All The Small Things - And How They Make The Food System Possible
The casual abundance of things flying, biting, humming, simply living their tiny, seemingly insignificant lives. Why we don't really see that anymore, and why it matters for food.
When I was a kid, insects were not something you thought about as fragile. They annoyed us, bit us, fascinated us, but mostly, they were just there. I remember the constant fight with bugs, I remember my limbs being covered in bites and scratches all summer, and my dad chasing off the first annoying black flies of spring with a rolled up newspaper - it was all just a regular part of growing up in the Estonian countryside. I remember finding beehives, chasing dragonflies, waiting to see the first butterfly of April and wondering what colour it would be. I remember my grandfather, who used to be a beekeeper, and his honey room - the place where he kept the gear, the frames, the strange tools I did not fully understand. The air in that extraction room was sticky and sweet, you stepped in and all you saw was yellow and the structure of the honeycomb. You could walk into that room and almost taste it before tasting anything at all. I remember taking all of this completely for granted. As I did with dead bugs on the windshield after driving home from my grandparents. The casual abundance of things flying, biting, humming, landing on your skin, simply living their tiny, seemingly insignificant lives. And now, I don’t really see that anymore. I don’t see the bugs on the windshield. I don’t remember the last time I saw the first April butterfly and it was not just the usual yellow one. My toddler has not chased a dragonfly yet. My dad is not chasing flies with a newspaper either, and it is already June in Northern Europe. My grandfather is long gone, and so is that honey room, but what unsettles me most is not only the loss of a person or a place. It is the feeling that something I thought belonged permanently to the background of life may not be permanent at all. I used to think bees were ordinary. I do not think that anymore. I used to think good food was ordinary too - varied, tasty, colourful, clean and somehow always available. That is not the case anymore either.
The Quiet Work Behind Food
We are seeing fewer insects in many places, although not in a neat, universal way. Some species are declining faster than others; some places are better studied than others; some years are naturally better or worse. But the general direction is worrying enough to take seriously. The reasons are also not mysterious: habitat loss, intensive agriculture, pesticide use, pollution, climate change, invasive species, and the simple fact that many landscapes have become cleaner, flatter and less forgiving for small living things..
The most obvious example is pollination. Pollination is simple in principle: pollen has to move from one flower to another so plants can form fruits, seeds or nuts. Sometimes wind does it. Sometimes plants manage on their own. But very often, an animal does the work. Bees are the best-known pollinators, but they are not the only ones. Butterflies, moths, hoverflies, beetles, wasps, flies and even some birds and bats do this work too. It is small work, repeated endlessly, and the food system has been built around the assumption that much of it will simply happen.
However, not all food depends on pollinators. Wheat, rice and maize, the crops that provide much of the world’s calories, are mostly wind-pollinated or self-pollinating. So the point is not “no bees, no food”. That is too easy and not quite true.
To put it more precisely - less pollinators, simply means a lot poorer food system.
More than three-quarters of the world’s leading food crops depend at least partly on animal pollination, and pollinator-dependent crops make up around a third of global crop production volume. But the more important part is what kind of crops these are. Fruits, berries, nuts, many vegetables, oilseeds, spices, cocoa, coffee. Not all of them disappear without pollinators, but many become harder, less reliable or more expensive to produce.
This is where the issue becomes less sentimental and more practical. A food system can still produce calories while becoming less rich. It can feed people in the narrow sense while giving us fewer colours, fewer textures, fewer micronutrients, fewer small pleasures that make food more than fuel. This is not marginal to how we eat, or how we want to eat.
That is why the lack of bugs should bug us. Not because every insect is lovely, or because anyone needs to romanticise mosquitoes. But because insects are part of the quiet machinery creating our food. When they disappear, they are not only disappearing from fields, gardens and windshields. They are disappearing from the assumptions underneath food.
Why should a food VC talk about bugs? Where is the impact in that? And where is the money?
The answer is that insect decline is not a niche biodiversity topic. It is a signal of hidden fragility in the food system. And hidden fragility eventually becomes something investors should be very accustomed to - cost, risk, regulation, supply-chain pressure, yield volatility, or an innovation opportunity.
We are used to valuing infrastructure when it is visible - factories, logistics, supply chains, sensors and fermentation tanks. But some of the most important infrastructure in food is biological and unpaid. Pollination, natural pest control, soil, decomposition. All the small, continuous work.
Just because something does not sit on a balance sheet does not mean it is not doing economic work.
When insect populations decline, that work does not simply disappear from the system without consequence. It shows up somewhere else - in less reliable yields, in higher spending on managed pollination, in more chemical pressure if natural pest control weakens, and in more pressure on already fragile supply chains.
That is the financial side. The impact side is just as simple. Insects are part of the conditions that make food production possible. They help support diverse crops, healthier ecosystems, better soil function and more resilient farms. In food and ag, impact is not only what happens after a product is eaten. It is also what had to stay alive for that product to exist.
This does not mean every interesting company has to be a “bug startup”. The best opportunities may be companies that reduce the cost of biological breakdown: better pollination monitoring, biological pest control, precision spraying, pesticide reduction, soil-health measurement, biodiversity data, regenerative farm tools, crop diversification, or ingredients that reduce pressure on fragile supply chains.
The bugs on the windshield, the dragonflies, the sticky yellow air of my grandfather’s honey room - none of it is, or can be, an investment thesis. But it taught me what abundance felt like before I had to write an article about it 30 years later and call it “food-system resilience.”.
If we want to invest in the future of food, we should pay attention to all the small things still making food possible.