Enjoy your chocolate and champagne while it lasts

"I'm screwed."

That is a polite way of expressing my thoughts upon meeting the chef with whom I was supposed to prepare a banquet at the World Economic Forum.

Nearly twenty-five hundred dignitaries from 140 countries had assembled in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual networking extravaganza. Their numbers included no fewer than forty heads of state. Among them: David Cameron of the UK, Justin Trudeau of Canada, and Jacob Zuma of South Africa. Ban Ki-moon, John Kerry, and Joe Biden were in town, as were Mary Barra, the head of General Motors, and Satya Nadella, of Microsoft. Yo-Yo Ma, Bono, and Leonardo DiCaprio represented the arts.

And then there was me. My job was to conceptualize and oversee a luncheon for fifty of these luminaries—with the help of a woozy codger standing in front of me.

Anyone who has worked in a professional kitchen recognizes the type. He had thinning gray hair and looked to be well into his sixties, an age when even the most physically fit cooks find it tough to summon the energy to prepare a banquet. He had the telltale puffy face, watery eyes, and flaming complexion of someone who habitually uncorked a bottle of red wine upon rising in the morning and guzzled the dregs of his second or third bottle just before going to bed at night. I surmised that like most of his kind, he cooked dated French catering fare—bacon-wrapped green beans, beef filet with an insipid demi-glace, gummy potatoes au gratin—food he considered good, or rather good enough for the guests at a faded hotel in a Swiss town with a permanent population of just eleven thousand, where the main draw is powdery snow and well-groomed ski runs, not haute cuisine. He seemed a relic of the past. My meal was supposed to be all about food's future—or, more accurately, its lack thereof.

I had come to Davos in 2016 at the request of the United Nations' World Food Programme. They asked me to put on what I call a Last Supper, a concept I developed as a way to demonstrate how climate change will affect what we eat. "Demonstrate" is the key word. The six years that I cooked nightly dinners in the White House for the Obama family, while also serving in an official capacity as the administration's senior nutrition policy adviser, taught me valuable lessons about the unrecognized power of a meal and also about how leadership works in the real world.

You can lecture all you want about the perils of global warming, and listeners' eyes will glaze over. Repeating hackneyed statistics like "The world will soon become two degrees warmer than it is now" doesn't motivate people at all. Hell, as someone born and raised in Chicago, I guarantee that many residents of my hometown would say, "Two degrees warmer? Great! I'll take it, let's warm this place up!" Especially on a January morning with a north wind howling off Lake Michigan. Beyond the fact that it doesn't sound like a serious problem, no one connects in an emotional way to two degrees. Any marketer will tell you that if you want someone to change their behavior, it is imperative that you create an emotional connection with them. One of the biggest failures of the climate and environmental movement has been its inability to connect with people on that level.

A good example is straws. As bad and unnecessary as plastic straw waste is, straws make up a statistically insignificant amount of plastic that we put into the world. But surely you've seen your local restaurant or café act as the environmental battleground on which the war on straws is being fought. Why do we care about it? Because we see those horrible pictures of sea turtles with straws stuck in their noses and they pull on our heartstrings. We feel empathy and guilt for the turtle, sadness that it has to live with our plastic lodged in its body. And now we see paper and seaweed and bamboo straws all over, Starbucks takes them out of their stores, and so on. So the question I asked myself was, How could a meal, one that leaders literally consume, connect them to the issues and the stakes and change their attitudes as a result?

You'd like to believe that people make decisions rationally, based on evidence and science. You'd really like to believe that people in high offices, where they have access to advisers who know the evidence and science, especially do so. But people, even people in high office, make important changes based on feelings, not just cognitive analysis. I've spent the kind of time in Washington that offered me access to power boardrooms and government offices. And I saw this firsthand over and over again.

Sometimes the data is just so strong it's a clear choice. But more often than not, choices being made in these rooms were full of difficult trade-offs and risks, political and otherwise. Remember that data is not a magical, objective cure-all. The type of data presented in a meeting, or the way it's presented, is subject to human decisions. So data is often just one part of the puzzle. How decision makers feel—call it their gut, or call it their intuition if that sounds better than their "feelings"—inevitably has a role to play. Time and time again I have watched decision-makers—Barack Obama included—find the resolve to make the tough but right decision even at a high cost when they connected with the issue on a deeper level and understood the real-life implications.

At my suppers, I would create a memorable menu—full of many of the ingredients that have brought joy to our lives and that we eat on a daily basis. As people began to enjoy their first bites, I would stand up to speak. But instead of rambling along with the usual "cheffy" spiel about the local artisans who made the cheese or the idyllic life the chicken lived, I'd announce, "Welcome to the Last Supper."

There would usually be a rumble of uneasy laughter as diners wondered, "What the hell is this?" Then I'd say, "Experts are increasingly certain that our children and grandchildren will not be able to taste many of the items you enjoyed at this meal."

I'd raise a glass and point out that because of climate change the wine they sipped may no longer be available or, if available, not be of the quality they expect and at a price they can afford. To produce decent wines, grapevines need consistent weather. Sudden swings in temperature or periods of excess rain—or drought—ruin a vintage. Ruinart is one of the oldest and most prestigious champagne producers in France. It has been making champagne since 1729 using the same single-grape variety for generations.

In 2023, for the first time, it released its champagne with a blend of different grapes: It could not produce enough of the time-tested variety. It's getting so bad that vineyard owners in Champagne are buying land in Britain as a hedge against the day when weather patterns will make the English Midlands more amenable for producing fine sparkling white wine than the legendary French province. You know it's bad when the French are buying land in England to make champagne! Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences predicts if temperatures rise by two degrees, which will likely happen in the next few decades, the world's viable wine-growing regions will be cut by more than half.

After I imparted that information, the room would fall completely silent.

Having caught my guests' attention, I'd urge them to savor the chocolate in the dessert. Cacao, from which chocolate is made, demands the warm, wet, and above all stable conditions found within about 10 degrees latitude of the equator, primarily in South America and Africa. Basically all of the chocolate the world eats is produced by smallholder farmers in those regions. Assuming we hit the two-degree threshold, hotter and drier weather will leave nearly all of cacao's current growing regions unsuitable for the crop.

The startled look would spread to more in the room.

I'd ask how many people had a cup of coffee that morning. Nearly the whole room's hands would go up. Raise your hand if you had two cups. Most keep their hands raised. Three cups, fewer hands but still many. Four cups? I tell those whose hands are still up that I am worried about them and we should talk after the dinner. But coffee, which for about a billion people is somewhere between a daily pleasure and a necessary drug, is also one of the most sensitive crops grown. The best beans are raised at high altitudes often at the base of mountains in warm—but not too warm—regions. Hotter weather is forcing growers to seek cooler temperatures ever higher on mountainsides and to abandon lower-level plantings. Research shows that because of climate change two-thirds of the world's wild coffee species are threatened with extinction. You may not be drinking liquid extracted from the beans of these undomesticated plants in your morning cup of joe, but they are the gene bank we need to keep growing coffee. Quality arabica coffees survive today only because they have been crossbred with wild cousins that have immunity to otherwise fatal diseases.

Wine, chocolate, coffee. I'd add tea, because tea's plight is the same. By this point, basically everyone in the room has that look on their face. Depending on the menu, I might add that oysters, lobsters, clams, pistachios, and almonds are among foods that we should enjoy while they last.

This same story is playing out for many, many other vitally important and beloved foods. Something so closely associated with a geographic area as Georgia peaches is also in trouble. José Chaparro, a geneticist specializing in stone fruit at the University of Florida, predicts that the peach industry in Georgia and other southern states could collapse due to erratic weather. He is urgently trying to breed tolerant varieties, but for Georgia peach farmers the future is here. In 2023, more than 90 percent of their crop was lost due to a heat wave and then early frost. We will probably still have peaches, but there will be a big disruption on where we grow them when farmers are forced to replant orchards in more agreeable regions—at tremendous cost.

Even at the highest levels of policymaking, food is a powerful communication tool. Everybody relates to it. And because of climate change, many of the foods we love are in real danger. But the good news is, food can also have a huge role in how we mitigate climate change, if we get enough people to take action.

To drive home the link between what we eat and the changing climate, for my Last Supper events I always serve menus that include threatened products from the regions hosting the gatherings, places often thousands of miles away from where I live. Having created these meals on three continents, I've learned that it is critical to partner with local chefs who know their areas' native ingredients well and will choose the ones they're best at preparing. I need my colleagues to become personally invested in the Last Supper concept. And I really didn't think the arranged marriage between me and the chef in Davos was going to work out.

This article is also published on Literary Hub. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the opinions of leading Sustainability Thought Leaders, their views do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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