Everyday food products will be hard to come by in 30 years because of climate change, according to a chef who worked in the Obama White House.
At a recent dinner event to promote regenerative agriculture, Sam Kass, who also served as White House senior policy adviser for nutrition, listed rice, coffee, wine, and chocolate as examples of popular food items that could become scarce in the decades to come.
“A number of foods that we hold very dear to our hearts and largely take for granted are under a real threat,” Kass said, according to PEOPLE magazine. “And you’re seeing in the future, we’re on track for a lot of those to become quite scarce and some really to be largely unavailable to most people and others just significantly increased in cost.”
Kass teamed up last week with food brand Knorr to hold a “$500 Dinner,” an event in New York City meant to highlight dinner table staples that are in jeopardy without the widespread adoption of regenerative agriculture practices, which according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, focus on a “holistic approach” in farming to foster sustainable food systems and environmental health.
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The dinner event celebrated World Soil Day, which took place on December 5. HOLA! USA reported attendees were served dishes that mixed rice with seafood and truffles. Such a meal would cost $72 now, but $566 in 2050, when “the ingredients we rely on become even more scarce,” Kass said.
Kass is now a partner at Acre Venture Partners, a firm that says it invests in “companies creating fundamental change in food and agriculture in order to address large scale problems in human and environmental health.” In 2017, the World Economic Forum selected him as one of its Young Global Leaders.
At the dinner, Kass said he wanted to make rice a centerpiece of the dinner because it is very popular around the word and is also a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, per PEOPLE.
“Food and agriculture is the number two driver of greenhouse gas emissions globally and uses about 70% of the world’s waters. It’s the number one driver of deforestation, land use change. It’s really at the center of a lot of these environmental issues,” Kass said.
Kass also said: “Food and agriculture is the only real opportunity that we have to sequester enough carbon on the scale that science is telling us, within the time horizon that the science is saying we have, and that’s really unique to food and agriculture.”