“Food is the most powerful means we have to think and act together to create a better world (...) the most powerful tool to transform our lives.”
This is how Carolyn Steel expresses herself in
Sitopia
(Captain Swing, 2021), who maintains that we live in a world conditioned by food and relentlessly diagnoses that many of the great contemporary challenges, such as climate change, are due to the fact that we do not value food as it deserves.
Precisely, the current climate crisis puts stable and safe food production in check.
Among them, fats, loved and hated, vegetable or animal, are a necessary nutrient for human life, whose obtaining could be difficult due to climate change, since its effects on the planet have direct consequences on our diet.
“Drought, which is expected to increase around the world, complicates the cultivation of vegetables and forages,” say A. Nardone, B. Ronchi, N. Lacetera, MS Ranieri and U. Bernabucci, scientists at the Department of Animal Production of the Universià della Tuscia, in Viterbo.
More information
The farga, the strange olive whose oil drives the Japanese crazy and costs 260 euros per liter
All of this affects both the obtaining of vegetable fats and the raising of livestock, especially the intensive regime.
“High temperatures harm production (growth, meat and milk production and quality, egg production, weight and quality), as well as reproductive activity and metabolic and health status, and the response immunity of animals,” the authors point out.
In short, both the oils obtained from seeds or olives and the fat generated by animal bodies could reduce their volume and even worsen their quality.
And of all the foods that contain fat, in Spain there is devotion for two: sausages and olive oil.
“Fats are melting when they don't have to be melted,” explains master butcher Xesc Reina, from Can Company (Mallorca), who this year will publish his treatise on charcuterie,
Puerca miseria
(Col&Col, 2024).
“The climate causes alterations in the product, since it is hot when it should be cold.
In January, we wake up with 3ºC, and at noon we are already at 21ºC, which means that the fats that melt escape from the sausage and do not return.
It would be like trying to put the squeezed juice back into an orange.”
What might seem like a mere loss is of greater importance: “in the case of sobrasadas, they lose their soul, contained in those fats, and this affects their maturation.”
The fats in sausages, says Reina, have vital functions for the correct development of the product because, apart from giving flavor —“the most powerful aromas are in the fat, which is a transmitter of flavor,” recalls the artisan—, they occupy a space and seal it.
"When the fat exudes due to an increase in temperature, it leaves voids in the product and allows the entry of oxygen, which can oxidize the other less soluble fats that remain in the sausage, making it rancid."
To fight against the problems that arise from climate change and that affect her sausages, Reina does the following: “I invent winters.”
After carefully studying the current situation, she has looked back to understand how sausages were made before.
“I try to know what the winters of the past were like, with three or four months of intense cold, at what temperatures the sausages developed, and I recreate it, because December no longer exists, because I no longer trust the current climate, even though "Sometimes I give myself an impossible challenge that stimulates my ingenuity."
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by CAN COMPANY MALLORCA (@cancompany)
The artisan confirms that maintaining an artificial winter involves a great waste of electricity, but that at the moment the life of the black pig that they raise to make their products is not affected too much: "they are used to being hot and have their strategies, such as getting under the trees in search of shade, and drink more water.
Despite everything, the forecasts are scary and I know that the traditional product will have to adapt to the world in which we have to live.”
He also adds that the need to have everything quickly, to produce en masse, has led us to climate change and also poorer quality fats on our tables: “we have raised animals that are pure muscle because people don't want fat, because we have demonized, when it is a virtue.”
In the case of olive oil, the olive growing specialist, Agustí Romero, researcher at the Institute of Research and Food Technologies (IRTA), explains that climate change is already affecting the production and obtaining of vegetable fats such as olive oil. .
"It causes imbalances and in the case of the olive tree there are two main effects: the lack of water and the increase in temperature."
This is demonstrated by data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food on the last olive oil campaign, 34% below the last four, with production up to 40% lower than the average in Andalusia, the region that produces 70% of Spanish olives.
“The climatic situation in recent months is the main condition for the planned production,” Minister Luis Planas assessed then.
On the one hand, although it is popularly considered that the olive tree is a dry crop that does not need water, this is not exactly the case.
“Depending on the availability of water in the area where it is grown, the olive tree can be dry or irrigated.
In Catalonia, three quarters of the olive trees are rainfed, but we owe 60% of olive production to irrigated olive trees.
As a tree, the olive tree endures drought, but becomes less productive.
Younger trees will suffer especially due to their short roots,” explains Romero.
On the other hand, excess temperature at certain times of the plant cycle becomes severe problems: “if the temperature increases during flowering, when the flower should open, it will cause it to dry out and not be able to bear fruit.
Likewise, if the temperature is too high when the oil is being synthesized in the olive, it can result in an olive with too little oil.”
“Climate change will continue to affect the total volume of oil available on the market, which will be less and less, which means that prices will rise,” says Romero.
Furthermore, the great work that Spanish oil dealers have done in recent years, opening new markets, could turn against the needs of the national population: "they will not be able to leave these new customers unsupplied."
The expert values that climate change also affects and will affect rapeseed crops, which have increased greatly in recent years in Spain, as well as sunflower crops.
He estimates that to replace fats that are scarce and becoming more expensive, wealthier consumers will reduce oils and change their diet because it will be easier for them to do so than those with fewer resources, who will substitute one oil for another.
He does not consider that animal fats, such as butter, will ever occupy the role that oils have today.
You can follow EL PAÍS Gastro
on
and
X.