My son’s an expert and finding the best and the biggest in the woods!
SETTING THE FLAVOR OF MORELS FREE
TODAY’S LESSON: Nothing is as delicious as fresh morel mushrooms sautéed in sweet butter but how can you enjoy the flavor without all the fat? The trick is in the technique and we’ll show you a couple of methods tobring out that special morel taste.
WHY IT TASTES SO GOOD: Mushrooms are mostly water which contains almost all of the distinct flavor profile. Cooking techniques which concentrate these juices will intensify the flavor of the morel. Besides the direct mushroom taste, the use of high heat during cooking will caramelize the natural sugars to produce that wonderful, deep-toasted flavor. The overall combination of these two flavors produces that incredibly rich morel mushroom flavor.
ADVANTAGES: Cooking with low or no fat obviously has its health advantages but also allows the subtle flavor of the mushrooms to come forward no longer covered by the taste of heavy fat. Morels are low in calories with lots of fiber, some vitamins, minerals and, most importantly, that great taste.
HOW TO SELECT PERFECT MORELS: Wild morels can be a number of different species which will result in slight variations of flavor and texture. Select the best by freshness as noted by full, plump stems. The texture should be pliably supple, never dry or soggy. Avoid crumbly paper-like mushrooms which will disintegrate when cooked. Store in a paper bag with a few holes poked in it for ventilation, in the coldest part ofthe refrigerator. Use within a few days to enjoy them at their peak.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE: Mushrooms are like sponges. Clean the mushrooms by trimming the stems, then brushing away the dirt with a stiff, small brush, such as a toothbrush. If they are dirtier, rinse well under slowly running cold water, one by one, and immediately drain in a colander. NEVER soak or submerge in water. Dry
in a lettuce spinner or on paper toweling well. The trick to concentrated mushroom flavor and cooking without steaming is to keep the mushrooms dry.
Morel Mushroom & Wild Ramp Blini
Makes 4 servings
4 Rye Blini, cooked recipe follows
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
8 ounces fresh morel mushrooms, cleaned and stems trimmed as necessary
16 small ramps, pull off coarse outer skin, trim roots and rinse as necessary
Porcini sea salt
ground Telecherry black pepper
1 tablespoon snipped fresh chives
2 tablespoons creme fraiche
2 tablespoons Purple Haze goat cheese
To Make:
Position the cooked blini in the center of each warm serving plate.
In a medium skillet over high heat add the butter cooking until it starts to brown. Add the morels cooking until seared on all sides, about 3 minutes. Add the ramps cooking until wilted and tender, about 1 minute. Add the chives. Season to taste with Porcini salt and black pepper. Remove from the heat. Position the morels atop the blini. Artistically position the ramps atop the morels.
In a small bowl combine the creme fraiche and goat cheese. Spoon the creme fraiche atop the ramps. Serve.
Created by Chef Jimmy Schmidt
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In 2021, the latest year for which ReFED’s food waste data is available, 33.8 million people lived in food-insecure households in the US, according to the US Department of Agriculture, including 5 million children. Still, less than 2% of the excess food was donated, ReFED reported. While 18% was composted and nearly 9% recycled into animal feed, about 36% of the surplus food went to landfills.
“We are not making anywhere near the progress we need to be to reach the 2030 goal,” said Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED. The organization aims to reduce food waste by half by 2030 compared to 2016 levels, in line with goals set by the United Nations and the US.
In addition to exacerbating food insecurity, food waste is a major emissions culprit, and by some estimates generates about 8% of all human-caused greenhouse gases. ReFED estimates that the 2021 surplus accounted for 372 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, or about 6% of total US emissions.
Despite the dire numbers, the newest data does mark an improvement in measurement for a waste stream that is notoriously difficult to track. ReFED’s new model updates earlier years’ numbers and makes use of reported data from grocery stores to estimate retail waste. (The organization previously used two older datasets, relying on information from 2008 and 2012 — one from the USDA and one from an industry report.) The updated data shows retail waste is about half of previous estimates. “There’s hope that we’re making more progress than it seems,” Gunders said.
But the very nature of food waste, which is usually tossed into one of many piles of unmeasured garbage, means that estimates are needed to make up for significant gaps in data. “We’re not separating, we’re not measuring, we’re throwing it out in different places,” Gunders said. Even figuring out total food produced is difficult.
ReFED’s latest numbers are its best effort to fill in some of those gaps, drawing on more than 80 data sources, including the updated retail numbers. But Gunders recognizes there is still plenty of room for improvement. “I’m optimistic that we’ll get better at capturing it,” she said.
Other groups providing food waste estimates include the US Environmental Protection Agency, which published its own numbers this month. It estimates that in 2019, the US wasted 66.2 million tons of food, most of which went to landfills. Gunders notes that the EPA does not include farm-level waste and measures manufacturing waste differently than ReFED.
To address the underlying problem, experts say the most important change in developed countries like the US will have to be one of mindset and cultural expectations around food, where cheap abundance is the norm. ReFED proposes 42 food waste solutions, with a public information campaign at the top of the list. Such a campaign would need to be government-funded and should run for at least a decade, Gunders said.
In the meantime, investors have poured money into technologies to reduce waste in every sector, and there are plenty of tips available for people who want to throw away less, from buying more frozen vegetables to keeping foods beyond “best by” dates that indicate quality not safety. But getting businesses and consumers to stop throwing food away is a major challenge.
“There are lots of little nudges and incremental improvements that you can make,” said Liz Goodwin, senior fellow and director of food loss and waste at the nonprofit World Resources Institute, “but until we really value the food, it’s not going to happen.”
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LUCKY’S JOB 1 = GREAT TASTE!
Great Food Nourishes the body, the mind and the soul!
It provides life and the reason to live!
Lucky’s Foundation is Great Beef
Cows have the unique ability to capture and absorb the micronutrients from the plants of the pasture and convert it to animal protein to nourish our human lives. The Wagyu-Angus breed has the unique ability to produce more Omega fatty acids than other breeds and disperse these benefits throughout their muscle structure for our benefit and enjoyment.
Noble Ingredients such as Gulf Shrimp, and Local Fish capture rich aqua micro nutrients through their diet converting to marine based proteins as well.
The plant world provides so many wonderful nutrients to enhance our lives. Vegetable rich in Carotenoids, Flavonooids, Polyphenols and Catechins are essential to the health of our microbiome and so many of our active body functions.
Noble grains such as basmati rice and protein rich lentils are combined to achieve a complete plant based 20 amino acid protein. Culinary techniques cook the grains to make complex carbs for better nutrition and blood sugar control, while reducing those pesky lectins (see below,,link)
The Botanical plant world has a lot to contribute with tasty spices that deliver rich flavonoid polyphenols to elevate the flavor of the dish and nourish your body. Turmeric, Ginger, Chiles, Black Pepper, Cumin, Coriander and many, many more make up our Lucky Spice Blends laced through all our dishes.
Don’t forget healthy fats that also fuel our bodies. Omega rich Wagyu Golden Culinary Oils are in our great candles, pretty to look at and tasty for dipping our bread. A2 Cow Butter with micronutrients, MCT rich Coconut Oil, and of course Polyphenol rich Olive Oil round our Lucky’s Pantry.
Sip Soar Restore with Lucky’s Twisted Classic Cocktails that are enhanced with botanical enriched restorative syrups for taste and nutrient delivery in your now guilt free – good for you cocktail!
WHY FIRE……
In “Catching Fire” by Richard Wrangham, Fire is presented as kindling the evolution of the modern human by breaking down protein and other nutrients to make them more bioavailable to our digestive system. It radically decreased the time our ancestors spent on collecting, chewing and digesting food for nutrients to survive.
Yes, raw food has more nutrients than cooked food BUT most raw nutrients are less or not even nutritional available without cooking. For instance it is absolutely necessary to cook Carotenoids such as carrots, tomatoes, peppers, corn as the only way to make their nutrients BIOAVAILABLE to your body.
WHY SMOKE…
Smoke led us to the fire that transformed us as a species. Smoke is excitement and when we catch it we can transform it into delicious flavor. LIVE SMOKED Wagyu Beef Short Ribs captures being inside the smoker while enabling you to dig right in. LIVE SMOKED Twisted Cocktails takes you right inside the fire charred barrel that has tamed wild liquor spirits into delicious. Marshmallows on fire atop the Twisted Smores takes us back to out childhood campfire fun. Smoke goes hand in hand with Fire, harnessing the flavor and nourishing benefits of delicious natural foods.
Lucky’s LIVE Smoked Wagyu Short Rib
HOLY TRANSFORMATION..
In the beginning, first comes the cure, the secret blend of Lucky’s Famous Red Spices with all the fixings that takes the wonderful Wagyu Beef to the next world of flavor sensation that everyone loves. Originating in the Fertile Crescent in the beginning of history the spices complete the protein structure thus preserving flavor, texture, color, and nutrition.
Second comes the low and slow wood smoke. The Wagyu cured cuts are hung to expose all surfaces to the subtle scent of the flavorful smoke, for hours and hours, gently merging the rich flavors of the Red Spice Cure surrounded by wisps of Apple and Hickory Smoke.
Third, the Slow & Low cooking for 12 to 24 Hours achieve the rich Umami Flavor and Silky Fork Tenderness. Then and only then, it is ready for Lucky’s Classic & Innovative food creations.
This HOLY TRANSFORMATION is a journey of Tender Love. From Harvest to Aging to Red Spice Curing to Hickory Smoking to Low & Slow Cooking only takes about 60 days!
See more at http://luckysfiresmoke.com/. Also https://luckyslafayette.com/gallery/
WHY DOES LUCKY’S COOK SO LOW (TEMPERATURE) AND SLOW?
The “low and slow cooking temperatures”, lower than the temperature in a smoldering fire, melt the Omega rich amino acid marbling and natural connective tissues to delicious sweet silky texture. This “low and slow” is not hot enough to drive out the natural juiciness, thus preserving the incredible aged Wagyu flavor and texture. “Low and slow” also delivers more flavor and better texture while breaking down the proteins for more absorption and better nutritional delivery to our body.
LUCKY’S GREAT TASTE DELIVER SUPERIOR NUTRITION
More Protein & Fiber, Lower Complex Carbs
WITHTOUT – No Wheat, No Gluten, No Soy, Low Lectines
NONE OF THE BAD STUFF!!
The Troublesome Gluten, Wheat, Soy & Lectins……
Yes, Lucky’s menu is completely composed of Gluten Free Ingredients. Our Super Buns reflect our goal to create “better for you foods “ with higher proteins, good fats and lower carbs, all without gluten. We do not have wheat, soy or pork of any type in our kitchen.
As you know gluten is only one protein in a huge family of proteins called lectins. Some lectins are severely poisonous while others are less troublesome to consume. We try to eliminate or minimize these other sources of lectins on the menu as well. It is generally believed that celiac disease could also be stimulated by other lectins not solely gluten.
http://luckysfiresmoke.com/gluten-lectins
Phytic acid is considered an antinutrient because it impairs mineral absorption. Phytic acid prevents the absorption of iron, zinc, and calcium and may promote mineral deficiencies. Phytic acid is mainly found in grains, nuts, and seeds. Foods high in phytic acid include cereals, legumes, and certain vegetables.
Sweet Protein Breads and Buns (Dough Products)
Lucky loves bread and everything made from dough but wheat flour is not so good for you. Not so long ago Congress enacted the flour enrichment legislation in War Food Order of 1943 to add essential nutrients stripped during processes and naturally absent from wheat flour, to offset deficiency cesease syndrome and insure better available nutrition to our population. (See foot note below)
The little Wheat Protein in bread only converts 25% of its protein into your system compared to Whey Protein conversion of 100% into bioavailable nutrients to you.
Lucky’s approach is start with noble seed flours (no wheat no soy no gluten) with cleaner carbohydrates and fiber combined with rich sweet digestible proteins such as wholesome natural milk protein which converts 95% to your system that we use to make our Lucky’s Sweet Protein buns and breads. With more protein and fibers,there are less carbohydrates in these delicious breads,buns,rolls and pastries.
The Bread we Love that Loves Us Back
LOTS OF THE OTHER GOOD STUFF FROM THE PLANT WORLD..
Carotenoids are a class or more than 750 naturally occurring plant pigments that the
results of observational studies suggest that diets high in carotenoid- vegetable and fruits are associated with reduced risks of cardiovascular disease and some cancers,
They are best absorbed with fat in a meal. Chopping, pureeing and cooking carotenoid containing vegetables in oil generally increase the bioavailability of the carotenoids they contain.
Flavonoids are various compounds found naturally in many fruits and vegetables. They’re also in plant products like wine, tea, and chocolate. There are six different types of flavonoids found in food, and each kind is broken down by your body in a different way. Flavonoids are rich in antioxidant activity and can help your body ward off everyday toxins. Including more flavonoids in your diet is a great way to help your body stay healthy and potentially decrease your risk of some chronic health conditions.
Catechins are a class of flavonoids – plant-based chemicals that help protect plants from environmental toxins, repair damage, and give certain foods, such as wine, tea and chocolate, their color and taste. They’ve also been found to have powerful antioxidant effects in people.
SUPERIOR COOKING TECHNIQUE TO DEVELOP NUTRITION –
EXECUTED BY LUCKY’S CULINARY ARTIST TEAM
SEE MORE HERE OF LUCKY’S FOOD HERE
Complex Carbs are created by advanced culinary techniques that convert simple blood sugar spiking carbs into slow burning microbiome friendly complex carbs. Complex carbs are the best fuel for our life as a journey not simple carbs that give us a short sprint to the end.
Pressure Cooking is very effective to break down those pesky lectins. Lectins are those plant based human pesticides that can kill us directly, but in our common diet kill us slowly by destroying our gut body friends that make up our microbiome.
Lucky’s Chicken – Poultry Curing and Butter Poaching Technique
** oil vs water based thermal capacity and energy transfer
The thermal energy to cook food travels with less thermal capacity through fats than through liquids. This culinary technique works very efficiently at lower temperature to cook food for our nutritent benefit. This lower energy-lower temperature range drive out less moisture from the foods maintaining better textures, juiciness and or course nutrients.
A broad range of progressive culinary techniques, expand the taste and nutritional benefits of the vegetable world. Lucky’s chases fresh and deep rich flavors from our friends in the plant world so you can love your vegetables as much as you love proteins.
At Lucky’s we love bread, so our approach is to start with the best noble seed flours that have more flavor, more protein and cleaner carbohydrates to make our Lucky’s Sweet Protein rolls and buns. Yes they have bigger flavor and a rich texture because they are packed with better for you nutrients.
Lucky’s doesn’t use wheat flour because unless it is enriched, it really has very little nutritional value, too many carbs and not so good for you gluten.
(Without enrichment the flour is unsuitable for human consumption)
NOTES:
In the 1930s and 1940s specific deficiency disease syndromes were first identified and documented in the United States (Foltz et al., 1944; McLester, 1939; Williams et al., 1943). Based on this new science, in 1940 the Committee on Food and Nutrition (now the Food and Nutrition Board [FNB]) recommended the addition of thiamin, niacin, riboflavin, and iron to flour (NRC, 1974). About that time FDA first established a standard of identity for enriched flour that identified specific nutrients and amounts required for addition to any flour labeled as “enriched” in order to improve the nutritional status of the population (FDA, 1941). The approach of using a standard of identity, which establishes the specific type and level of fortification required for particular staple food to be labeled as enriched, has remained a key aspect of fortification regulations and policy in the United States. These standards have been amended over the years, but they continue as the basis for the addition of thiamin, niacin, riboflavin, folic acid, and iron to enriched flour, with the addition of calcium as optional.
Concurrent with these activities, the nutritional status of Americans was being questioned as a result of the poor nutritional status of young men enlisting for service during World War II. These concerns led to the National Nutrition Conference for Defense in May 1941, convened by President Roosevelt. An outcome of this conference was the recommendation for flour and bread enrichment using the existing standards developed by FDA (Quick and Murphy, 1982).
Although the original FDA standard was not amended to include bread for several years, the enrichment of bread began in 1941 as a result of discussions among FNB, AMA, FDA, and the American Bakers Association. The voluntary cooperation of bakery-associated industries led to 75 percent of the white bread in the United States being fortified by the middle of 1942 (Quick and Murphy 1982). The first War Food Order, enacted in 1943, stated that all flour sold for interstate commerce would be enriched according to FDA standards.
Read more at https://www.healthline.com/health/what-are-flavonoids-everything-you-need-to-know
ALLERGENS WE AVOID OR IDENTIFY
]]>new report questions the dramatic environmental claims that alternative proteins can save the planet, disrupt the status quo, or challenge the power of the corporate food industry.
APRIL 7, 2022
en you’re told there’s a simple solution to a very complex problem, you’re probably not getting the whole story.
Today’s meat consumption is a good example. Meat and dairy are increasingly under the world’s microscope as livestock—which rely on huge quantities of feed crops and occupy nearly 80 percent of global farmland—accounts for between 14 percent and 30 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It’s also the source of more frequent antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, and much of the global livestock and seafood industries have been exposed for unsafe and abusive working conditions.
This complex web of problems requires more than one answer. And yet “alternative proteins”—from plant-based to lab-grown “fake” meat and dairy—are being promoted as a simple solution. Products like the Impossible Burger, with its 15-plus ingredients, are now in supermarkets and fast food establishments worldwide. Lab-grown chicken has been on the market in Singapore since late 2020 and will likely soon be approved in the U.S. and elsewhere. These products are being sold as a “win-win-win” for animals, people, and the planet. According to Patrick Brown, the outspoken CEO of Impossible Foods, livestock is “the most destructive technology on earth,” and meat substitutes are “the last chance to save the planet.”
“Alternative proteins and their sustainability credentials rest on shaky ground—as chemical-intensive, heavily processed foods, they have major impacts on human health, biodiversity, and climate change.”
Dramatic claims about plant-based meat, lab-grown meat, and “cellular agriculture” have already succeeded in drawing billions of dollars to the sector, including from big-name investors like Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Governments are now paying attention as well. China is readying major investment in lab-grown meat as part of its latest Five-Year Agricultural Plan, and the U.S. government is ploughing $10 million into a National Institute for Cellular Agriculture. Denmark is also backing alternative proteins through a $98 million plant-based food fund.
But these products and their sustainability credentials rest on shaky ground, as I show in a new report out today, “The Politics of Protein,” from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).
Firstly, the idea that these alternative proteins can save the planet is highly speculative. These claims are based on a narrow assessment of which products can deliver the most protein for the least CO2. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Products like the Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger source their ingredients from chemical-intensive (and therefore fossil fuel-intensive) monocultures and rely on heavy processing—all of which has major impacts on human health, biodiversity, and climate change.
Factory farming clearly has huge impacts of its own, but the environmental and social impacts of livestock vary massively. In some parts of the world, raising animals helps to use limited land and resources efficiently, buffer against food shocks, and provide livelihoods where few options are available. Livestock contributes to the livelihoods of 1.7 billion smallholder farmers in the Global South, and plays a crucial economic role for approximately 60 percent of rural households in developing countries.
Highly processed alternative proteins may therefore be more harmful than animal source foods in some contexts, depending on how they are produced.
Secondly, the idea that these products can “disrupt” the status quo and challenge the power of the corporate food industry is highly misleading. Start-ups may have initiated the boom, but nearly all of the world’s meat and dairy giants have now rolled out their own “fake meats” or bought up existing players. Nestlé, for example, has acquired Sweet Earth, while Unilever has bought up The Vegetarian Butcher. JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, has snapped up another market-leading meat-free brand, Vivera, adding to its portfolio of more than 100 brands—including organic meat lines.
“Nearly all of the world’s meat and dairy giants have now rolled out their own ‘fake meats’ or bought up existing players.”
Many of these corporations are also investing heavily in lab-grown meat and seafood manufacturers in the hope that these products will soon be market-ready. These are the exact same firms that dominate sales of conventional (factory-farmed) meat and dairy, i.e., the products that alternative proteins are supposed to replace. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to know who is behind the brands, and increasingly hard to avoid the world’s agribusiness giants—even when opting for a so-called alternative product.
Russia’s aggression in Ukraine will have “severe” effects on the world economy, the International Monetary Fund warned Saturday. Grain and fuel prices have surged to historic peaks. This seems like an awkward time to offer hope. Yet hope remains.
Our world is much more rigid. than it was even a generation ago, especially with regard to food. The food shock of 2022 is not a good-news story. The news is bad. But our “bad” is less bad than ever before.
Russia and Ukraine are massive growers of grain, especially wheat. Russia produces about 10 percent of the planet’s wheat; Ukraine about 4 percent. Some of that production is consumed at home, but after their domestic use, Russia and Ukraine together provide about one-quarter of all the planet’s wheat exports. They are important exporters of corn and barley as well, and of cooking oils, especially sunflower oil. Now the Russian invasion has closed the ports through which Ukraine’s wheat moved to world markets. Insurance costs have jumped for all shipping in the Black Sea. Spring crops will probably go unplanted in Ukraine; Russian crops face sanctions and embargo. Russia and its ally Belarus also are—or were—important exporters of the fertilizer that other food-raising countries use to grow their own crops.
The upheaval will touch every food consumer on Earth, even those living in food-secure countries such as the United States. Food prices are set in efficient global markets. All countries face similar prices, whether they are sellers into those markets or buyers from those markets. If the price goes up for anyone, it goes up for everyone.
Again: Sudden increases in global food prices are not good news. But also again: Some context is necessary. Four points of context, actually.
1. We live in an age of food abundance.
Maybe you retain some memory of old predictions about global famine? A best-selling book published in 1967 carries the lurid title Famine 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? Among other predictions, the authors identified India as the nation most inevitably doomed to mass starvation and economic collapse.
So … guess which country is the world’s second-largest producer of wheat in 2022, accounting for more than 13 percent of all output? That’s right, the former alleged basket case India. Since the 1960s, Indian wheat production has increased by nearly an order of magnitude, to almost 110 million metric tons last year. Indian wheat exports will probably exceed 7 million metric tons this year, up from the previous peak of 6.5 million in 2012–13.
India also exported nearly 18 million metric tons of rice in the 2020–21 marketing season, more than any other country. That’s impressive, but not as dazzling as the performance of Vietnam, which has vaulted from exporting basically nothing as recently as 1989 to second place among rice exporters in the 2020s. (The United States ranks fifth.)
2. Many food-importing countries can cope.
The world’s largest wheat importer is Egypt. I spoke with Mirette Mabrouk, the director of the Egypt Program at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, D.C. Based on my conversation with her, I’d characterize the food outlook for Egypt as serious but not critical. Egyptian authorities estimate that their reserves will be sufficient for at least the next six months, perhaps the next nine. Egyptian governments have been in the business of managing food reserves for 5,000 years. From the days of Joseph’s storehouses to now, they have accumulated some considerable management capacity.
Egypt buys wheat through a system of reverse auctions: posting a tender for a certain quantity, then accepting the lowest bid for that tender. Since the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt has operated a system of subsidized bakeries that sell low-priced loaves to qualified buyers. More recently, Egypt has begun to convert to direct cash assistance provided through cards that function very much like American electronic-benefits-transfer cards. In a crisis, the Egyptian government can effectively provide more cash assistance to low-income buyers.
Many other major wheat-importing countries are either rich (Italy, Japan, South Korea) or led by reasonably effective governments (Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey) that can emulate Egypt and deliver assistance to the hard-pressed. The countries to worry most about are those wracked by war and political instability: Yemen above all, but also Ethiopia, Mali, and other disrupted states.
3. Global emergency aid can help.
Where famine does threaten, the international community can save lives. In 2021, international relief agencies provided in-kind or cash food assistance to 13 million Yemenis. Such programs will cost more in 2022, but not impossibly more. Before the war in Ukraine, the United Nations’ food program projected a Yemen aid budget of $2 billion for this year. That number will likely go up by 25 percent or more, but the money can be found.
An even more terrifying food crisis faces Afghanistan under its new Taliban rulers. The Taliban’s self-imposed international isolation has been followed by a cruel drought. Millions of lives are at risk. India has committed considerable food aid. The war in Ukraine does not make feeding Afghanistan’s population easier, obviously, but it’s only a very incidental aggravating factor. Afghanistan’s agony would be no less agonizing if Vladimir Putin had chosen peace in Ukraine rather than war.
4. High prices are not bad news for everybody.
Higher prices for food consumers mean higher incomes for food producers. In most of the world, consumers hugely outnumber producers. There is one region, however, where producers remain so numerous that higher prices can improve the livelihoods of millions: sub-Saharan Africa.
About two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africans farm for a living. When prices rise, farmers produce more and earn more. Sub-Saharan farmers could produce a lot more. African farmers could soon double or even triple their output of grains, livestock, and other products if they use more intense farming methods, the economic-consulting firm McKinsey estimates.
Higher prices could encourage African farmers to adopt more advanced seeds and other modern methods. They could prod governments to invest more in rail and roads in order to move crops to market, and to clarify property laws in order to support commercial farms that produce for the international marketplace. Sub-Saharan food output grew twice as fast from 2000 to 2018 as it did in the 1980–99 stretch. That boom was driven by higher food prices, especially in the peak years of 2006 to 2013, according to a 2021 study.
African agriculture can be extended as well as intensified. The South African agricultural economist Wandile Sihlobo calculates that 60 percent of the world’s remaining unused arable land is located in sub-Saharan Africa.
Higher food prices will be a stress and a burden for hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Higher food prices will test the stability of governments. Higher food prices may become an important part of Russia’s anti-Ukraine propaganda, which will blame Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression—and Western sanctions against Russia—for the higher cost of food.
But a stress is not a crisis, and a crisis does not have to be a catastrophe. Good management can mitigate the stress, and begin to identify and capture opportunities. Dealing with the food-price increases that this conflict will bring will not be easy. But it can be done.
By James Dinneen
Solanum jamesii, aka the Four Corners potato, has sustained Indigenous people in the American Southwest for 11,000 years; USDA is now studying its 8-year shelf life, and its resistance to disease, heat, and drought. The future of this remarkable little potato remains unwritten.
“Hello everybody,” Bruce Pavlik said to no one. It took me a second to realize that Pavlik, an ecologist at the University of Utah’s Red Butte Garden, was addressing the plants. We were standing above a wide desert canyon just outside Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah; near us was a stand of juniper trees. Further out, the canyon bottom was dotted with fragrant sagebrush and twisted piñon. And somewhere down there, likely near two humps of red sandstone where people once lived for a thousand years, were the potatoes.
Lisbeth Louderback, Pavlick’s collaborator and spouse, appeared beside him wearing a backpack GPS rig. An archaeologist at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, Louderback would use the rig to mark the locations of any potato plants we found, precise to the millimeter. Leaves collected from each plant would then be sent to a lab for DNA sequencing, the latest data in a sprawling research project on a wild potato species called the Four Corners potato. In 2017, Louderback and Pavlik found evidence that Indigenous peoples in the Southwest have used the potato for at least 11,000 years—far longer than any other documented potato use in North America.
That finding spurred the pair to delve further into how Ancestral Pueblo, Ute, and Diné people used the potato along with maize, squash, and beans—the so-called “Three Sisters” core to Indigenous agriculture in the Southwest. Archaeologists believe the Three Sisters were first domesticated in Central America, then brought to the dryland farms of the Colorado Plateau through the extensive trading networks that existed at the time. Louderback and Pavlik suspected the potato had also been carried around, cultivated, and perhaps even domesticated, all within the Four Corners area. If true, the potato would represent one of only a handful of independent crop domestication events anywhere, and the only known example in North America west of the Mississippi. “It puts us on the map,” Louderback told me.
“Reconnecting to the potato brings back our stories, our songs, our connection to the landscape. It brings back the cultural memory of how we used to nourish ourselves.”
But plumbing the potato’s secrets has required more than just archaeology. What started with Louderback and Pavlik has grown into a collaboration between some unlikely partners, with different, arguably incompatible views of how the potato should be used and valued. These include Department of Agriculture (USDA) geneticist John Bamberg, who is leading the work to interpret the potato’s DNA for fingerprints of domestication. Separate from the archaeology, Bamberg is working to use the Four Corners potato’s unique genes to breed a common potato more resistant to disease, heat, and drought—an increasingly urgent project in the face of our changing climate. Bamberg’s team is also exploring some of the potato’s other singular traits, like its ability to remain viable for eight years in the fridge, or its resistance to extremely cold temperatures.
Also on the team is Cynthia Wilson, a Diné nutritionist and traditional foods advocate working to restore the potato to Native communities and gardens, and to collect ancestral knowledge from Diné elders. “Reconnecting to the potato brings back our stories, our songs, our connection to the landscape,” Wilson told me. “It brings back the cultural memory of how we used to nourish ourselves.”
In August, I traveled to the Four Corners area to learn more about this curious group, and the potato that has brought them together. From Salt Lake City, I headed south with Louderback and Pavlik in search of potato clusters that might have persisted from ancestral gardens. In the Monument Valley in the Navajo Nation, I met with Wilson at her home, where growing the potato seemed an act of defiance against centuries of oppression. And in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, I met with Bamberg, whose potato breeding research may well be a feat of modern agricultural science with a genetic debt to centuries of Indigenous farming. I left sure this most ancient potato, whichever way one chooses to see it, is anything but stuck in the past.
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Unless you are a uniquely experienced potato eater, the Four Corners potato, known by botanists as Solanum jamesii (pronounced james-EE-aye), is unlike any potato you’ve eaten. The potato you’ll find in a grocery store is Solanum tuberosum, the common potato. Idaho, Russet, Yukon and the rest are all varieties of that species, which was domesticated in the Andes around 8,000 years ago, cultivated by the Inca, and brought to the rest of the world by the Spanish in the 16th century. The Four Corners potato, Solanum jamesii, is related to the common potato in somewhat the same way coyotes are related to dogs. Its tubers are about as small and varied as grapes.
Louderback and Pavlik’s saga with the tiny potato began in 2013. Louderback was working to reconstruct ancient Southwestern diets using microscopic starch grains recovered from an archaeological site in Utah’s Escalante Valley. She had found grains she thought might be from the potato on an 11,000-year-old grinding stone, but had not yet developed a way to distinguish the grains of one potato species from another. And while there was ethnographic evidence that the potato had been used for centuries by Hopi, Diné, Zuni, and a number of other Indigenous groups, there was no evidence for potato use that far back in time. In any case, the plant was uncommon that far north. Even if the grains turned out to be from the Four Corners potato, it seemed unlikely to have been a significant source of food in the region. Louderback might have disregarded the unidentified grains, had two things not happened.
First, doing field work one day, Pavlik found a small cluster of potato plants growing just a few hundred steps from the Escalante Valley site. Then, a few days later, the pair happened upon a book at a local bed and breakfast that claimed Mormon cavalry in the 19th century had called the Escalante area “Potato Valley.” The two finds suggested to them that the Four Corners potato may have been a more important food source than they had believed. Further, if people had not only foraged, but transported and cultivated the potato, it was also conceivable that selection by farmers of the best-performing plants and adaptation to new habitats had altered the wild potatoes into something more desirable to people, something domesticated. “We thought, this is too good,” said Pavlik.
It was conceivable that selection by farmers of the best-performing plants and adaptation to new habitats had altered the wild potatoes into something more desirable to people, something domesticated.
That’s not to say proving any of it would be easy. “[Archaeologists] aren’t used to thinking about living things,” Pavlik told me. “They’re all bones and stones. Living things aren’t so convenient.”
Over the next several years, Pavlick, Louderback, and a growing group of collaborators, including Bamberg and Wilson, pursued these suspicions about the potato along multiple lines of evidence: starch grains, geographic distribution, nutritional analysis, and traditional knowledge. With this, they established that the potato was used, transported, and cultivated widely in the Four Corners region. To show domestication however, they needed more DNA from potatoes growing near archaeological sites, which is why Pavlik and Louderback had appeared in the desert talking to plants.
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Soon we were hiking down a steep sandy wash, still mushy from rain. This boded well. Without sufficient moisture, the potato’s tubers can remain underground for more than a decade awaiting their moment to sprout. That’s a sensible strategy for a desert plant, but it can make for tough collecting. In 2019, a dry year, the team’s first survey for the domestication project had been a disappointment. Then 2020 was a bust due to both drought and Covid-19. But this summer was looking up: On the drive from Salt Lake City south to Bears Ears, a late summer monsoon had brought every plant in that red desert country into its most vivid green.
Pavlik, up ahead, was the first to find potatoes. “Look at all of ‘em. Oh my god!” he shouted. When we caught up, he pointed out a cluster of at least 80 short leafy plants, topped with sweet-smelling white and yellow flowers. They were growing along the rim of a stone-ringed depression Louderback explained was likely once the foundation of a pit house. “Even on this small scale, the plants are with the archaeology,” Pavlik said. The ground around the potatoes was littered with fragments of ceramics, some with black and white geometric patterns, others with grooves finger-pressed in the clay.
After marking each potato plant with a bright red flag, the pair went to work collecting GPS data and leaf clippings, sealing each sample in teabag-like sacks to dry. Later, the leaves’ DNA would be purified, then sequenced.Differences between wild and archaeology-associated populations might then indicate domestication, especially if those genetic differences were linked to desirable traits like tuber size or bitterness. The hope was that these plants, and their genomes, were artifacts, just as much as the ceramics scattered around them.
That evening, over a dinner of steak and mashed potatoes (what else?), Louderback and Pavlik explained what it would mean to find robust evidence that the potato had been domesticated. Though the genetic data remains preliminary (their most recent paper shows potatoes from archaeological sites often cannot produce seeds, a sign of a genetic bottleneck possibly caused by human transport) they agreed such a finding would put the Four Corners potato on the world-historical map of agricultural beginnings. It would point, as Pavlik put it, to “the genius of [Indigenous] stewardship and ancestry.” It would also deepen the story archaeologists tell about ancient diets in the Southwest, adding another energy-rich and nutrient-dense option to the middle-Holocene menu.
Proving Solanum jamesii was domesticated could also have implications for how the potato and other culturally significant plants are managed within Bear Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, both of which were expanded by President Joe Biden in October on the recommendation of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. (When Haaland, herself a member of the Laguna Pueblo, visited Bears Ears in April, she was served the Four Corners potato, twice.) Plants like the potato, Pavlik and Louderback argued, deserve to be better documented and protected, especially in ways that incorporate the people and knowledge responsible for protecting them in the first place. “It’s yet another example of ingenuity thousands of years before the white man came around,” Louderback said.
Of course, it’s not as though Indigenous people familiar with the potato require archaeological or genetic evidence to be sure of any of this. At meetings to discuss the potato with Native farmers, Pavlik said he often gets a similar response after going over his and Louderback’s research: “Well, we could have told you that.”
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BY Joe Fassler
Splashy headlines have long overshadowed inconvenient truths about biology and economics. Now, extensive new research suggests the industry may be on a billion-dollar crash course with reality.
Paul Wood didn’t buy it.
For years, the former pharmaceutical industry executive watched from the sidelines as biotech startups raked in venture capital, making bold pronouncements about the future of meat. He was fascinated by their central contention: the idea that one day, soon, humans will no longer need to raise livestock to enjoy animal protein. We’ll be able to grow meat in giant, stainless-steel bioreactors—and enough of it to feed the world. These advancements in technology, the pitch went, would fundamentally change the way human societies interact with the planet, making the care, slaughter, and processing of billions of farm animals the relic of a barbaric past.
It’s a digital-era narrative we’ve come to accept, even expect: Powerful new tools will allow companies to rethink everything, untethering us from systems we’d previously taken for granted. Countless news articles have suggestedthat a paradigm shift driven by cultured meat is inevitable, even imminent. But Wood wasn’t convinced. For him, the idea of growing animal protein was old news, no matter how science-fictional it sounded. Drug companies have used a similar process for decades, a fact Wood knew because he’d overseen that work himself.
For four years, Wood, who has a PhD in immunology, served as the executive director of global discovery for Pfizer Animal Health. (His division was later spun off into Zoetis, today the largest animal health company in the world.) One of his responsibilities was to oversee production of vaccines, which can involve infecting living cells with weakened virus strains and inducing those cells to multiply inside large bioreactors. In addition to yielding large quantities of vaccine-grade viruses, this approach also creates significant amounts of animal cell slurry, similar to the product next-generation protein startups want to process further into meat. Wood knew the process to be extremely technical, resource-intensive, and expensive. He didn’t understand how costly biomanufacturing techniques could ever be used to produce cheap, abundant human food.
In March of this year, he hoped he’d finally get his answer. That month, the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that represents the alternative protein industry, published a techno-economic analysis (TEA) that projected the future costs of producing a kilogram of cell-cultured meat. Prepared independently for GFI by the research consulting firm CE Delft, and using proprietary data provided under NDA by 15 private companies, the document showed how addressing a series of technical and economic barriers could lower the production price from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound over the next nine years—an astonishing 4,000-fold reduction.
Costs for cell-cultured meat need to come down quickly. Most of us have a limited appetite for 50-dollar lab-grown chicken nuggets.
In the press push that followed, GFI claimed victory. “New studies show cultivated meat can have massive environmental benefits and be cost-competitive by 2030,” it trumpeted, suggesting that a new era of cheap, accessible cultured protein is rapidly approaching. The finding is critical for GFI and its allies. If private, philanthropic, and public sector investors are going to put money into cell-cultured meat, costs need to come down quickly. Most of us have a limited appetite for 50-dollar lab-grown chicken nuggets.
With its TEA findings in hand, GFI has worked tirelessly to argue for massive public investment. Its top policy recommendation, according to GFI’s in-depth analysis of the TEA results, is aimed at “forward-thinking” governments: They “should increase public funds for R & D into cultivated meat technology” in order to “seize the opportunity and reap the benefits of becoming global leaders” in the space. In late April, just six weeks later, that message was amplified by The New York Times. In a column called “Let’s Launch a Moonshot for Meatless Meat,” Ezra Klein, a co-founder of Vox who is now one of the Times’s most visible and influential writers, argued that the U.S. government should invest billions to improve and scale both plant-based meat alternatives (like the Impossible Burger) and cultivated meat.
Bruce Friedrich, GFI’s founder and CEO, appeared in the story to argue that the need for significant public investment was urgent and necessary.
“If we leave this endeavor to the tender mercies of the market there will be vanishingly few products to choose from and it’ll take a very long time,” he told Klein. The message was clear: If we want to save the planet, we should double down on cultured meat.
Cultivated meat companies have repeatedly missed product launch deadlines
Read more https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/?mc_cid=19ea89b3b3&mc_eid=a8b61e24b5
Wood couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI’s TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI’s analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he’s worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concludedthat GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.
In an interview by phone, Wood wondered if GFI was being disingenuous—or if the organization was simply naive.
“After a while, you just think: Am I going crazy? Or do these people have some secret sauce that I’ve never heard of?” Wood said. “And the reality is, no—they’re just doing fermentation. But what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, we’ll do it better than anyone else has ever, ever done.”
In fact, GFI was well aware of Wood’s line of criticism. Several months earlier, Open Philanthropy—a multi-faceted research and investment entity with a nonprofit grant-making arm, which is also one of GFI’s biggest funders—completed a much more robust TEA of its own, one that concluded cell-cultured meat will likely never be a cost-competitive food. David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”
Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
“And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
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By Terrence Doyle
More than a billion marine animals died in the heatwave that swept across the Western U.S. and Canada last month. The climate crisis doesn’t exist in some hypothetical future — it’s already here.
Tens of thousands of dead mussels lay along the coastline in Vancouver, British Columbia, boiled alive by the extreme heat wave that swept across the Pacific Northwest late last month. The Canadian city’s beaches transformed into mass gravesites for the bivalves, their shells forced open by the extreme temperatures, innards dried out or picked over by hungry scavengers. It is one of the most searing images yet of the ongoing climate crisis.
What makes this bizarre and depressing moment even more difficult to grapple with is the fact that mussels have evolved to withstand high temperatures — they hold water inside their shells to prevent from drying out, and live in beds, or clusters, which ordinarily help to protect the collective against the heat. But those evolutionary tools, developed over literally millions of years, were no match for temperatures that climbed as high as 121 degrees Fahrenheit in British Columbia and coincided with low tides, leaving the mussels exceptionally exposed.
It wasn’t just mussels that died off en masse in the region: From the Puget Sound to Vancouver Island, countless other bivalves, including oysters and clams, and other assorted ocean dwellers boiled to death amidst the extreme heat. According to researchers at the University of British Columbia, more than 1 billion marine animals died in the waters of the Salish Sea during the record-breaking heat wave. One Washington state-based shellfish farmer told the Tacoma News Tribune that they lost 50,000 oysters and 10,000 clams, a quarter of their total stock, worth about $60,000 at market. Oysters take anywhere from 12 to 18 months to reach maturity, so the die-offs will affect the business of oyster farmers — and what restaurants are able to offer diners — for years to come.
Where the heat wave didn’t kill oysters, it made the people who ate them sick. According to Washington state’s department of public health, the state is experiencing an historic outbreak of vibriosis, which is caused by eating raw or undercooked shellfish and causes diarrhea, abdominal cramps, vomiting, headaches, and a host of other unpleasant symptoms. Vibrio is naturally occurring in salt water environs, but it thrives at warm temperatures, and the low tides, combined with scorching hot days, created the perfect conditions for the bacteria to grow.
If you want to see what climate disaster looks like in real time — the fires, the mass die-offs, the pathogens, the effect on our food system (and our food system’s effect on it) and your plate — you don’t have to look any further than the Western U.S. and Canada.
In California, the record high temperatures could result in the death of all juvenile Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River, nudging the endangered fish to the brink of extinction. Chinook salmon are not able to survive in water temperatures above 56 degrees Fahrenheit. In a normal year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation would release water from Shasta Lake in order to keep the waters of the Sacramento cool enough for the young fish, but historic droughts in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta have necessitated that large amounts of water be released to farmers instead. This year, there’s just not enough water left to keep the salmon cool, and instead they might all die.
As the Chinook salmon swims toward the point of no return in northern California, much of the wildfireprone state is up in flames. Hundreds of thousands of acres in California are currently on fire, due to the confluence of an extremely dry winter and spring and a series of heatwaves. In Oregon, the Bootleg Fire, which has been burning since July 6, is in the process of incinerating 300,000 acres. And the same drought that transformed the Western U.S. into a tinderbox is forcing ranchers to shrink the size of their herds because there isn’t enough quality pasture land for animals to graze.
Add to the mix the wildfires destroying vineyards in Napa Valley, cherries in Oregon cooked on the branch by (yet again) record breaking temperatures, a new-ish cycle of droughts and floods affecting broad stretches of farmland in the Midwest, among other disasters, and it’s clear that climate change isn’t some terrifying eventuality for future generations to deal with — it’s happening right now, and it will continue to happen without extreme intervention, including big changes to the global food system (for example, cutting way back on meat and dairy production) to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
At the moment, climate disaster is most visible in the U.S. and Western Canada in the forms of mass die-offs, unprecedented conflagrations, and struggling farmers, and in Europe in the form of deadly flooding. But the climate crisis has more subtle and insidious effects, ones that tend to impact less industrialized countries, poor people, and people of color more acutely than anyone else. In the Republic of Palau in the Western Pacific, for example, rising sea levels are salinating its agricultural land, making it impossible to grow crops that aren’t salt-tolerant. And in the U.S., decades of racist housing policy, known as redlining, have left Black neighborhoods in many of the nation’s cities sweltering in the summer heat — as average temperatures in cities across the Eastern seaboard now average what they did in their far more southern neighbors just a decade ago — due to a lack of green spaces and an abundance of pavement and concrete. White neighborhoods, on the other hand, tend to be much cooler.
The more extreme effects of climate change may not be knocking at your front door just yet, but it’s inevitable that climate disaster will affect everyone, eventually. According to a report by the United Nations, climate change will redefine life on Earth going forward, even if humans are able to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. The report cites species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, and communities endangered by rising seas among the many complications that will arise in the coming decades.
For more than a century, scientists have understood that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide cause the Earth to warm, but an intractably powerful cohort of legislators and fossil fuel lobbyists continue to do their damndest to deny that this is true. Still, no combination of political pressure, bad policy making, or bald-face lying can change the fact that global temperatures continue to rise, oceans continue to warm (and acidify), sea levels continue to rise, ice sheets continue to shrink (further contributing to the rise of sea levels), glaciers continue to retreat, and extreme weather events (tropical storms, 100-year floods, wildfires, etc.) continue to wreak havoc across the globe.
For decades, we’ve wondered what climate change might look like, and when it might arrive. It looks like thousands of boiled alive mussels spread across a beach in Vancouver, and it’s here now.
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Climate change has been holding back food production for decades, with a new study showing that about 21% of growth for agricultural output was lost since the 1960s.
That’s equal to losing the last seven years of productivity growth, according to research led by Cornell University and published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study was funded by a unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The revelation comes as the United Nations’ World Food Programme warns of a “looming catastrophe” with about 34 million people globally on the brink of famine. The group has cited climate change as a major factor contributing to the sharp increase in hunger around the world. Food inflation is also on the rise as farmers deal with the impact of extreme weather at a time of robust demand.
This is the first study to look at how climate change has historically affected agricultural production on a global scale, using econometrics and climate models to figure out how much of the sector’s total productivity has been affected, across crops and livestock.
The loss of productivity comes even as billions has been poured into improving agricultural production through the development of new seeds, sophisticated farm machinery and other technological advances.
“Even though globally agriculture is more productive, that greater productivity on average doesn’t translate into more climate resilience,” said Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an author of the paper and associate
professor at Cornell’s Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
The damages to productivity growth aren’t evenly spread across regions. Warmer areas — especially those in the tropics — are more detrimentally affected. Ortiz-Bobea said that coincides with many countries where agriculture makes up a bigger share of the economy.
He was also warned that current research into improving production may not enough consider the pace of climate change.
“I worry that we’re breeding or preparing ourselves for the climate we’re in now, not what is coming up in the next couple of decades.”
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BY Adele Peters
Around half of the habitable land onthe planet is now used for agriculture. A millennium ago—or more recently, in the case of many countries—it was mostly wilderness. Soon, technology could reshape that balance again, bringing back acres of trees as tools to fight climate change.
Jonathan Riggall, the director of energy and natural resources at Stantec, researched how technology might enable rewilding in the U.K. and Europe. Riggall had begun thinking about the historical landscape when he studied environmental archaeology as a university student. “My first introduction to the concept that Europe had a wildwood was through the archaeological record,” he says. Over the years, as he worked in the climate change sector, he noticed a disparity in how that past was discussed—developing countries would be criticized for cutting down forests to farm, but few people talked about the fact that the same thing had happened earlier in Europe at a massive scale, and again when Europeans arrived in America.
Now, he argues, the fourth industrial revolution—from genetic engineering to robotics and artificial intelligence—could make it possible to change land use at a large scale. Vertical farms, including systems that plant, grow, and harvest food autonomously, can use as little as 1% of the land that a conventional farm would use to grow the same amount of food. The systems are still at a relatively early stage and expensive, but beginning to prove that they can be profitable. Right now, vertical farm companies focus on leafy greens, which make the most sense financially, but berries and vine crops will soon follow. Other indoor agriculture facilities, like a large, state-of-the-art greenhouse now growing tomatoes in Appalachia, use one-thirtieth of the land used in traditional farming. A new vertical wheat farm grows as much in 850 square feet as could normally grow on 30 to 50 acres.
Areas that were once forested and no longer needed for farming could be restored to wilderness. The idea of rewilding is already on some government agendas. In the U.K., where Riggall works, the government recently pledged to restore woodlands on 30,000 hectares of land per year as part of a larger plan to fight climate change. “What I find interesting is that they didn’t really necessarily align to new agricultural practices,” he says. “And those two things are so interlinked, because you can’t have land-use change without figuring out where you’re going to feed people.”
The United Nations has projected that as the global population grows, world food production will need to nearly double by 2050—so some gains in using land efficiently will likely be offset by demand. Still, there’s opportunity to rethink current farmland. Riggall hopes that by visualizing how land can be used differently, the Stantec project can help designers begin to make new choices when planning multi-year developments that will be in place for decades. The project “helps people look forward,” he says, “because we’re designing things now.”