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Jun 07, 2024

What's for breakfast in 2050?

You open your eyes, roll out of bed, and stumble to the kitchen. What's for breakfast? Coffee, eggs, bacon, rice, beans, bananas — so many breakfast staples worldwide are in peril. Climate change has

You open your eyes, roll out of bed, and stumble to the kitchen. What's for breakfast?

Coffee, eggs, bacon, rice, beans, bananas — so many breakfast staples worldwide are in peril.

Climate change has reduced global farming productivity by 21% since 1961, Cornell University researchers calculated in a 2021 study.

But our agricultural system was already unsustainable. Nearly one-third of the world's food is wasted, while people go hungry. And up to one-third of humanity's greenhouse-gas emissions stem from the food supply chain.

"If we carry on with business as usual growing the same crops to produce the same breakfast, we are not gonna get very far," Caspar Chater, a researcher in crops and global change, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, told Insider.

Still, there is hope. There's more than enough food to feed the planet, said Tim Benton, a biologist who leads the Environment and Society Programme at policy institute Chatham House.

But it could mean that your favorite foods — starting with the first meal of the day — will look and cost differently by 2050.

Most of the ingredients that go into this fan favorite probably won't disappear.

They might get more expensive though, according to Ed Carr, a lead author on the latest United Nations climate report. Starting with meat:

Prices depend on how policymakers respond to upheaval, Carr said, who studies climate adaptation, development, and policy.

"No question, there'll be impacts on the production side of the things that I eat. But whether or not that translates into a price signal isn't determined just by the climate," he told Insider.

For example, current policies and subsidies in many countries encourage farmers to rely on fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation that degrade the environment and soil. This in turn makes it harder to get grain out of the ground without relying on these industrial farming practices.

Benton argues that price hikes are inevitable because the damage caused by the industry is not accounted for in the price of food today. One 2021 paper estimated the food system caused about $19.8 trillion in global damages, almost twice as much as the roughly $9 trillion it brought in.

"Put simply, the prices we pay for food today do not reflect the true cost of producing it — and such a system is unsustainable," Corinna Hawkes, Professor of Food Policy, City, University of London, wrote in The Conversation.

Part of the issue with agriculture today is that it relies heavily on a few select species of plants and livestock.

In fact, only nine plants provide two-thirds of the world's food by weight — and of those nine, just four (wheat, rice, maize, and soybean) account for two-thirds of the calories we eat.

That means much of the world's food lacks the genetic diversity necessary to adapt fast enough to a changing climate.

"In the future, what we need are plants that don't mind having a good harvest under high temperatures, fluctuating drought conditions, and weather extremes that we are starting to experience," Chater said.

Part of the solution is reinjecting more genetic diversity into our day-to-day foods. Let's examine this through the spectrum of another breakfast classic: huevos rancheros.

Technology could help us save today's staple crops. However, the ultimate goal shouldn't be to continue relying on so few plants and animals for our food, because it's degrading ecosystems.

Farming focusing on just one crop or one type of livestock is efficient. It can generate higher yields with less effort. For instance, machines can harvest grain if they are tailored to that crop, freeing humans from having to do the backbreaking work themselves, Chater said.

But cropping and animal husbandry take up half of all the habitable land in the world today. While these few species dominate the landscape, there is limited space for lush ecosystems like forests and the diversity of life they conserve.

This lack of biodiversity means there are fewer of the plants, insects, and microbes that naturally contribute to agriculture by cleaning water, pollinating crops, and replenishing the soil. This in turn makes farming harder in the long run.

Intensive agriculture, for instance, is one of the main contributors to the dangerous decline of bees, per the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.

As the climate changes and regions of the planet get hotter, drier, or rainier, animals and plants will find themselves in environments that aren't suited to them. Some foods will have to relocate. Some will simply disappear.

Take salmon and avocado toast for example.

In the search for ever-increased profitability, the food system has gone global. Today, a few hotspots in the world produce a lot of the world's food.

Let's take a look at three foods that likely traveled halfway around the world to get to your breakfast table: coffee, banana, and orange juice.

Moving the food system to a global scale has driven more competition, which has increased food production and brought food prices down. However, because everything is interconnected, if there is a problem on one side of the planet, it can affect the whole world's access to food, Benton said.

"If anything goes wrong with the supply chain — you have a disease that breaks out in meat packing plants, a port infrastructure problem because of a climate change impact, a drought, a war, or whatever — then everything grinds to a halt very quickly," said Benton.

Russia's war on Ukraine famously highlighted the vulnerabilities of the global food chain. For instance, Ukraine was one of the world's main grain exporters, but after Russia's invasion in 2022, those exports ground to almost a complete halt. This caused a major price rise in global wheat exports.

The war may be the wake-up call countries need, since breadbaskets can easily "become an enemy in the future," Benton said.

One way to support a transition to a sustainable food system is with your choices at the grocery store, scientists said — if you can afford it.

"The food we eat depends on the demand side, the eating habits," Toshihiro Hasegawa, who co-led the food-systems chapter of the last UN climate report, told Insider. "Hopefully we see more plant-based food in the future on the table."

It's impossible to have a perfectly sustainable diet. But some foods are more environmentally friendly than others. Here are some breakfast foods experts said they feel good about.

Eating sustainably, healthily, and locally is always a good idea. But it's not an option for everyone, because the food system is geared to sell cheap, low-quality calories.

The world currently only produces a third of the fruit and vegetables that would be needed for everyone on the planet to have five servings per day, per Benton. Meanwhile, grains and sugar have become more affordable than ever.

This has made unhealthy processed foods much more available than they used to be, driving a dangerous rise in diet-related chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer. One in five deaths globally can be linked to an unhealthy diet, a 2019 study found.

Ultimately, experts say it is possible to feed everyone. In spite of the rising temperatures, innovations like gene editing that can make agriculture more efficient and less environmentally destructive are still unfolding.

Still, to drive meaningful change, the global food system will have to prioritize human health and the environment. That will take the political will of governments across the globe, said Benton.

"Switching out of the food system we spent 70 years to evolve is going to be a difficult thing," he said.

For him, the way to enact change is to work "as a citizen to use your political power," he said.

"Once as people, we start raising this as an issue that we want tackled, it gives the politicians the political space to say: 'we have to change the market,'" he said.