Welcome to five minutes in the future with Sarah Smith. Sarah, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Hi Max, thanks. So tell us, what futures are you focused on right now? So I focus mostly on the future of food and recently I've been thinking a lot about the intersection between the future of food and the future of climate change. Seems like an urgent future, climate, food. What excites you? What's new? What's interesting? What should we be focusing on? So in particular I've been looking for signals of change about the way that people are already starting to adapt their food practices, what they eat, how they grow food based on how the climate is changing. There are already places in the world that are experiencing more droughts, more floods, more extreme weather because of climate change and we can learn a lot about what people are doing with their food in those places. So in the geographies where people are already facing climate disruption, what are people doing to deal with that? So actually there's an amazing cook book that documents some of this and it's a project called, ''Adaptive farms, Resilient tables'' that the United Nations Development Program put out recently and it looks at six countries all over the world that are already experiencing disruptions from climate change. Then it documents stories and recipes and ways that they are changing some of their traditional food practices in order to be more resilient in the face of those changes. Can you give us an example of a new type of Resilient farm or a new type of recipe? Sure. So one of the recipes featured in the book or an ingredient that actually comes up a lot in the cookbook is millet and specifically this is looking at some areas in Niger and Sudan where they're experiencing more drought, not as much rain fall is there used to be and millet is a grain that used to be grown much more commonly and now they are kind of bringing it back and trying to grow it more because it just does so much better in drought situations than say something like wheat or maybe Corn would do. When you see the signal of change and you think 10 years into the future, what might become more common? So I think the kind of unfortunate or a scary thing that will become more common is more disruptions to our food system, to our agriculture because of climate change. So then maybe the positive side of that is that what's also becoming more common is more ways to adapt to that. When it comes to food people want to be able to keep eating the foods that they've always eaten and they've always loved, and so we're seeing a lot of really amazing creative efforts to ensure that we can still enjoy food even in a changing climate. That sounds delicious. What what might become less common? So we want to enjoy the food that we know and love. We might be able to continue to do so in new ways. What might not we be able to do in the future? One scenario is that we won't be able to expect to eat the foods that are always available, always abundant. When we go to the grocery store and there's every possible food you can imagine on the shelf, that might not be as possible in the future as climate change disrupts when and where we can grow food and how far we think it's appropriate to ship food to get it to our grocery stores. So one thing that I think this cook book kind of points to is, the ways that we might need to start adapting or changing our eating practices really based a little bit more on where we live. Amazing, this is both a unique opportunity for the future and some unique challenges. When we think about what becomes more common, what becomes less common and we think about these signals have changed this cook book. What do you think emerges that's new? What new type of possibility becomes potentially real over the next 10 years? The biggest possibility that I see coming out of this is really more of a focus on biodiversity. So that's promoting the variety and different types of species of fruits and vegetables and grains and nuts and everything that we want to eat but trying to grow more of them. Grow a more diverse selection of them and it turns out that that also is more resilient in the face of climate change. So what I think that this cookbook points to is possibilities for how everyday people might start adapting their practices, how you might choose different recipes or choose different ingredients at the grocery store. But if we kind of zoom out to think about the bigger food system, it also suggests how food companies might start changing the ingredients that they use in their food products so that those also support biodiversity and support a more resilient Climate Ready food system. I can't wait to design new recipes with you. Let's go make some food. Thank Sarah, so this has been five minutes in the future, see you next time.
