What Climate Change Means For Your Dinner Plans
And other reasons we’d better get ready to be hungry.
Got plans for dinner? They may change. Or vanish. Climate change is only one of the reasons we are about to enter a new age of hunger. But let’s start with climate change, because that’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore, and it’s the biggest short term factor reshaping our menu.
For anyone who mistakenly believes that food is something that grows in aisle three, a quick reminder of how agriculture works: you can only grow the plants we use as food in places that provide the right conditions for them to thrive. Everything we eat that isn’t a plant is still dependent on plants to begin with, because your burger had to be fed an immense number of calories of plant matter before it eventually reached the size that it went to the slaughterhouse and its unhappy life came to an end. That means that the physical survival of every human being on the planet requires the Earth’s thin skin of soil, various nutrients hopefully found within it, sunlight, water, and the other things that vegetation, particularly the 200 or so plants that we consume out of the 400,000 or so that our planet holds, requires to grow.
“But isn’t more CO2 good for plants?”
