A Hot New Twist on Low Carbon Diet Day

Written by Maisie Greenawalt on April 22, 2013in Events, Featured, Low Carbon Diet - 0 Comments

Santa Clara University students snatch up a custom edamame-black bean burger for Low Carbon Diet Day

Last May, I was standing in some strawberry fields in Salinas, CA, listening to Tony Serrano of ALBA Organics talk about seeing the effects of climate change in just the past decade. Ten years ago, the farmers he works with hadn’t been able to grow strawberries in certain areas because it was too cold for them — and now it’s not. “But the biggest manifestation comes in the radical changes in weather,” Tony said. “Sometimes we see a 20-degree difference from one day to the other.”

A young colleague of mine went to Colombia to see where the Cordillera Fair Trade Certified chocolate we use for baking comes from, and came back worried about the cacao industry’s contribution to climate change as well as its effect on farmers.

A friend at Thanksgiving Coffee, an artisan coffee roaster in California, shared the amazing work Thanksgiving is doing with its Rwandan coffee growers to adapt to increased temperatures, shorter ripening periods, and losses in complexity of flavor.

For me, these stories meant climate change stopped being an abstract scientific concept or an animated picture of a polar bear on melting ice cap far, far away and instead pulled up a seat at my table. Continue…

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