If Food Could Talk: Stories from 13 Precious Foods Endangered by Climate Change

By Theodore Dumas

At issue for everyone who eats food, If Food Could Talk highlights thirteen important foods that will likely disappear in the very near future due to climate change, discussing origins of these foods and cultivation histories, as well as spiritual, socioeconomic, and nutritional impacts. Intervention strategies are highlighted. Each foo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theodore Dumas
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646632381

Theodore Dumas

Theodore C. Dumas is an author and an interdisciplinary biomedical scientist with a talent for communicating complex scientific findings in fun and humorous ways that anyone can appreciate. At all levels of his career he has won awards and other recognitions for his teaching and writing abilities. He has published over forty scientific journal articles, three book chapters, and served as a professional scientific writer for three editions of Core Concepts in Health, a widely used college level textbook. Diverse professional health care audiences comprised of nurses, pharmacists, psychological therapists, massage therapists, clergy, midwives, and others appreciate his communication style and his ability to bring science to life with colorful examples and societal implications.

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If Food Could Talk:

Stories from 13 Precious Foods Endangered by

Climate Change

By Theodore Constantine Dumas

© Copyright 2020 Theodore Constantine Dumas

ISBN 978-1-64663-238-1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

Published by

Theodore C. Dumas, Ph.D.

4400 University Drive, MS 2A1

Fairfax, VA 22030

Images were captured by Nhu N. Dumas and Theodore C. Dumas

Greenhouse illustration was created by Theodore C. Dumas

CO2 emissions pie chart was created by Dr. Sultan Al-Salem

(cited in the text and the References list)

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK to my family, immediate and extended. Thank you!

To my yiayias and pappous for immigrating to the United States from Greece. Nothing against Greece. It’s a great place to visit, but it’s not the United States, the land of golden opportunities, as my grandparents would often say. None of my grandparents were highly educated, but they had the personal character and work ethic to endure and thrive.

To my mom and dad, who loved me, fed me well, who painted a kickball field onto a public road in front of our house to promote outdoor play and exercise, and who paid for most of my undergraduate college education. Perhaps most important, my mom taught me persistence and my dad taught me kindness, both of which substantially impacted the writing of this book.

To my three sisters, who acted as three additional mothers when I was a kid. I am as mentally and physically healthy as I am as a fifty-plus-year-old male in large part because of the quantity and quality of the early life nurturing I received.

To my wife, Nhu, and daughters, Siana and Isla, who are the core inspiration for this book. I was never so aware of what I was eating until I met Nhu, and we’d like our daughters to continue to enjoy the same foods when they are adults that we do today. After a few decades on my own, immersed in scientific investigation, rock and roll music, and pick-up soccer, you gave me a second life with more dimensions and wonders than I could ever have imagined. I hope this book makes an impact on the way we all view food.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter

Introduction

Chapter 2

Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture, Briefly

Chapter 3

The Non-Chilling Future of the Ubiquitous Apple

Chapter 4

Science Portends the Pits for Avocados

Chapter 5

Did You Know Bananas Are Herbs?

Chapter 6

Simply, Beer

Chapter 7

Cherries Fueled Armies and Libidos

Chapter 8

Chickpeas, the Thirstiest Endangered Food

Chapter 9

No! Not Chocolate!!

Chapter 10

How Will I Start My Day Without a Mug of Coffee?

Chapter 11

Fish Are Delicious Food Chain Linchpins

Chapter 12

Winnie-the-Pooh Is Having Panic Attacks About Honey, Oh, Bother

Chapter 13

When Life Stops Giving Peanuts, We Stop Making Peanut Butter

Chapter 14

The Potato Was the Ultimate Comfort Food

Chapter 15

How Will I End My Day Without a Glass of Wine?

Chapter 16

Saving the Foods We Love 

Appendix

Health-Promoting Nutrients, Minerals, and Phytochemicals in Endangered Foods

References

Acknowledgments

PREFACE

Climate change is arguably the greatest challenge the human species will face in the coming decades. For quite some time, climate scientists have been warning about the chaos that will occur with an increase of just a few degrees in global temperature. News reports, internet articles, and blogs all seem to focus on the weather itself, the more severe and more persistent storms that will occur along with the fires, droughts, and floods. Less consideration appears to be given to what living conditions will be like in between the catastrophes and in regions that are not as directly or as severely impacted by changes in local weather conditions. If we break down life to its most basic parts, we eat, we drink, we sleep, and we do other things when we’re not eating, drinking, or sleeping. This book focuses on the eating and drinking parts of daily life. How will the foods we eat and the drinks we imbibe change as the global climate changes? Food loss is not something that might happen in the future; we see the impact now in the rising costs of many natural foods. The scientific evidence is strong that food loss is already happening and will get much worse.

This is a reference book, if you will, a compilation of information about thirteen of the most endangered foods. It is more about plants and less about animals. However, there is a full chapter dedicated to fish, a relatively sizeable section about pollinating bees (honeybees in particular), frequent references to other insects, some props to gargantuan mammals that don’t exist anymore, and discussion of human behavior (of course). There are cooking recipes in each chapter that are intended to better link a visceral experience to this serious problem (food is mood) and to provide instructions for simple and delicious ways to prepare and eat these foods while they are still available. There is also a list of the healthy nutrients, minerals, and phytochemicals contained within these endangered foods at the back end of the book, following the final chapter. The historical and scientific information was gathered from multiple sources including pubmed.gov (a search engine for peer-reviewed biomedical journal articles), federal agencies (including NOAA, USDA, FDA), Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and some national and local news sources. The nutrients, minerals and phytochemicals listed at the back of the book were all sourced at the Linus Pauling Institute–Micronutrient Information Center. As a disclaimer, I donate a few dollars to Wikipedia on a yearly basis to keep the site running. All but one of the food images that open each of the food chapters were taken in our kitchen or dining room with an iPhone 10. All recipes were prepared and photographed in our kitchen.

I’m not a chef, a food critic, a dietician, or a food scientist. I am just a husband and a father that has developed a bit of an obsession with climate change. I’m also a college professor in the life sciences who studies how the brain controls animal behavior and who happens to have free access to a ton of peer-reviewed journal articles. I became concerned about global warming many years ago, when I was single, but it didn’t produce the response in me then that it does now that I’m married and have young children. I call it an obsession with climate change, but not in a pathological way. I don’t think and re-think the same global destruction scenarios one might envision if she/he were pathologically obsessed or producing some blockbuster planetary doomsday movie. I call it an obsession because the interest drove me to write this book, which was a bit of an undertaking. I felt this topic was worthy of a book because eating and drinking are a big deal and people might want to know this stuff.

We all eat at least a handful of the foods that are described. Some of us eat all of the foods that are described. This is not an issue for any singular demographic of modern-day society. This is an issue for all of us. Time to think and act, my fellow climate-change survivors.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Food, glorious food! Never in the history of mankind has there been so much food on this planet, both in bulk and in variety. In just about any postindustrial nation, anyone can walk into a grocery store or supermarket and experience this on a near twenty-four-hour basis seven days a week. Dozens of varieties of fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains; whole wheat, rye, pumpernickel, sourdough, unleavened breads, and bread crumbs; hard and soft cheeses, creams, curds and Brie; red meats, white meats, various poultries, sausages, fish, and other seafoods. Including all of the different types of sauces, syrups, soft drinks, juices, candies, cookies, crackers, and other canned, jarred, packaged, and frozen foods, most supermarkets sell tens of thousands of different products. Some supermarkets sell 40,000 more products today than they did in 1990. There are roughly 38,000 grocery stores in the US creating a retail food industry that earns about $660 billion dollars per year. Total food sales in the US are about $1.4 trillion dollars every year, which amounts to approximately 5 percent of the total US economy (Food Marketing Institute, US Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Some of the foods we eat today have been with us for almost 10,000 years! To put this in perspective, plants have existed for about 700 million years while humans have been around for about 200,000 years. Well, the day of reckoning is upon us. The peak has been reached, and the food boom is already beginning to bust. In only fifty years or