Climate Change Makes For Tougher Meat

Climate Change is Changing the Food That we Eat

Dear reader, if you have paid any attention at all to my blog posts, you will realize that the world is changing, as we know it. In fact, you may have gotten tired of hearing about climate change, the effects of Global warming and why we need to go paperless, but, alas, that will not stop me because it’s something that continually needs to be addressed. I might not be able to single handedly annihilate global warming, but this is my ever so humble contribution towards the cause. So, I hope you aren’t tire of me yet as I will never tire of writing to you. Anyways, I digress.

Climate Change makes Goat Meat Tougher

Whilst living my normal everyday life, you know, minding my own business, scrolling through some news stories on Snapchat (gotta love social media), I stumbled on this very headline, “Climate change makes goat meat tougher”. I paused. “How could that be”, I wondered. Has it now come to the point whereby the climate is toughening the skin of animals?? The thought of it ran a shiver up my spine. “Oh my goodness, that’s horrible”, I thought to myself. I was pretty much already freaking out and I hadn’t even read the actual post. Typical.

So, anyways, I read the post ; it did not mean what I had initially thought, thankfully (because that would have been really creepy), but it wasn’t anything good either. In some parts of Kenya, they have been experiencing terrible droughts- the amount of rainfall in recent years has greatly depreciated as a result of climate change. And, when water is scarce, goats have to walk long distances to find it, and well-traveled goats make for unappetizing meat.

Kenyan Droughts are Impacting the Quality of the Meat 

Grilled goat meat, locally known in Swahili as nyama choma, is a very popular delicacy in Kenya. However, with the incidence of droughts, they don’t taste like they used to. The goats have to go longer periods dehydrated, and this eventually results to them having tougher skin when grilled. This has caused many eateries to lose some business. Some may think, well, this is not that big a deal, it’s just tougher meat. But, actually, it’s more than that, these droughts are eating deep into the pockets of farmers, who now have to spend a lot of money to transport gallons of water for these goats, when before all they had to do was dig wells for them to drink from. Some of this farmers and goat rearers are barely making enough for themselves, and now, they have to spend extra on this goats because without water, they will die quicker.

I wanted to share this on this paperless blog because I feel like, sometimes, people view global warming as very distant… remote. To some people, it is perhaps a very vague and abstract issue. Something not here-and-now that only our children’s children’s children will really experience. “I don’t see how climate change is affecting our world today”, they chime. Well, tell that to the cattle rearers in Botswana who are extremely vulnerable to drought because a lack of water increases the likelihood that their crops will fail and their animals will die. Tell that to farmers in Namibia who are experiencing reduced crop yields from crop failure leading to loss of income and inadequate food supply in households (which of course results in starvation and malnutrition in children). And, tell that to the goat rearers in Kenya whose pockets are as dry as the drought they are CUURENTLY facing.

Climate change, to them, is a here and now, undisputedly present-continuous situation. And therefore, to us, it should be too.

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