If We Don’t Change Our Ways, We Risk Losing Coffee (And Other Foods We Love)

Andrew Zimmern is an Emmy-winning and four-time James Beard Award-winning TV personality, chef and writer whoserves as curator and spokesperson for the food and climate programming of The Great Northern festivalheld in Minneapolis and St. Paul. He hosts the show “What’sEating America”on MSNBCand authors a newsletter on Substack called Spilled Milk to educate people about the U.S. food system, addiction in the restaurant industry and climate change. In this edition of Voices in Food, Zimmern talks about why we risk losing our beloved food and drinks within our lifetimes due to rising global temperatures and what we can do to save them.

Back in the ’60s, my mother was what you would now label “an activist.” With her, I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy and the Black Panthers. We protested the Vietnam War and were active in the early days of the climate movement, before the Clean Water Act, and before federal legislations were passed to protect the environment.

Growing up as a white man living in America, the greatest country on Earth, I led a mostly self-centered life. I didn’t necessarily think that way then, but looking back, I can see that I felt that there was no existential crisis happening during my lifetime.

About 20 years ago, when I started traveling abroad for television, it was impossible to ignore what I was seeing. From pollution of inner harbors in Asian cities to river systems in Amazonia, everything was changing for the worse. Elders in the northernmost areas of Canada told me that 80 years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to go outside. They didn’t have thermometers, but we looked up recorded history, and they were right. In Trinidad and Tobago, a conch diver told me he was the last