The threat of extinction of a number of products is predicted: from coffee and chocolate to wine

Former White House chef Sam Kass hosted a four-course dinner featuring dishes that could change dramatically—or disappear. According to The Guardian, the idea sounded like the ethically suspect fever dream of a rich man: a dinner consisting of endangered foods, dubbed the “Last Supper.”

But instead of obscure dishes on the verge of extinction, the Last Supper featured recognizable dishes—salmon, oysters, coffee, wine—that could change dramatically or disappear in the coming years as the climate warms and the world’s weather becomes more erratic.

“The reality is that it’s starting to play out right now,” said Sam Kass, a former White House chef and policy adviser to President Barack Obama who hosts these events to highlight how the climate crisis is affecting food and agriculture.

Cass first presented the dinner concept at Cop21, the global climate change convention, in 2015. Since then, he has hosted them in Davos at the World Economic Forum and in cities across the United States.

The Jan. 28 dinner, hosted by Kass and chef and TV personality Andrew Zimmern in Minneapolis, was supposed to be a cold one: The Midwestern state is typically covered in snow and bitterly cold in January. But this year Minnesota had an unusually warm winter.

Mark Collins, chef at Tullibee in Minneapolis, created a menu that could be found throughout the United States. Dishes included Norwegian salmon, oysters, lamb, French fries, sticky toffee pudding.

“This is not something from the polar ice caps,” Collins said. “We don’t do exotic, crazy things here.” These are the things that are legitimately affected by what happens. The general availability of the menu is kind of the point.”

At dinners, Kass focuses her narrative on three staples: coffee, wine and chocolate. All three pleasures could suffer severe crop losses with little warming, affecting livelihoods and lifestyles. “These are foods that we consume every single day that bring us so much joy, and for some, a deep expression of their identity,” he said. “Our ability to convey the quality of life we ​​have enjoyed is seriously compromised.”

As noted by The Guardian? Dinner is not intended to depress diners. It aims to show how climate change is affecting food and agriculture, and how food systems, a major driver of climate change, can be adapted to prevent the most extreme impacts and potentially make the world a better place.

A few dozen people paying nearly $300 a ticket won’t be able to single-handedly solve the climate crisis threatening global food systems. The presenters emphasized the importance of disseminating information both to people they know and to policy makers.

“I want people to send a note to every friend in their email address book and let them know that we are at an existential critical point,” says Zimmern. “This is a crisis that we really need to resolve.”

Dinner opens with appetizers (amuse bouche): shrimp and salmon chips with bay leaf and dill. A small jar of crispy salmon skin and shrimp chips brought home the idea that all types of seafood are particularly at risk from the climate crisis. The water warms up, causing animals to seek cooler waters. For American consumers, this means some, such as lobsters, will travel further north to Canada, affecting their cost and availability.

Collins, Tullibee’s chef, chose to use salmon skin, perfectly crisped and seasoned, to also highlight how to use food that is often thrown away – a nod to the problem.

First course: East Coast oysters, West Coast oysters and marinated mussels served on the shell with spruce ponzu and lime wedges. The delicious crunch and earthy flavor of the first course highlight the dangers shellfish face in the wild. However, they’re not only good for food: oysters actually help clean the waters in which they live. Oysters that once grew naturally in wild habitats are facing serious threats to their existence, such as overfishing, disease and pollution. Efforts are currently underway to restore these habitats and produce oysters through agricultural methods such as aquaculture.

Second course: Norwegian salmon with romesco sauce and confit potatoes. Collins chose farm-raised and sustainable Norwegian salmon. “I didn’t want to use exotic ingredients. I still want to be responsible,” he said. Warmer waters and less snow have made life much more difficult for wild salmon, affecting their ability to reproduce and our ability to ultimately eat them. Salmon’s life cycle occurs in both freshwater and oceans, and the habitats in both cases are harmful to the fish. The ocean waters are warming up. And not as much snow falls, but instead it rains, leaving less snow cover for streams and rivers. Aquaculture programs that raise farmed salmon and other fish now produce sustainable products that can adapt to changing weather conditions and environments.

Collins’ Romesco sauce contains another endangered food: almonds. Nuts and fruits need cool night temperatures and are susceptible to warming temperatures. Some studies have shown that these trees may have more crop-destroying insects due to higher temperatures.

Third course: Lamb with hand-picked wild rice, fenugreek and coffee, ramp marinated sauce and red wine lamb.

Collins included a menu featuring lamb from a nearby farm and related locally and globally endangered products. Land animals may not be at high risk, but the foods they eat may be. Kass notes that commodity crops such as wheat, corn and soybeans would have a significant impact on global food supplies if they suffered even smaller changes in crop viability than seafood.

As a commentary on how changing weather, rising temperatures and over-harvesting can threaten wild foods, wild rice, and ramps, and wild onions were included in the dish. Food grown in the wild is subject to the whims of nature.

The dish also includes two of the three staples Kass uses to communicate the importance of preventing climate change: coffee and wine. Coffee needs a stable climate, with cool nights and warm days, he said. According to him, if the globe warms by 2°C by 2050, half of the regions where coffee is grown will no longer be suitable for cultivation. “I don’t know what life means without coffee,” he told visitors.

Likewise, wine suffers when the weather is unstable, as is the case due to climate change. Cass noted that winemakers in France’s famed Champagne region are buying land in England in preparation for producing wine there in the future as parts of France become too warm for some varieties.

Fourth course: Coffee and chocolate sticky toffee pudding with pistachios, hazelnuts and vanilla Chantilly cream. The final dish featured several endangered foods. The coffee and nuts mentioned earlier in the dinner were featured in a toffee pudding and a leaf-shaped pressed wafer made with pistachios and hazelnuts. Collins said he wanted to use flour to point out that staple crops like wheat grown throughout the midwestern United States are also part of the equation. Small declines in the prices of these staple foods risk economic disruption, increased food security, migration changes and conflict, Kass said, and in this sense they are perhaps of greatest concern.