The writer Upton Sinclair once famously said, upon the reaction to his classic exposé of the slaughterhouse industry, The Jungle, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” He thought he was writing a book exposing the horrendous conditions for workers, and instead ignited outrage over the plight of the unsanitary slaughtering of animals and contamination of the meat.
When it comes to reporting on the climate crisis, let’s aim for the stomach instead of getting to it accidentally, as Sinclair did. Accelerating climate volatility is shining a harsh light on the frailty of our industrial food system. Usually with climate change we talk about heat, but let’s talk about the cold, or the lack of it. We humans may not like the cold, but a lot of fruit trees do. Cherries, apricots, peaches and some other tree fruits need the nighttime temperatures to drop during the winter, from December-February, in order to slow their metabolism — a sort of winter hibernation — to conserve energy before ripening in the spring. In California’s Central Valley, the nation’s leading producer of those and dozens of other different fruits, the cascade that starts with greenhouse gas pollution has been leading to dramatic drops in the number of what are known as winter chill hours. As a result, yields of those and other fruits are tapering off or the quality is declining.
