Many Of Our Favorite Foods Are Going Extinct

A conversation with Obama's White House Chef Sam Kass

A few weeks ago I attended one of the more interesting dinners of my life. Partly, it was the conversation: the venue was the Council on Foreign Relations. But mostly, it was the menu. The dishes served were of ingredients that are going extinct.

Sam Kass curated the menu for this “Dinner of Extinction.” He was the White House chef for the Obamas and now works at the intersection of climate sustainability and food systems — and take it from me, also cooks a great meal.

I caught up with Sam Kass again last week for a wide ranging conversation about foods that are going extinct. He discusses in detail the ways in which climate change is imperiling everything from Snow Crabs to the peaches he served atop the burrata, to coffee and wine.

Here’s an excerpt of our conversation, edited for clarity. The full audio podcast episode and transcript is available immediately below the fold, exclusively for paid subscribers.

Sam Kass: Wine needs warm days, cool nights and a very stable climate. That's now changing pretty rapidly. Ruinart is one of the great champagne producers. They made their first production of champagne in 1729 and they've been making champagne with the same grape in France for the last almost 300 years. And this year, for the first time they had to produce a champagne that had a blend of various different grapes. They just have not been able to produce a consistent enough grape harvest with what they've been doing for the last 300 years because of volatility in the climate.

There's other growers in Champagne that have been buying land in England because they don't think they're going to be able to make champagne in Champagne. You know it's bad when when growers in France feel like they got to make their champagne in England! So it's a pretty dire situation as well when it comes to wine.

I think everybody has what motivates them the most intensely. For me, it's really it's really around wine and coffee.

Mark Leon Goldberg: A couple of years ago I did an episode on coffee extinction. I interviewed a scientist from Kew Gardens in the U.K. who said that wild coffee varieties were threatened to go extinct, and the sustainability of the two varieties of coffee that that we consume, Arabica and Robusto, is to a certain extent dependent the ability to cross-pollinate with these wild varieties in order to survive climate change.

Sam Kass: 75 of the 124 wild species of coffee is on the verge of extinction now. Scientists think we're going to need to produce more resilient coffee in the future and the loss of that genetic material is going to make it much more difficult to find coffee that can adapt to this changing climate we find ourselves in.

Also, as many as people know great coffee is grown often at the bases in mountainous regions -- in the valleys where it's nice and cool and shaded. It is now getting too hot in those valleys to support coffee production. So growers are trying to plant their trees up the sides of mountains because it's cooler. But there's only so far up the mountain you can go. There's some growers in certain places, like in Hawaii, where they're already running out of room. And so the future of coffee is pretty dire. The Inter-American Development Bank predicts that by 2050, over over 50% of the growing regions for coffee will be gone around the world.

Below the fold for paying subscribers

• The Global Dispatches podcast interview with Sam Kass.

• The full transcript of our conversation.