Can you imagine a world in which your favorite foods didn't exist -- where you couldn't easily satisfy a chocolate craving by grabbing a chocolate bar at the nearest convenience store? Or a world where drinking coffee was a luxury rather than a necessity because it's too rare and expensive to drink every day? And what if you could never again drizzle sweet maple syrup on your pancakes?
Not having these foods readily available could be your worst nightmare. The truth is that many of the foods we eat on a daily basis are endangered, and some could disappear in just a few decades.
Foods may become endangered when people change their eating habits, when a viral disease wipes out an entire species, when changes in weather patterns and temperatures make it challenging for a crop to grow, or for several other reasons.
One particularly devastating disease known as Panama disease is threatening the world's supply of bananas. Rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns from global warming are creating unsuitable conditions for growing the chocolate crop, cocao. Production of maple syrup, the pancake's partner in crime, is declining due to lower levels of rain acidity, extreme weather conditions, and pest infestations from global warming.
So we ask, are these foods doomed to disappear? Read on to learn more about these and other endangered foods.
-Haley Willard, The Daily Meal