Thought we'd begin enhancing this media news site with additional points of interest such as information from the food industry which impacts our daily lives and and the entertainment business, both of which is of great interest to all our subscribers to LeNoble's Media Sales Insights.
So...here's the first of many interesting articles which may affect our lives: PLease let us know how much you enjoy them as they are published. You may write to me at drphilipjay@gmail.com. That way I'll get your comments more quickly.
The Result of More GLOBAL WARMING Could Climate Change Destroy the Bloody Mary? “The
entire global food system is a nightmare on the horizon.”
By Clint Rainey
This drink might look a little different in the next
few decades.
At this point, we’ve all just made peace with the idea
that climate change will devastate the Earth, right? As far as food is
concerned, it is now easy to imagine a world without coffee, wine, bananas,
avocados, chocolate, crops whose mere presence in the world’s food supply is
threatened by a warming planet. But some climate-change experts stress the fact
that complete extinction is less of a threat than the ways smaller adjustments
will affect our food chain. “The unpredictable ways in which our food system
takes up shocks and stressors is the really compelling story here and it is
going hugely under-reported,” says Ed Carr, director of Clark University’s
international development, community, and environment department. “The entire
global food system is a nightmare on the horizon.”
Carr warns that our modern food system is
interconnected in ways we will fail to truly grasp until “a single shock or
stress impacts the system.” He says, “Add multiple shocks, or even several
moving parts, and that uncertainty compounds.”
Take, for example, that iconic brunch drink, the
Bloody Mary. It is often calledthe world’s most complex cocktail due to the
sheer amount of stuff that’s in it. Even a normal Bloody Mary — one that isn’t
garnished with, say, raw oysters or an entire fried chicken — contains far more
ingredients than you might think (Worcestershire sauce alone contains over a
dozen separate components), any one of which could be a victim of climate
change in the future. “You look at the glass and go, ‘A lot is going on in
there,’” explains Michael Hoffmann, who runs the Cornell Institute for Climate
Smart Solutions. “But if you take the pieces one by one, you start realizing
tomorrow’s Bloody Mary is going to taste very different.”
How different? Scientists can’t definitively say how
flavors will shift. It depends on whether the environmental stressors manifest
as rainfall declines, or perhaps a long-forgotten disease emerging from melted
Arctic ice. (That really happened, btw.) What the experts we talked to can agree
on is that the ingredients that make up your favorite Bloody are in for a rough
few decades of change. And, yes, the loss or change of boozy tomato juice is —
in the grand scheme of things — admittedly trivial, yet examining each
ingredient of this classic hangover cure is also, ahem, a surprisingly
eye-opening way to get a grasp on the ways in which our changing climate could
affect our food supply. Here’s how it looks:
Tomatoes
The one constant across all Bloody Mary recipes is
also the most susceptible to change. Nutrient depletion has wracked tomatoes
for years; the standard, garden-variety version of the fruit continues to leach
vital nutrients like vitamin C and calcium. According to one influential
report, the atmosphere itself may be to blame due to rising CO2 levels.
Scientists have found that higher temperatures increase the odds of plants
getting a disease called blossom-end rot, which make them ripen more slowly,
decreases their fruit size, and reduces natural sweetness. Once temperatures
soar above 90 degrees, just kiss tomatoes good-bye entirely: The plant won’t
blossom in such heat. It will sacrifice flowers to conserve moisture, and fruit
that’s already on the vine will, for example, turn an unappetizing shade of
yellow.
Vodka
Vodka can be made from a variety of different
ingredients, but the outlook is pretty bleak for all of them.
Researcherspredict climate change will have a “profound effect” on potatoes in
warm climates like India, and in the next two decades, global yields are
predicted to drop by as much as 32 percent. By 2060, it’s possible Bolivia will
be the only place on Earth that doesn’t have to drastically change its farming
practices to maintain the current yield. The U.N. also warnsthat the
biodiversity of potatoes is under global threat.
High rollers, meanwhile, might want to know that Grey
Goose is made with wheat instead of potatoes, but those grains are grown in
Picardy, a region in northern France where a new study predicts precipitation
shortages and hotter weather will shrink yields 21 percent by century’s end.
And Tito’s, America’s top-selling spirits brand, is distilled from corn. Carr
points out that the Corn Belt is in trouble: Models predict a 6 degree
temperature increase for parts of the midwest over the next half century and,
in two generations, Canada may produce much of the corn that America does now.
Hot sauce
Rising sea levels are quite literally drowning
Tabasco, the crucial Bloody Mary ingredient produced by Louisiana’s McIlhenny
family: The company is headquartered on Avery Island, Louisiana, a salt dome by
the Gulf of Mexico that’s headed underwater, along with one of the country’s
largest salt mines. The peppers used to make the sauce are actually grown in
Central and South America, but that only ensures supply, not quality. Research
shows warming temperatures have a metaphorically apt consequence for chiles:
Heat stress on the plant increases capsaicin, which means the peppers get
hotter in their own way. Droughts have already caused shortages of some other pepper
varieties, like of the chiltepin in northern Mexico, and others as traced in
the excellent 2011 book Chasing Chiles.
Lemons
Lemon production is concentrated in coastal regions
with similar climates, and the crop is sensitive to dramatic temperature changes
— fruits that ripen too quickly become bitter. They’re also vulnerable to
disease and hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and severe, and that
in turn translates to price volatility. They’re also practically amonoculture
crop; the more similar they are, the more susceptible the entire supply becomes
to any unexpected “shock,” which would mean a serious citrus decline.
Worcestershire sauce
The classic condiment requires fermented anchovies
which, like all fish, are in grave danger of going extinct. (The most dire
warnings predict edible fish could disappear as soon 2048.) Already, the
anchovy population off of California’s coast has seen total collapse: It
dropped from 1 million tons in 2009 to just 15,000 tons in 2011.
Horseradish
A majority of North America’s horseradish production
comes from just two counties in southern Illinois. A sole environmental
stressor to the area could decimate supplies of the pungent root. In fact, it
almost happened once, in 2002, when a fungus nearly wiped it out. It’s not like
farmers could just start planting it somewhere else. As the Washington Post
explained at the time, “There are no seeds for root crops. Instead, offshoots
the size of carrots are separated from the thick part of the horseradish by
hand, then replanted in the loose, rich soil of this stretch of Mississippi
River bottom land.”
Ice
Consider different types of water, and the individual
traits they confer on drinks. As Hoffmann says, “You have to think about that
in addition to the Tabasco, tomatoes, vodka, and all of that.” And, surprise,
climate change is throwing a real wrench in the nutrients found in water, which
is also a reliable conduit for pollutants, second only to air. As the EPA
warns, bad things are in store for the “amount, timing, form, and intensity” of
rainfall, and those problems will inevitably threaten our water resources.
Algal blooms now routinely taint our lakes and rivers; and a recent study in
Science points out extreme storms will wash in larger quantities of nitrogen —
possibly 20 percent more, by the end of the century. Freak downpours also
create runoff that flows into our water supplies, after picking up pollutants,
animal waste, sediment, and other trash along the way.
Black pepper
A few dashes of salt and fresh-ground black pepper are
necessary finishing touches for any great Bloody, but that pepper could be a
problem. Vietnam and India are the biggest producers, and output in both areas
is at its maximum. In fact, production bases are shrinking. It’s a rain-fed crop,
and researchers call the warm, dry recent years a cause of “great concern,”
particularly because there’s a fear the shifting weather could bring in new
pests and pathogens, too.
Celery
This is the one spot of good news, if you want to call
it that. It turns out everyone’s least favorite vegetable is surprisingly
resilient. U.K. scientists investigated greenhouse gas effects on the vegetable
last year, and according totheir data, “There was no effect of increased
temperature on above ground celery yield.” Um, great?
Celery
Celery’s apparent invincibility notwithstanding,
experts are clear about the fact that shocks and stressors have already
affected these ingredients (and plenty of others) in meaningful ways — and the
issues that we already understand are actually the least troubling. “I’m not
worried about what I know will happen — we can plan for that,” Carr says. “I
worry about what I don’t know.” He adds that the sheer number of possible
threats is simply overwhelming, and all it takes is bad luck. “It could be one,
or three, or a million. They just have to happen at the wrong time and the
wrong place, and we have a mess on our hands.”
