Amanda Little is the author of the new book The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World. She recently sat down with me at Betaworks to discuss lab-grown meat, GMOs, and why we need to really think through how technology can save our coffee from the climate crisis.

Nicholas Thompson: The way I started working with Amanda is that I tried to kill her. I assigned her a story that required her to fly 200 miles in a helicopter to an oil rig for a feature for WIRED.

AL: Yes, it was 2007. I had discovered Xanax, which was really good timing for me because I was in a very small helicopter for a very long time.

NT: So let's start there. That was for a project reporting on oil. You spent several years working on that topic, and then you switched to food. Tell me why.

AL: I was following the interests of my readers. I did this first book called Power Trip: The Story of America's Love Affair with Energy in 2008. And everywhere I went on book tour, people wanted to talk about food. As George Bernard Shaw said, “There's no simpler love than the love of food.” It’s a topic that unifies people, and we do it every day, three times a day. And it was actually very liberating to come at this from the outside, not as a food person or as a foodie. It gave me a lot of freedom to look at the way that this issue is so emotional for people and why there’s such a polarized discussion around the future of sustainable food.

NT: Was the hypothesis: “Climate change is the struggle of our time, and the single most important element of its consequences that we can deal with is food”?

AL: Well, the main way that most people on Planet Earth are going to experience climate change is through its impact on food. And I really found that surprising. We've heard so much about forest fires and mega droughts and all the problems that come with climate change. But it was Jerry Hatfield, who's a USDA scientist, who said to me that the broadest disruption caused by climate change will be in food systems, because there will be very region-specific impacts: from droughts, from flooding, from intolerable heat. There will be uninhabitable regions of the earth, and the global food system is completely integrated. In the US we import more than half of our fruits, we are so heavily reliant on other regions of the world to produce the food we love, to say nothing of, for example, coffee and chocolate.

NT: So the book starts with a surprising realization: We stress about water coming in off the West Side Highway, but actually we should really be worried about food.

AL: As I was reporting this in all these different locations—apple farms and corn farms and in aquaculture facilities—it kept occurring to me that climate change is something you can taste. We're in this moment where we're witnessing an assault on climate science from the White House, and the consequences are so intimate. The corn and soy farmers currently in the Midwest are dealing with flooding in their fields. Italy was running out of olive oil a few months ago because of extreme weather. The 20 million small coffee farmers around the world are dealing with the pressures not only of heat but of how fickle the coffee plant is. People are tuning in, because in part we realize strawberries and Chardonnay are on the line. I don't know what would happen to the GDP in the United States if we couldn't get a steady supply of dark roast. But in our household, it would be catastrophic.