Humans Will Never Run Out Of Food... Right?

By: Srija Bhattacharya

Unsplash, Anastasiia Chepinska

Everyone likes a good pack of potato chips, or maybe a nice large pizza. How about your favorite ice cream flavor? Well believe it or not, climate change has an impact on all of those and more! The science behind that is simple. Climate change drastically affects our weather patterns, whether it is extreme highs or extreme lows. These changes affect our soil, which affects our plants, which affects everything around us.

Global warming is a major part of climate change. As you know, global warming is caused by humans releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Instead of going into space where it is supposed to go, it sits in Earth’s atmosphere and slowly heats it up. Now, this heat is becoming so extreme, it is starting to dry up our soil. Most people think that dry soil isn’t such a bad thing, they probably see it everywhere! But in reality, it is a lot worse than it seems. Soil performs a key function for our plants and ecosystem. These functions include temperature regulation, distribution of water and oxygen, supply of nutrients, and much more. When soil dries up, it loses all of these things (water, nutrients, oxygen, etc). This means our plants are not getting these things that are necessary to function and as a result, they die.

Unsplash, Jordi Vich Navarro

Slowly, all of our soil is drying up, and plants are dying. These include fruits, grass, flowers, vegetables, trees, pretty much all things that grow from soil. What does that to our food chain? It completely collapses it. Whether you eat meat or not, somehow your food is being destroyed. For example, most cows graze on grass and maize. If those things die, our cows won’t be able to eat it and they will start to suffer as well. Then if we lose our cows, we’d lose so much milk and potential meat! There are however other ways to get milk, for example like almonds; but where do almonds grow? On trees! And if our trees are slowly starting to die, we won’t have access to almonds or make any milk!

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Another example are chickens. A chicken’s diet mainly consists of flowers, grass, fruits, vegetables, grains, seeds, etc. When chickens don’t have access to these things they will start to disappear as well because they aren’t being fed what they need to maintain stable internal functions, and we’ll lose a valuable source of eggs and meat.

Clearly, climate change is going to affect our diets very much in the years to come. We eat plants, meat, eggs, and drink milk. All of our favorite foods such as ice cream, cakes, french fries, and chips won’t be made anymore. We need to understand how our actions will impact the earth on a long term basis such as how it would cut down our food supply. Eventually our food will run out, and so will our fresh water. What we need to do is make changes. We have to change our lifestyle to support our planet rather than tear it down. We have to change how people think about climate change, and show them that it is the real enemy out there. That way not only you, but everyone can make a change to support our planet and help everybody out in the long run.