Illustration: Rui Pu for Bloomberg Businessweek
What is French cuisine without Camembert? It’s hard to fathom. The round, gooey, slightly pungent wheels of cheese are an iconic part of any Parisian dinner party. Yet in March 2024, CNN forced that very question, with a headline warning that Camembert was facing an impending “‘extinction’ crisis.” The fungus used to make the classic white rind was running out, scientists warned, possibly endangering its production.
It turned out to be a bit of a false panic. The head of a French cheesemaker association was completely unconcerned—he hadn’t heard about any serious fungus problems—and even one of the researchers behind the original study acknowledged that the famous cheese wasn’t really going anywhere. “There is no short-term danger to Camembert production,” scientist Tatiana Giraud told CNN.
The Camembert affair might’ve been a fake-out, but it seemed entirely plausible. Since June 2023, we’ve been warned of a peach shortage, an avocado shortage and a beef shortage. In each scenario, farms produced less of the foods in question, but that didn’t make those products hard for American shoppers to find. That’s because corporations have been going to great lengths to make sure consumers don’t notice.
Our food supply is on incredibly shaky ground, a confluence of what might’ve once seemed like “black swan” events: worsening climate change, geopolitical strife, a pandemic, wars, supply chain bottlenecks and widespread labor shortages. Despite the end of the pandemic and significant improvement in supply chains, the chaos is unlikely to end anytime soon.
Yet we’re more dependent than ever on sourcing our food from everywhere. The American kitchen changed, beginning after World War II, when supply chains got longer, transportation evolved and food production advanced, says Pawan Joshi, a supply chain expert at software company E2open. Lo and behold, New Yorkers had asparagus in the supermarket in the middle of winter.
Most of us have grown up taking this all for granted and didn’t notice when, say, then-President Donald Trump’s trade war with China deprived soybean farmers of one of their best markets. But the food supply’s precarious situation became starkly obvious during Covid-19. Outbreaks at meat plants had supermarkets capping purchases; lines at food banks snaked for miles; farmers around the world dumped milk, smashed eggs and let fruit rot on the vine. In August 2021 shelves were still frequently empty.
Packaged-food companies faced an onslaught of supply chain problems, not just from the pandemic, but also because of the Russian war in Ukraine. Hostess, General Mills, Conagra Brands and Mondelēz International all complained on earnings calls that they were having ingredient shortages in 2022, Supply Chain Dive reported, with an emphasis on grains and edible oils, of which Ukraine has long been a major producer.
Climate change has been another factor hurting supplies. That same summer, a drought decimated Canada’s mustard seed crop, leading French shoppers to notice the absence of Dijon from supermarket shelves—even in the region of Dijon. This year cocoa prices have surged to record highs as a result of chronic crop shortfalls driven by extreme weather, disease and woefully underpaid farmers unable to invest in improving their cocoa trees, despite providing the essential ingredient in a global chocolate market worth more than a hundred billion dollars. Inadequate rain has put robusta coffee beans in their fourth year of deficits. A heat wave in Brazil means the world’s biggest orange juice supplier is having its worst crop in 36 years. The hits just keep on coming.
“We are in an era of volatility,” Salman Amin, chief executive officer of Pladis Foods Ltd., the London-based parent corporation of Godiva and a host of other snack brands, told me in April. He listed not just cocoa but also wheat, palm oil, sugar and dairy as examples of his company’s staples that have seen instability in recent years.
But somehow none of these products are missing from our shelves. Kraft Heinz Co., maker of Grey Poupon, managed to outsmart even the French Dijon makers, finding its needed mustard seed “across the globe,” says spokesperson Lynsey Elve. “As a result, Grey Poupon didn’t experience any notable gaps in service,” she says. Americans got their mustard, and Kraft Heinz avoided what Elve calls a “potential $50 million business gap.” Chocolate, coffee and orange juice are all still available, too.
Within the US, climate change is hitting some of our favorite fruits and vegetables, but retailers are adapting to the unpredictable weather patterns, with consumers unlikely to notice provenances are changing. In 2023, an unusually warm winter followed by a late frost killed more than 90% of Georgia’s peach crop, so supermarket buyers went elsewhere: Online grocer FreshDirect offered peaches from California. And because temperatures are getting warmer overall in Georgia, FreshDirect says, it’s now selling more citrus from there, too, including varieties of mandarin and Cara Cara oranges.
California’s floods in early 2023 drove up Romaine lettuce prices, but problems with that crop, whether from E. coli outbreaks or Covid, have presented opportunities for the fledgling indoor farming industry. Despite the floods, California is still in a long-term drought, so some farmers are finding ways to adapt. Stuart Woolf, president and CEO of Woolf Farming & Processing, is turning some of his fallow farm acreage that once grew crops such as water-intensive almonds into fields of agave, the desert plant that produces tequila and mezcal and is typically grown in Jalisco, Mexico—where it’s faced its own threats of shortage.
All this volatility largely translates into what I’ll call a new food volatility tax. It’s driving up grocery prices, but inflation has made us almost numb to our mushrooming supermarket bills. As a result, we’re ignoring signals that are loud and clear to food producers, companies and scientists.
Michael Hoffman, a professor emeritus at Cornell University who focuses on climate’s impact on food, sees food insecurity as the one issue that "maybe, just maybe" has the power to wake people up to this shared global existential threat, one that’s been highlighted by the United Nations, the US Department of Agriculture, the European Food Safety Authority and countless other organizations. “Even Republicans are concerned about climate change impacting the food they eat,” he says, referencing a 2022 poll.
But apparently not that concerned. Although food prices are a major worry, a February Pew poll on voter priorities across the political spectrum put climate change third from the bottom on a list of 20; “dealing with global trade” was dead last.
I admire Hoffman’s dedication to his cause—he teaches students, pens op-eds and willingly spends time talking to journalists like myself. But while I know he’s right on the science, I’ve yet to see the broader public take seriously these threats to our food supply, from voters all the way up to our elected officials. I’d like to think the absence of certain foods will open our eyes to the looming disasters, but as long as companies find ways to get all of our favorites on the table, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.