The Climate Will Affect Our Food Supply
It’s Blog Action Day. Are you ready to make a difference?
This year, bloggers from around the world and standing up to say now is the time to do something about the climate. I know, it’s a weird thing for a food blog to be talking about, but I’m a locavore and slow food guy for a reason. I know changes in the environment will affect the amount of food we have to eat in the coming years.
But what does that really mean? Affect food supply?
How about the end of the apple? In her post Blog Action Day: Saving Apple Pie, FreshNewEngland argues (quite convincly) that the changing temperatures are affecting apple production.
Go ahead. Click it. I can wait.
I’d never really thought about it like that before, but she’s right. Climate change is changing the length of growing seasons everywhere, including New England, Minnesota, and Missouri where the best apples in the world are grown. Ergo climate change = no apple pie.
And as we all know apple pie is the true non-partisan issue. Who doesn’t love apple pie?
Living in Kansas, I am around farmers all the time. My family were farmers and I know the climate here in the Midwest (always weird) is getting more unstable. However, that article suddenly made the government euphemism “loss of food security” actually mean something.
More greenhouse gas = less apples and maple syrup. Oh my!
But it’s not just apple pie
Even worse, it only took a Google search for me to realize what else climate change means to my state.
According to a NASA-GISS, Columbia University, Florida State University study, one of most credible models about the environment in the coming years shows that rainfall will significantly decrease across both Kansas and Oklahoma. That’s bad, m’kay? While a lot of agriculture has shifted to California, Kansas is still the bread basket of United States. We grow a lot of wheat, soy, and corn that feed thousands of people every day. And we grow cows. Holstein cattle are raised by factory farms and artisan ranchers which supply the nation a bunch of delicious meat.
And that’s just the large scale production. There are also small and medium farms growing fresh produce all across this great state which feed many local families and are sold to restaurants and homes all across the region.
All of that is threatened. All of it. If rainfall decreases while greenhouse gases increase (which according to estimates is a certainty if we don’t make a change soon…), both meat, according to the University of Maryland, and crops, accoding to NASA, will be harder to grow and farms harder to maintain if we cannot reverse climate change soon. So in other words, if you like fresh bread or if you like your K.C. Strip, the time to act is now. Do something about it.
Here are fifteen things you can do to make a difference. (Scroll down to the bottom.) You can also download my eBook Greening Your Diet which talks about food choices and recipes you can make to help the environment. You don’t need to make huge change. All it takes is all of us making small changes and one hundred years from now your grandkids won’t be having to ration their meat. Or their water. Or their food.
Think about it. If not, there might not be as much food to enjoy.
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