Amelia Christie-Miller didn’t set out to become Britain’s most persuasive advocate for beans. Before founding Bold Bean Co, she worked in food sustainability, connecting farmers directly with chefs on a platform not unlike CrowdFarming’s own model, only for the restaurant trade rather than the household one. It was there, watching the best chefs in London build menus around pulses rather than meat substitutes, that she became convinced beans were the answer to most of the food system’s problems. The jar of beans she tasted on a hungover morning during her Erasmus year in Madrid gave her a better story to tell than that, but it wasn’t really where it began.We sat down with Amelia to talk about why beans deserve the same reverence as coffee or wine, how she’s persuading supermarkets to give an unglamorous, declining category more shelf space, and why she will never, ever market a bean as a substitute for meat.Is it true you got into beans on a hungover morning during your Erasmus year?Has it always been beans, or did you consider other products when you were starting out?Always beans. It’s the food group. I was in the fortunate, if often depressing, position of being exposed to food system problems early on, but I’m an optimist, and the solution I kept coming back to was simple: people need to eat more beans. When I launched, people assumed I meant coffee. Beans felt dull next to the London restaurant scene I’d been working in. But two years after we launched, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Advocacy Hub chose beans as the campaign they believed would have the most impact across all their goals, and the Food Foundation in the UK made a similar call. The problem with beans has never been availability or affordability. It’s desire. That’s what I wanted to build in a category that’s been commodified and unloved for decades.For people who don’t know as much about beans as you do, why should we all be paying attention to them?Their role in soil health is one reason, and food security is another. If we all had to live off what our local land could produce, we couldn’t eat the way we currently do. We can’t all live on lamb and chicken. We’d need to rely on beans and pulses, and there are thousands of varieties, including ones that grow in deserts, which matters a great deal in a warming climate. Then there’s health. Fibre feeds the gut microbiome, which we now know is deeply connected to mental health, immunity and longevity. Beans are associated with the world’s Blue Zones, the places where people live the longest and the healthiest, and a common thread running through all of them is beans at the centre of the diet. I had gestational diabetes during my pregnancy, and beans were genuinely useful there too, because they release energy slowly rather than causing glucose spikes, which affects mood as much as it does fat storage. This isn’t a fad. It’s the oldest food group we’ve eaten for thousands of years. It only became associated with poverty once industrialisation gave us easier access to meat. If someone set out in a lab to design the answer to most of our food system’s problems, they’d end up with beans. We already have the solution. We just need people to want it.Tell us about the farmers you work with. What makes their beans different?It depends on the bean. Our butter bean comes from a specific region in Poland, and it’s a different genetic variety to the conventional butter bean most people know, closer to a scarlet runner bean, harvested differently. It’s the same food group, but varieties can taste as different as one apple does from another. The Carlin pea is a different case entirely. We work with a farmer called James on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, alongside Hodmedods, who support British growers transitioning to regenerative practices and bean crops. Nobody in Britain really knows what a Carlin pea is, so there we’re not chasing the most popular bean, we’re trying to raise the profile of one nobody has heard of. We got a whole chapter on them into our last cookbook and onto Prue Leith’s television show. Sometimes the difference isn’t that an entire harvest is superior. It’s about which grade of that harvest we choose. The lower grades often go to canneries and sit in warehouses for years. We take the highest grade based on texture and cook.Were these farmers already growing beans like the Carlin pea, or did you have to convince them to take a chance on a crop without existing demand?There’s already a huge appetite among farmers to grow something like the Carlin pea. I have farmers messaging me constantly offering to grow for us. The gap isn’t willingness, it’s that we haven’t created the demand yet, and that’s the work I’m doing. Our butter beans present a different challenge, because for our farmers they’re a cover crop, planted to benefit the soil rather than to sell. Getting them to keep scaling that as we grow means shifting their mindset from “this is good for my soil” to “this crop is worth something,” because we’re willing to pay well for the best of it.Are the farmers you work with already focused on organic or regenerative practices, or does that vary?It varies enormously, and it’s closely tied to origin and culture. A lot of farmers are farming to survive, not to change the world, and persuading them to care about soil health when they have other priorities is a work in progress. I’d like to say every farmer we work with prioritises this, but it isn’t true yet. Our job is to make growing beans commercially interesting, because we know that by default it’s good for the soil. Why would a farmer pay to certify a cover crop as organic when they might need to reach for a pesticide if a particular risk comes along? Our ambition is much bigger than serving one type of consumer. We’re trying to grow demand for beans generally, and organic growth follows from that. I believe money is what creates change. I can be as passionate as I like, but farmers need to make a living. Almost all the beans sold in major UK supermarkets are varieties that don’t grow well here, or exist only as a single, expensive trial field. There’s a cultural shift needed to get people excited about the varieties that do grow well in our soil, and growing the popularity of beans generally is what makes space for that.How have you convinced supermarkets to give a commodity category more shelf space?We’re incremental to the category. Stores that don’t stock Bold Bean Co see beans decline year on year. Because beans have been a commodity for so long, they’re accessible, and cheap tinned beans aren’t our competitor, because we want people eating more beans full stop. What we’re doing is closer to what Fever-Tree did for gin and tonic: creating a premium product that turns drinking into an experience, which then lifts the whole category. For every four pounds we make for a supermarket, one pound comes from someone who wasn’t previously shopping the bean aisle at all. If a supermarket lists us, we make them money, because the people already buying tins will buy more too, just for a different occasion. What supermarkets need to do now is give bean brands the same kind of impulse-buy space they give Cadbury’s Fingers, rather than relying on people who were already heading to that aisle. When we were placed in the meat aisle for a period, forty per cent of the people who bought us there had never bought our beans before.Do you lean on the “meat alternative” message to reach that new audience?Never. People don’t like being told what to eat, and framing beans as a substitute creates compromise rather than desire. I don’t want someone choosing a chickpea tikka masala over a chicken one because they feel they should. I want them looking at a pecorino and sweetcorn risotto and simply wanting that, without thinking about what they’re not having instead. That’s how we change behaviour: by giving people something they want, not something they’re settling for.Do you see yourselves ever moving beyond beans in jars?The rule I’ve set for myself is that the bean has to be the hero. Hummus is a good example of what I mean. People love it, and most don’t really register that it’s beans. I don’t think we have a job to do there. A bean patty could work if it were something in its own right, but not if it exists purely to replace a burger someone actually wanted. We want to create things that are unapologetically bean-centred, not a way of making people feel better about a decision they’re only half-committing to.Your product sits at a premium price point. Does that create friction with customers?It does, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I wish we could charge less, but the moment we do, we start creating a commodity product. Price comes down, the quality of the bean we can afford comes down with it, and the transformative first-taste experience disappears. Our goal is for someone who thinks they dislike chickpeas to try ours and change their mind, and that experience depends on not compromising. There are plenty of cheap beans out there already. We’re offering something different, and a different job to be done.How do you reach beyond the food-loving, Ottolenghi-cookbook audience who already gets it?We’re currently serving a fairly specific, food-literate, middle-class customer. But I believe food culture moves outward from people with credibility in food. Avocado toast appeared on a menu in an Australian brunch spot decades before it became a mainstream, multi-format industry. We’re serving that core audience first because I believe that if we keep doing a good job, we’ll progressively become more mainstream. That’s my honest theory of how you shift consumer behaviour on something like this.Do you ever lean into how broken the food system is, and how that explains the price of good food?I don’t, deliberately. I feel that way myself, and my team is motivated by it, but I don’t think it’s our job as a brand to make people feel dismayed. I want the message to stay singular: these are the best beans, and they’ll change your mind about beans. Not “these are the best beans, and here’s why the food system is broken and that’s why they cost more.” I don’t think that gets the best out of people. I’m trying to win people over to loving beans, and I don’t think guilt is the right lever for that.If you had to convert one committed bean-hater, what’s the first thing you’d have them try?Ideally, straight from the jar, so they can tell me honestly what they think. But realistically, I’d start with a dish that includes meat if they’re not vegetarian. One of the best recipes in our first cookbook, contributed by a guest chef, is a sausage and butter bean stew: fried sausages with creamy butter beans, mustard, Parmesan, lemon and crunchy breadcrumbs. It’s hearty enough that people forget they’re eating beans at all, and by the time they realise, they’ve already fallen for them.Is there a myth about beans you’d like to put to rest for good?That they’re dusty and tasteless. That perception is everything we need to change. I always compare it to coffee thirty years ago, when people assumed it was all the same. Now everyone understands there’s terroir, process, and real variation, in the same way there is with wine. Beans deserve the same reassessment.What’s been your biggest “what the field” moment on this journey?Before starting Bold Bean, I was deep in food system problems, and that was bleak in its own way. What genuinely gets me now, working in retail and commercial food, is how much control big food companies have over what we see on shelves simply because of what they’ve paid for that space. Supermarkets want to stock us, but they’ve already committed shelf space elsewhere. Governments need to step in, because supermarket executives aren’t going to sacrifice short-term sales of something like Chocolate Fingers for the long-term upside of nudging people toward healthier, more sustainable diets, even though that’s exactly what a brand like ours can offer. The system is built for big, ultra-processed businesses to win, and a brand celebrating genuinely good ingredients has to fight for space it should, given what’s actually at stake, be handed freely.Any recommendations for our listeners, a recipe or otherwise?Head to the Bold Bean Co website. Over 300,000 people visit each month for the recipes alone, and you don’t need our beans to cook any of them. Try the butter bean puttanesca, and if you’re not ready to go fully vegetarian, add some fish. My own go-to is what I call miso beans: cook down miso, butter and whatever onion is lying around, add a jar of white beans, then top with whatever’s in the fridge, usually a fried egg in chilli oil, some kimchi or pickled cucumber, and a bit of green veg. It’s comfort food with enough going on to never feel repetitive.

Dr. Jenny Goodman trained as a conventional medical doctor before spending decades building a practice in ecological medicine, a field that takes nutrition, environmental toxins, and root causes seriously in a way that mainstream medicine, she argues, simply does not. She is the author of Staying Alive in Toxic Times and Getting Healthy in Toxic Times. We spoke with her about pesticides, the gut microbiome, why governments won’t protect us, and what we can actually do about it.You trained as a conventional doctor, went through all of that, and then walked away from it. What happened?It was much sooner than most people expect. Probably within the first year or two of medical school, I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the moment of real disillusionment came at the start of the third year, when we were finally meant to meet patients and learn the arts of healing. I thought: now I’ll understand what all that anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry was for.Instead, the word “healing” was taboo on the wards. The word “cure” was taboo. What they talked about was managing symptoms — suppressing them with drugs, then adding more drugs to manage the side effects. Nobody went home well. Nobody went home healthy. The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing. It’s not just that they never achieved that — they weren’t even aiming for it, and they would have been embarrassed if you mentioned it.There was also no attempt to look at root causes. I would ask: why has this 40-year-old man had a heart attack? Why has this woman of 45 got liver cancer? And not only did they not have answers — the question itself was taboo.Did you find anything within conventional medicine that worked for you?Emergency medicine. I liked it because I didn’t disagree with what was happening. Conventional medicine is brilliant at emergencies — you break a bone, you have a heart attack, in that moment, that’s what you need. I felt I was doing the right thing. But I didn’t want to do it forever.What eventually changed everything was discovering the British Society for Ecological Medicine in the late nineties, about 17 years after I’d qualified. These were doctors doing the kind of medicine I had imagined I was going to learn as a 19-year-old. They were getting to root causes, making people better, and not making them worse.So what actually is ecological medicine?It has two halves. The first is nutrition — identifying what good substances are missing from our bodies, understanding why they’re missing, and putting them back. The second is environmental medicine — identifying which industrial toxins have entered our bodies and teaching people how to avoid them going forward. And those two halves are deeply connected, because a lot of why we’re nutritionally depleted comes back to farming.The reason it’s called “ecological” is twofold. First, we see the whole body as one joined-up ecosystem. In conventional medicine, if you go to your GP and say you have joint pain, a rash, and trouble breathing, they’ll send you to three separate specialists who have no way of connecting with each other. The body is a whole. We look at what is causing inflammation to manifest across all those different systems.But it’s also ecological in a broader sense: the human body is not just an ecosystem, it is part of the ecosystem of planet Earth. This isn’t vague, new-age language. It’s basic biology, physics, and chemistry. Whatever we put into the air, we inhale. Whatever we put into the water, we drink. Whatever we put into the soil is taken up by the plants, ends up on the plate, and gets into our bodies — including our gut microbiome. There is no separation. We cannot poison the planet without poisoning ourselves.You’ve said that farmers hold the keys to public health solutions. Why?Because the connection is direct. If farmers are growing food in nutrient-depleted soil using synthetic fertilizers that don’t contain the minerals we need — no magnesium, no iodine, no chromium, no zinc, none of the things I find people desperately deficient in after 26 years of practice — then the food on the plate is nutritionally depleted too. And if they’re using pesticides, those pesticides kill the good bacteria in the soil, which are responsible for getting nitrogen and minerals into plant roots. You don’t just get poisoned crops. You get nutritionally empty ones.Everywhere I go, farmers are desperate to convert to organic and regenerative. There is no ideological problem. There’s an economic problem in making the transition. But once they’ve made it, they save money — they’re no longer spending on synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. The issue is that governments need to subsidize the transition to small-scale, human-scale, organic, regenerative family farming, instead of subsidizing agribusiness.Our research found that around 84% of Europeans have at least two or three different pesticides in their system at any given time. What is that actually doing inside the body?I should start with detox, because we do have ways of clearing these things — but let me explain the mechanisms first, because they’re worth understanding.Most insecticides and pesticides are cholinesterase inhibitors. To understand why that matters, you need to know how nerve transmission works. When an electrical impulse travels through your nervous system, at every synapse — every gap between nerve cells — it briefly becomes a chemical signal. The neurotransmitter responsible for that chemical crossing is acetylcholine. Once it has done its job, it has to be destroyed, otherwise the system gets stuck in the “on” mode and becomes paralyzed. The enzyme that destroys it is called acetylcholinesterase.What pesticides do is destroy that enzyme. The system can’t reset. It gets stuck. And that is one of the major mechanisms behind neurological deterioration — Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, motor neuron disease, and Alzheimer’s.And this isn’t a fringe hypothesis. When I started writing my second book, I thought: I hope I can find half a dozen studies connecting pesticides to these diseases. I was overwhelmed. There are tens of thousands of studies, in peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, showing strong links between pesticides and Parkinson’s, MS, ALS, and most forms of cancer.Where do these chemicals come from, in terms of their original chemistry?Their chemistry is based on nerve gases used in the World Wars — particularly the Second World War. Come 1945, the manufacturers couldn’t sell those products anymore. So they converted them, first into insecticides, then herbicides, fungicides, and so on. It is essentially the same chemistry, slightly modified, that was used to kill human beings. These are biological weapons. And of course they kill wildlife, disrupt soil bacteria, harm mammals, and harm us.You also mentioned endocrine disruption as a third major impact area.Yes. Some pesticide molecules structurally resemble estrogen. They sit on estrogen receptors in the body and trigger estrogenic effects. Many heavy metals — aluminum, nickel, mercury, cadmium — appear to do something similar.The results are already visible in wildlife: feminization of male fish in rivers, dramatic drops in fertility across mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish. And in humans: sperm counts across the Western world have been falling for decades. There’s a classic Danish study comparing sperm counts in organic versus non-organic farmers. The organic farmers had excellent sperm counts and healthy children. The non-organic farmers had worryingly low ones.In my practice, so-called “unexplained” infertility was one of the most common things I saw. When you get the nutrition right and identify and detox the heavy metals and pesticides, couples can often conceive within a year. And the damage doesn’t stop with one generation. These chemicals can be adducted — literally stuck onto DNA, from both egg and sperm — and passed on. We’re talking about multi-generational damage.Glyphosate comes up constantly in this conversation. Is it really as dangerous as people say?The World Health Organization classifies glyphosate as a carcinogen. Monsanto Bayer’s defence has been that the metabolic pathway glyphosate interferes with in plants doesn’t exist in mammalian cells. That’s technically true. But it does exist in the bacteria in our gut. And the microbiome isn’t an optional add-on — it’s as vital as the liver or the kidneys. Glyphosate poisons it, and therefore we get sick.There’s also something deeply troubling about its molecular structure. Glyphosate is structurally very similar to glycine, an essential amino acid that forms part of our connective tissue — tendons, ligaments, collagen. It’s biologically plausible that in people with insufficient protein intake, the body could substitute glyphosate for glycine in collagen molecules, which would compromise their structural strength. Nobody has funded that research. Who would?In the meantime: if you’re not making your own bread from organic flour, your children are eating glyphosate every day.What can people actually do?First: eat organic. When people switch, I consistently see their health transform. After a few months, they stop needing supplements because they’re finally getting the nourishment from food, as we always used to.On affordability — the criticism is valid, but the framing is misleading. Mass-produced cheap food is effectively subsidized because the environmental damage it causes isn’t factored into its price. If we charged the real cost, organic food would win the comparison easily. There are also practical adjustments: if you eat chicken three times a week, switch to organic and eat it once a week. One organic chicken costs less than three battery ones. And think of it as health insurance. Getting cancer is extraordinarily expensive — in lost income, in treatment, in suffering.Second: filter your water. In many parts of Europe, unfiltered tap water contains residues of pesticides, fertilizers, hormones from HRT and contraceptives, antibiotics, heavy metals, and chlorine. A good water filter removes most of this.Third: avoid pesticide contact outside of food. Pet flea treatments are a major and underestimated source — most of them are insecticides, regardless of the trade name. Ask your vet directly. Local authority grass verge spraying is another exposure route, especially for young children. Campaigns to stop unnecessary spraying have gained real ground in recent years.For detox, there are seven approaches I outline in my books: high-dose vitamin C; organic vegetable juicing; Epsom salts baths; short saunas — critically, five minutes only, and wipe the sweat off continuously rather than letting the body reabsorb it; specific supplements like phosphatidylcholine (found in egg yolk) and glutathione; colonic hydrotherapy for some people; and sprouting seeds on your windowsill. Tiny two-centimetre broccoli sprouts contain up to 50 times the nutrient density of a mature broccoli head.Why hasn’t any of this been acted on at a government or industry level?In one word: capitalism. These products are highly profitable, and the companies that make them have the resources to counter independent research with their own. The pattern is the same with every pesticide: it’s introduced, then banned 10 years later when the evidence becomes undeniable. The companies say they’ll go back to the drawing board and make a safer version. Then that one gets banned too.As for governments — they are not neutral parties. Ministers hold shares in these companies the same way they hold shares in pharmaceutical companies. The regulatory authorities that are supposed to control this industry are staffed by people who have worked for that industry. It’s the revolving door. Accepting this was genuinely disillusioning for me, but the evidence is plain.The only people who are going to protect us are ourselves. Through food choices, through campaigning, through teaching the next generation — including that the level of illness we’re seeing, in children as well as adults, is not normal, not natural, and not necessary.

Entomologist Dave Goulson on vanishing insects, pesticide-laced bedrooms, and why the fate of bees and humans are more intertwined than we’d like to think.Dave Goulson has spent his entire career studying insects and watching them disappear. Professor of biology at the University of Sussex, founder of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and author of more than a dozen books, his latest, Eat the Planet Well, published on the day of this recording, is a guide to eating sustainably that connects the food on our plates directly to the crisis unfolding beneath our feet. We spoke about the staggering scale of insect decline, the agrochemical industry’s grip on farming, and why your messy garden might just be a small act of resistance.The first thing you need to know about Dave Goulson is that his love of insects is not something he can explain rationally. It began at primary school, collecting caterpillars from the edge of the playing field and bringing them home in an empty lunchbox to keep in jam jars on his bedroom windowsill. Most of them died, he admits, but some survived, including a set of tiny yellow and black striped caterpillars that became cinnabar moths, brilliant red and black. “I just thought that was really cool,” he says, with the tone of someone who still thinks it’s really cool, four decades later.It’s a disarming quality, that unguarded enthusiasm, in someone who also has to regularly deliver some of the bleakest statistics in contemporary science.The scale of what we’ve lost is difficult to comprehend. Where do we actually stand?All the evidence we have suggests insects have undergone a pretty massive decline, and that it’s still ongoing. It’s quite hard to put accurate figures to it because the data we have are really patchy. We don’t have a global insect monitoring network, which would be ideal. We only really started monitoring any insects in the 1970s, which was probably long after they started declining. But a reasonable estimate is that in Europe we may have lost 90% of our insects in terms of abundance over the last hundred years. We can’t be entirely sure of that figure, but that’s where the evidence points.The causes are numerous. The biggest one is habitat loss driven by the industrialisation of farming, and associated with that, all the chemical inputs, particularly insecticides, which are designed to kill insects, so it’s not really surprising that they’re driving insect declines. Then there are invasive species, like the yellow-legged hornet from Asia, which is sweeping through Europe and decimating wild bee populations. Climate change is starting to kick in. Light pollution affects nocturnal insects. It’s a perfect storm of problems, all of them manmade, that insects have to deal with.It’s worth pointing out: insects are pretty tough. They’ve been around for nearly half a billion years, twice as old as the oldest dinosaurs. They survived mass extinction events, including the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. So it’s quite telling that after all of that, they’re now struggling because of us, in the blink of an eye, really, in the last hundred years.You live in a rural part of southeast England, exactly the kind of place you’d expect to be full of wildlife. What do you actually see when you step outside?There are still butterflies and birds and some wildflowers, but there’s an awful lot of bugger all, to be honest. Even ten years ago I remember hearing skylarks singing. There aren’t any skylarks anymore. Cuckoos, occasionally in the spring. I don’t hear those either. Both feed at least partly on insects. That’s one of the many knock-on effects of declining insect populations: things that rely on them for food are obviously also declining. It’s a bit disheartening at times.For someone who lives in a city, it’s possible to go through life and genuinely not notice any of this. How do you explain why it matters?We’ve become an urban creature, and it’s really easy for people to be completely disconnected from nature, not realising that we are still part of nature, that we all depend on food, which has to be grown in a healthy ecosystem. It needs soil, it needs pollinators, it needs insects to recycle.There’s a whole list of things insects do that we can’t do without. Lots of creatures eat them, creatures that people value, like birds. Most bird species, plus bats, fish like salmon and trout, most amphibians and reptiles, they all depend on insects for food. Beyond that, insects control crop pests, recycle dung and dead matter to release nutrients for new growth, and help keep soil healthy. And then there’s pollination, which has at least seeped into public consciousness. People know, roughly, that bees pollinate plants and without them we’d have less fruit and veg. That’s broadly true. Three-quarters of the crops we grow wouldn’t give a full harvest without being visited by some kind of insect.Though often it’s not a bee. It might be a butterfly, a moth, a hoverfly, a wasp, a beetle. There are thousands of species of insect that pollinate. A nice example is cacao, which gives us chocolate, pollinated by tiny little midges, the only things that can get through the small entrance of the flower. Bees can’t get in at all. So for chocolate, at least, bees are entirely irrelevant. No midges, no chocolate: that’s probably a better marketing campaign than most things I’ve heard.Your new book, Eat the Planet Well, might seem like a departure for someone known for studying bees. What’s the connection?It’s become pretty clear to me that our fate and that of insects are intertwined. A lot of the things driving insect declines are also affecting us. Pesticides affect bees, but they’re also in our food, and there’s clear evidence that human exposure to pesticides is harmful to health. And broadly, I think the industrialisation of agriculture is not sustainable. It’s the biggest driver of biodiversity loss. One recent estimate suggests 40% of the world’s soils are now badly degraded. Food growing, processing and transport is a massive contributor to climate change.The system we have can’t carry on. The planet can’t cope, especially with a growing human population. We need to ask: how do we come up with a better system that actually feeds eight billion, soon probably ten billion, a healthy diet without destroying the planet? If we can answer that, then we can save the bees and everything else. It’s all intertwined.We often talk about the Green Revolution as a mistake, but at the time it was a genuine solution to a real problem.I completely agree. It’s easy to see why we adopted these practices. There was a time when people were hungry, when food was rationed across much of Europe. Producing more food obviously seemed like a good idea. But the way we’ve done it, we’ve done too much. The irony is it’s been so successful that we now massively overproduce crops and have become incredibly wasteful. Roughly a third of all food grown is wasted. And we do far too much animal farming. Something like 77% of all the world’s farmland is devoted to producing meat, which provides about 18% of our calories. The logic just isn’t there.If you’d started from scratch to devise a way to feed eight billion people efficiently and healthily, you would definitely not have arrived at the system we have today.A lot of that system is held in very few hands.It’s all wrapped up by a very small number of companies these days. There have been various buyouts and mergers. I think there are a couple more in Asia, but yes, it’s Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva, a tiny number of players who between them control the fertilisers, the pesticides, the GM crops, the seed patents, and increasingly the curricula in agricultural universities as well. They’ve tied farmers into a high-input, high-output system that makes some people very rich but is destroying the planet.Let’s talk about pesticides specifically. We recently covered research showing that 100% of urine samples tested in Spain contained pesticide traces, regardless of diet.And in most of those samples, it wasn’t just one pesticide. Many people are walking around with dozens of pesticides in their bloodstream, in their urine. We are basically guinea pigs in a huge experiment. Nobody was ever exposed to a cocktail of pesticides from conception to death until the generation born around 1940. And we’re all now continuously exposed to an ever-changing mixture for decades at a time.The safety testing done before pesticides are released is nearly always short-term toxicity studies, usually just a few days of exposure. That tells you nothing about a lifetime of exposure. And yet there is growing evidence of links between particular pesticides and all sorts of ill health, particularly in farmers, who are more exposed than most. Parkinson’s disease is now regarded essentially as an occupational disease of farmers. Paraquat and chlorpyrifos have been very strongly linked to Parkinson’s and other neurological problems.It almost doesn’t require a scientific study to conclude that products designed to kill living organisms might not be great for human health.No, not at all. I was actually one of the authors of a large review paper recently, where researchers looked at essentially every trial ever published on the impact of any pesticide on any organism. One of the really interesting findings is that each class of insecticide doesn’t just affect its target. Insecticides are obviously toxic to insects; that’s the point. But they’re also toxic to vertebrates, to plants, to soil microbes. Herbicides, which you’d think wouldn’t particularly harm insects, turn out to do so as well.They’re biocides. And if you reflect on where the first pesticides came from, many of the organophosphates were developed during the Second World War by people trying to create chemicals to kill people. When the war ended, they were repurposed for crops, and apparently no one stopped to ask whether that was a good idea.The regulatory system seems spectacularly unfit for purpose.It takes decades, typically from the moment a warning is first flagged by a scientist to the point where enough evidence has accumulated, enough researchers have attended to it, and governments have actually listened and acted. A minimum of twenty years for anything to happen. Meanwhile, hundreds of new pesticides have been introduced to the market. In Europe there are currently around 450 different active ingredients available to farmers; in the United States it’s closer to 1,000. The vast majority have never been independently evaluated for safety.And the companies that produce these pesticides lobby very hard to prevent any improvements to the regulatory system. They don’t want it to filter out harmful products. It would be more expensive for them if the tests were more rigorous. They’ve done a really good job of blocking reform. There have been many attempts to tighten the European pesticide system, and they’re almost invariably blocked by industry.It’s much like smoking. The tobacco industry managed to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer for nearly fifty years before it became impossible to deny. We’re in a similar situation with pesticides. It’s pretty obvious they’re doing us significant harm, but the lobbying in the other direction makes it very hard to persuade governments to act.There’s also a problem with the testing itself. Chemicals are assessed individually, not in the combinations people are actually exposed to.We should somehow test the mixtures, but the trouble is it’s almost impossible to do, because the number of possible combinations is near-infinite and everyone is exposed to a slightly different cocktail. You’d need billions of dollars to even begin to scratch the surface. And those who have billions of dollars are, of course, doing the opposite kind of testing.A lot of the farmers we work with feel they simply can’t transition away from these products, that they’d lose their crops. How do we change that?That’s a real barrier, and it’s not irrational. You can’t just stop using pesticides overnight and go organic. If you do, you’ll probably lose your crop. You need to adapt the varieties you’re growing, you need to give time for the natural enemies of pests, whose populations have been depleted by decades of spraying, to recover. It’s not simple.But there are successful organic farmers out there, and one of the most effective ways of persuading other farmers to try it is simply taking them to see a working, profitable organic farm. If they can see it working somewhere, and talk to a farmer who’s actually done it, they’re far more likely to believe it than if they hear it from an academic like me. No farmer would listen directly to what I have to say. Probably quite right, to be fair.The other part of the problem is agronomists. They’re supposed to give farmers impartial advice about how to grow their crops. In the UK, the large majority either work on commission or are directly employed by pesticide companies. They’re not impartial. And they’re also incentivised to recommend spraying: if they advise a farmer to spray and the crop still fails, the farmer is unlikely to blame them, at least they tried. If they say don’t spray and the crop fails, they’ll be blamed. So they’re conditioned to recommend spraying regardless of whether it’s strictly necessary. A critical component of a better farming system would be a network of independent agronomists that farmers could actually trust.You’ve spent much of your career on bees specifically. How many bee species are there, actually?Globally, 21,000 known species, and probably more awaiting discovery. In the UK alone there are 270 species. Of those 21,000, honey is made by a small number, mainly the honeybee, Apis mellifera, which is the domesticated species kept all over the world. There are about a dozen honeybee species globally that make honey, and a few stingless bee species in the tropics used on a small scale, mainly for medicinal purposes. But the bulk of honey does effectively come from one species.The large majority of bees don’t make any honey at all because they’re solitary. There’s no hive with a queen and thousands of workers, just a female that makes a nest on her own, and males that fly around trying to mate. If you go into a garden with flowers on a sunny day and spend five minutes watching, it quickly becomes obvious there are loads of different types of bee. In my garden right now you could probably find eight different bumblebee species. And yet most people think there’s one bee, it lives in a hive, it makes honey. If you ask them to draw it, they’ll draw something fat with yellow and black stripes, which honeybees aren’t. The cartoon bee is a bumblebee.On insect hotels, useful or not? I’ve had conflicting information.They can definitely be useful. I have about fifteen nailed to my house. They get occupied, particularly in urban areas. Most of mine have bees in them, maybe six or seven species. A few weeks ago there were loads of red mason bees, which are about a hundred times more efficient than honeybees at pollinating apples. So they’re supporting genuinely useful pollinators.There are downsides. They can become hotspots for parasites and diseases, so some people recommend cleaning them or replacing them periodically. I take a slightly more relaxed attitude, because I’m not trying to maximise my bee population. I’m happy for there to be parasites; they’re part of biodiversity. And frankly, I love sitting with a coffee watching my bee hotels in the morning.Bear in mind that these bees naturally nest in holes made by beetles burrowing in dead tree trunks. The modern world has very few slowly decaying trees with beetle holes in them. They’re tidied away and burned. So these bees probably struggle to find places to nest unless we give them somewhere. On balance, I think they’re a positive thing.What can individuals actually do? Is there genuine reason for optimism?The good news is that insect populations can recover really quickly. They’re not pandas or rhinos, breeding slowly. Give them the right conditions and their numbers can shoot up in weeks or months. And there’s a surprising amount of diversity hiding in urban spaces.There was a woman called Jenny Owen who lived in Leicester, not a city particularly famed for its biodiversity, with a small garden, about a sixteenth of a hectare. She spent 35 years cataloguing every species she could find: plants, birds, insects, spiders. After 35 years, she had found 2,673 different species in her urban garden. Nearly 2,000 of those were different types of insect. And that’s in northern England. Someone in Spain or southern France would find considerably more.The steps to get there are simple: don’t use pesticides, grow some native wildflowers, have a pond, don’t mow the lawn too often, put up a bee hotel. Many of those things save you time and effort. And there’s a cultural shift happening, which is genuinely encouraging. A lawn that was previously seen as “abandoned” is now being reframed as “rewilding.” There are still people who complain when road verges aren’t mown, but there’s a growing number who love it. In the UK there are 22 million private gardens covering around 500,000 hectares. If the majority became even modestly wildlife-friendly, that would matter enormously. And if we could get councils on board, road verges, roundabouts, parks, cemeteries full of wildflowers and pesticide-free, that would really help. It wouldn’t solve everything, but it would be a meaningful step with very little downside.You mentioned light pollution earlier. I hadn’t come across that one as a significant factor.It’s quite a new topic. The most obvious effect is moths and other nocturnal insects flying round and round streetlights and bashing themselves against them, which clearly isn’t good, and they’re being picked off by bats while they do it. But more recent research suggests other effects beyond just disorienting flying insects. Many insects judge when to emerge from hibernation by the lengthening of days. If they’re near a light that’s on all night, they may lose the ability to detect day length and emerge in the middle of January.There’s a wonderful, slightly obscure example: an African dung beetle that navigates by the Milky Way when rolling balls of dung. The line of the Milky Way tells it which direction to roll towards the hole it’s dug. If there’s light pollution, it can’t detect the Milky Way, and it wanders in circles. It’s a sad illustration of how many unintended effects we have on the world.It’s also a reminder of just how interconnected everything is. A beetle using a galaxy as a compass.It is remarkable. The insect world is full of strange and wonderful things, some of them quite disgusting, but many of them fabulous in their own peculiar ways. And there are thought to be millions of species we haven’t yet named. Who knows what we haven’t discovered.Finally: what has made you think, “What the field?” lately?There are so many things to choose from. The one that springs to mind is a paper about cores taken from glaciers in Svalbard, north of Norway, somewhere you’d imagine would be the purest place on the planet. They screened those cores for pesticides. There are layers of pesticides in the snow, corresponding to different periods of use further south, drifting in the atmosphere and depositing as snow at the poles. I just couldn’t quite believe that our impact had extended even to places where nobody ever goes. They’re still being poisoned by pesticides. How depressing is that.And there was another one. Researchers in the Netherlands screened dust from bedroom floors for pesticides. The average bedroom had 43 different pesticides in the dust lying on the floor. I don’t know what inspired someone to test that, but there it is. We’ve contaminated everywhere. What are we doing.Eat the Planet Well by Dave Goulson is out now. His documentary recommendation: My Garden of a Thousand Bees, available on streaming platforms.