There Are Only Nine Meals Between Humankind and Anarchy

We’ve all seen the headlines and the accompanying Twitter hashtags:

OMG your beer is in danger!

On the WWF site:

… as erratic weather and droughts driven by climate change impact crops and freshwater, the world’s favorite fermented beverage could take a hit.

Is climate change drastically deteriorating the quality of your wine?!

Per the Atlantic headline:

Full-Bodied with Notes of Band-Aid and Medicine

Chocolate threatened by climate change?! Noooooooo!!!!

According the Green Queen, there are 5 foods to worry about, including potatoes and chocolate:

We all love chocolate, don’t we? Sadly, due to climate change, the cacao plant could be completely wiped out by 2050.

And so it goes. The catchy internet story forwarded to you by your aunt who bonds with you over wine, or your best friend who owns that “I NEED A HUGe amount of chocolate” t-shirt.

Those buzzy stories about wine and beer and chocolate are laudable attempts to grab the attention of the average Facebook or Instagram or TikTok user. And maybe they work, a little, sometimes. But they largely fail to meet the challenge of getting people to genuinely think hard about what is coming, in a granular, detailed way, and imagine some of the dire challenges ahead.

Strip away the fluffy tone of most of these pieces. Forget how they overuse as examples foods that are in no way dietary staples, but instead are usually well-loved and oft-memed treats. And then think – hard – about what this might actually mean to you, your family, and by extension the human family here on Earth.

On July 20, 2023, the India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MoCI)/Directorate General of Foreign Trade issued Notification No. 20/2023 – Amendment in Export Policy of Non-basmati Rice under Harmonized System (HS) Code 1006.30. 90. The Indian government is banning with immediate effect the export of non-basmati, white (NBW) rice (semi-milled or wholly milled, whether polished or not, glazed: other).Aug 31, 2023

What does that mean?

Per CNN Business,

More than three billion people worldwide rely on rice as a staple food and India contributed to about 40% of global rice exports.

The abrupt announcement of the export ban triggered panic buying in the United States, following which the price of rice soared to a near 12-year high, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Do you remember all the way back in 2020, when it was almost impossible to buy toilet paper? I do. It was annoying AF, mainly because the shortage was not driven by supply chain issues, but by panic buying.

Even if there is enough of something – toilet paper, rice, batteries – if the public perception is that there is not, panic buying can cause shortages and aggravation and actual hardship for millions.

Now imagine that there are real shortages.

Think, for example, of 2022’s baby formula shortage.

In that example, children in poorer, more rural, and majority Black/brown communities were harder hit than others, but the shortages were everywhere, and children died.

Children in several states were hospitalized as a result of the shortage. In Tennessee, two children requiring an amino-acid-based formula due to short bowel syndrome were hospitalized. They had been eating EleCare, an Abbott product manufactured in the shut-down Sturgis plant. In South Carolina, four infants were hospitalized, three due to poor reactions to new formulas and one due to mineral imbalances in a homemade formula. A hospital in Atlanta also reported treating infants affected by the shortage.

So with those recent memories under your belt, please imagine near-term widespread crop failures.

Visualize what might happen if there were a sharp, significant decrease in the availability of rice, or wheat, or corn, staples by any measure.

Let’s take just wheat to see if that eventuality sounds far-fetched.

Winter wheat crops start their growth in the fall and are harvested the following summer. High temperatures in spring, when the plant is flowering, can affect the wheat’s development. At temperatures over 27.8 degrees Celsius (about 82 degrees Fahrenheit), the plants start to suffer from heat stress. At temperatures over 32.8 degrees Celsius (about 91 degrees Fahrenheit), important enzymes in the wheat start to break down.

Now consider the record high temperatures felt worldwide this past summer and think about buying a loaf of bread or a burrito or a pizza or a burger if the crop has failed.

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Grandpa’s 1930s Farmall

Think about supermarket shelves stripped bare by both actual shortages of crops and the concomitant panic buying driven by breathless and unhelpful reporting in the media.

Staple crops like rice and corn and wheat aren’t buzzy enough to generate many fun “OMG climate is change is coming for your (fill in the blank)!” memes. But if staple crops aren’t buzzy, they are absolutely essential to much of our diet, including products that you probably use every day and might be pretty lost without.

Think about your shopping cart without crackers or pasta or a sandwich loaf or plain flour or any kind of breaded frozen entrée or ready-meal, not to mention baby food, breakfast cereal, cereal bars, sauces, and even some confectionary.

And if the corn crop fails it won’t be just shelves empty of cornmeal, cornflakes, some brands of beer, pretzels, corndogs, and anything with high fructose corn syrup in it. The availability of myriad non-food products could also be affected – things like hand soap, drywall, “eco-friendly” diapers, mouthwash, and fortified milk.

How will you live your life? What will you do without? What *can* you do without?

Please don’t be blithe about thinking that if rice fails, or there’s a wheat shortage, you will make do with other foods like oats, or potatoes, or beans. If there isn’t enough rice, or wheat, or corn, then other people will be stocking up on beans, or oats, or potatoes.

If there is 1 kilo of nutrition available to feed 3 people, someone will lose out. So while if the US wheat crop fails in 2026 you might be able to count on other crops to fill that void, if any of them were also to be affected by summer temperatures hot enough to interfere with enzymatic action necessary for growth… what? Certainly there would be food shortages caused by real failures in agriculture, but there would also be panic buying based on news reports and popular social media chatter.

People will generally do almost anything to get enough to eat.

In a United States where there are more guns than there are people, do you think it will be long before the shooting starts?

Think I’m being a bit over-the-top and performative? Well, I just read a bit from PBS that was very troubling, and seems to support my overall point.

February 1931

"Food riots" begin to break out in parts of the U.S. In Minneapolis, several hundred men and women smash the windows of a grocery market and make off with fruit, canned goods, bacon, and ham. One of the store's owners pulls out a gun to stop the looters, but is leapt upon and has his arm broken.

In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis, a muckraking journalist and novelist, stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.“

Think, for a moment, about being short of food. Not, “I’m out of tofu and basmati rice, do you want a sandwich instead?” but really short of food, faced with bare shelves at Costco and Safeway, a rapidly emptying fridge, and spiking prices at the drive-through.

How long before panic would set in? If you were assured that supplies would be restored in a day, or a week, could you make do? Could you get creative, stretch things, borrow from a neighbor?

Probably.

But what if there were no certainty about when shelves would be full again? What if your children were hungry? What about your elderly parents?

What if you went without food to make sure others in your family were fed, and then you learned that the shelves at Piggly Wiggly weren’t empty just because the wheat crop that year was only 40% of the year before, but also because others in your street or down the block had stockpiled, and were sitting on a trove of dried pasta and cans of beans? What then?

This is not idle supposition and the foamings of the over-active imagination of someone who likes the Mad Max films a bit too much (although I do).

In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, is quoted as saying,

For a long time, we were within the range of normal. And now we’re really not.

Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has said,

The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing.

From an Al Jazeera report:

Argentina, the planet’s biggest soy exporter and a top corn producer, has been suffering from its worst drought in 60 years, leading to sharp cuts in yields.

Indonesia, the world’s largest exporter of palm oil, banned its exports briefly last year amid rising prices, triggering a global scramble for edible oils, especially with Ukraine’s supplies of sunflower oil also disrupted because of the war.

And Professor Bill McGuire is positing collapse by 2050.

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So no, I am not a lone voice crying wolf.

All of us must take this seriously, and not only plan ahead, but take action NOW.

More action now – more pressure on our government, more marching, more voting, more walking and biking and carpooling, more tree planting and talking to people and spreading the word that something MUST BE DONE about the climate crisis – just might result in a future that spreads scarce resources more equitably, provides adequate services and support to communities on the front lines of the climate crisis, and avoids the worst of the potential chaos as crops fail, the earth heats, weather systems collapse, and mass movements of people grow ever more desperate.

Will it take work? It will take work. But you knew that. You’re one of the ones who marched on Washington, voted for the candidates with the most human-centric policies, signed petitions, knocked on doors, knitted pussy hats, wrote postcards, volunteered for phone banks, and fought the good fight. THANK YOU.

Preparing for the already inevitable results of the climate crisis is an even bigger fight. So let’s get at it! We can do this!