EXPLAINERGlobal heating is lowering crop yields while making food like rice and wheat less nutritious
In this photo taken on April 25, 2024 a farmer shows a dried up corn at a drought-stricken farm in San Antonio, Nueva Ecija. (JAM STA ROSA/AFP via Getty Images)
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}Chetan Shetty is the executive chef at Passerine, a seasonal Indian restaurant in New York City’s fashionable Flatiron district. Before moving to the United States, however, Chef Shetty lived in Mahabaleshwar, a small town in India famous for its holy sites, majestic rivers and delicious strawberries.Yet Shetty ruefully acknowledges that climate change has put a damper on that last part of his hometown’s legacy. Thanks to Earth’s rising temperatures, there has been a “reduction in the yield and quality of strawberries” in Mahabaleshwar. It is just one example of a trend noticed by not only this Michelin-starred chef, but countless others who work with food for a living: Humanity’s overreliance on fossil fuels is hurting the agricultural industry we all rely upon.The trends of global heating makes people like Greg Hall nervous. The founder and owner of Virtue Cider, a Michigan-based creator of farmhouse cider only using locally sourced fruit, generates 61% of their electricity from 200 solar panels out of awareness of climate change. Hall is very aware of how climate change imperils his harvest. He says he’s lucky there aren’t issues with the quality of his apples, but yields have dropped as temperatures unexpectedly change.”Climate change has made early spring much warmer,” Hall said. “In 2012, the apple trees in Michigan went to bloom in March too early. When an April freeze came, since the buds were already out, they froze and didn’t produce apples.” Michigan lost over 90% of the apple crop that year as a result of that bout of weird weather. “The trees rebounded, but that was our first crop year. It was a disaster.””While I can’t definitively say it’s all due to climate change, there’s no doubt that something is shifting.”Jason Perkins is similarly worried about the raw materials he needs for his livelihood. He is brewmaster at the Maine-based Allagash Brewing Company, which crafts Belgian-based beers, and like all brewmasters Perkins relies on a range of crops. Beers can be made using grains like wheat, barley and hops, all of which are threatened by climate change.”We are finding challenges related to climate change in the reliability of being able to source raw ingredients,” Perkins said. “To both deal with that reality, and decrease our own footprint, we’ve been working closely with local farmers and maltsters to strengthen our food systems close to home.”In addition to impacting the ease with which farmers can cultivate crops like strawberries and apples, or make alcoholic products like beer, climate change is also negatively impacting the nutritiousness of the foods that we finally are able to
