“How We Survive” returns Oct. 15

How We Survive

Marketplace

Business, News

5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 3 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Imagine a future where chocolate and coffee are rare and expensive; where cheap, nutritional staples, like corn and wheat, are threatened.

The climate crisis is a food and agriculture crisis. A third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from what’s on our plate. Cow burps, deforestation, water use and food waste all feed into making our planet unlivable. And it’s a double-edged sword, because as the planet heats up, staple crops are withering, soil is losing its nutrients, and droughts and famines will become more common. Our food systems are hurting the planet, and the hotter planet is hurting our food systems.

To survive, we need to drastically cut down our use of farmland and we need to find alternative meat sources that don’t give consumers the creeps. How will we keep feeding millions of people? And how will we do that with less land?

This season of “How We Survive,” we’ll take you on a food tour of the future. May we interest you in some lab-grown chocolate or some cell cultivated salmon (that is, if you’re not in Florida)? We explore the uncanny valley of meat and visit farmers in our nation’s breadbasket where hotter, drier, less predictable weather has global consequences. Finally, we’ll take you on the ground into one of the more demonized (and misunderstood) parts of the agricultural system: Factory farms.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Imagine a future where chocolate and coffee are rare and expensive,
0:06.2	where cheap nutritional staples like corn and wheat are threatened.
0:11.6	The climate crisis is a food and agriculture crisis.
0:15.7	The frequency of extreme weather events has increased this summer.
0:18.9	Price jumps, including an 80% spike in the cost of U.S. vegetables.
0:22.6	These events could have a devastating effect on the global food supply.
0:26.6	And ultimately, it's a hunger crisis.
0:29.6	Food goes to whoever can afford it.
0:33.6	Our food systems are hurting the planet.
0:36.6	Even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, we're on
0:40.4	track to blow through all of our climate targets by 2050. And the hotter planet is hurting our food
0:46.7	systems. To feed a growing population? We're going to have to make more food with less land and
0:52.8	fewer emissions. And how are we going to do to make more food with less land and fewer emissions.
0:56.1	And how are we going to do that?
1:02.6	This season on How We Survive, we'll take you on a food tour of the future.
1:04.4	I've got a really good piece.
1:12.6	We'll taste alternative butter and bacon and sample food grown from cells. Yeah, everything that we create today came from one little fish seven years ago.
1:19.6	It's not my favorite. I'm going to be honest.
1:21.6	Okay.
1:22.6	We should stop and say that's kind of mind-blowing, right? They grew this chocolate in a lab.
1:26.6	I think it's the end of civilization when we have to culture food to make it good. It's like,
1:31.1	really? I'm not eating that shit. We'll explore the uncanny valley of meat.
	...

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