Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need

Our Changing Menu helps us understand how to think about food, rather than what to think. The diversity of the co-authors' experiences is woven together to create awareness and help us get involved in improving our diets, while reducing food waste and food's impacts on climate change and the planet.― Jason Clay, Senior Vice President, Markets, World Wildlife Fund

Our Changing Menu unpacks the increasingly complex relationships between food and climate change. Whether you're a chef, baker, distiller, restaurateur, or someone who simply enjoys a good pizza or drink, it's time to come to terms with how climate change is affecting our diverse and interwoven food system.

Michael P. Hoffmann, Carrie Koplinka-Loehr, and Danielle L. Eiseman offer an eye-opening journey through a complete menu of before-dinner drinks and salads; main courses and sides; and coffee and dessert. Along the way they examine the escalating changes occurring to the flavors of spices and teas, the yields of wheat, the vitamins in rice, and the price of vanilla. Their story is rounded out with a primer on the global food system, the causes and impacts of climate change, and what we can all do.

Our Changing Menu is a celebration of food and a call to action—encouraging readers to join with others from the common ground of food to help tackle the greatest challenge of our time. 

Michael P. Hoffmann is Professor Emeritus at Cornell University.

Carrie Koplinka-Loehr is a freelance writer with an MS in science education from Cornell University.

Danielle L. Eiseman is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Communication at Cornell University.