As we’re sitting down for the Thanksgiving feast, there’s one thing we should all be thankful for, whether we realize it or not: insects. It turns out that insects are involved one way or another with many of the foods we’ll be stuffing ourselves with. Without those very insects, the dinner table would have a drastically different appearance.
Think about the ubiquitous pre-dinner veggie platter at the family get-together. If you already have seeds of carrots, celery, broccoli, and cauliflower, you can technically grow a batch of these crops just fine. But with many vegetables, insect pollinators help produce that next batch of seeds. Then there’s the cheese and cracker appetizer plate. Being made from wheat (a wind pollinated plant), crackers technically don’t require insects to be produced. You might also think that cheese (being a dairy product) is also unaffected by insects. However, insects play a role in the production of alfalfa, which is a common food source for cows. Without alfalfa, cheese, butter, and other dairy products would be harder to produce, and could be tough to find at the grocery store. Oh, and without insects as pollinators, we wouldn’t have the almonds on the outside that smoked cheese log anymore.
Some of the items from the main course don’t rely on insects to make it to the table: turkey and potatoes. Technically, wild turkeys can feed on insects as part of their diet, although they can feed on many other things as well. If you’ve recently seen The Martian, you’ll remember astronaut Mark Whatney growing potatoes sans insects to survive, so those mashed potatoes would still make it to the table. Bread and dinner rolls (from wind-pollinated wheat) would still be around. We could also have certain vegetables that can self-pollinate without insects, such as lima beans (who doesn’t love a great big helping of lima beans…). However, some big players on the dinner table rely on insects for pollination, including the many types of squash. One of the most crucial Thanksgiving dishes, the cranberry sauce, wouldn’t be around as cranberries rely on bees for pollination. It’d be a sad Thanksgiving if there were no cranberry sauce.
As we finish dinner and get ready to watch football, it’ll be about time for dessert and coffee to perk up. Unfortunately, that’s where some bad news comes in. Without insect pollinators, we wouldn’t have pumpkins to make the traditional pumpkin pie, or some of the spices, like nutmeg, to flavor it. The whipped cream to go on top? Well that’s one of those dairy products that could be hard to come by in a world without alfalfa. Maybe you don’t care for pumpkin pie and prefer apple, cherry or blueberry pie instead? Those fruits all rely on insect pollinators as well. Maybe we’ll forget about dessert and go right for that coffee so we don’t fall asleep on the couch. Just keep in mind that insects are also responsible for the pollination of coffee plants.
When it comes to Thanksgiving tomorrow, be thankful for family, friends, good health, and also the insects that helped put a lot of that great food on the table.