Chew on That

It is well known that humans evolved as omnivores, but whether the diet in a particular place or time was more or less plant- or meat-based, food insecurity has been an intermittent threat from our earliest hunting and gathering phase through our mastery of agriculture. Even today, despite complex networks of production, processing, storage, distribution, and consumption, the quantity and quality of the world’s food is by no means assured. This was witnessed in the supply chain disruptions of COVID-19, and is again evident in the repercussions of Russia’s folly in Ukraine, which will almost certainly contribute to food and fertilizer shortages that ripple seismically across the planet for years to come.

Recently shipments resumed from Ukraine, but just prior the United Nations Secretary General warned of a “global hunger crisis” with possibly “catastrophic” impacts on hundreds of millions of people. Faced with this prospect, an optimist would find comfort in the work of organizations such as the World Food Program, the Hunger Project, and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, the last of these a consortium whose mission is to “help shift food and agriculture systems towards greater sustainability, security, and equity.” Also encouraging is the emerging potential and increasing use of different types of foods and methods that include insects, algae, seaweeds, genetic engineering, and lab-grown or plant-based meat.

While the aforementioned is indeed positive, experts agree that climate change is now irreversible and, in the words of University College London’s Bill McGuire, the future will be “unrecognizable.” As a case in point, climate models predict more than one billion hungry people by 2050, many of them on the move in desperate search of sustenance. Migration at such a scale is bound to trigger widespread chaos and conflict, but after defiant decades of ignoring warnings to change course, here we are, no way back and no place to hide. Most of us would rather not chew on that.