Why Is It So Hard to Talk about Food & Climate Change?
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Why Is It So Hard to Talk about Food & Climate Change?
Plus: Firenadoes, Floods in India and Bangladesh, the DNC on fossil fuel subsidies and more
Hot Take
Aug 23 2020
Hey Hot Cakes!
Welcome to Hot Take! Your weekly (at least) newsletter surveying the state of the climate crisis and all the ways we’re talking—and not talking about it! We give you a round up of the latest climate stories and articles of the week, plus exclusive original reporting and commentary from us. Oh, and who are we? Amy Westervelt, long-time climate journalist with more seasoning than an everything bagel, and Mary Annaise Heglar, a literary writer known for her essays on climate, race, and emotion—and her enthusiasm for dad jokes!
In addition to this newsletter, we have a podcast and a store!
It’s time to talk about climate!
Why Is It So Hard to Talk About Food and Climate Change?
By Mary Annaïse Heglar
I’ve never met a Climate Person who wasn’t also a Food Person, and I’ve never met a Food Person who wasn’t at least climate-curious. I notice it every time I walk into a fancy kitchen store like Sur La Table or browse the shop at Food52 or the explosion of vegan recipe blogs. However, when it comes to food writing and most* food TV series, there’s a gaping hole where a discussion of climate change should be. In a world with disappearing ingredients and restaurants on fire and sinking islands—with rich food traditions—if we’re not talking about climate when we talk about food, then we’re not really talking about reality.
So, when David Tamarkin, Chief Editor of Epicurious and proud Hot Cake, reached out to me and Amy for a forthcoming story on beef and climate, I knew we had to have him on the show. David is working hard to bring climate more to the fore of content over at Epicurious and he drops some major news about that here in this episode.
This conversation took us to a LOT of places. Some of them we expected, some we didn’t. For one thing, we talked about how so many chefs are actively hostile to vegans because….of some weird machismo shit, further proving Amy’s Venn Diagram of shitty people! We talk about why limiting your diet—even going vegan—doesn’t always have to be framed as a loss. We also talk about the ONLY instance in which Mary wants more individual action and less emphasis on systemic change. And, we talk about how, as the world shrinks and burns, food allows us a portal back to the places we lost, and how that makes it that much more precious.
Seriously, you’re going to want to listen to this. Probably with a snack.
*We recently got a tip from a Hot Cake that Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation on Hulu is all about climate change and food. So that’s on our to-watch list now.
Articles we discussed:
- Every Question About Sustainable Cooking, Answered by a Climate Change Expert
- Olive Oil and Climate Change: How the Pantry Staple Is Affected by Extreme Weather
- The global coffee crisis is coming
- The Chicken Curry That Put My Broken Family Back Together Again
- Return to Oaxaca
- Food Trends:
- Smoked Watermelon Ham Recipe by Tasty
- Why the 'everything is cake' trend creates 'strange dissonance' in the brain
- Get ready for pea milk. It doesn’t taste like peas and it’s not even green.
Subscribe now
And Just Like That, Firenadoes Are a Thing
By Amy Westervelt
The first fire tornado on record was in 2018: the Carr fire in northern California. But for a while the National Weather Service thought it might just be a freak occurrence. Climate change said “nah,” and now we officially have firenado warnings.
For a first-hand account of the first NWS firenado warning, subscribe now for just $7/month!
Drowning in a World on Fire
By Mary Annaïse Heglar
While California burns, India and Bangladesh are drowning. So far, the death toll has reached 1,000, while another 1.5 million people have been displaced.
1.5 million people.
Have lost everything. Just like that.
And the worst part: they did nothing, nothing at all, to deserve it or to cause it.
You’re probably used to hearing India’s name bandied about as one of the “top three” GHG producers in the world, falling behind China and the United States respectively. But that number is deceptive to the point of criminality.
Keep reading to find out why the idea of India as a super-emitter is flawed.
WTF DNC
By Amy Westervelt
Over the course of their convention this week, we learned that the Democratic National Committee had quietly removed a key part of the party's climate plan from its platform: a pledge to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. Both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden made this pledge as presidential candidates, so the sudden reversal didn't exactly make them look good. Both quickly came out and confirmed that in fact they *do* support eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. The DNC made the lamest of all excuses, claiming that actually the original amendment to end fossil fuel subsidies was—and I wish I was kidding—an error, and the removal was just correcting that error. The guy who wrote the amendment called bullshit on that.
Subscribe now to find out what happened in the end, and what the heck labor unions have to do with any of this.
Digest
- Rising Temperatures, Rising Seas
- Fire Tornadoes Reported in Northern California Wildfire By Allyson Waller in The New York Times
- Lights Dim and Worries Mount as a Heat Wave Roasts California By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs in The New York times
- Lake Hughes and other wildfires have destroyed more than 90,000 acres across 3 states By Christina Walker, Sarah Moon and Joe Sutton in CNN
- China’s Summer of Floods is a Preview of Climate Disasters to Come By Lili Pike in InsideClimate News
- Going, Going ... Gone: Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheet Passed a Point of No Return in the Early 2000s By Bob Berwyn in InsideClimate News
- Humans Have Changed North America More Than an Ice Age By Dharna Noor in Earther
- Death Valley Saw Hottest Temperature Reliably Recorded on Earth By Brian Khan in Earther
- Amazon blazes burn forest, farmland and threaten homes in Reuters
- Obama and the Beach House Loopholes By Sophie Cocke in ProPublica
- California's rolling blackouts hit millions after heat wave overwhelms electric grid By Zeeshan Aleem in Vox
- Extreme weather just devastated 10m acres in the midwest. Expect more of this By Art Cullen in The Guardian
- Trump Opens Arctic to Drilling but Companies May Not Buy In By Dharna Noor in Earther
- The first undeniable climate change deaths By Daniel Merino in Grist
- Can California’s Prison Firefighter Program Be Reformed? in The Real News Network
- COVID and Climate Change Have Put California Firefighters and Residents at Risk, by Izzie Ramirez, Vice
- The climate crisis has already arrived. Just look to California’s abnormal wildfires. By Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano, The Guardian
- The Climate Disasters We Ignore Today Will Eventually Come for Us, by Dharna Noor, Earther
- Rhode Island Is the 'Calamari Comeback State' Because All the Other Fish Are Dead, by Brian Kahn, Earther
- California Has Australia Problems Now by David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine
- California wildfires 2020: Why the current fires are so unusual by Umair Irfan in Vox
- Okay, Maybe Don’t Do That???
- Trump Administration Finalizes Plan to Open Oil Drilling in Alaska's Arctic Refuge By Brad Plumer and Henry Fountain in The New York Times
- In a Move That Could be Catastrophic for the Climate, Trump’s EPA Rolls Back Methane Regulations By Phil McKenna in InsideClimateNews
- Covid Killed New York’s Coastal Resilience Bill, and People of Color Could Bear Much of the Cost By Kristoffer Tigue in InsideClimate News
- Melting ice is a gift to the fossil fuel tankers navigating the Arctic By Maria Gallucci in Grist
- That Stranded Ship Leaking Tons of Oil Near Mauritius Just Split in Two By Alyse Stanley in Earther
- What Would Happen if We Burned All the Fossil Fuels? By Daniel Kolitz and Brian Kahn in Earther
- The Loophole Allowing Climate Change Denial to Spread On Facebook
- The irony: ConocoPhillips hopes to freeze thawing permafrost to drill more oil
- 'There's nowhere like it': Alaska's wildlife refuge fears death by drilling. By Oliver Millman, The GuardianDammit, Two Hurricanes, by Yessenia Funes, Earther
- An oil well right next to your house? The California Senate says that’s OK. By Alexandria Herr, Grist.
- Still the Climate Election
- A Novel Way to Fund a Green Economy By Kate Aronoff in The New Republic
- A simpler, more useful way to tax carbon By David Roberts in Vox
- Trump withdraws nomination of controversial attorney for top environment post By Emily Holden and Jimmy Tobias in The Guardian
- DNC Reversed Position on Fossil Fuel Support, Angering Activists
- The DNC virtual roll call was also a cry for climate action
- The DNC won’t oppose fossil fuel subsidies. How much am I paying for them?
- Joe Biden Taking Climate Science Seriously Isn't a Move 'Left', by Brian Kahn, Earther.
- When It Comes to Climate Change, It’s Joe Biden Versus the DNC, by Tamara Toles O'Laughlin, The Nation.
- Democrats have made a puzzling decision to drop their demand to end fossil fuel subsidies by Umair Irfan in Vox
- California's Coping Resources Are Running Thin by Jacob Stern in The Atlantic
- Glimmers of Hope
- Europe's Big Oil Companies Are Turning Electric By Stanley Reed in The New York Times
- TECHNOLOGY: DOE lab seeks to 'de-risk' grid's climate transformation
- How the twin disasters of climate change and Covid-19 could transform our cities | Irena Bauman By Irena Bauman in The Guardian
- Tessa Khan: ‘Litigation is a powerful tool in the environmental crisis’ By Tessa Khan in The Guardian
- Corporate Sustainability Reporting Is Growing Up By Emily Chasan in Bloomberg
- Tinted Solar Panels Can Help Farms Generate Clean Energy While Growing Food By Yessenia Funes in Earther
- Will fossil fuel sponsors be allowed at the next U.N. climate conference?
- Plus More
- The next challenge for plant-based meat: Winning the price war against animal meat By Kelsey Piper in Vox
- 'They deserve to be heard': Sick and dying coal ash cleanup workers fight for their lives By Austyn Gaffney in The Guardian
- The Debate About Reopening Schools Is a Preview of Climate-Related Disruption to Come, by Justin Worland, Time
- During the Last Ice Age, Erratic Temperatures in Greenland Triggered Changes All Over the World, by Dharna Noor, Earther
P.S. Which bear is the most condescending?
A panda (pan-duh!)
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