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Excerpt: "Climate change is changing the way we grow, distribute and choose food. Shifting environments could alter the nutritional value of our vegetables."

 (photo: Getty Images)
(photo: Getty Images)


Thanksgiving Food of the Future: How Climate Change Could Transform Our Food

By Anna Codrea-Rado, Nice and Serious, Guardian UK

27 November 14

 

limate change is changing the way we grow, distribute and choose food. Shifting environments could alter the nutritional value of our vegetables – but they could also result in tastier turkeys, as we look for more sustainable farming techniques. Our interactive explores what the future holds for the classic American holiday feast – click on the red arrows to learn more

Turkey

The backbone of turkey farming is corn. It’s the feed of choice for the majority of US turkeys – as it is for most livestock – so any fluctuations in price or supply of the grain will directly impact the poultry production process. It is also highly susceptible to climate change.

Corn cannot seed above 95 degrees. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, warns that, if temperatures continue rise, production will be forced to move north, possibly even to Canada. This, in turn, will lead to increased reliance on imports, rising corn prices and, ultimately, to more costly turkeys.

Before that happens, Pollan hopes that consumer pressure will transform the face of the turkey industry. Turkey is already a meat that produces some of the lowest greenhouse gas emissions (it produces nearly 3 less than beef for example), but this varies depending on how the poultry is reared. Heritage turkeys, an alternative to the standard Butterballs, are the more sustainable option.

The turkeys are reared in a way more closely in line with how wild turkeys breed; fed off grass, mating naturally and growing for a longer time. This natural life cycle results in less intensive farming and lowers their carbon footprint – making them an attractive option for the Thanksgiving of the future.

Cranberry sauce

A cranberry harvest is a beautiful sight. The crimson fruit grow on vines in bogs and, when they're ready to be harvested, the bogs are flooded with water. The air inside the fruit makes them float up to the surface of the water, where they're scraped off with a wheel rake. This method, the first step in the process that leads to cranberry juice and cranberry sauce, is highly water-intensive. As such, it’s also very sensitive to changes to water quality and supply.

In Massachusetts, the second largest producer of cranberries in the US after Wisconsin, climate shifts have already had an impact on cultivation. Temperatures in the region have risen steadily, causing dry spells – and forcing farmers to use more water to irrigate their crops.

Although many farms use sustainable techniques such as water recycling, the challenge continues to grow. Rising sea levels, changes in rainfall and temperature shifts have already started to affect the balance of the water cycle. As this continues to happen, the production process, which is so reliant on water, may not be viable.

Stuffing

Cornbread or breadcrumbs? Sausage or mushrooms? Sage or rosemary? For families across the country, stuffing is the ultimate Thanksgiving battleground. For those who swear by pork sausage in their stuffing recipes, however, their family politics are about to bump into global geopolitics.

According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Chinese pork consumption has skyrocketed since the 1970s. Today, the average person in China eats 85lbs of pork per year. By comparison, the average American eats only 60lbs.

That pork habit comes with a cost: although it’s the world’s largest pork producer, China also heavily relies on US imports. In 2012, the US sent just under half a billion metric tons of pork to China. And, the following year, China acquired the US pork manufacturer Smithfield Foods, prompting a heated debate over what it means when a foreign country acquires a leading producer of culturally significant food.

Meeting these export demands comes with a steep cost. According to the USDA, the agricultural industry produces an estimated 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that those emissions could increase by 30% by 2050.

Half of the agricultural industry’s emissions come from livestock. And, though pork is far more efficient than beef or lamb, it still accounts for approximately 10% of livestock-based greenhouse gas. As the FAO’s analysis demonstrates, while climate change will impact the food we eat in the future, the decisions we make about now – all the way down to our stuffing choices – are already having an impact on the environment.

Sweet potatoes

In 2014, Irakli Loladze, associate professor at the University of Maryland, conducted the biggest study to date of the effect of C02 on plants. He found that rising emissions, a key factor in climate change, could alter the makeup of plants, fundamentally changing the nutritional value of food.

"For [most] plants, rising CO2 does three things: it depletes essential human nutrition minerals in their tissues, it reduces protein in their tissues and significantly increases the ratio of carbohydrates to protein. That means, more starch and sugar in your potatoes, pumpkin and other C3 crops but fewer essential minerals."

The concern is that people will be consuming enough calories, but their diet will lack vital micronutrients such as iron, a phenomenon known as "hidden hunger".

The basic premise can be boiled down as follows:

More CO2?more photosynthesis?more carbohydrates (sugars and starch) in plants?fewer essential minerals in plants and on your Thanksgiving plate.

Potatoes

Potatoes are America's favorite vegetable – according to the USDA, they account for 15% of all vegetable sales. Idaho, the main producer, grew 13.2bn pounds last year.

Like corn, wheat and soybeans, potatoes are also a monocrop. They're grown each year, on the same land, with a harvest that happens at the same time. This type of industrial agriculture is big, cheap and yields uniform crops. Unfortunately, as the Irish potato famine demonstrated, it’s also highly susceptible to disease.

Climate change further increases the disease threat. Scientists from the University of Exeter in the UK studied the global spread of crop pests and found fungi – which devastates potato crops – to be the leading threat to crops worldwide. Scientists warn that if these pests continue to spread at their current rate, within 30 years the countries producing major potato crops will be overwhelmed by disease.

Green beans

Green beans may not seem like a particularly vulnerable part of the Thanksgiving plate, but many of them are imported. In fact, the US is the fourth largest importer of green beans, and the popular legumes are very dependent on the stability of international shipping.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warns, "climate change is likely to damage transportation infrastructure through higher temperatures, more severe storms and higher storm surges". As Hurricane Sandy demonstrated in 2012, a storm surge can devastate a city's infrastructure in less than 24 hours, halting food delivery and causing shortages.

It doesn’t even take a catastrophic event to upset the food chain. As aging infrastructure gradually weakens under the pressure of extreme weather, it will have a growing impact on food, as well as on other commodities vital to the food production process. The costs associated with repairing or compensating for failing transportation infrastructure will result in higher food prices.

Wine

Without grapes, there is no wine, and without a constant climate, there are no grapes. Grapes are part of a plant group known as perennials. Unlike annual crops, which have their whole plant cycle in one growing season, perennials are planted once and last for years. They yield crops each harvest cycle.

As perennial plants, they are especially vulnerable to climate uncertainties. "The extremes in the environment that happen has a great effect on perennial crops like grapes because you can't just pick them up and move them," Lewis Ziska from the USDA says. "They're not annuals. You can't shift them from year to year – you're stuck where you're growing."

Grapes are highly sensitive to temperature changes. When the mercury creeps above 95 degrees, the sugar in the fruit starts to break down, spoiling the crop. This is a particular concern in Napa Valley, where temperatures have been rising by one degree each year and where drought and water shortage are already a major problem.

Pecan pie

To make almost any pie crust, you need flour. The global outlook for wheat – one of the world’s major staples, is far from rosy. A 2014 study by Stanford University found that by 2040 wheat yields across Europe could drop by more than 20% due to rising temperatures. In other words, the world’s supply of the grains, the cornerstone of the global diet, is depleting.

In the spring of 2014 the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that the global food supply has already been affected. According to their most recent report, the rate of increase in wheat yields is slowing down. This problem is particularly pressing, given the fact that the rate of increase of the global population is growing.

In 2010, the International Food Policy Research Institute warned that climate change could push the price of food staples up by 130% by 2050. With an additional two billion people to feed by that time, this could be the basis of a food security crisis.

Pumpkin pie

What happens when almost the entire crop of one of the stars of the holiday table is grown in the same place? A big rain comes and washes it all away.

That's what happened during the Great Pumpkin Crisis of 2009, when heavy rains flooded Morton, Illinois, where 95% of US pumpkins are grown. As field after field of orange gourds rotted, even the few pumpkins that survived the moisture-induced blight weren't ready to harvest in time to meet the usual holiday demand.

To add insult to injury, back supplies of canned pumpkin were lower than average because the previous year's crop hadn't done so well either. As Nestle – the leading manufacturer of canned pumpkin – told customers that there wouldn’t be enough pumpkin for Thanksgiving, the dangers of agricultural monopolies and monocrops made itself manifest on store shelves across the US.

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