This election season, many Americans are deeply distraught about the cost of food. You hear their frustrations in polls, at rallies and in focus groups — sticker shock is one of the few issues left to unite Americans across the political spectrum. But as painful as foodflation is, it may just be an early ripple of the kind of disruption to the food system that’s coming. The scale of these changes will be breathtaking. Their global consequences will be profound. And for most of us, they will change what’s in our refrigerators and on our kitchen tables.
Already, we can see the early tremors starting to rattle the global food system. As climate change permanently alters weather patterns, farmers are struggling to produce crops in the same huge volumes they once did. In California this month’s heat wave turned lettuce yellow. In Vietnam extreme heat has damaged the coffee crop, sending prices worldwide soaring. Consumers will soon see even higher prices and less of the foods they have come to know and love. Like it or not, our produce aisles are on the brink of transformation.
At the same time, agriculture itself is putting greater and greater pressure on the environment and the climate. Though the organic and plant-based food movements have helped shift production and consumption patterns ever so slightly, we remain dependent on a largely unsustainable food system that’s destroying precious resources as it races to feed the world.
A few countries are sensing that they have to innovate: Brazil has an industrial farm that produces record yields with regenerative farming practices. But hardly anyone in the United States is talking about the coming crisis — and how to fix an alarmingly broken system. That’s what we here at Opinion want to change.
The idea behind What to Eat on a Burning Planet, a new Times Opinion series, is to push lawmakers, scientists, farmers and consumers to confront the growing strain on our global food supply and the natural systems it depends on and to advance a range of solutions.
David Wallace-Wells’s opening essay, which we published yesterday, is a searing portrait of a food system beginning to backslide. In it he asks tough questions about what it will take to deliver better nutrition to more people without tipping the planet further into climate chaos.
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