When it Comes to Food, is the New York Times Out to Lunch?

A New Series Highlights Western Myopia on Climate and Agriculture

By Alex Smith and Vijaya Ramachandran

Journalists, academics and policymakers often talk about the “global food system.” But if there is such a thing, it isn’t really global, it’s only partially about food, and it’s not very systematic. 

To be sure, some food commodities flow around the world. Grains, food oils, fish, and even meat can travel vast distances before they’re forked, spooned, or shoveled into a consumer’s mouth. Yet to describe the process by which Earth’s 8 billion people get their daily sustenance as a single “global food system” is a simplification. 

Populations in wealthier regions enjoy the benefits of globally-sourced groceries, but billions (of often poorer people) around the world depend on much more localized trade, combined with some external sources of food—some from trade and most from aid. 

Simply put, the “global food system” is really many food systems, each with its own flavors, luxuries, and standards.

So when people in western media refer to the “global food system,” what they’re often referring to is either something close to the American food system—that is, the network by which consumers in the United States get their food—or to global food prices. Global food prices are only partially about food; they’re largely driven by  the price of energy, which is used to produce the nutrients needed to grow food or is produced directly from agricultural production in the case of biofuels. 

Cue The New York Times opinion section. In a note announcing a new series titled “What to Eat on a Burning Planet,” Times opinion climate editor, Eliza Barclay, states that “we can see the early tremors [of climate change] starting to rattle the global food system.” The ongoing series includes pieces about the climate impacts on American grocery prices, a plea for drought-tolerant fine dining, a lament about the future of natural vanilla flavoring, and an ode to beans in American cuisine. 

With few exceptions, the series reflects elite preferences and Western blinders, and confuses U.S. fine dining, high cuisine, and luxury goods with the “global food system.” What does a $235 dollar tasting menu in Australia really tell us about a “revolution in consumption,” let alone food policy?

More importantly, however, the series underlines the lack of understanding—even by those writing for the New York Times—about how food is produced. Climate change may shift what food can be grown, where, and how much consumers must pay for it, but these changes are small when compared to the shifts unlocked by technological progress or societal change—both of which have long been the most significant drivers of food systems change.

The Climate of Hunger

In the opening essay of the series, journalist David Wallace-Wells offers a pessimistic view of what climate change might do to food production. He points to the fact that global hunger had been declining for decades but has recently ticked upwards. 

A recent report from the Global Network Against Food Crises and the Food Security Information Network found that more than 280 million people in 59 food insecure countries faced “high levels of acute food insecurity” in 2023, an increase of almost 24 million people from 2022. But, despite these recent upticks in food insecurity, global rates of hunger remained on a downward, if stagnating, trend. The Global Hunger Index, designed to comprehensively track hunger levels, marked a decline in hunger both globally and in almost all regions—Latin America and the Caribbean, excepted—between 2015 and 2023 (See figure).

Source: Global Hunger Index

Wallace-Wells argues that this recent uptick in food insecurity is a result of climate impacts reducing agricultural productivity. As evidence, he points to a 2021 Cornell University study. But this study did not find that climate change reduced agricultural productivity . Rather, it found that significant gains in agricultural productivity would have been even larger without climate change. And yet “The climate impacts to come,” Wallace-Wells insists, “loom even larger.”

Changes to the climate do not appear to be the main cause of this most recent increase in hunger; they are listed as the third-leading cause of food insecurity behind conflict and economic crises. Negative weather shocks which impact food supply may not have much to do with climate change. Hot and dry weather caused by the El Nino Southern Oscillation—a scourge on food supply for as long as agriculture has been around—is often the main driver of weather-related agricultural challenges. 

Conflict in Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine have played a significant role by driving up prices, disrupting global trade networks and increasing food insecurity in poor countries. The Russian invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago sent shockwaves across the world. While initial disruptions have passed, the long-term impact of that conflict is still being felt in grain and cooking oil-importing countries. Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world on its head, causing lasting economic impacts. 

Over the past 50 years, the global mean temperature has increased by over 1 degree celsius. In that time, global agricultural output has increased four-fold, and agricultural total factor productivity (a measure of productivity that includes outputs divided by all inputs) has increased by just under 80%. Meta-analyses cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that since 1960, climate change has decreased yields for wheat by 4.9%, maize by 5.9%, and rice by 4.2% compared to a hypothetical world without climate change. But those declines are tiny when compared to the global increase in yields in the same period

.Source: Patrick Brown (2023)

Climate change, at least to date, has played a much smaller role in determining agricultural productivity than factors like technological adoption, social change, and economic growth. And while positive trends in agricultural productivity may become more difficult to maintain in the future, there is little evidence to suggest that they will be out of reach altogether.

Even if climate concerns aren’t warranted, Wallace-Wells’ solution for them—raising agricultural productivity—is crucial for feeding a growing population while minimizing the impact on the local environment. Research and development for hybrid seeds, water control, and other agricultural technologies will drive productivity growth in countries like the United States that already employ technologically advanced farming practices. 

Fine Dining and Good Smells

It wouldn’t be the New York Times without a focus on fine dining and the preferences of coastal elites. 

Essayist Aaron Timms’ “Fine Dining Can’t Go On Like This” argues that American haute cuisine must learn from Australian chefs who have found a way to highlight drought-resistant foods on their menus. A noble cause, to be sure. Timms does not mention the ingredients that are the largest users of water in most fine-dining establishments: meat and dairy. 

And it is more than a stretch to claim that we are now in an era of “chronic drought,” as Timms poses. According to the IPCC, soil moisture (a common measure of drought relevant to agriculture) shows large spatial variability and no global trend over the past several decades. Using climate models to project the future, the IPCC shows that we are quite uncertain about even the direction of expected change and that there is a strong possibility of increases in soil moisture over much of the world’s land surface. One reason long term changes in drought are so hard to detect and project is that natural variability is simply much larger than any long-term trend induced by human-caused climate change. 

But the real problem with Timms’ essay lies in its basic conceit: that fine dining must reckon with climate change. In reality, it does not need to. Fine dining is just that—fine. It is expensive, exclusive, and not very impactful on drought, heat, or anything else to do with the climate. There are about 2500 Michelin-starred restaurants in the world. If every one of these restaurants served 100 people a day each (a massive stretch), they’d be feeding only 250,000 people daily; total calories served up would be a rounding error on global food consumption.

You could argue that fine dining sets the standard for how the rest of us eat. Regardless, the impact is just nowhere near as grand as the restaurants’ purveyors may like to believe.

Timms’ essay is not alone in confusing elite conundrums with global challenges. In “This is How the World’s Favorite Scent Disappears,” poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil reflects on what climate change might mean for the flavor and smell of natural vanilla. She frets that increasingly chaotic weather patterns may threaten the tiny regions in which vanilla beans are grown, thereby threatening the flavor and smell that we love in ice cream, perfume, and more. 

Nezhukumatathil writes, “Most people I know who brood and despair over climate change might know that extreme weather could soon threaten crops like corn and coffee. But you probably haven’t fathomed what it would be like to lose the scent and the taste of real vanilla.” In reality, natural vanilla is not something that most of us will ever smell or taste. Between 95 and 99 percent of products containing vanilla are made from synthetic vanilla flavoring, not the actual vanilla bean itself. In fact, vanilla bean has always been a luxury good, costly to grow and even more expensive to purchase.

And it’s not climate change that is making vanilla expensive. A recent surge in the popularity of natural vanilla has increased demand, thereby raising prices. Storms or other weather-related events may well have something to do with prices, but that has held true since the 15th century when the Totonac people began to grow and use vanilla in what is now Mexico.

Putting the Global into Global Food Systems

The New York Times is right that we need investment in the U.S. food system. But the real challenge lies in Africa and in Asia, where most of the world’s poor live. In these regions, people do not have enough food to eat—only 56 percent of Indians can afford three meals a day. In the poorest parts of Africa, farmers have not yet adopted some of the most fundamental 20th-century agricultural technologies such as fertilizer, tractors, irrigation, and modern crop breeds. These farmers are most affected by extreme heat and coastal flooding, driven by climate change. We need an honest and practical discussion about what it takes to grow enough food to feed the billions of poor people who live in the non-Western world.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s farmers desperately need to raise yields. In many cases, the innovations farmers need have been in existence for decades, but have yet to reach rural areas. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, and Sudan, increased yields will not come from yet-to-be discovered high-tech innovations, but from the application of tried and true productivity-boosting technologies such as synthetic fertilizers, machinery, cold storage, hybrid seeds, and irrigation. 

Some of these technologies come with climate concerns. Fertilizer uses natural gas as a feedstock. Irrigation and cold storage require the use of fossil fuels. But yield-increasing technologies like fertilizer and irrigation are nonetheless beneficial to humans and to the environment; they enable local communities to grow more food on less land and decrease reliance on rainfall. Extreme heat, drought, and floods have negative impacts, but we have the technological means to overcome them and to raise yields, both now and in the future.

In many ways, the problem with the so-called ”global food system” is that it is not global enough. We may have a system of global food prices, but producers in food insecure regions of the world lack access to the technologies and inputs that have made places like the United States so agriculturally productive. Perhaps then, when everyone in the world has the opportunity to be concerned with haute cuisine and luxury food products, the New York Times could produce good food coverage.