Gastronomy and climate change

Whether the best wine and oil come from the Mediterranean areas of the planet, whether potatoes are as much a staple food in Andean areas as they are in Alpine ones, whether the coffee plant grows only between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn and no further, and whether swordfish are not caught in the North Sea is ultimately a matter of climate. Each species has evolved by adapting to a specific climate, and thus to specific patterns of temperature, humidity, rain, and wind, and to changes in this pattern throughout the year, the seasons. Every food system and food are the result of human action from the conditions imposed by the climate and the species adapted to that climate. Fishing, agriculture, hunting, fermentation and processing processes, and animal husbandry systems are all constituted from climatic conditions and depend on the dynamic stability of these conditions. Food systems are also based on biodiversity and ecological processes that ensure what are known as ecosystem services, for example pollination, soil fertility and carbon dioxide sequestration. These ecosystem services are provided by species and their interactions, and thus are also grafted and dependent on climatic conditions and their relative stability.

The current (2021) rapidly evolving, anthropogenic climate change is breaking the “threads” of both the ecological fabric of the planet and the food systems and gastronomic heritages associated with them. Human activity, based on exponential population growth, increasing per capita consumption of all kinds of resources, and the use of fossil fuels, is undoing what ecological processes had generated over millions of years: to maintain a carbon dioxide rate in the atmosphere, and thus a global average temperature as favorable as possible for life itself, by storing carbon dioxide in the logs of ancient forests (coal), in phytoplankton and zooplankton buried at the bottom of the sea (oil), in the calcium carbonate structure of coral reefs, or in the undecomposed organic material of peatlands and soil beneath permafrost. There is no corner of the planet that is not feeling the consequences of this sudden increase (in geological terms) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; there is no species that is not affected by these changes. With these premises, it becomes almost trite to say that climate change has and will have profound effects on food systems around the world, and on the food we eat and will eat.

Climate change is manifesting itself in diets, practices and food traditions in every corner of the planet, and it will increasingly manifest itself by putting productions and economies at risk, requiring resilience and flexibility from all stakeholders. Looking for a summary of the multiple effects involved, we can say that climate change impacts:

1. ecosystems, with loss of their ability to create biomass and thus produce food (example of the reduction of Antarctic krill and the impact on the oceanic trophic chain);
2. on the geographic distribution of crops and species hunted and fished (example of future scenarios in relation to olive oil production in the Mediterranean basin, of the increase in the price of Japanese squid as a result of their displacement deep into the Pacific, and of the impact on the Senegalese coastal economy of the offshore displacement of sardines);
3. on traditional products and gastronomy, including the associated transformation processes (example of lambic beers, whose spontaneous fermentation is threatened by rising temperatures, and ice cellars used as warehouses for Alaskan Inuit whale meat).

Communities, people, farmers, ranchers and fishermen are already coping with the effects of climate change, adapting their practices and activities to a rapidly changing environment as much as possible. Thus, Tunisian fishermen have turned the invasive blue crab into a national export item, Andean farmers are moving their potato fields higher, mountain beekeepers are adapting the positioning of their hives to the blooms moving upward from generation to generation, and nomadic reindeer herders in the Eurasian tundra are learning to recognize and avoid areas of melting permafrost with their herds.

These adaptations, and the flexibility that enables them, need to be supported because they underpin the resilience that food systems will need to cope with ongoing changes. Consumers, all of us, can cultivate this resilience and flexibility by introducing into our diets the new species and foods that climate change will bring, for example by adapting fish consumption to the species on the rise in the so-called tropicalization of the Mediterranean, while policy can accompany this process with ad hoc laws and regulations that keep pace with the change (example of the plaice fishery along the Atlantic coast of the United States).

Although climate change is a global problem, solutions and adaptations to it in terms of food and food systems should be local, multiple, and based on the diversity of foods and their sustainable production. What climate change and its often disastrous effects are showing us is that we are not masters of anything, not of our destiny and not of the planet we inhabit, nor have we ever been. Instead, we are dependent on every other species, on the rest of the life that inhabits the planet, and it is only by accepting this dependence, by re-tuning ourselves to the planet’s ecologies, albeit rapidly changing ones, that we can ride the wave without being swamped by it.