If Food Could Talk

Stories from 13 Precious Foods Endangered by Climate Change

Theodore Dumas

• Publisher: Theodore Dumas
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781646632381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Agricoltura sostenibile

At issue for everyone who eats food, If Food Could Talk highlights thirteen important foods that will likely disappear in the very near future due to climate change, discussing origins of these foods and cultivation histories, as well as spiritual, socioeconomic, and nutritional impacts. Intervention strategies are highlighted. Each food chapter ends with traditional and nontraditional recipes to prepare and eat these foods while they are still available. We can save these precious foods, and If Food Could Talk is an introductory manual to do just that!

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Food, glorious food! Never in the history of mankind has there been so much food on this planet, both in bulk and in variety. In just about any postindustrial nation, anyone can walk into a grocery store or supermarket and experience this on a near twenty-four-hour basis seven days a week. Dozens of varieties of fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains; whole wheat, rye, pumpernickel, sourdough, unleavened breads, and bread crumbs; hard and soft cheeses, creams, curds and Brie; red meats, white meats, various poultries, sausages, fish, and other seafoods. Including all of the different types of sauces, syrups, soft drinks, juices, candies, cookies, crackers, and other canned, jarred, packaged, and frozen foods, most supermarkets sell tens of thousands of different products. Some supermarkets sell 40,000 more products today than they did in 1990. There are roughly 38,000 grocery stores in the US creating a retail food industry that earns about $660 billion dollars per year. Total food sales in the US are about $1.4 trillion dollars every year, which amounts to approximately 5 percent of the total US economy (Food Marketing Institute, US Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Some of the foods we eat today have been with us for almost 10,000 years! To put this in perspective, plants have existed for about 700 million years while humans have been around for about 200,000 years. Well, the day of reckoning is upon us. The peak has been reached, and the food boom is already beginning to bust. In only fifty years or fewer, many of the delicious foods we eat will be things of the past that we describe to our kids, like rotary phones or the Dewey Decimal System. However, bulky phones with numbered dials causing the dialing of nine to take nine times longer than dialing one and ancient systems to organize books in libraries were replaced by better versions. This is not the case for food. Those foods that will disappear will not be replaced by better versions. Let’s not lose these precious foods. Let’s do the little things that will allow us to continue to wake up to a hot cup of coffee and end the day with some dark chocolate.

There are some great books out there that talk about how food production and industrial farming impact the environment and contribute to global warming (ex. The Fate of Food by Amanda Little; Kiss the Ground by Josh Tickell; Food Fix by Mark Hyman). This book takes the opposite perspective and focuses on the impact of global warming on the foods that we eat on a daily or weekly basis. The point of this book is simply to be a compilation of biographies for those endangered foods that have no voices to speak on their own behalf. Just as there is an American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) that speak on behalf of abused and threatened domesticated and wild animals, perhaps there should be an American Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants (the ASPCP), or even better, an American Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food (ASPCF), with this book highlighting the poster children.

Following a brief chapter on climate change and agriculture, each subsequent chapter describes an endangered food, from its known origin in the wild and symbolic or societal significance to its nutritional value, its earliest domestication, and the reasons why it will perish. Each food chapter finishes with two recipes, one for a standard dish and one for a nonstandard delicacy. The final chapter contains suggestions to help maintain the glory days of food, a list of little things that we can all do on a daily or weekly basis so that our children and grandchildren may grow up to directly experience fruit salads complete with apples and bananas, Mexican dinners with guacamole, and sporting events with beer and peanuts.

CHAPTER 2

Impacts of Climate Change on

Agriculture, Briefly

Global warming is occurring primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide (CO2) and other pollutants produced from fossil fuel combustion absorb infrared radiation from sunshine. In other words, as we burn more fossil fuels, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, and more CO2 stores more heat produced by the sun. This is analogous to a greenhouse trapping heat, which led to CO2 being described as a “greenhouse” gas. The planet has undergone warming periods in the past, but never at such a pace as is occurring now.

How do we know CO2 is increasing?

The Global Monitoring Division of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) was established about fifty years ago by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This is a worldwide network of atmospheric monitoring stations. The Baseline Atmospheric Observatory in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, metaphorically the wise grandmother of this monitoring system, was established in the 1950s and has been continuously collecting atmospheric data since its inception, including CO2 levels. Mauna Loa may be the perfect site for CO2 measurements because of its remote location, undisturbed air, and distance from human activity. Measurements taken at the Baseline Atmospheric Observatory indicate that gaseous CO2 levels have exceeded 400 parts per million (ppm, meaning that for every million floating molecules that comprise the atmosphere, 400 are CO2). This is a level that has not been reached for about four and a half million years and continues to rise rapidly. A vast majority of climate scientists, like 97 percent or more, will say that we (humans) are responsible (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, 2013–2019). We did this. We can undo this.

The illustration above depicts the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), methane (CH4), and water (H2O). Energy from the sun passes through the atmosphere (stratosphere and troposphere shown) and reaches earth, where it is reflected back toward outer space. Greenhouse gasses prevent some of this reflected energy from traveling back into outer space and trap heat near the earth’s surface. Good ozone (O3, not considered a greenhouse gas) in the stratosphere helps to keep the earth cooler by reflecting energy back into space. Bad ozone in the troposphere, at the earth’s surface, is toxic to animals and plants.

How are plants impacted by elevated CO2 and other greenhouse gases?

I’m pretty sure we all remember from our high school botany lessons that plants “breathe” CO2. So, we might put two and two together and think, somewhat correctly, that global warming and increased atmospheric CO2 are good things for plants. They metabolize CO2 on warm sunny days and, in the process, produce the oxygen that we breathe. One might guess that more CO2 in the air should promote plant health. Indeed, this is the case. For instance, banana production has increased pretty steadily for the past five decades due to climate change.

Plants grow faster with higher levels of ambient CO2. In fact, CO2 canisters can be purchased commercially to aid in the growth of indoor plants. But excess CO2 is only one factor that is raising the global temperature to dangerous levels. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) produced by high-temperature combustion of coal, oil, gas and diesel fuels is a major greenhouse gas produced mostly at the industrial level. Also, methane (CH4) is released from decaying or burning organic materials or natural gas and is perhaps the most potent greenhouse gas. None of these chemicals will directly destroy plants, but they all raise the global temperature that then causes other effects that are severely deleterious to plant survival. Most of the dangers to our delicate food plants have been present for a long time, but have been manageable to a large extent. Continued global warming will make these situations unmanageable. Global warming is a bigger problem than just rising sea levels, bigger storms, and even greater food scarcity in developing world nations, as if that is not huge enough.

It is plausible to think that, as the planet warms, the longer growing seasons will also benefit plants. However, increased metabolism and a longer growing season produced by global warming are not necessarily compatible. All of the plants that exist today have evolved in a relatively cooler environment, with daily temperature, daily sunshine duration, and light intensity and wavelength fluctuating in harmony across the days and seasons for millions of years. Plants have developed complex genetic regulatory systems in direct response to these coordinated environmental changes. Think Darwin and reproduction of the fittest. Those plants that expressed the proper genes at the proper times with respect to daily and seasonal rhythms were more likely to reproduce and pass on their fitness genes to the next generation. These are the natural plants that exist today. They have thrived because their genes matched their environments.

While environment-driven changes in gene expression can occur on a relatively rapid timescale (elegantly described in Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture) and may benefit some lucky plants and animals, in general genomes don’t evolve as fast as the warming of the planet, and the overall increase in global temperature is causing climate zones to shift very quickly (John Daniel, NOAA; Susan Solomon, MIT). Many of these plants will not be able to adapt to such rapid changes in local climate. Some of the more endangered plants produce foods and beverages that have been beloved by humans across the globe for thousands of generations, and we are the generations that very likely will witness their extinction.

What are the environmental changes that doom these foods?

The primary factors that will drive food extinction are excessive ambient temperature, fresh-water scarcity, air pollution, extreme weather events, and heightened susceptibility to predators and disease. Some plants are very sensitive to temperature or require very specific temperature and humidity conditions during the growing season and across seasons to bear fruit. Apples, cherries, peaches, pears, and wine-making grapes fall into this category, some requiring 300 to 900 continuous hours anywhere between thirty-two and sixty degrees Fahrenheit every winter for proper bloom in the spring. Other plants use relatively large amounts of water to survive and bear fruit or beans. These climate-change victims include avocado, chickpea, and cacao plants that like it hot above ground and really wet below ground consistently for six to nine months. Finally, while elevated CO2 may be beneficial to plant growth, the accumulation of other pollutants will produce negative impacts on plant health. Loosely speaking, when plants inhale ground-level ozone through their stomata, which are the rough equivalent to thousands of nostrils, they rust or oxidize from the inside out. In other words, just as oxygen strips electrons from iron to initiate rust (ferric oxide) formation and iron deterioration, ozone strips biological molecules of their electrons and important biophysical properties, leading to cell death.

As mentioned above, if unchecked, ground-level ozone will continue to rise during the next few decades. Also, methane is an important player here. Fossil fuel (natural...