Five ways climate change shows up on your plate

Future droughts have producers altering the ways they make—and we eat—food

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      The following article was originally published by the Daily Climate

      By Lorena Galliot

      “What’s for dinner?” is becoming a complicated question.

      The world’s population is projected to top nine billion by 2050, a 28-percent leap that will greatly increase the demand for food just as climate change is altering rainfall patterns and causing more frequent and widespread droughts.

      The colliding trends have serious implications for agriculture and food security.

      Food producers are finding surprising ways to adapt—and while some sound cool, others err on the creepy side. These are a few of the things that could end up on our dinner plates, courtesy of climate change.

      Infrared-peeled tomatoes (and apples and pears)

      Peeling fruit destined for canning—like tomatoes, apples, and pears—takes a surprising amount of water: a 28-ounce can of tomatoes, for instance, needs 27 ounces of water to remove the peels.

      But California, the nation’s fruit and vegetable basket, is facing its worst drought in more than 100 years. Helpfully, researchers at University of California, Davis, have developed a way to blanch and peel fruit that eliminates water and saves energy.

      The trick? Blast ’em with infrared rays. The technology, straight out of a Star Trek set, shuttles tomatoes on a conveyer belt through an electric infrared heater to soften the peels, then into a vacuum chamber to suck the peels up.

      Switching California’s processed-tomato industry to infrared peeling would save more than 660 million gallons of water and $31 million per year, said Zhongli Pan, the U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher who’s leading the team.

      Produce grown in saltwater greenhouses…

      Before tomatoes can be processed, however, they need to be grown.

      Produce grown in greenhouses tends to have more negative environmental impacts than open-field crops, mainly because greenhouses use more energy and water. But who doesn’t enjoy a hothouse tomato in early March?

      A London-operated startup called Sundrop Farms has a solution. Its commercial greenhouse in the desert near the Australian city of Port Augusta uses solar power to desalinate seawater for irrigation and provide energy for heating or cooling when necessary. That’s good news for Gulf countries like Dubai or Abu Dhabi, whose arid climate make them ill-equipped to meet the food needs of their growing populations.

      …or on your supermarket roof

      A New York–based start-up called BrightFarms is surfing the locavore wave, building hyperlocal, hyperefficient aquaponic farms and greenhouses in urban settings. The company has partnered with over a dozen major retailers in the Northeast and Midwest to sell produce grown within a 32-kilometre radius—with an eye on building greenhouses on the supermarkets’ own roofs.

      The result? Fresher, better-tasting fruits and vegetables and little to no transport-related emissions.

      The problem, of course, is that the math won’t pencil out for BrightFarms as a large-scale solution. Consider the numbers: if you add up all of the cropland and pasture on the planet, you get 40 percent of the ice-free Earth—the size of Africa and Latin America combined. Urban areas, on the other hand, cover just seven percent of the Earth’s surface.

      “Even if you put a greenhouse on every roof in every city in the world, it would still be too small a surface to feed the planet,” said Paul West, a researcher in food security and sustainability at the University of Minnesota. Factor in population growth and we need to double crop output by 2050, he added.

      Your heat-resistant, drought-tolerant Thanksgiving dinner

      Faced with that reality—and an ever drier and hotter climate—scientists are looking for solutions in the controversial world of GMOs, or genetically modified organisms.

      Some, for example, are working to create GMO strains of staples like corn, rice, and wheat that can withstand prolonged periods without watering. The goal is to help them resist temporary periods of drought, or allow them to be irrigated less frequently, explained Eduardo Blumwald, a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis.

      He and his team are also test-growing plants watered with a mix containing up to 25 percent seawater—a must as diminishing aquifers turn brackish.

      Researchers are not just manipulating crops. Turns out turkeys are vulnerable to a sudden illness caused by heat waves, which turns their meat limp and insipid. A team at Michigan State University is breeding hundreds of turkey chicks under heat lamps in the hopes of singling out the genes that could help the animals endure hotter environments.

      Meatless Meat

      Heat-resistant or not, most food experts agree that the single biggest thing the meat industry can do to adapt to climate change is produce less meat.

      ”There’s a huge opportunity to reduce world hunger and increase sustainability just by changing how we use existing crops—if less of them were used to produce meat,” said West, the University of Minnesota food researcher. Nearly a third of all calories grown each year in the world are used as animal feed, enough to feed an additional billion people.

      But would you give up your burger?

      If Bill Gates has his way, you won’t have to. The Microsoft founder is funding a start-up, Beyond Meat, that uses pea protein to create chicken and beef substitutes that taste and feel exactly like the real thing. Even foodies are duped: New York Times food columnist Marc Bittman wrote about fake chicken so convincing it fooled him twice during a blind fajita tasting.

      Clearly, this isn’t your mother’s tofurkey. Still, many consumers balk at substitute meat products. What would win their hearts and minds?

      Deception.

      “It may take them not knowing it,” said Arlin Wasserman, a partner at food-sustainability consulting firm Changing Tastes. He points to a study conducted by the Culinary Institute of America and UC Davis that showed that blind tasters preferred taco blends that were a mix of beef and mushroom over 100 percent beef ones.

      Of course, for those wary of fake chicken, there are always stir-fried bugs!

      The Daily Climate is an independent, foundation-funded news service covering energy, the environment, and climate change.

       

      Lorena Galliot is a New York-based journalist and producer and a Columbia University Pulitzer fellow. 

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