Feast and Famine: Climate Grief at the Dinner Table
- Cedric Habiyaremye
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Today, on Earth Day, I am thinking about the soil—not just as a scientist, but as a human being living in a time of deep uncertainty. I am thinking about the way food binds us to the earth, and the way climate change is slowly unbinding that relationship, one lost harvest at a time.
Earth Day is often filled with promises—plant a tree, reduce waste, go green. But what does it mean to truly honor the earth when the very act of eating feels heavy with consequence? When a simple meal carries the weight of droughts, floods, and the silent vanishing of species we will never know?
The tomato in my hand is both a confession and a prayer—A confession of complicity in a system that feeds on more than soil, that consumes futures to serve the present.
A prayer for grace, for the earth to remember how to forgive, for us to remember how to tend.
Tonight, as I sit at my dinner table, the meal feels heavier than usual—not in weight, but in meaning. Each bite carries more than flavor; it carries a story. The greens wilt under the heat of a world changing too fast. The bread crumbles like the promises we once made to the land. And in the sweetness of the roasted carrots, I taste something bitter: the knowledge that to eat well in this world is to reckon with the cost of plenty.
How do we nourish ourselves in a time of loss? How do we balance guilt with gratitude, grief with grace?
These questions stay with me, lingering like the aftertaste of a fruit picked too soon. They follow me into the stories I have come to know—the stories of farmers whose fields no longer yield, of chefs who make beauty from what others throw away, of communities who gather not only to eat, but to mourn and to imagine.
To understand the weight of food, we must begin with those who coax it from the ground. Imagine waking each morning to land that no longer loves you back. This is the daily reality for many farmers, standing on the edge of survival, caught between skies that give too little and skies that give too much.
In the worn pages of a farmer’s journal, we read the quiet despair of the soil:
April 14 – The sky opened, not with rain, but with a silence that split the ground. The seeds did not rise this spring.
May 22 – They call this a floodplain, but it has forgotten how to hold water. The fields are drowning in memory.
June 9 – I ran my fingers through the soil today. Dust. The earth, brittle as old bones. How long can we keep pretending this is normal?
Their entries speak not just of crops lost, but of a deeper loss—a severing of the ancient bond between land and livelihood.
And yet, amidst the ruin, some still sow hope. I think of Rwanda—where I first learned that the earth is not just ground beneath our feet, but a giver of life, a keeper of memory. I remember farmers who planted not only for themselves, but for the community. Even in the hardest seasons, they believed in the promise of the land.
I remember when I was in Ecuador in 2016, working with the indigenous community in Cañar. Before planting, they would hold a ritual ceremony—offering food and drink to the soil, sharing what they had eaten with the earth itself. These rituals were acts of gratitude and reciprocity, honoring Pachamama (Mother Earth) with gifts of food, coca leaves, and yes—even aguardiente (if you know, you know 😊)—seeking fertility and protection for their crops.
This wasn’t just symbolic; it was a living reminder that the soil is not just a resource, but a relative. It made me think deeply about what it means to live in alignment with the land—to give back, not just take. To honor the earth not only with words, but through the simple, sacred act of sharing.
In those moments, I saw resilience not as a choice, but as a way of being. A quiet defiance in the face of loss. That same spirit moves through me now, as I wonder how we, too, might plant something new—even as the climate shifts, even as the future trembles.
But resilience alone cannot shoulder the burden of a system so out of balance.
We carry the weight of a system where 70% of global freshwater is siphoned to grow monocrops for cattle feed, while smallholders like Kristyn Leach—reviving heirloom perilla in California’s dust—fight for every drop.
From the fields, we find ourselves drawn into the kitchen, where another kind of transformation takes place. Here, grief takes the form of waste—forgotten vegetables, rejected fruit, the detritus of abundance. But in the hands of certain chefs, even waste becomes a beginning.
You turn carrot tops into pesto, a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of perfection. You see beauty in bruises, art in leftovers, and hope in the bitter rind of a lemon.
Douglas McMaster, in his zero-waste restaurant in London, builds his menus not from what is wanted, but from what is left behind. Spent grains from a brewery become miso; yesterday’s bread becomes today’s feast. His kitchen is a living argument that we can feed ourselves without feeding the fire.
As we learn from him, we begin to ask: What if every meal became an act of care, not consumption? What if our plates told stories of restoration, not extraction?
But kitchens alone cannot mend what is broken. For that, we need tables where grief is not a private burden, but a shared language.
Across cities and villages, a new kind of space is emerging—climate cafés, where food is not just sustenance, but a way to hold sorrow. In Detroit, The People’s Kitchen brings neighbors together, not only to share meals, but to share stories. They speak of storms and seasons, of loss and longing, of the ache that comes from watching a world unravel.
These cafés are sanctuaries for those who carry unspoken grief—the kind that comes from knowing that the glaciers are melting, that the bees are vanishing, that the earth we inherited is slipping away.
Yet within these walls, grief does not harden into despair. Instead, it softens into solidarity. Around the table, we remember: while we cannot change everything, we are not alone in wanting to.
There was a time when I believed that choosing differently was enough. That buying local, eating less meat, composting kitchen scraps could absolve me.
But guilt is a poor gardener. It withers under its own weight.
It is grace we need now—grace that moves us from solitary acts to shared commitments. Grace that reminds us we are not saviors, but kin—bound to soil, sky, and the calloused hands that plant tomorrow’s feast.
At the climate café, I found that grace. In the eyes of strangers who, like me, were hungry for more than food—for connection, for meaning, for hope. We broke bread, and in doing so, broke the silence. We grieved, but we also dreamed.
The famine is not of food, but of meaning; the feast is not of abundance, but of belonging.
In the cracks of a crumbling system, something new is growing. A seed, fragile yet fierce, pressing upward through concrete—not in spite of the weight, but because it knows no other way to live.
This is not just a story of loss. It is a story of becoming—of remembering that even in famine, there can be feasts of resilience.
As we mark this Earth Day, let us not only speak of the earth as something to be saved—but as something to grieve with, to stand with, to live in right relationship with. Let our meals become prayers. Let our grief become seeds. And let us choose, together, to turn the famine of this moment into a feast of resilience.
The question is no longer can we change, but how: Will we gather at climate cafés? Will we demand policies that honor the hands that feed us? Will we let our plates become petitions for a world where soil and soul can thrive?
The answer lies not in our forks, but in our hands—calloused, clasped, cradling the soil that will grow what comes next.
Let every meal remind us not only of what is gone, but of what is possible. Let our grief become soil, rich enough to sustain something new, and let us feast—not on the earth, but within it, as kin to the roots that bind us.
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