Could We Still Have Enough Food In America If We Stopped Using Pesticides?

[Spacescifi]

Main Question: Would America have enough food to feed our population if we stopped using pesticides?

Right away I assume prices would go up... but at least we would no longer be eating poison giving us cancer or other preventable diseases.

I would like to say yeah America could feed everyone without pesticides... but only at cost, and a cost I don't think leadership is willing to make given it changes every 4 years. I would like to assume pesticide usage is the product of human greed trying to maximize profits and we could survive better without them.

Or maybe it's just a subtle population control measure? The rich and powerful can afford healthy food, whereas the average man can only get it part of the time.

Or perhaps it is far more simple and simply just capitalism run amuck? Profits matter above all, more than anything else, unfortunately, even human life expectancy.

Then again when you are behind the wheel running things and crunch the numbers you probably see matters a wee bit different. Since the one thing anyone powerful cares about most is staying powerful, and money is power to a degree.

If they see their money diminishing at all... even for the greater good as it were, they will shelve the greater good in favor of self preservation of their power.

So I am sad to say it, but I can understand why pesticides and other harmful practices are tolerated even if I do not agree with it.

America is a social darwinistic society. You either rise to the top at one extreme, or die at the bottom at the other, while someone else profits either way.

 

Thoughts?

[farmerben]

Yes we could easily feed the population without pesticide, but you wouldn't have all the same fruits available all the time at your local grocery store.

[Spacescifi]

4 hours ago, farmerben said:

Yes we could easily feed the population without pesticide, but you wouldn't have all the same fruits available all the time at your local grocery store.

 

That would be a price I was willing to pay if I were the one pulling the strings. I think in general the golden rule is the fairest way to treat others, with exceptions only created out of absolute necessity.

Edited July 14 by Spacescifi

[grawl]

The usage of pesticides is inherently tied to mass production and globalization. It's not only about "not using pesticides", but about a whole lot more things. Let me explain myself :

Mass production
- Mono-culture : It needs pesticides or your whole crop will be ruined the first parasite that goes by.
- Huge crop areas : Same as above, added the bad guys have nothing to stop or at least slow them, like hedges.

Global trade 
Local crops would get ruined by imported pests if you don't use pesticides.

 

Agreed these issues can be somewhat circumvented using adapted crops and applying good agronomic practices, but it they are really hard to put in place, and I doubt they can scale well, except for imported crops.

 

I doubt we can go without globalization by now, so, the only leverage left is leaving the mass-production and abundance ways. That way, we'll need way less food to be produced.

 

[Spacescifi]

42 minutes ago, grawl said:

The usage of pesticides is inherently tied to mass production and globalization. It's not only about "not using pesticides", but about a whole lot more things. Let me explain myself :

Mass production
- Mono-culture : It needs pesticides or your whole crop will be ruined the first parasite that goes by.
- Huge crop areas : Same as above, added the bad guys have nothing to stop or at least slow them, like hedges.

Global trade 
Local crops would get ruined by imported pests if you don't use pesticides.

 

Agreed these issues can be somewhat circumvented using adapted crops and applying good agronomic practices, but it they are really hard to put in place, and I doubt they can scale well, except for imported crops.

 

I doubt we can go without globalization by now, so, the only leverage left is leaving the mass-production and abundance ways. That way, we'll need way less food to be produced.

 

I think the powers that be have other issues as higher up on their priority list, and pesticides is not even on it... or if it is, waaay at the bottom.

 

Like most things fixing it would cost money (increase taxes) and Americans are easy to sway into caring about other issues anyway.

[cubinator]

We should eat the bugs too.

Also, parasitoid wasps are helpful in controlling insect pests, when they can be found. No poison required, but we don't have a wasp for every pest yet.

Edited July 15 by cubinator

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, cubinator said:

We should eat the bugs too.

Nope.  Chickens eat bugs.  I eat eggs and chickens.  Why wouldn't I leverage the chicken's ability to preprocess things like chitin?  Silly idea, and anti-science

9 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

The rich and powerful can afford healthy food, whereas the average man can only get it part of the time.

Push your local politicians to allow keeping chickens if you have local ordinances against it.  Chickens eat ticks and all kinds of bugs.  They have fantastic dinosaur-bred predator eyes that can pick out a flea in the grass of your yard and peck it out faster than it can escape.  They are bug eating machines.  If you don't want to slaughter chickens just eat the eggs.  Poor people have kept chickens all over the world for centuries.  If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

Edited July 15 by darthgently

[Nuke]

depends on whether or not you bought hannibal lecter's cookbook.

that said pesticides dont bother me, im more disturbed by the process used to remove gluten from wheat. i go shopping and everything is x/y/z free. like they are removing essential ingredients, and another process that we, the people in the kitchen, doesn't get to control. organic is just an excuse to make you pay 20% more. most of the waste comes from efforts to make useless empty calorie snacks that are killing us anyway. learn to cook and eat real food. its as simple as that.

Edited July 15 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

+ =

Fresh toastsquitoes every summer morning!

 

They should combine 2-in-1.

[TheSaint]

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

depends on whether or not you bought hannibal lecter's cookbook.

that said pesticides dont bother me, im more disturbed by the process used to remove gluten from wheat. i go shopping and everything is x/y/z free. like they are removing essential ingredients, and another process that we, the people in the kitchen, doesn't get to control. organic is just an excuse to make you pay 20% more. most of the waste comes from efforts to make useless empty calorie snacks that are killing us anyway. learn to cook and eat real food. its as simple as that.

This. There are far more people dying from processed food/obesity than pesticides.

[kerbiloid]

We are already using the pesticides for a century.
Several generations of humans are grown on the pesticide-rich food.

What if the humans not just got used to the pesticides, but the pesticides are an integral part of their normal metabolism?
What if without the pesticides the humans will suffer from abstinence?

Edited July 15 by kerbiloid

[K^2]

14 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

We are already using the peticides for a century.
Several generations of humans are grown on the pesticide-rich food.

What if the humans not just got used to the pesticides, but the pesticides are an integral part of their normal metabolism?
What if without the pesticides the humans will suffer from abstinence?

Great point. We should bring back lead in gasoline and water pipes too. There is absolutely no way whatsoever to tell if it has any negative impact, and what if it does something good for you? After all, so many generations in the past had to live with lead pois... I mean, with lead in their diet.

Fortunately, we do have pretty good research, and thanks to that, have gotten rid of many pesticides that were particularly dangerous. DDT comes to mind. In addition, a lot of genetic modification has been used to increase our crops' pest resistances, greatly reducing the need for pesticides in a lot of cases. All in all, we're actually doing pretty well on that front. The pesticides we are still using are far less harmful, many crops require less pesticide use, or even none at all, and we've even used sterilized releases of certain pest insects to curb populations instead of relying on chemicals.

[kerbiloid]

2 minutes ago, K^2 said:

We should bring back lead in gasoline and water pipes too.

When the silver spoons aren't prohibited, why not? Nobody licks the toxic lead pipes, but it's culturally promoted to use the toxic silver cutlery.
While the silver concentration limit in water is 0.05 mkg/l, and the lead is 0.03 mkg/l.

So, the silver spoon lickers may not care of the lead pipes. The pipe is far, the spoon is inside.

The "born with a silver spoon in your mouth" literally means "post-natal chronic intoxication with heavy metal ions", literally an equivalent of "mad hatter", just with the silver instead of mercury.

8 minutes ago, K^2 said:

After all, so many generations in the past had to live with lead pois... I mean, with lead in their diet.

In our city the aqueduct was always ceramic since late XVIII, and never was lead. So, we are nice and healthy.
So, it's to be addressed to the Parisians, covering the burnt Notre Dame with lead roof again.

Also why spend the lead on the gasoline, when you can remove the detonation with ethanol admixture, which is much cheaper and produced from low-quality grain and potatoes.

17 minutes ago, K^2 said:

a lot of genetic modification has been used to increase our crops' pest resistances, greatly reducing the need for pesticides in a lot of cases.

Enslaving the users by M-nto and other modified grain manufacturers, because the modified crops aren't necessarily as viable as the natural ones.

19 minutes ago, K^2 said:

we've even used sterilized releases of certain pest insects to curb populations instead of relying on chemicals

I've quoted this to our balcony friends:

Spoiler

Had a good laughter together.

What about making GMO spiders? The karakurts are sending hello from the Central Asia, where they were being yearly genocided by chemicals from planes.

What about hundreds of pest plants? Modifying the crops to resist them all? Or seeding friendly GMO pests?

P.S.
Btw, @cubinator, what if study producing food from those bugs from the picture above instead of innocent crickets?

We have this scum around a lot for free, and turning them from pests into a cattle food would be enormously great.

[Nuke]

ive more than once held my solder in my mouth while my hands were otherwise occupied. you can have my 60/40 when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.

 

*double checks to make sure i spelled solder right*

[Nuke]

6 hours ago, darthgently said:

Nope.  Chickens eat bugs.  I eat eggs and chickens.  Why wouldn't I leverage the chicken's ability to preprocess things like chitin?  Silly idea, and anti-science

Push your local politicians to allow keeping chickens if you have local ordinances against it.  Chickens eat ticks and all kinds of bugs.  They have fantastic dinosaur-bred predator eyes that can pick out a flea in the grass of your yard and peck it out faster than it can escape.  They are bug eating machines.  If you don't want to slaughter chickens just eat the eggs.  Poor people have kept chickens all over the world for centuries.  If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

in addition to the chicken thing, idk why everyone is anti-beef all the sudden.  cows and grasslands go together like bacon and cheeseburgers. they cut the grass and fertilize your lawn for you, providing native habitat for grassland dwellers, birds, etc. free range cattle are happier and taste better. ive even herd there were experiments with gmo cows with reduced methane emissions (il let myself out). 

[kerbiloid]

It's an interesting moral dilemma: is it better to kill one cow or a hundred of chickens to get same amount of meat.

(Let alone the countless bug personalities to be massacred instead of them.)

P.S.
GMO rodents which ignore the crops, but eating pest bugs would be a thing instead of the insecticides and mousocides.

Hedgehogs. Dreadful GMO hedgehogs should replace mice in the fields. Or snakes.

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

It's an interesting moral dilemma: is it better to kill one cow or a hundred of chickens to get same amount of meat.

(Let alone the countless bug personalities to be massacred instead of them.)

P.S.
GMO rodents which ignore the crops, but eating pest bugs would be a thing instead of the insecticides and mousocides.

Hedgehogs. Dreadful GMO hedgehogs should replace mice in the fields. Or snakes.

There is no fundamental moral dilemma.  The gnostic tradition leading to human - nature dualism is flawed.  We are part and parcel of nature.  But Greg said it better

 

 

[TheSaint]

Not to mention the fact that there is a very large fraction of the Earth's landmass that is not suitable for farming but is suitable for cattle grazing. (I should know, I live in the middle of a large parcel of it.) Eliminating beef and other grazed meat from our diet completely removes that land from the food production chain and actually reduces the total amount of food available. So the argument against feed lots and other sorts of industrial cattle farming can be made, but the argument to remove cattle completely from the diet is not based on clear thinking.

[KSK]

34 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

Not to mention the fact that there is a very large fraction of the Earth's landmass that is not suitable for farming but is suitable for cattle grazing. (I should know, I live in the middle of a large parcel of it.) Eliminating beef and other grazed meat from our diet completely removes that land from the food production chain and actually reduces the total amount of food available. So the argument against feed lots and other sorts of industrial cattle farming can be made, but the argument to remove cattle completely from the diet is not based on clear thinking.

Agree on both points, and would add sheep grazing in the UK as an equivalent. The amount of fertilizer and other inputs required to convert such marginally productive land into useful arable land is not environmentally friendly. Source, working for a public research institute a couple of jobs back, who were doing a lot of research into land use, food and water security and sustainability.

16 hours ago, cubinator said:

We should eat the bugs too.

We already do, depending on who you mean by we. Apparently, insects are part of the traditional (aka, not prompted by a need to find alternatives now to mitigate climate change or whatever) diet of about 2 billion people. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55603-7,

Hopefully a Nature article is a reliable enough source. From that article:

"Over 1900 insect species are considered as forming part of the traditional diets of at least two billion people^13,30,31,32, representing approximately 30% of the world’s human population. It is estimated that people in 113 countries consume at least one insect species³³, and Africa, Latin America, and Asia have a well-established history of insect consumption."

Not quite seeing what's anti-science about eating bugs.

[Terwin]

Caffeine, Capsaicin, Nicotine, urushiol, and many of the spices we use are all ways plants try to limit what eats which parts of the plant (Caffeine and nicotine are to stop bugs while capsaicin and urushiol are to stop mammals).

Humans delight in eating all sorts of pesticides(some even pointed at mammals).

So long as they are using pesticides with human-safe LD50 numbers, I do not see a problem.

(The pest control company I use for my home and yard uses stuff that has a LD50 in mammals higher than table salt, as in eating equal amounts of the pesticide and table salt will kill you from the table salt first)

 

I still wash my produce however, but more out of a concern from dirt or the contaminants  over any pesticide concerns.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, KSK said:

Agree on both points, and would add sheep grazing in the UK as an equivalent. The amount of fertilizer and other inputs required to convert such marginally productive land into useful arable land is not environmentally friendly. Source, working for a public research institute a couple of jobs back, who were doing a lot of research into land use, food and water security and sustainability.

(Just desperately looks at the map of the salted and soilless Mars, comparing it to the poor British plowlands.)

2 hours ago, KSK said:

18 hours ago, cubinator said:

We should eat the bugs too.

We already do, depending on who you mean by we

We - don't. Because we don't stick our head out from the running car.

2 hours ago, KSK said:

"Over 1900 insect species are considered as forming part of the traditional diets of at least two billion people^13,30,31,32, representing approximately 30% of the world’s human population. It is estimated that people in 113 countries consume at least one insect species³³, and Africa, Latin America, and Asia have a well-established history of insect consumption."

This doesn't stop them from rapidly burning out the jungles with hack-and-slash agriculture.
And also the Chinese peasants, who are used to consume the delicious insects, still prefer herding pigs and chickens for food.

Though. of course, all humans were insectivorous some time ago.

Spoiler

Several tens millions years ago.

 

Edited July 15 by kerbiloid

[darthgently]

Maybe it was moving away from an insect diet that led the lemur-hobbits toward the possibility of more complex brain chemistry and organization.  Like certain fatty acids?  From fish especially.  Who knows?  I'm not taking a chance.   Now I want a steak

[darthgently]

20 hours ago, Nuke said:

depends on whether or not you bought hannibal lecter's cookbook.

that said pesticides dont bother me, im more disturbed by the process used to remove gluten from wheat. i go shopping and everything is x/y/z free. like they are removing essential ingredients, and another process that we, the people in the kitchen, doesn't get to control. organic is just an excuse to make you pay 20% more. most of the waste comes from efforts to make useless empty calorie snacks that are killing us anyway. learn to cook and eat real food. its as simple as that.

It took me awhile to puzzle out that all the non-trans fat being removed from low fat versions of food for decades, which cost the same or more than the normal version, was being used in other products that were sold.  It was like getting people to believe that shirts only need two buttons up the front but still charging for six or seven buttons, then selling the "extra" buttons elsewhere as designer craft beads in another market.

[Nuke]

4 hours ago, darthgently said:

Maybe it was moving away from an insect diet that led the lemur-hobbits toward the possibility of more complex brain chemistry and organization.  Like certain fatty acids?  From fish especially.  Who knows?  I'm not taking a chance.   Now I want a steak

im the smart one in my family, im also the biggest carnivore. coincidence, i think not.

13 hours ago, darthgently said:

There is no fundamental moral dilemma.  The gnostic tradition leading to human - nature dualism is flawed.  We are part and parcel of nature.  But Greg said it better

 

 

best application of the hannibal lecter cookbook imho. fish > human. peta member = human. therefore the ethical thing to do is let the fish live and eat the peta member.

[darthgently]

7 hours ago, KSK said:

Agree on both points, and would add sheep grazing in the UK as an equivalent. The amount of fertilizer and other inputs required to convert such marginally productive land into useful arable land is not environmentally friendly. Source, working for a public research institute a couple of jobs back, who were doing a lot of research into land use, food and water security and sustainability.

This is crucial.  Many activists like to speak in terms of plants being more "efficient" than livestock.  But that assumes that the meat is the only output.  Which is silly.  The "inefficiency" goes back into the soil as manure and rebuilding soil is a common good.  Nothing is really ever "wasted" forever in a planetary ecology.

In reply to the general thread:

Doing without pesticides would be a challenge.  But doing without nitrogen fertilizers would be very hard at this point.

Edited July 16 by darthgently