New Veggies for a Warming Planet

When you bite into an ear of fresh corn, you are eating something profoundly unnatural. A modern ear is a big, flavorful thing packed with 18 rows of plump kernels. Its sad-looking wild ancestor had just six to eight rows of kernels, looking more like something you’d weed out of your lawn than something you’d put on the grill. The juicy version we eat today is the result of thousands of years of breeding and selection. The same is true for most every modern crop: They have been genetically modified over and over to feed an ever-growing, urbanized population.

Now we need to remake our crops yet again. The old strategies of improving size and yield are no longer enough. A couple centuries of human greenhouse emissions have caught up with us. With the world likely to get at least 2 degrees Celsius warmer, on average, by the middle of the century, and with extreme storms, rains, and drought already happening more frequently, growing conditions are changing faster than farmers and their crops can adapt. Zachary Lippman, a professor of genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, likens the situation to an arms race—only this time around we are competing against ourselves.