, species of insects, 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. But I think that would miss the kind of broader story of insects, their intrinsic importance, obviously, 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 for other mass extinctions of this world. So yeah, I did kind of had to straddle those two kind of points of you know, you know, they're really cool. And we, you know, they do important things. They have their own value, though. And, you know, we can't be motivated to save them for selfish reasons. But hopefully we'll we'll we'll act for for more altruistic reasons on that, too.

So getting the bees right in you deal a lot with the problems with bees and bee crashes and 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 was 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 a 1996 or something. That was like, PS we all love bees, but it's wiped out like a bunch of pollinators because it's so freakin good at just taking whatever nectar is around that like, you know, this little species of solitary bee can't compete with it, and it just nukes it. Honey bees. Let's be clear, honey, honey bees honey bee about European honeybees. Yeah, you're not like not like, you know, melipona bees or any of the 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 these look like? They got black and 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 honeybees. And they're kind of imported species. They're not native to the US. 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 used to be this thing. He kept a couple of hives, he 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, pollinating blueberries and almonds and citrus and all that kind of thing. Just to keep the keep the Vegara cultural system running food security in the US is dependent on on honeybees. So they're very important, but they have humans to look after them to artificially keep their numbers up. And like you say they have detrimental impacts when we were talking before about this kind of phrasal verb and beekeeping. People think they can help by kind of getting a honeybee hive, putting in an urban environment. I mean, you can't do that but all that's gonna do is vacuum up all the kind of food around around you because there's you know, 40 50,000 bees in the hive, leaving nothing for the wild native bees bumblebees, there's only maybe 3014 A nest There's lots of solitary Billy bees. There's 1000s of species of bees, most of them are solitary bees like mason bees, these kind of leaf cutter bees that live by themselves. They're left with no food because honey bees stripped that all from the environment. So we it's not it's not hugely helpful to kind of just boost honeybee numbers just to keep honeybees it's not it's not doing it's not doing much for the kind of broader ecology of of The country

right? Well, that's what I got out of your book. There is no big win. No.

I'm sorry. I know we were in kind of times where there's not a shortage of problems. And I'm sorry to lay another one on this. But yeah, there's no quick There's no quick way.

Hey, Dave, I'm curious, you know, to ask, Do we lend a hand in those African wasps that are been killing the the honeybees? The ones that have been, I guess what they do? Is they, the they, they they look and resemble honeybees, 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 they came in via shipping, didn't they there and other kind of invasive?

I mean, does does do humans like help to eradicate this wasp to let the honeybees live? Or do we let nature take its course?

I mean, I guess for our own kind of food security and our own imperatives, we're going to intervene on that and I can see that that's, you know, sensible. The same with the murder Hornet, so called Murder Hornet, this popped up in Washington State. Right, right, and British Columbia and Canada, 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 can I can understand that I can understand that effort is being made. It makes sense on certain levels. I only wish that we made such an effort to protect. Well, you have a species of bees that actually the helpers that actually helped hold off life.

And you can tell when you read the book, that Oliver is a great lover of the Bumblebee

or love a bumblebee. Yeah, like, right.

What are those giant ones 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 yeah, they're giant. They look like a child's drawing of a bee. They're huge. And big fairy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know nothing about them. Except for like, I was never worried about them. They didn't really

like the big kind of cuddly bears of the insole world on there. I mean, I

stayed away from them. I didn't like go and try to get one. But I wasn't like, Oh my god. You don't I mean,

yeah, yeah, they don't. They don't engender panic, like a wasp does

gotta hate them. I know. I don't know. No, not supposed to

hate them. Yeah, no, I understand. Yeah, bumblebees are great. I mean, they're very intelligent as well. They can be taught to play soccer. They can unsend the concept of zero they can saying something

more about soccer, isn't it? I'm just kidding. I'm just gonna say. Yeah, just plain. Okay. So when we're talking about pollination, there's 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 part of the thing that you deal with is that you're like, Hey, listen, I realized that we have billions and billions of people to feed. Yeah. And that this problem is 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, is it's a whole bunch of people are gonna die in the next couple of decades. Right?

I mean, are we in response? Yeah, right.

I don't think that's an appropriate response to have when we're talking about people. But, you know, a lot of people will say that. So you know, you're not saying that you realize that these are problems. And then you go to try to kind of suss out all the stuff you're like, look at, there's a bit of a bunch of studies that if you pollinate something, via a mechanism that was 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 hand sex something, or, or as you know, tongue in cheek, without telling cheat. 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 Bay. Yeah. But I mean, the idea that that's going to be the solution is kind of,