COPing out of the food crisis?

A comforting recipe for Walnut macaroons

**This Tabled comes with a Rant Warning**. Feel free to scroll straight to the recipe

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash

Where there is COP there is hope. Though the fact it is being held in Brazil requires considerable resolve in clutching at that fragile hope. Conventions like COP are reminders of those daunting days of high school gatherings where only the top athletes and most beguiling cheerleaders were bathed in attention. At global conferences, if you’re not China or the US or Russia or India, you don’t carry much weight these days in the climate department. Or any other. And those heavyweights’ heads haven't bothered to attend.

It’s unlikely any remaining major nation at COP30 will pay much attention to Finland, population 5.637 million. Still, Finland’s knowledge might well be of powerful interest. Findings from that country’s Aalto University published earlier this year show that global temperatures increasing beyond 1.5 centigrade will result in a significant drop in crop diversity. Global warming exceeding 3C (not impossible to imagine - some scientists contend we’re already at 2C) could put almost three-quarters of current food production in sub-Saharan Africa at risk. Can you picture the levels of immigration this will result in - of people simply in search of food? Yesterday, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) reported the figure for the forcible displacement through climate-related disasters over the past decade as 250 million people globally, the equivalent of 70,000 every day, including people who have been displaced multiple times.

Oliver Twist: “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

Already cropland globally is becoming too arid to reliably support 30 major food crops. Land available to grow rice, maize, wheat, soy beans, potatoes and other root crops - crops vital to the provision of more than two-thirds of the world’s food energy intake - is being reduced by global warming. In low latitudes, half of crop production is at risk, and crop diversity already in decline. I’m not a fan of bullet points, so you’re not getting them. But: The world has officially entered into a historic drought. ‘Heatflation’ has become a recognised term. Extreme weather events like convective storms, wildfires, tropical cyclones, drought, floods are no longer rare.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch - RanchUK Ltd, that is, and very limited it is too - just in the past year, 51 percent of British farmers have considered packing it in. Canadian oven-ready fries maker McCain, largest buyer of British potatoes and working with nearly 300 British farmers to buy 20 percent of the national annual crop, is now anxious about future sourcing. So this becomes a Canada/US/world story as well as a UK one. It has just published its inaugural survey, Farmdex 2025, which found 90 percent of British farmers feel “pessimistic about the British economy”, 95 percent expect family-run farms to decline over the next decade, and 80 percent are pessimistic about long-term food security in Britain.

Fries, Belgian style, in Amsterdam this year . Eat them while you can

While the post-Brexit British economy is so far up the spout it’s floating like an ectoplasm, all shimmer and no substance, somewhere in the stratosphere, it’s not the only nation where food security has become of serious concern. During COVID, supermarket shelves globally emptied almost overnight with panic buyers hoarding for their own survival. Under the Aalto University’s predictions published in Nature Food, a monthly academic journal, in the future there may not be much to hoard.

Earlier this year, after meeting in secret for 18 months, a group of food and drink industry insiders known only as Track x Food who have worked in senior positions for over 50 percent of the UK’s leading grocery suppliers, released a memo to investors pressing them to “explore the resilience” of disaster preparedness levels of the food companies they own or have invested in. “We have reached a moment of threat to food security like none other we have seen”, they wrote. The food production industry, they said, was unable to rely on the yield, quality or predictability of supply from most major sourcing regions in the coming years. The threat came (assume bullet points) from extreme weather events, global heating, water scarcity and soil degradation. Other factors included insufficient consideration for long term issues and “bias towards pleasing shareholders instead of being honest.” Gosh. How well was that received?

I’m investing in a Bokachi, a Japanese composting system which produces a potent liquid from kitchen food waste in a matter of days that will revivify the exhausted soil in my flowerpots. I have great hopes of living off it myself when there’s nothing else because COPs - No. 1 to whatever number they survive to - have little effect on our collective governments’ and billion/trELONnaires’ desire to burn us all off the planet for the benefit of winning the next election or increasing their crypto currency accounts to buy themselves a ticket to Mars where they can settle in to do it all over again.

There are voices to change this: ours. We have to go out and vote, and vote being fully and accurately informed about all the issues. So don't allow the destruction of the BBC.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. To lift your spirits, here’s a recipe, simple to make, that will see you straight through to the New Year, to eat and to give away - my take on the far more refined macarons from French patissiers. Pierre Hermé I am not.

Bruno’s Cookbook, Martin Walker & Julia Watson. Photo Klaus Einwanger

Makes about 20

300g/10½ oz walnuts
12 tablespoons superfine sugar
Zest of ½ scrubbed lemon
2 egg whites
Icing/confectioners' sugar to dust
250ml/1 cup of double/heavy cream (optional - see end of recipe)

Preheat the oven 180C/350F.

Toast the walnuts on a baking sheet till lightly coloured. Remove and allow to cool, keeping the oven on.

Put into a food processor the cooled walnuts 8 tablespoons of the sugar and lemon zest. Beat the egg whites to firm peaks. Fold in the remaining 4 tablespoons sugar and bet them back to stiff. Gently fold in the walnut mixture.

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. With wet hands, roll a tablespoonful of the walnut mixture into ball, set in on the baking sheet, then lightly flatten it with the back of a damp spoon Repeat with the remaining mixture, wetting your palms when needed.

Bake 16-20 minutes, rotating the tray 180 degrees after 8 minutes. The macaroons should have a crisp, dry surface but be soft inside.

Cool a little, then dust with confectioners’ sugar. They are at their best served warm but will keep 4-5 days in a sealed box. They are generally served plain. But if you want to sandwich them together with cream, beat until not quite stiff 250ml/1 cup of double/heavy cream.

From John F Kennedy’s 1963 ‘peace speech’: “In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”