Chetan Shetty is the executive chef at Passerine, a seasonal Indian restaurant in New York City’s fashionable Flatiron district. Before moving to the United States, however, Chef Shetty lived in Mahabaleshwar, a small town in India famous for its holy sites, majestic rivers and delicious strawberries.
Yet Shetty ruefully acknowledges that climate change has put a damper on that last part of his hometown’s legacy. Thanks to Earth’s rising temperatures, there has been a “reduction in the yield and quality of strawberries” in Mahabaleshwar. It is just one example of a trend noticed by not only this Michelin-starred chef, but countless others who work with food for a living: Humanity’s overreliance on fossil fuels is hurting the agricultural industry we all rely upon.
The trends of global heating makes people like Greg Hall nervous. The founder and owner of Virtue Cider, a Michigan-based creator of farmhouse cider only using locally sourced fruit, generates 61% of their electricity from 200 solar panels out of awareness of climate change. Hall is very aware of how climate change imperils his harvest. He says he’s lucky there aren’t issues with the quality of his apples, but yields have dropped as temperatures unexpectedly change.
"Climate change has made early spring much warmer,” Hall said. “In 2012, the apple trees in Michigan went to bloom in March too early. When an April freeze came, since the buds were already out, they froze and didn’t produce apples.” Michigan lost over 90% of the apple crop that year as a result of that bout of weird weather. “The trees rebounded, but that was our first crop year. It was a disaster.”
"While I can’t definitively say it’s all due to climate change, there’s no doubt that something is shifting."
Jason Perkins is similarly worried about the raw materials he needs for his livelihood. He is brewmaster at the Maine-based Allagash Brewing Company, which crafts Belgian-based beers, and like all brewmasters Perkins relies on a range of crops. Beers can be made using grains like wheat, barley and hops, all of which are threatened by climate change.
"We are finding challenges related to climate change in the reliability of being able to source raw ingredients,” Perkins said. “To both deal with that reality, and decrease our own footprint, we've been working closely with local farmers and maltsters to strengthen our food systems close to home."
In addition to impacting the ease with which farmers can cultivate crops like strawberries and apples, or make alcoholic products like beer, climate change is also negatively impacting the nutritiousness of the foods that we finally are able to consume. Chef Nekia Hattley, the Los Angeles-based owner of vegan products and meals company My Daddy’s Recipes, told Salon she has noticed changes in the quality and flavor of food.
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“While I can’t definitively say it’s all due to climate change, there’s no doubt that something is shifting,” Hattley said. “Whether it’s the quality of our soil, the pesticides and chemicals we allow on our crops, or even food being grown in less natural conditions, the difference is undeniable.”
As one example, Hattley points to watermelons, a crop known for being sensitive to fluctuations in temperature such as those caused by climate change.
“What used to be a juicy, sweet reminder of summer now often tastes rubbery and bland,” Hattley said. Red bell peppers, which also suffer in quality and quantity because of climate change, “sometimes have an odd, dark discoloration inside and don’t seem as vibrant or crisp as they once were.”
There is more than Hattley’s hunch to let people know their food’s quality is dropping because of climate change. Scientists have confirmed that as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere, staple crops like wheat and rice lose vitamins, proteins and micronutrients like zinc and iron that humans need to survive.
“It’s a really strong example of planetary health: Something that we’re doing to the environment is impacting health,” Dr. Samuel Myers, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health and a professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, said in a statement at the time. “As we change these complex systems, we’re seeing unintended consequences and unanticipated results.”
People who enjoy steak and burgers, as well as dairy products, will also feel the strain because of these nutrient deficiencies. Cattle eat grasses that provide them with essential proteins, and that protein content is dropping as grasses languish with rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels. Even when climate change is not making vital foods more scarce and less nutritious, it is literally knocking the raw materials around by causing extreme weather events.
"As a chef, I’ve come to realize that many vegetables now have increasingly shorter seasonal availability due to unpredictable weather,” Shetty said. “Flooding and drought significantly impact wild-foraged products, with damage that often takes years to stabilize. For example, the floods in North Carolina in September 2024 severely affected Appalachian truffle foragers.”
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He also mentioned how climate change is driving coral ecosystems to extinction, which will hurt his bottom line by “disrupting the delicate balance of the food chain.”
If things continue to spiral out of control, what’s different on the menu might be the least of our problems. In some cases, there could be no menu at all. As the world gets hotter, famine too has risen. "In 2023, 281.6 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 59 countries/territories, with numbers increasing every year since 2019," reads an introduction to a 2024 special issue on famine and food insecurity in the journal Disasters.
The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is caused by human activity, particularly our overuse of fossil fuels. As humans dump carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases and water vapor into the atmosphere, the overheating planet causes droughts and heatwaves to become more frequent and more intense, sea levels to rise and hurricanes to become more extreme. As this happens, food experts like Hattley will find innovative ways to improve the quality of what they create, despite the fossil fuel-imposed obstacles.
"For me, the solution has been sourcing as much as I can from local farmers who prioritize soil health and traditional growing methods,” Hattley said. “The produce I buy from them feels closer to what I remember eating as a child — flavorful and nutrient-dense. If climate change continues to disrupt growing seasons and traditional farming methods, I fear that unless we’re proactive, food quality will only continue to decline, and we’ll lose more of the natural goodness we once took for granted."
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