Coffee, chocolate, peaches: climate change is affecting them all | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on February 6, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: While agriculture is currently a greenhouse gas contributor, accounting for about 30% of global emissions, it's also being dramatically impacted by our warming planet. Many foods we consider essential will simply not be around for our children and grandchildren. But it’s not all doom and gloom. New tools and technologies hold incredible promise when it comes to not just slowing down climate change but actually fighting it. Culinary Entrepreneur Sam Kass, former chef to the Obamas, joins The Excerpt to help us understand the role of food and agriculture in the global fight against global warming.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more Paste BN podcasts right here
Dana Taylor:
Hello, and welcome to the Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, February 6th, 2025, and this is a special episode of the Excerpt.
Agriculture currently accounts for about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is already impacting food production around the world. Many foods we consider essential will simply not be around for our children and grandchildren. Peaches in Georgia, chocolate, coffee, these and many other foods are severely threatened by our warming planet, but it's not all doom and gloom. New tools and technologies hold incredible promise when it comes to not just slowing down climate change, but actually fighting it.
Here to help us understand the role of food and agriculture in the global fight against global warming, I'm now joined by culinary entrepreneur, Sam Kass, former chef to the Obamas, author, and investor. Sam, thanks for joining me.
Sam Kass:
Thanks so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Let's start with some of the bad news here. I mentioned Georgia peaches, chocolate, coffee. Are these staples of the American diet going away, and how many staples are we talking about here? Can you give us a sense of the scope?
Sam Kass:
The scope is pretty broad. These issues are playing out around the globe really, and definitely having a huge impact here in the United States. Not everything's going to vanish. Of course, you'll see some major disruptions year over year, like Georgia years ago lost 90% of their peach crop due to climate related weather conditions, but hopefully this year the peaches will be back. But year over year, we're going to see declines in yields across many of the foods that we love.
Coffee is already going through really difficult, challenging times around the world and here in the Americas, where farmers are having to plant their coffee trees up the sides of mountains because it's getting too hot in the kind of valley regions that traditionally coffee has been grown, but in many places they're running out of room. They're only so far up the mountain one can go. Chocolate last year saw a 200% increase in the cost because of massive drought in many of the regions that produce chocolate. And by 2050, the models show that very few of the regions that are currently producing chocolate will be able to continue to do so.
I think the other area that's very important to pay attention to, and as a land mammal, I think we have biases towards the issues playing out on land, but our oceans are really also bearing the brunt of climate. The oceans are drawing about a third of the emissions we're putting into the atmosphere, it's warming the waters and also making the water more acidic, which is impacting shellfish and crustaceans pretty dramatically. The snow crab fishery that's been on an operation since basically the beginning of civilization in the Americas has now been closed for the second year in a row because there's simply no crabs. We've lost over 80% of the crabs in five years. I mean, you've seen a complete collapse of that population. Same with the salmon, commercial salmon fisheries in all of California have been closed, there just isn't any salmon.
So these issues are playing out, I think faster than models and experts have predicted, and these are foods that we hold near and dear to our very identities, to our way of life, to our culture, and it's a pretty scary future that we're going to face if we don't dramatically accelerate our ability to decarbonize.
Dana Taylor:
Sam, for agricultural producers, why can't they simply migrate production to regions that are now more hospitable to the crops they want to grow?
Sam Kass:
On some levels that's already happening. When I was a kid, there was not a single stock of corn in the Dakotas. None of the Dakotas are major corn growing states, and that's because the plants themselves are migrating as the weather is warming. You also see mass migrations of fish and animals moving north because it's getting too warm where the natural habitats have been.
So on some levels that's happening on its own, but tell that to the Georgia peach farmer whose family has been growing peaches in Georgia for decades, for generations. Yes, can Maryland start growing more peaches and then Maine start growing peaches and then somewhere up in Canada start growing? Yes, and that is what's going to happen, but it's going to come at a extraordinary costs. We have hundreds of billions in trillions of dollars, really invested in the way we produce our food in certain regions with pieces of equipment with whole agricultural systems, and cultures that have built up around certain products. They're more than just a food. They're really truly a way of life for these regions and these communities. And as those trees have to move one, it's very expensive. You can't just pick up the trees, can't walk very well, so they're not just going to pick up and move.
So there comes just a huge cost to society, both economic and social and cultural. And so you're going to see, I think the big implications here are just rising food prices, like significant rising food prices. And we've already seen examples of this. A couple years ago the oat harvest was down like 40 to 50%. Oat prices were through the roof. Oatly couldn't source enough oats for just their oat milk, let alone the rest of the use of the oats. I can go on and on about these examples.
For so many families, millions of American families and certainly hundreds of millions around the globe, this throws more and more people who are already food insecure into real crisis, and that's when it starts to get pretty scary for those families. But also from a geopolitical and national security standpoint, massive political instability around the world, as more and more people simply won't have enough to eat or at least can't afford to feed themselves the prices of food in the future. So, those issues are quite serious and we have a lot of work to do to ready ourselves for how to produce food in a far more volatile future.
Dana Taylor:
Let's talk about red meat, which is often blamed for its huge contribution to climate change. Some people have said we just need to give it up altogether in order to solve global warming. Are you in that camp too?
Sam Kass:
So, I'm a chef first and foremost, then a policy wonk, and now an investor. So, I look at this issue from many different angles, but for me personally, no. I enjoy a good steak as much as anybody, although there's absolutely no question when you look at the science that we're simply consuming way too much animal protein and certainly way too much beef. It is taking a massive toll on the environment. Anytime you see a rainforest being chopped down, like in the Amazon for example, that's being chopped down for two reasons. One to either graze cattle or grow soybeans to feed animals. So, it has both a direct emissions from burping, etc, from the feed that we're feeding these cows, and then also from deforestation that's being driven by animal agriculture.
I think the reality is, people are going to eat meat. Given all the outcry, meat consumption is still on the rise and it's in some parts of the world exploding. I think we need to be pragmatic and ask people to dramatically reduce the amount of meat, both in terms of what they're eating in a single serving. So, gone should be the days where we have just a giant steak as your main meal and just eat it less frequently, but allow people the space to enjoy those products, because I just think that's the reality.
In a utopic world, would we be producing beef very differently? I think there is sustainable ways to have animal protein. It just to create enough animal protein at a price point that the mass market can afford just comes at a huge cost, and essentially we're externalizing the environmental impact of that production system. We're pushing that out and we're not paying for that part, and that's why meat is cheap and that's why we're eating so much of it and that's why it's having such a negative impact on the environment. So, and this is what I've done in my life, just try to eat a lot less of it and every once in a while when you want a special treat, go for it.
Dana Taylor:
Now I want to switch to some of the ways food might actually help solve some of the very problems it's contributing to. Things like deforestation, overuse of water resources, loss of biodiversity. Tell me how this might work.
Sam Kass:
I think there's sort of two buckets here, the work we have to do in the food system. The first is we have to invest heavily in preparing ourselves for producing food in a very different environment and climate. For the last 1,000 years, we've lived in the most stable climate, from a climate perspective, the most stable period in the historical record, and we've just gotten really lucky. The weather's been very moderate, we've had endless water and plenty of soil and lots of cheap energy. So we've created a food system around that stability and bounty of resource. We're now moving into a future where we have huge constraints on water, we've lost a huge amount of our soil, energy is going to increasingly become more expensive, and weather and climate is going to be extremely volatile. We're seeing that play out now year over year. And by the way, as bad as the fires in LA were and I know so many have been affected personally in my life, this is just the beginning of our future and it's very scary to think about.
So we have to figure out how to ready our system to deal with the volatility that we're going to face in the future, and we just don't have a system built for that. So that means investing heavily in more resilient genetics, both plants and animals, more diversity in the foods that we're eating. Right now, we're only eating a handful of foods, really, and most of our foods comes from about five crops, and that is a lot of risk when you're starting to see more extreme weather patterns play out when you have kind of... We have all of our eggs in basically a couple baskets, so to speak. So we have to get much more diversity, in terms of what we eat and how we produce it, to ready ourselves for extreme weather conditions. So, that's a big piece of business.
I think the second part is, and this is the part that gets me very excited, particularly on the startup land that I spend most of my time on trying to find companies and technologies that can solve some of these challenges, is that food and ag culture, yes, is one of the biggest drivers of emissions and environmental impact globally, but it also holds the key to so many of the challenges we face. So much of the carbon that's in our atmosphere used to be in our soils and nature-based solutions. Broadly, forestry and oceans hold extraordinary potential to sequester the amount of carbon we need to fundamentally shift the carbon footprint. And it's a system that has over a billion people currently working in it, and one that can be harnessed through the changing of practices and new emerging technologies to start to not only reduce our footprint, but start sequestering this kind of carbon in the time horizon that the science says we have.
I think the thing that people miss on a lot of the, there's a lot of carbon direct air capture technologies and all these other kind of science fiction-like futures that are getting a lot of money and a lot of attention because they're very sexy sounding. But the costs and scale of these emerging technologies simply aren't anywhere close to making an iota of difference in time. I think it's great that it's happening and maybe someday in the future they'll have a big impact on our global footprint. And so I applaud the work, but they're like $1,000 a ton of carbon per ton removed, and it's just not scalable at all.
I think the difference that soil has and nature-based solutions has is that it can scale really broadly and can start bending the footprint right now. And we only have a few years left, frankly, to avoid really extreme catastrophe. The clock is really ticking, we are completely out of time. We have to start incentivizing growers, just change the way they're farming and start adopting new technologies that can really change the environmental footprint of our economy. And I think it's the only system that I know of that has the capacity to do that.
Dana Taylor:
What's one thing that all of our viewers and listeners can do to support sustainable food production? What's a takeaway you want to leave people with?
Sam Kass:
I'd say two things. One, I do think to our earlier conversation, we really do need to eat less animal protein, especially the bigger animals like beef and lamb are two of the bigger emitters. You get down to chicken, it has a much smaller footprint, so I'm all for that. So, that's one thing we can all do in our daily lives.
I think the other thing is, choose brands that are making some kind of sustainability claim. Now, there's a lot of nonsense out there, there's definitely plenty of greenwashing, but we all are busy. I got two young kids, a bunch of jobs, plenty of stuff to deal with. We all got a lot going on, and we all do not have the time to start doing the research. This one company who claimed that they're whatever was produced sustainably, you try to do the research to figure out whether that's true or not. I understand that that's just too much. But as consumers, we have to send a very strong signal to food companies that we will make purchases based on products that are produced in a more sustainable way. That's the other thing we can all start doing and it could have a huge impact.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks so much for joining me on The Excerpt, Sam.
Sam Kass:
Such a pleasure, thanks. Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan, for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcast@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor, Taylor Wilson. We'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.