4 foods that are likely to suffer from climate change

Climate change threatens many of the world's favorite foods. A writeup in National Geographic's Earth Day 2020 magazine by Daniel Stone lists seven "charismatic foods" that we can expect to "morph in appearance, nutritional value, availability, and price as growing regions shift and farmers turn to warm-weather crops."

Right now, it's easy to take for granted foods that grow far away and are imported to wherever we live. It's easy to deny that climate change will affect their production, or to assume (erroneously) that warmer weather means longer and better growing conditions. The former may be true, but the latter not necessarily: "Lack of rainfall or insufficient cold weather could stunt even the best-laid seeds and plans," Stone writes.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not expect the world to lose much arable land before 2050 and says that few foods will disappear by then, but we should certainly brace ourselves for changes to crops and diets. The best thing we can do is start to accustom ourselves to a more locally-sourced diet. For someone like myself, living in Ontario, Canada, that means acquiring a taste for cabbage and apples in January over lettuce and strawberries flown from California.

Read the story from Treehugger by Katherine Martinko - “4 foods that are likely to suffer from climate change.”