Remember the last time we freaked out about what would happen if the world’s pollinators suddenly perished? Someone get me a paper bag, because I’m starting to hyperventilate again.
To raise awareness about colony collapse disorder, a mysterious disease that started taking out entire beehives in 2006, Whole Foods brought the fight to suburban grocery aisle by showing us what our supermarkets would look like without any food that had been helped along by a bee. That’s right: Your greek yogurt, butter, cream cheese, organic milk, and — gasp — ice cream, are in peril.
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Whole Foods Market/PRNewsFoto | Huffington Post
Basically, anything that came out of a cow (or goat, or sheep) is off the table, since grazers feed on bee-pollinated clover and alfalfa.
Whole Foods kicked off the pollinator panic last year by showing us what their produce section would look like minus all the fruits and veggies that need bees to pollinate them. The answer was: a whole lot of nothing, with some oranges.
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Whole Foods Market/PRNewsFoto | Huffington Post
Though the images are labelled “with bees” and “without bees,” the grocery chain actually took some creative liberty and removed any food that depends on a pollinator, which means — damn! Chocolate, pollinated by South American midges, was our last hope.
Colony collapse disorder is linked to a number of things, including an infectious fungus and these noxious pesticides. From the Huffington Post:
“We wouldn’t really have much of a business or a livelihood on one level without pollinators,” Errol Schweizer, Whole Foods executive global grocery coordinator, told The Huffington Post. “We’d see a 70 percent reduction of foods, and really, without pollinators we wouldn’t have a food system.”
Guys, I like food AND systems. This sounds dire — unless you fancy your picnics with a slice of flour pie.
