tingilinde

precision agriculture

food as the climate changes

Change is certainly coming.

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The world as a whole is already facing what the Cornell agricultural economist Chris Barrett calls a “food polycrisis.” Over the past decade, he says, what had long been reliable global patterns of year-on-year improvements in hunger first stalled and then reversed. Rates of undernourishment have grown 21 percent since 2017. Agricultural yields are still growing, but not as quickly as they used to and not as quickly as demand is booming. Obesity has continued to rise, and the average micronutrient content of dozens of popular vegetables has continued to fall. The food system is contributing to the growing burden of diabetes and heart disease and, through new spillovers of infectious diseases from animals to humans as well.

And then there are prices. Worldwide, wholesale food prices, adjusted for inflation, have grown about 50 percent since 1999, and those prices have also grown considerably more volatile, making not just markets but the whole agricultural Rube Goldberg network less reliable. Overall, American grocery prices have grown by almost 21 percent since President Biden took office, a phenomenon central to the widespread perception that the cost of living has exploded on his watch. Between 2020 and 2023, the wholesale price of olive oil tripled; the price of cocoa delivered to American ports jumped by even more in less than two years. The economist Isabella Weber has proposed maintaining the food equivalent of a strategic petroleum reserve, to buffer against shortages and ease inevitable bursts of market chaos.

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But disruption is only half the story and perhaps much less than that. Adaptation and innovation will transform the global food supply, too. At least to some degree, crops such as avocados or cocoa, which now regularly appear on lists of climate-endangered foodstuffs, will be replaced or redesigned. Diets will shift, and with them the farmland currently producing staple crops — corn, wheat, soy, rice. The pressure on the present food system is not a sign that it will necessarily fail, only that it must change. Even if that progress does come to pass, securing a stable and bountiful future for food on a much warmer planet, what will it all actually look like?

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dark cuisine

Purposefully offensive food in China

 

a smoothie for idiots

For $19 you can compromise your health.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

the disappearing english apple

Pressures on local farmers and varieties. 

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The British grocery market is an oligopoly. Eight retailers control ninety-two per cent of sales. A recent report by the House of Lords Horticultural Sector Committee described their power as “behemothic.” They can source cold-stored Galas from all over the world. (About sixty per cent of apples sold in the U.K. are imported.) For cultural, possibly griggle-related, reasons, British consumers like a small apple, one that fits easily in the hand. The U.S. and Asian markets prefer larger fruit, so foreign farmers can often sell smaller apples that have been rejected by their own retailers to British grocers at a discount. “It’s very difficult to compete with that,” Capper said.

The combination of steeply rising costs and being undercut by cheaper, similar apples from overseas is proving unmanageable. “It’s happened very quickly,” Capper told me. “We’ve had businesses going from profitable and able to cope with volatility to losing money.” As a rule, British apple growers tend to plant between eight hundred thousand and a million and a half new trees each year to refresh their orchards and keep up with changing tastes. In recent years, the total has been closer to four hundred thousand. “If you don’t reinvest as a sector, you don’t stay with the market,” Capper said. “And if you can’t stay with the market, then you go out of business.” Last fall, a survey of a hundred fruit and vegetable farmers found that forty-nine were expecting to go bankrupt in the next twelve months.

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the disappearing english apple

Pressures on local farmers and varieties. 

 

the disappearing english apple

Pressures on local farmers and varieties. 

 

food expiration dates

An enormous amount of food is thrown out when it doesn't have to be.

A guide to sorting things out.

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Food product dating, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls it, is completely voluntary for all products (with the exception of baby food, more on that later). Not only that, but it has nothing to do with safety. It acts solely as the manufacturer’s best guess as to when its product will no longer be at peak quality, whatever that means. Food manufacturers also tend to be rather conservative with those dates, knowing that not all of us keep our pantries dark and open our refrigerators as minimally as necessary. (I, for one, would never leave the fridge door open for minutes at a time as I contemplate what to snack on.)

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the ptfi

Part of The Periodic Table of Food Initiative is a database of the bimolecular composition of food.  It's an effort to standardize analysis and offer the information to researchers as well as farmers and the pubic in the future. 

(from a description)

The initiative—which in addition to AHA has partnered with universities and nonprofits—has compiled information on about 500 foods, with 1600 more in the pipeline. Unlike previous food composition tables—which focused on macronutrients such as fats, proteins, and carbohydrates—the new database includes information on a much wider group of compounds, including micronutrients and specialized metabolites, some of which may help prevent disease. To collect those data, PTFI has partnered with more than 20 research laboratories globally. To date, the Rockefeller Foundation and other funders have spent more than $30 million on the multiyear effort.

“With a rapidly growing [world] population … growing enough food was clearly an urgent priority,” said Bruce German, director of the Foods for Health Institute and chair of PTFI’s advisory board. But the consolidation of agriculture into fewer high-yielding crops, he says, has in some parts of the world impoverished diets and contributed to mortality. To help correct this, the initiative is focusing attention on lesser known indigenous food plants, which can be better suited to local growing conditions and more nutritious than some popular commercial crops.

Eventually, organizers hope the database will enable researchers to compare the nutritional value of foods produced in different places and by different techniques, including large-scale monocultures and organic agriculture. It will also track how climate change is shaping the molecular content of plants. Such information could help “feed people in a way that is regenerative to the planet, equitable, and nutritious,” says John de la Parra, director of the Global Food Portfolio at the Rockefeller Foundation.

In addition to building the food components database, PTFI is involved in several research projects. One led by ethnobotanist Alex McAlvay of the New York Botanical Garden is examining practices in the Wollo Highlands of Ethiopia. There, farmers have historically sown mixtures of different kinds of seeds in the same fields, a practice that helps protect against crop failure during droughts and insect infestations. The strategy could also have health benefits “When various crops are planted together, harvested together, and consumed together, they appear to be complementary nutritionally leading to a better diet,” McAlvay says, adding that he hopes such research will help revitalize traditional agriculture and improve commercial farming.

The initiative could “bring nutrition [research] into the 21st century,” says Jess Fanzo, a food system expert at Columbia University who is not involved in project. It will not only help train scientists around the world, she notes, but also encourage the adoption of “uniform global standards for food analysis,” which will make it possible to compare results generated in different laboratories.

 

bad news for chocolate lovers

(that would include me)  Climate change and massive yield cuts in Western Africa.