The following piece ran in nearly every Edible publication across North America in Fall 2021.

If we had been told, a decade ago, that so many climate-fueled disasters would hit the food system so soon, would we have believed it?

If someone had described the catastrophic flooding of the Missouri river that submerged a million acres of corn and soybeans in 2019 (followed a year later by winds in the same region that were so destructive they flattened corn silos), crops in Texas freezing in April, winemakers having to throw away entire vintages because they tasted of wildfire smoke, shellfish in British Columbia being literally cooked alive in the ocean and ranchers throughout the West being forced to sell off tens of thousands of cattle so they wouldn’t starve due to drought—would we have listened?

Would we have done more to prepare?

I can’t help but think back to a lecture I sat in on in 2008 on the future of food and climate change by a pair of Ivy League economists.

I had seen An Inconvenient Truth and was serious about local food. And I had a hunch that reducing my “food miles” wouldn’t cut it.

The economists talked about the potential boon to crop yields, due to “increased photosynthesis” and “CO2 fertilization,” but added that warming temperature and rising evaporation would balance one another out, at least in our lifetimes.

Some places would get too wet, and some would be too dry, they warned. And, as if to reassure us, they said that other parts of the world—developing nations with little infrastructure and large numbers of subsistence farmers—would face the worst of the problem.

And those of us in North America? We’d be fine until at least the end of the century.

Then someone turned the lights back on, the economists thanked the audience, and everyone went home.