One of my goals as a gardener is to grow as much of my own food as possible. With a small suburban garden and a plot in my local community garden, my options are limited. Each year, I try a few new varieties of heritage garlic, tomatoes, and potatoes. My perennial food crops, including red currants, serviceberries, raspberries and grapes are by far the most rewarding and productive. Like a lot of folks concerned about climate change, I’m convinced that human diets have to change. The following stories highlight options for changing our diets in the face of climate change.
Tiny but mighty microgreens
Zhenlei Xiao, an associate professor in residence in the UConn’s College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources Department of Nutritional Sciences focuses her research on microgreens. Tiny, nutrient-dense, and fast-growing, microgreens could help in feed the world’s growing population, both on Earth and potentially in space. Microgreens, including vegetables and herbs, such as arugula, broccoli, beets, and even sunflower sprouts, also well-suited for urban agriculture, which could play an important role as arable land is increasingly squeezed by development. More than four billion people live in cities, accounting for roughly 55% of the world’s population. This number is expected to rise to an anticipated 7 in 10 people living in urban settings by 2050. One way to make food systems in future cities more sustainable is through urban agriculture—growing food near where it will be consumed. The balance of this article is an interview with Xiao, discussing the origins of her interest in microgreens and how she sees them fitting into a sustainable food system.
Forgotten food crops in sub-Saharan Africa
Integrating sub-Saharan Africa’s “forgotten” foods into agricultural systems could provide a “double-win” of more climate-resilient and nutrient-providing farming, a new study found. The research used modelling to examine the potential of 138 African forgotten food crops under changing climate conditions, ranging from leafy vegetables and other vegetables to fruits, cereals, pulses, seeds and nuts, and roots and tubers. It found that a diverse profile of forgotten foods could be grown across 95% of assessed production sites in sub-Saharan Africa in 2070, when changing climate conditions could make the cultivation of staple crops such as maize and rice unsuitable.
Enset, Ethiopia’s ‘tree against hunger’ flowers at Kew
Enset (Ensete ventricosum), an African relative of the much-beloved banana plant, has flowered for the first time in Kew Gardens’ Temperate House. Due to its monocarpic nature, the plant will flower only once and die. Known by some as the Ethiopian banana, the Abyssinian banana, or even the false banana, RBG Kew scientists and partners refer to enset as the “tree against hunger.” Thanks to its remarkable versatility, drought resistance, and disease tolerance, enset is a staple source of nutrition for more than 20 million people in Ethiopia. Reaching up to ten meters high, as few as 15 enset plants can feed a person for an entire year, often propping up diets during periods of drought or when other crops fail. According to the research, Ethiopian smallholder farmers choose to plant more enset directly in response to drought. Research at RBG Kew has also uncovered the spectacular genetic diversity of enset with the potential to strengthen food security and feed millions more people across the region.
Changing diet can have unexpected impacts
Switching to a healthier diet not only reduces your risk of disease, it also improves the sustainability of our food system. But eating healthier also has indirect consequences that can lead to unexpected economic, social and environmental side effects. Wageningen University & Research have used a global economic model to investigate a change toward the EAT-Lancet diet on a global scale. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Food. While the direct effects of the EAT-Lancet diet are positive, indirect effects include economic, environmental and social effects that can be mixed. For example, healthier diets can lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions, especially in higher-income regions. When people spend less on food, they spend more on non-food products. This can lead to increased demand and thus production of non-food products.
Change food choices to tackle global warming
Action to protect the planet against the impact of climate change will fall short unless we reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the global food system, which now makes up a third of man-made GHG emissions, a new study reveals. The largest emission increase within food supply chains is triggered by beef and dairy consumption in rapidly developing countries, such as China and India, while emissions per head in developed countries with a high percentage of animal-based food declined. Publishing their findings in Nature Food, an international group of scientists led by the Universities of Groningen and Birmingham, say that the growth of the global population and rising demand for emission-intensive food are likely to boost emissions further. “A global shift in diets, including reducing excessive intake of red meat and improving shares of plant-based protein—will not only reduce emissions but avoid health risks such as obesity and cardiovascular disease,” stated corresponding author, Prof. Klaus Hubacek from the University of Groningen.
A slew of other articles emphasize the same point. See for example: A vegan diet is better for environment.
Space Food of the Future
Sarah Miller’s article about work on space food may not be all that relevant to home gardeners, but it’s a fun read! Phase II of the Deep Space Food Challenge is jointly sponsored by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. The 18 teams selected are tasked with creating foods that will not only feed a crew of astronauts on a deep-space mission to Mars for at least three years but also improve life on Earth.
In search of lost fruit
Thanks to Rebecca McMakin for pointing me to this wonderful article in The Guardian UK. Fruit explorers are horticultural enthusiasts who search for the last cultivars of old, rare or important plants. Throughout the centuries, the residents of North America – from Indigenous Americans to white botanists in the early 1900s – cultivated various fruit and nut trees. These trees’ last descendants now grow on remote farms, in forests, on state lands, tucked along roads. Fruit explorers’ mission is to track down those trees, test their quality and then graft them before their genetics are lost for ever.
For some, it’s about history: learning about a majestic tree in the historical record and trekking off to the woods to find it. For others, it’s about taste. David Shields, an heirloom foods expert at the University of South Carolina, explained that our food system homogenized after the second world war and that many fruit explorers want to preserve old regional flavors before it’s too late.
Then, there are the environmental reasons. Many fruit explorers reject the US’s current reliance on monocultural, seasonal agriculture, which means planting massive amounts of animal feed like soy and alfalfa in vast, deforested fields. These explorers want to replace that system with one of permaculture, which involves planting perennial fruit and nut trees instead.
“If we come to our senses and realize that planting 200m acres of corn with tillage is not a good idea from an ecology perspective, we’re going to need the best germplasm [genetic resources maintained for plant breeding] in existence,” said Buzz Ferver, a plantsman from Vermont who described himself as a “rabid” fruit explorer. “We’re going to need to keep that stuff alive so it’s there if we need it.”
Forgotten peas – future food?
Ongoing work at Kew RBG aims to help reverse the massive loss of food biodiversity that occurred following WWII with the globalization of food supply chains. Kew PhD student Szymon Lara is focusing on pea biodiversity. With a background in Gastronomy and Culinary Arts, Lara decided to advocate for more resilient food systems by using sensory science to evaluate the commercial potential of neglected and underutilized foods.
There are around 7,039 edible plant species, 417 of which are considered food crops. However, only 15 account for 90% of human calorie intake and are considered commodity crops. The remaining 402 are neglected to some extent and are usually found in minor food systems, but even these are shifting too as global food chains tend towards uniformity. These so called “forgotten” foods get lost in the ultimate shuffle between the local and global food systems. In a nutshell, increasing the number of fresh edible species would improve food security, by decreasing vulnerability to pests, and have beneficial nutritional implications, by introducing species with higher micronutrient absorption rates. One of the major factors driving consumer acceptance of a new food is what we call its “sensory profile”. n order to understand if a “forgotten” food could be accepted by consumers, we need to study its sensory characteristics. This can be done by using what we call “subjective methods” – bringing together real humans to sample the foods and evaluate their sensory attributes. Alternatively, we have “objective methods” – techniques that describe the physical and chemical make-up of the food, such as ‘texture analyzers’ or infrared spectrophotometers (instruments that can analyse the chemical make-up an object by the amount of light it absorbs). The combination of these outputs helps us predict whether an underutilized species is likely to be popular.
Gardening at Last 