The next pollinator technology? Blowing bubbles
Issue 175: Researchers in Japan have created successful pollinating soap bubbles. But maybe we should be prioritizing supporting insect pollinators instead.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter that is skeptical of market-based solutions to capitalism-induced problems.
Read yesterday’s dispatch: Is "safely reopening restaurants" an oxymoron?
An interesting story I want to share comes from researchers in Japan, who’ve created a surprisingly successful way to use bubbles to pollinate plants. As has been discussed often recently, pollinator populations are declining. Bees in particular are having a rough go of it, with pesticides, climate change, habitat loss, disease, and more threatening bee populations and, in turn, our food supply. It is, quite frankly, an emergency. Conceptually speaking, there are a couple ways to address this — (1) support these pollinators, and/or (2) find a way to pollinate the plants ourselves.
Although I personally think Option #1 is the clear priority, Option #2 is where the pollen bubbles come in. A few years ago, Dr. Eijiro Miyako, a materials science professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, tried pollinating flowers by lining a tiny drone with gel-covered horsehairs. It was a bit hard to maneuver and sometimes broke the flowers, he told the New York Times. So, he went back to the drawing board — and one day, when a bubble landed on his son’s face, he wondered if that could be the ticket.
Bubbles are gentle, have a large surface area, are carried by the wind, and are significantly less expensive than a fleet of drones. At a concentration of about 0.4 percent, the soap solution Miyako’s team used doesn’t interfere with the pollination process. And it works! Cara Giaimo of the New York Times writes:
They took their superbubbles to a pear orchard, and blew them at each of 50 pear flowers. Ninety-five percent of the flowers later bore fruit. This was the same success rate as hand-pollinated pears but required less time and effort, and much less pollen — about 1/30,000th the amount, Dr. Miyako said.
The bubble-based approach “does appear to have potential,” said Dave Goulson, a biology professor at the University of Sussex in England and an expert in pollination.
But, he added, there are still many things bees can do that bubbles can’t, like collecting pollen in the first place, which is half the job. Dr. Goulson is also concerned that if farmers no longer rely on insects, they might start using more pesticides.
“It concerns me that our response to the pollination crisis is to find ways to do without pollinators, rather than investing our efforts in looking after our environment better,” Dr. Goulson said.
(photo by Eijiro Miyako, via New York Times)
Now, per the NYTimes, Miyako is creating a new solution that’s organic and safe for humans to drink (not that you’d want to, of course). Because even if the soap solution doesn’t interfere with pollination, it’s still dropping trace amounts of lauramidopropyl betaine (a common ingredient in baby shampoo) onto the plants.
Still, I think Goulson’s point stands — technology can be interesting and exciting and full of potential, but it shouldn’t be a replacement for supporting, protecting, and regenerating the natural systems that are breaking down. I don’t think we can innovate our way out of an emergency without also addressing (and eliminating) the factors that are jeopardizing the natural world.
(To that point, I’m also skeptical of calls for individuals to change their behavior that don’t also recognize the need for the food/ag industry at large to end its destructive practices. But, this also doesn’t mean we should do nothing in the meantime — supporting pollinators is something we all can and should contribute to. Our friends over at the Natural Resources Defense Council so offer some easy ways you can help pollinators in your area.)
In other plant news…
Thanks to everyone who voted in yesterday’s poll about whether you’d personally feel comfortable dining outside at this point in the pandemic! Here are the results:
19% of respondents said yes, they’d go for it (wearing a mask, of course!) and 81% of respondents said they would prefer to hold off.
I’ve been thinking more about what we talked about yesterday, about the role of critics during the Covid-19 restaurant reopening phase. After I sent this newsletter, I came across another article from a critic in Austin, Texas — which, as I mentioned yesterday, has had to partially reclose after partially reopening — that is, in my opinion, so deeply NOT the move. The article (“Statesman restaurant critic dines out for first time in months,” linked here) frustrated me so unbelievably that I wanted to take a moment to explain why:
Matthew Odam, a restaurant critic and travel writer at the Austin American-Statesman, delivers an article that feels more like a (potentially dangerous) stunt than legitimate journalism. After several syrupy and honestly self-entitled paragraphs about how great it was to finally be served again, he delivers this passage:
My wife asked our server how he felt being back on the floor and if customers seemed properly cautious. He admitted he’d been a bit reluctant to return to work, as his wife is immunocompromised, but he needed to make money. Wearing masks protects you and other people.
So here, Odam casually drops the detail that this server is essentially being compelled to put his immunocompromised wife’s life in danger so they can have the money they need to survive. (This question, notably, is asked by Odam’s wife — would Odam even have thought to consider the pandemic’s impact on restaurant labor if not for her? Odam also says it was his wife who had “declared” they would eat out, so he positions himself as a completely non-thinking person.)
And then, after the facile non-sequitur about masks, he proceeds to never again mention the server or his family’s medical and financial precarity. What Odam does mention, though, is that his dining companions “endured their own tangle with COVID-19 in April.”
Jeez, my dude. This, to me, is an abdication of the responsibilities of being a food writer, or, like, a human being living in a society. These are not ~colorful details~ to add flair to your story. If you’re dining out with people who “endured a tangle” with Covid-19, whatever that means, and your server literally tells you they live with someone who’s at high risk, you should think long and hard about the harm you could be causing. (Can people who have clinically recovered from Covid-19 still transmit the virus? We don’t know! The CDC is still researching it.)
I think it’s impossible to cover food or restaurants in good faith without considering the people whose labor you’re writing about and benefitting from. Especially for critics, I find it irresponsible — always, but especially during the pandemic — to fail to consider your own positionality. This is not a moment where you say, “Oh well, thanks for bringing me these crab cakes” and dig zero percent further into your own privilege in this situation relative to your server’s.
This tweet from the writer Andrea Grimes sums it up:
(Later in the article, Odam rips on a woman for being entitled enough not to wear a mask, writing, “The privilege wafted off her like the stink of rotten fish.” First off, what a wild turn of phrase, and second, the obliviousness!)
Instead, let’s be asking more questions like these, which make for a more interesting story than describing your crab cakes:
