The Pacific Ocean Is Warming: Your Pantry Should Be Ready
8 Essential Climate Resilient Foods to Stock This El Niño Winter
I made black beans and rice this week.
I made it because that bag of black beans had been sitting in my pantry since the beginning of the year, shoulder to shoulder with bags of black-eyed peas, red beans and pintos. Four bags. Eight months of good intentions.
I spend a lot of my life telling you to eat more beans. They are the cheapest of the climate resilient foods, and the case for them is easy. Nutrient dense. Cheap. Easy on the planet. All of it true, and all of it very easy for me to say.
If I am going to talk the talk, I need to wok the wok.
The other reason I finally opened that bag is what’s stirring in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
What Is Happening
NOAA stands for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its Climate Prediction Center is the office watching the unfolding of El Nino.
El Niño starts in the Pacific Ocean. Winds that usually push warm water toward Asia lose their strength. The warm water slides back east toward South America instead.
That is seriously concerning.
The ocean drives the weather. Storms follow warm water. When the warm water moves, the storms move with it, and so does the rain.
NOAA calls it El Niño when that part of the Pacific runs half a degree Celsius above normal for several months. At the end of August we were at 2.6 degrees. More than five times the threshold.
The warm water has shifted so far east that storms which normally sit over Indonesia have picked up and moved thousands of miles. Places that count on rain are not getting it. Places that were dry are flooding. The ocean is also giving off heat it had been holding, which pushes up temperatures everywhere.
In August, NOAA put the odds of a very strong El Niño this fall at 95 percent. It gave a 69 percent chance this one beats every El Niño on record since 1950. The World Meteorological Organization says it is nearly certain to last through February.
Celeste Saulo, who leads the WMO, said this El Niño requires exceptional preparation, and the droughts and floods have already started.
What Is Likely to Happen
NOAA’s outlook for this winter is straightforward.
The southern half of the US gets wetter. That means Arizona, coastal California, Texas, and the Southeast. The northern Rockies and northern Plains get drier. Most of the country runs warmer than normal.
The heavy rain is expected to arrive late, closer to midwinter than to fall.
That is as specific as anyone can be. Nobody can tell which week the storm comes or how hard it hits, but we do know they are coming.
What That Does to Food
El Niño moves weather. Weather moves harvests. Harvests move grocery prices.
Rice, wheat, coffee, and cocoa usually feel it first, because the places that grow them sit right in the path of the rainfall changes.
This is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to look at your shelf, and to know which climate resilient foods belong on it.
Climate Resilient Foods
Climate resilient foods are the crops that come through a hard growing year intact. They are also some of the most nutrient dense foods you can buy, and some of the cheapest.
Black-eyed peas. Twenty-three to thirty-two percent protein and rich in lysine. About twenty cents a serving.
Lentils. Iron, folate, and eighteen grams of protein per cooked cup. Red lentils are done in fifteen minutes and require no soaking.
Chickpeas. Manganese and fiber. Roast them, mash them, or drop them into soup.
Sorghum. Gluten free and loaded with polyphenols. Cook it like rice.
Millet. Finger millet carries more calcium than any cereal on earth. Pearl millet provides iron and zinc.
Sweet potatoes. Orange-flesh varieties are a serious source of carotene.
Winter squash. Carotenoids in the flesh, zinc in the seeds. Stores in a dark pantry for months.
Mushrooms. Grown indoors on agricultural waste, so no rain, no soil, no season. Sun-dried or UV-treated ones are the only real plant-source vitamin D there is. Buy them dried and they keep a year on the shelf beside the beans.
Bonus mention: Sprouts. Grow your own. Sprouts are ready in three days on a windowsill. Mushrooms are easy peasy to grow.
Buy Food Not Supplements
There is a whole industry ready to bottle these nutrients and mark them up forty times. A pound of lentils delivers more usable iron and folate than most of what’s found on the supplement aisle, and costs two dollars.
Your cells do not know the difference between a supply chain and a shortage. They know what you feed them.
Pick the climate resilient food you have never tried. Sorghum, maybe, or the millet. Buy a bag and give it a try. And remember no one cooks a new grain well the first time.
You have a few months before any of this gets real. Start now, while there is t
Healthy cells, healthy planet. The climate resilient foods that survive a hard year are the same ones that need the least from the land.
Stay with me.
Subscribe to Healthy Healing Eats at andreabreaux.substack.com for the science of food as medicine, one delicious meal at a time. 🍏
