Following the Parade of Nations on the Seine River, athletes and spectators watch as lasers light up the sky around the Eiffel Tower, at the Trocadero venue, during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 26, 2024.
Of all the reasons Kamala Harris is better equipped than Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November—her relative youth, the fact that she’s a former prosecutor challenging a convicted felon—her biggest advantage may be her record on abortion. Harris served as the Biden administration’s de facto advocate for reproductive rights; it is her voice, not Biden’s, that’s been loudest in objecting to abortion bans and conservative efforts to curtail IVF and contraception. According to the White House, she is the only vice president to have paid an official visit to an abortion clinic. As a senator, she famously grilled the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on abortion, asking him, “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” (He could not.)
As California’s attorney general, Harris investigated the anti-abortion activists who pretended to be researchers from a biologics company and illegally recorded videos that were edited to suggest that Planned Parenthood sold fetal parts. (After Harris left the AG’s office for the Senate, her successor brought criminal charges, and Planned Parenthood eventually won more than $2 million in damages from a lawsuit against the activists.) It also doesn’t hurt that Harris is running against a notorious misogynist who selected for his running mate a man who said as recently as 2022 that he would support a nationwide abortion ban.
In the tiny sliver of time in which she’s been the potential presidential nominee, Harris has already reenergized Democratic voters, especially abortion-rights advocates. Laudatory press statements have been issued by abortion-rights groups including Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL) and EMILY’s List, which is planning to donate millions to her campaign. If Harris is the nominee, Democrats will have the opportunity to make reproductive choice the leading issue of the 2024 campaign. And that might be enough to win.
Since the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump-appointed justices, issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, Americans’ support for abortion rights has soared to the highest levels since Gallup began measuring abortion attitudes, in 1995. Over the past two years, seven states, including solidly red ones, have asked their citizens to vote directly on laws either expanding or constricting abortion rights, and every single time, abortion rights have won. Only about one in 10 Americans think that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances—about as many as believe Jesus will return to Earth in their lifetime. So many voters are in favor of at least some abortion rights that Republican lawmakers across several states are trying to make it more difficult or even impossible for citizens to vote directly on ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments, even as they continue to push unpopular abortion bans through legislatures and the courts.
[Read: The pro-life movement’s not-so-secret plan for Trump]
Abortion bans have irrevocably altered the lives of untold American women, but they’ve been political gifts to Democrats—one of the few advantages the party has this year. Voters have clearly expressed their displeasure with the current state of the economy, the border, and public safety, all of which have dragged down Biden’s approval ratings. Polling from early July (before Biden dropped out) showed that Trump had more voters’ trust on the border, the economy, the war between Israel and Hamas, and crime and safety. But abortion was the issue for which Trump received the least trust, and Biden the most.
And that’s polling on Joe Biden, a man who has been at best uncomfortable with and at worst hostile to abortion rights for most of his career. As a young senator, he groused that the Supreme Court had gone too far in Roe v. Wade. In the 1990s, he boasted about voting some 50 times against federal funding of abortions; in 2006, he said, “I do not view abortion as a choice and a right.”
By 2012, Biden was emphasizing his support for a woman’s right to choose. As Barack Obama’s running mate, he maintained his belief that life begins at conception but said, “I just refuse to impose that on others.” And after the Supreme Court overturned Roe during his presidency, he called on Congress to codify that right. But he still takes pains to avoid even uttering the word abortion, skipping over it in his State of the Union address despite its inclusion in the prewritten text. His June 27 debate performance reached its nadir when he was asked an easy-win abortion question and responded by bungling the premise of Roe, struggling to rebuke a Trump fantasy about abortions “even after birth” (which do not exist), and saying that “the deal” with abortion was at least partly about “young women who are being raped by their in-laws.” When Florida banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, Biden gave a sprawling speech in Tampa in which he used the word abortion just twice and quickly moved on to other issues, according to a Politico analysis. When Harris appeared in Jacksonville for a Biden-campaign event the next week, she spoke almost exclusively about reproductive rights, and said abortion 15 times.
Trump, like Biden, has proved malleable in his abortion politics, seesawing from “I’m very pro-choice” in 1999 to “I am pro-life” in 2011. In 2016, he said, “There has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions if the procedure ever became illegal (then quickly reversed his position), and he has more recently deemed himself “the most pro-life president in American history” and boasted that he “was able to kill Roe v. Wade.” But this year, public opinion has swung so hard against abortion restrictions that even Trump, who said in 2016 he was sure that voters would look the other way if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, pushed his party to scale back its stated opposition to abortion in its 2024 platform. Trump didn’t mention abortion once during a record-length convention speech in which he found time to pontificate on Hannibal Lecter and a potential RNC in Venezuela.
[Read: Suddenly Trump looks older and more deranged]
That say-nothing strategy might have worked if the contest had remained between Trump and Biden. But instead, Harris seems poised for the nomination, and Trump picked a staunchly anti-abortion running mate in J. D. Vance. Although he started trying to soften his stance when he became Trump’s VP pick, Vance previously voiced support for a national ban on abortion (though he acknowledged that it was unlikely in the current political climate) and for state laws that outlaw the procedure without exceptions for rape or incest.
Against these candidates, and with a single-issue advantage like this, talking about abortion nonstop is in Democrats’ best interests. Abortion is certainly not the only issue voters care about, or even the one they care about the most, so Harris would be remiss if she made it her campaign’s sole focus. Democrats have plenty of successes to tout from the Biden administration, including rescuing the post-COVID economy, investing big in infrastructure, and overseeing declining murder rates.
But focusing on abortion and reproductive freedom offers Democrats a rare opportunity to pick up swing voters and turn out dedicated pro-abortion-rights Democrats. Forty-one percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, including more than a quarter of self-described conservative Republicans, say abortion should generally be legal, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in April. In a Wall Street Journal poll from March, 39 percent of suburban women in swing states chose abortion as their most important issue—more than any other option. And because many people seem to see abortion through the lens of health, family, and personal freedom, the issue dovetails quite neatly with Democrats’ other (limited) strengths: health-care access and protecting democracy from the threat of autocracy during a second Trump term.
[Read: Can Harris reassemble Obama’s coalition?]
A Democrat like Harris, who speaks forcefully and passionately about abortion rights, is an ideal foil for Trump and Vance. Her position is strong in a nation where anger over abortion bans remains vigorous. A candidate who can galvanize abortion-rights voters is exactly what Republicans fear and Democrats need. If Harris makes reproductive freedom a cornerstone of her campaign, she just may be the woman who finally breaks the presidential glass ceiling—and who keeps Democrats in the White House.
As one of the physicians who recently expressed concern about President Joe Biden’s health and his likelihood of significant decline over the next four and a half years, I was relieved when he ended his reelection campaign—and also overwhelmingly sad. In essence, as people keep saying, he had his car keys and driver’s license taken away with the whole world watching. This evening as he gave a short speech from the White House about his accomplishments, his voice was weak, he stumbled occasionally over his prepared remarks, and his physical presence was diminished from what it once was.
For months, I have wished that I could have Biden in my exam room, not as the president of the United States, but as a patient in my geriatrics clinic. Instead, watching from afar as he insisted on running, I wondered if his doctors were talking to him honestly about his concerning symptoms, and his disappointing odds of fulfilling the requirements of the office for another term. I hoped that if they were discussing his future, they were pointing out the advantages of taking charge in this situation, even when no available option was Biden’s ideal. But, given what they and the president said in public before he ended his campaign, I worried that little of this was happening. Despite the aging U.S. population, few clinicians are trained to care for aging bodies, much less to discuss the developmental stages of elderhood and identity-threatening realities of later life.
In medicine, we use the term difficult conversations to refer to discussions of existential issues, particularly those with inherent uncertainty and ambiguity. They work best when the patient, perhaps in the presence of family or friends, shares their view of their own health and their hopes or concerns for their future, before—if they’re open to it—hearing a physician’s view and having a chance to explore the possibilities of the coming years in more depth. I might have asked the president what worries or scares him and what brings him joy and meaning, and worked to identify what his best- and worst-case scenarios would look like.
Part of what was so excruciating about watching Biden hold on to his hope of winning a second term was seeing someone struggle to accept that their best-case scenario might be impossible. Variations of this situation play out daily in clinics and hospitals, and if you have a shred of empathy, it’s always heartbreaking. Yet few such difficult conversations—or the loud silences that too often take the place of these conversations—happen so publicly. Watching this one reminded me how unwelcome they are in American life, even in the offices of physicians delivering bad news.
Admittedly, in denying the evident changes in how he walked, spoke, and looked, Biden contributed to the painful and public way that questions about his next four or five years of life were discussed. But his actions were of a piece with common age-denying choices and behaviors: Think of the gray hair diligently covered by many people over 50, the carefully cultivated older gym body, the graduation date dropped off a résumé, and the popular falsehood that “age is just a number.” These choices and statements are a response to a culture that views the diminishment of advanced age not as the natural progression for living organisms but as a personal failure. And people in this country do have reason to dread advanced old age. It can be deeply isolating, and many people end up warehoused and treated in ways that make little sense in a health-care system that hasn’t kept up with the numbers or needs of older adults.
This election cycle in particular has inundated Americans with signals that “old” and “disabled” are categories no one should want to join. Magazine covers have shorthanded politicians’ old age and questions about their competence with images of walkers. In the past, Donald Trump has ridiculed a disabled reporter and refused to be seen in the company of wounded veterans. In March, he mocked Biden’s stutter, and his nephew claimed today in Time magazine that Trump said people with disabilities “should just die.” (Trump has not yet responded to this.) Pundits and politicians alike have simplified, distorted, disparaged, and lumped all people over age 70 into an inaccurate whole. Many octogenarians are cognitively and physically healthy, and the right person at Biden’s age might have made a fine candidate—as would a person who uses a walker or other assistive device, whatever their age.
By staying in the race after he began to present such a concerning picture of health, Biden himself may have contributed to public conflations of old age and frailty. The driving analogy is apt: Most of us will need to retire from driving at some point, and it’s a much more positive experience for those who get to choose when to stop. Still, retiring from driving, work, or anything else can feel like that much harder a choice to make in a country where the Republican presidential nominee has used his considerable platform to suggest, repeatedly, that people who are old or not fully able-bodied are not worthy of our compassion or attention.
Ironically, Trump is now the oldest candidate ever to be nominated for president. He has made a show of his relative robustness compared with Biden, a line of argument that puts him in a precarious position. Although he doesn’t appear frail, health records released during his presidency indicated that he was obese and had hypercholesterolemia and heart disease. And although he doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke, he eats a lot of fast food and seemingly doesn’t exercise beyond slow-paced golf games. It’s impossible to diagnose a person from afar, but his multiple instances of inaccurate recall and disjointed, tangential speech call into question his basic communication and leadership abilities, and raise the question of cognitive change beyond that of normal aging. If Trump came to my clinic, I would do the same physical and cognitive assessment on his as I would on Biden. I would also explore his interest in taking a healthier approach to aging given how his many risk factors increase his chance of adverse health events, functional loss, and death. I hope Trump’s doctors are having such conversations with their patient now.
For Biden’s part, he now has to engage in another difficult—though also potentially exciting—conversation with himself and his family: What comes next? Clearly, after 81 years, most of his life is behind him. No one chooses how many years they have left. But with the privileges of free time and enough money, he can choose how to pursue his own health and happiness—to consider what matters most to him, what he enjoys most, and what he wants to do to avoid regrets when he comes to the end of his life.
Most people do not become president, so most people are not going to move into old age with a list of regrets that could include stepping aside in a presidential election and, perhaps, watching their opponent triumph. They would not include wondering if, after all, they might have won, if their best-case scenario had indeed been possible. I hope Biden never has those thoughts. Instead, I’d like to see him take a new leadership role by choosing a different best-case scenario: one in which he demonstrates how to embrace the opportunities of advanced old age, even if they are as simple as reliably getting a full night’s sleep and spending time with his family.
When President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he was ending his campaign for reelection, he took pains to describe his choice as one meant to serve the greater good. “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country,” he wrote in a statement. His decision seemed calculated to prioritize the health of the nation over his own self-interest—and, perhaps, above his own mental and physical well-being.
When people choose to retire, it’s generally a positive experience, without a sizable effect on mental health. But stepping away from a high-powered job, whether toward full retirement or a substantial reduction in work, is fraught for many Americans. And it’s especially difficult for Biden’s demographic: highly educated men who have continued working far past 65, the average retirement age for men. “Particularly for college-educated men in professional positions, there’s this expectation that your work is part of your identity,” Sarah Damaske, who studies gender and labor at Pennsylvania State University, told me. Losing it can have serious consequences. Being president has almost certainly harmed Biden’s health, and he has demonstrated symptoms of significant cognitive and physical decline during his term. But exiting the presidency in January will pose new cognitive challenges.
“When people are at the center of their universe through their job, we don’t have a storyline or a place in our society that is attractive enough to say, ‘Maybe I’ve had enough,’” says Joseph Coughlin, the founder and director of the MIT AgeLab. “You’re showing people the door with no direction.” That has implications for cognitive and emotional health. When a person starts to identify himself by the past tense—that he used to be a doctor, a teacher, or the president—he shifts his focus from his present and future to his past. Research shows that ruminating on the past can correlate with negative mental-health outcomes, including depression and a sense that one’s perspective and experiences are no longer relevant.
Many Americans who stay in high-powered positions into their 70s, 80s, and beyond do so out of a warranted concern over who they would be without the job. S. K. Park, 88, a former psychiatrist and professor at the University at Buffalo’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, never wanted to retire. But at 80, he told me, “I made up my mind to retire when I was still at the height of my cognitive ability. I was very conscious of not being a stubborn, obstinate old person.” At 84, 53 years after he started his job, Park left, figuring that he would turn to other interests: his children and grandson, calligraphy, hiking, and travel. But instead, “all of a sudden, life kind of stopped,” he said. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure how to spend his time or how he provided value to his community.
Stepping away from work—which can provide an identity, a routine, a social network, and a purpose—is linked to several ill effects on health, especially for older adults. It has been linked to declines in verbal memory, the skill that allows you to recall spoken and written information, crucial for tasks like giving a presentation and communicating with clients. A 2020 meta-analysis found that 28 percent of retirees suffer from depression. By comparison, 2019 estimates from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation suggest that, around the world, only 13.8 percent of adults age 60 or older experience any kind of mental disorder.
[Read: There are exceptionally sharp octogenarians. Biden isn’t one.]
Some doctors—a profession that notably skews older—are loath to retire precisely because they’re familiar with the medical literature. “I’m at least intellectually aware that in old age, people may fall into a state of despair,” Park said. “I’m trying hard not to fall into that hole.” Stephen Derbes, an 83-year-old rheumatologist at the LSU School of Medicine who still sees patients at the hospital, has no plans to retire. “I fear I would be very likely at risk of getting depressed if I just bailed out,” he told me. “As far as feelings of worth, that would be gone or at least diminished, since I wouldn’t have responsibilities.”
The loss of a professional self-identity is particularly acute for men, who often have weaker ties and self-definition outside of the workplace. “For men, traditionally, there’s a total identification with work,” says Jack Maslow, an 82-year-old clinical therapist who runs a men’s group in Corte Madera, California, treating his patients as they adjust to the transition away from work. Beth C. Truesdale, a sociologist who studies retirement and aging at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, told me, “Women have often had to find other ways to create a sense of who they are, beyond what they do.” They are more likely to be caregivers, to maintain social relationships on behalf of their spouse or family, and to volunteer in their communities. And by retirement age, women are more likely to have already taken breaks from paid work.
Gary Givler, a 77-year-old retired Episcopal deacon in Batavia, Ohio, sees the gendered struggle in the men’s group of retirees that he leads. For decades, Givler worked both as the vice president of an insurance company and as a deacon, with stints as a chaplain at a pediatric hospital and as a preacher. When he retired from his corporate job, in 2015, he started the men’s group at his church; he’s kept it up since his diaconal retirement, in 2023. Every Monday morning, the group of 15 men in their 70s and 80s—who retired from careers including engineering, teaching, and corporate leadership—meet at a local Panera Bread to talk about news, politics, and their lives. Yesterday, the conversation focused on Biden’s announcement: how he’d met the particular challenge of being pressured to end his campaign, and the courage it must have taken to publicly admit that he’s no longer the best candidate for the job. “The group thought that Joe did the right thing,” Givler said. But that didn’t change the men’s ambivalence about their own retirement. “A lot of them tell me they’d give anything to have a reason to put a shirt and tie on and go somewhere for an important meeting.”
[Read: Joe Biden made the right choice]
Retirement doesn’t have to be accompanied by decline. Mo Wang, a professor at the University of Florida who studies retirement and older workers, estimates that retirement has a significant positive effect on psychological well-being for 5 to 10 percent of people, largely those who worked very physically demanding jobs. But Wang has also found that retirement is linked to negative psychological effects for 20 to 25 percent of workers, at least temporarily. Other research has shown that people in full retirement tend to fare worse physically than those who keep up some kind of bridge employment or volunteering. The effect can become more dramatic as workers age, because a decades-long routine—the same weekly schedule, the same commute, the same colleagues—might help them perform daily tasks. “Their experience can compensate for cognitive decline, so they’re able to work much longer,” Wang told me. When they transition away from a professional routine, the adjustment can be a rude awakening.
Many working-class Americans are pushed into early retirement because they can no longer manage a physically demanding job, such as construction or waitressing. Truesdale estimates that only 5 percent of Americans over 80 are still working. But that number is almost certain to rise. The oldest Baby Boomers are 78, and they’re generally working longer than their predecessors. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that adults age 65 and older will be 8.6 percent of the labor force in 2032, compared with 6.6 percent in 2022. “The aging population today, let alone those that are coming, have more formal education than at any time in history,” Coughlin told me. They’re also living longer than their forebears. Over the next decade, more Americans than ever will be placed in an unenviable position similar to Biden’s, facing a delayed retirement that’s likely to pose new health challenges.
Whether he likes it or not, Biden has personified the ungainly challenge of reckoning with one’s work performance and stepping back from the job before one would like to. Now he has an opportunity to show millions of Americans navigating their 70s and 80s how to reckon with their limitations and maintain pride beyond the job. The best way to prepare for retirement at an older age, Wang said, is to make the transition gradual. At age 70, start to reduce your work hours and invest time in nonwork interests so that by 80, you have a strong identity beyond your professional work. For those leaving intense, identity-defining jobs, that process can include mentorship or an elder-statesman role. “Because Biden is transitioning from a very powerful role, it would be good for him to channel that energy to help the transition of power,” Wang said.
[From the July 2019 issue: Your professional decline is coming (much) sooner than you think]
Preparation, though, may not be enough to overcome the siren song of employment. Park missed his professional identity so much that this week, the 88-year-old went back to work, where he’ll resume supervising medical students. “I don’t think I should work until I die,” he told me. “I would quit myself if I go through what Biden seems to be going through.” But for now, he’s excited to get back to his career. When his current contract ends, he’ll be 89. “I will probably say that will be enough,” he said. “But never say never.”
For as long as I can remember, I have bought into the gospel of fluoride, believing that my teeth would surely rot out of my head without its protection. So it felt a little bit illicit, recently, when I purchased a box of German fluoride-free kids’ toothpaste for my daughter. The toothpaste came in blue, understated packaging—no cartoon characters or candy flavors—which I associated with German practicality. And instead of fluoride, it contained an anticavity ingredient called hydroxyapatite, vouched for by several dental researchers I interviewed for this story. Could it be, I wondered as I clicked “Buy,” that toothpaste doesn’t need to contain fluoride after all?
The scientific case for hydroxyapatite toothpaste is actually quite simple: Composed of calcium and phosphate, hydroxyapatite is the very mineral that primarily makes up our bones and teeth. Tooth enamel, the hard protective outer layer, is naturally about 96 percent hydroxyapatite. NASA researchers first patented an idea for repairing teeth with a hydroxyapatite precursor in the 1970s; nothing came of it then, but a Japanese company acquired the patent and eventually created a popular toothpaste called Apagard. Hydroxyapatite toothpaste has been approved for cavity prevention in Japan since 1993. It is also approved in Canada and endorsed by the Canadian Dental Association. And it’s sold in Europe, where the European Commission has deemed the ingredient safe in toothpaste.
In the United States, however, fluoride still reigns supreme. You likely won’t find toothpaste containing hydroxyapatite at your corner drugstore. A few boutique hydroxyapatite-based brands have popped up, but they cannot market themselves for cavity prevention without FDA approval, a long and expensive process that no hydroxyapatite toothpaste has yet gone through. The American Dental Association (ADA), meanwhile, gives its Seal of Acceptance only to toothpastes that contain fluoride.
Fluoride does work remarkably well: It is incorporated into the enamel structure of the tooth itself, forming a mineral crystal that is significantly more resistant to cavity-causing acid than the tooth’s natural material, according Bernhard Ganss, a scientist at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Dentistry. “The dogma in dentistry has always been: Fluoride is a good thing.”
The trouble with fluoride is that, at very high levels, it becomes a bad thing. Ingesting too much can lead to a condition called fluorosis, in which teeth become mottled in mild cases or structurally weak in more serious ones. The same can happen to bones. More controversially, high levels of fluoride in drinking water—higher than the level recommended in the U.S., but lower than the current EPA limit—have been linked to lower IQ in children. Toothpaste typically contains more than 1,000 times the fluoride recommended in drinking water. We use much less toothpaste than water, of course, and it’s not meant to be swallowed, but young children do not spit out toothpaste reliably.
Hydroxyapatite is a way to sidestep the fluoride controversy. It offers the anticavity benefits of fluoride, but without the risks. Bennett Amaechi, a dentistry professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, says he now recommends it to parents who have concerns about fluoride. He has collaborated with toothpaste manufacturers to study hydroxyapatite, but Felicitas Bidlack told me the same thing about its utility. Bidlack is not a dentist, but she is a tooth enamel researcher, recommended to me by the American Dental Association, which one could hardly accuse of being anti-fluoride. Yet for kids under 2 still learning not to swallow toothpaste, she would likely choose hydroxyapatite. “That’s what I would do as a mother,” she told me.
Fluoride toothpaste is in a bit of catch-22, Bidlack added. Sweet candy flavors, bright colors, and glitter can make toothpaste enticing enough for kids to want to brush their teeth, but if it’s too enticing, kids might simply eat it. “If you provide fluoride with this good-tasting goo that they put in their mouths, there is definitely a risk of unintentional ingestion,” says Ganss, who has published papers on hydroxyapatite in collaboration with scientists from the Dr. Wolff Group, a German business that manufactures toothpaste. He went even further: For very young kids, “I would actually really stand up and say no fluoride, period.”
I found these conversations clarifying, as they cut through the contradictory advice I’ve been given about fluoride for my 1-year-old. Toothpaste marketed to kids under 2 in the U.S. does not in fact contain fluoride (it usually contains a sugar alcohol called xylitol), and toothpastes that do contain fluoride are labeled as unsuitable for kids younger than 2 unless instructed by a doctor. But the American Academy of Pediatrics, whose guidelines our pediatrician repeated, says to use fluoride toothpaste as soon as the first tooth appears—though only a rice-size smear, which would limit exposure to fluoride. So is fluoride good or not? Is it safe or not? Wouldn’t it be nice not to deal with fluoride at all?
Hydroxyapatite’s track record is not as long as fluoride’s, but the evidence so far looks good: In clinical trials that have followed kids or adults for six months to a year and a half—largely funded by toothpaste manufacturers—hydroxyapatite and fluoride have come out about equally protective against cavities. Hydroxyapatite is chemically not as resistant to cavity-causing acid as the mineral formed by fluoride, but Ganss says that daily brushing might replenish hydroxyapatite often enough that the real-world protection is the same. The mineral may also have some other benefits: In studies, hydroxyapatite has helped reduce tooth sensitivity and the amount of bacteria stuck to teeth. The one thing it cannot do is resolve the controversy over adding fluoride to drinking water, which is done as a public-health measure in most parts of the U.S. to prevent tooth decay. Hydroxyapatite can’t be put into drinking water, because it doesn’t dissolve at a neutral pH. “The tap water would be milky,” Ganss says. “It would probably clog all your pipes within a few days or so.”
The researchers I spoke with thought fluoride still had its uses, particularly in treatments and toothpaste for adults who know not to swallow too much. Amaechi still brushes with the Colgate he’s used all his life, as he sees no reason for him, as an adult, to change his habits. But he does recommend hydroxyapatite in specific situations—for example, patients with dry mouth, he says, may particularly benefit from this formulation.
Age 2 isn’t some magic threshold at which the calculus regarding toothpaste in small children suddenly changes, of course. Canada, in fact, recommends holding off on fluoride for most kids until age 3; fluoride-free options for kids are now expanding in the U.S., even without FDA approval of hydroxyapatite. The German children’s toothpaste came only in boring white mint, but I found a number of brands in the U.S. already selling more tempting flavors, such as orange creamsicle and birthday cake.
This is an edition of The Weekly Planet, a newsletter that provides a guide for living through climate change. Sign up for it here.
Last month, at the start of hurricane season, I invited my inner circle to a hurricane-preparation dinner. Over a supreme pizza and a bottle of wine, my girlfriend, our roommate, my best friend, and I discussed how we would evacuate together from New Orleans with our three dogs and three chickens. We talked about when we’d decide to leave (as soon as the storm hit Category 2) and where we’d go (it would depend on the direction of the storm, but we have friends in Texas and Georgia with whom we could stay).
For decades, communities have relied on emergency-management agencies to tell them what to do during a disaster. But as our world warms, storms are intensifying more rapidly, making it much harder for cities to plan their responses. In an ideal world, emergency managers would have 72 hours to orchestrate a mandatory evacuation, but fast-moving storms give cities much less time to order people away. In the coming months and years, more people will need to decide either to evacuate—a process that is disruptive at best, and dangerous for vulnerable people at worst—or be prepared to stay home, in some cases without power for more than a week, and possibly without assistance from city officials.
Fast-moving storms put emergency managers in a double bind: If they leave residents with too short a window to flee, they raise the risk of them getting trapped in their cars as the storm bears down. But calling for an unnecessary evacuation, where a storm ends up less intense than first feared, has its own dangers. During Hurricane Rita in 2005, for example, evacuees in Houston were short on fuel, water, and food, stuck in a traffic gridlock in high heat; the evacuation wound up killing more people than the storm itself. With less time to prepare for a storm’s arrival, coastal managers could turn to more targeted evacuations, focusing on the people directly in the path of storm surge.
For residents who choose to stay, assistance from their city is not a given. In the days following Hurricane Ida, New Orleans city officials set up eight emergency resource centers where those in need could charge their devices, pick up food, and cool down. The city has since proposed a list of 15 potential Emergency Resource Centers, but the activation of these centers in an emergency isn’t guaranteed. Buildings could be damaged in the storm, and site availability would have to be determined accordingly. Ultimately, the messaging from the city has been that for the first 72 hours after a storm hits, those who stay are on their own.
When I told Kim Johnston, a Queensland University of Technology professor, who has thought a lot about how communities collaborate during natural disasters in Australia, about my hurricane-preparation dinner, she quickly replied with useful advice. Johnston’s research has shown that community-led disaster preparation saves lives and speeds up recovery. She suggested moving the group chat to WhatsApp, as cell service could be limited during a disaster. Figuring out how to evacuate pets is also important, she noted. For us, that meant the dogs would need to be in a different car than the chickens. I was grateful for Johnston’s guidance, but also worried: How will those who have fewer resources or no support system manage?
The problem extends far beyond New Orleans. Record-breaking ocean temperatures are expected to fuel more major hurricanes than usual this year, and research published in May found that the global mean rate of tropical-cyclone intensification has increased near coastal regions during the period from 1979 to 2020. One force that weakens hurricanes is vertical wind shear, how wind changes speed and direction with altitude. Climate change is reducing vertical wind shear in coastal areas, the climate and data scientist Karthik Balaguru, one of the authors of the study, told me. And that decrease means storms are more likely to intensify quickly just before they make landfall. We saw it happen earlier this month with Hurricane Beryl—a storm that forecasters said was unlike any they’d seen before, developing early in the season and undergoing two rapid intensifications before making landfall.
New Orleans is, in some ways, better equipped for this challenge than other cities. Richard Chatman, the deputy director of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, first came to New Orleans in 2005 to help with emergency response after Hurricane Katrina. “This is a special place,” he said of New Orleans. “All the way down to the porch-neighbor mentality. People know each other.” Community groups are stepping up to fill disaster-preparedness gaps, hosting supply distributions and adding commercial-scale solar panels and batteries to local churches. Mary Delahoussaye, who works at the Split Second Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the wellness of people with disabilities, told me she’s reminding her clients not to treat city-assisted evacuation as their plan A and advising them on other options to get ready for the next storm.
Planning smartly for one’s individual disaster response isn’t exactly a replicable strategy across cities and countries. But New Orleans’s lessons can apply to others who must rely on themselves to prepare: Neighbors should talk with one another openly and often about their just-in-case plans. People with disabilities should alert the national service Smart 911 about their particular needs. Have a plan for evacuating and a plan for staying. This list is not comprehensive, of course; it’s best to look out for specific guidance from local officials.
A week after our hurricane dinner, my roommate and I ordered plywood sheets to protect the windows in our house in Gentilly from high-speed winds. I was home by myself when the wood was delivered and started pulling the sheets into my backyard one by one. My neighbor from across the street came over to help. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone,” he said.
No one should have to do this alone, I thought.
Of all the news about bird flu, this month has brought some of the most concerning yet. Six people working on a chicken farm in Colorado have tested positive for the virus—the biggest human outbreak detected in the U.S. The country’s tally is now up to 11 since 2022, but that’s almost certainly a significant undercount considering the lack of routine testing.
Since the current strain of bird flu, known as “highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1,” began spreading around the world in late 2021, it has become something like a “super virus” in its spread among animals, Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, told me. Wild birds have been decimated, as have poultry farms: The virus has been detected in more than 100 million birds in 48 states. H5N1 has been around for longer than 25 years, but only recently has it regularly jumped to mammals, infecting cats, sea lions, and bears. In March, it was detected for the first time in American cattle and, since then, has already spread to 163 herds in 13 states.
All of that would be worrying enough without reports of people also falling sick. Everyone who has tested positive in the U.S. has worked closely with farm animals, but each additional case makes the prospect of another human pandemic feel more real. “That’s absolutely the worst-case scenario,” Webby said. It’s a possibility, although not the likeliest one. For now, the virus seems poised to continue its current trajectory: circulating among wild birds, wreaking havoc on poultry farms, and spreading among cattle herds. That outcome wouldn’t be as catastrophic as a pandemic. But it’s still not one to look forward to.
Even with the spate of farmworker infections, the threat of bird flu to humans is, at the moment, considered low. Researchers are keeping an eye out for two red flags. The bigger one would be the virus’s ability to spread between people. All of the people who have tested positive in the U.S. were infected by exposure to sick cows or poultry, and they have not seemed to pass the virus along to anyone else. Symptoms have generally been mild, including respiratory issues, though several people have developed serious cases of conjunctivitis, or pink eye. (No one in the U.S., or globally, has died from this variant of H5N1.) “There is no evidence at this point that this virus is going human to human, and therefore it really does not pose a threat to public health,” Jenna Guthmiller, an immunologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, told me.
The second warning sign is how the virus itself is changing. So far, H5N1 isn’t very good at getting into human cells and then replicating inside them, abilities that would enable the virus’s spread among people. But that may be changing. In a lab study, virus particles from infected cows showed signs that they were capable of binding to human receptors in the upper respiratory tract.
The current strain of H5N1 has already mutated to infect mammals, and a few genetic changes could be all it takes for the virus to spread more efficiently to humans—or, worse, between them. “We’re at the highest risk of the virus” since the early 2000s, when a different strain of H5N1 led to numerous deadly human infections in East and Southeast Asia, Webby said. Not because the virus itself is necessarily more infectious but because it is spreading among so many different animals, and especially mammals—giving it more opportunities than ever to find a way to replicate in humans. But, again, despite all that transmission—all those chances for the virus to mutate into something that can reliably sicken humans—it hasn’t yet. That could “absolutely” continue to be the norm, David Topham, a flu expert at the University of Rochester Medical Center, told me.
The status quo is still pretty troubling. New cases of bird flu keep popping up in herds across the country, raising fears that it might never be eradicated from cattle. The “most likely” scenario, Webby said, is that this virus will become endemic in birds and dairy cows—a constant presence, regularly causing outbreaks. Right now, infections in poultry tend to align with the migration of wild birds; if cows are constantly infected, chicken outbreaks could become more frequent.
Nothing about endemicity would be good for humans. The consequences would be diminished, but not eliminated. Farmworkers may continue to periodically fall sick, Guthmiller said. The cost of regular animal outbreaks would be exorbitant. The USDA has already allocated more than $2 billion to address surges among poultry and livestock, which includes compensating farmers for animals that have been killed and eggs that have been destroyed to quell the spread.
If the virus continues to regularly sicken cows, it will have even more opportunities to mutate in a way that could allow it to more easily infect humans. In infected cows, virus particles are mostly found in their udders; the virus is thought to spread between the animals through contaminated milking equipment. Research released last week, which has not yet been peer reviewed, indicates that cows can be infected by aerosolized virus; if they can spread the virus through their exhalations and sneezes, they could become infected merely by breathing the same air.
H5N1 is restless—it will continue trying to infect new hosts. Given enough opportunities to mutate, the virus will do so. “It’s like playing the lottery,” Topham said. “We’re giving this virus a lot of tickets.” H5N1 may also be able to combine with flu viruses from different animals. If cows, chickens, and other animals—say, pigs, which aren’t affected by the current outbreak—on the same farm all have different versions of the flu, “that’s your mixing vessel right there,” Topham said. The H1N1 virus that caused the 2009 swine-flu outbreak, for example, was a mix of flu viruses from pigs, humans, and birds.
There is one other possible future—the best-case scenario, which unfortunately is also the least likely. The virus possibly “could disappear,” Webby said. This would partly depend on eradicating it from cows, which he believes is plausible with human intervention and herd immunity. But eliminating the virus in birds—the main animals that get bird flu and spread it—is largely out of human control. H5N1 is particularly lethal in birds, with a mortality rate of up to 100 percent for some species; if it somehow kills enough of them, Guthmiller said, it very well could just fizzle out. “Dumb luck,” as Webby put it, might still prevail.
But a supercharged bird virus with a taste for infecting mammals is not the kind of thing that should be left up to chance. It is fortunate that only 11 farmworkers have been infected—as far as we know. Tools to curtail the spread of bird flu are available, but they’re not being used, or used appropriately. Personal protective equipment is helpful when worn correctly, but doing so isn’t feasible when it involves wearing respirators and Tyvek suits in temperatures that reach 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike many other countries, the U.S. does not vaccinate chickens against H5N1, in part because it’s expensive to do. And cost is also why only 60 farmworkers have been tested for bird flu, giving an imperfect window into the virus’s spread. “It’s going to be a lot more costly to deal with another pandemic than to deal with immunizing our farms,” Topham said.
America’s response has been painfully shortsighted, and the country is paying the price: Had bird flu been kept in check earlier, it might never have made it into cows, and might never have developed the mutations that allow it to flirt so closely with human-to-human transmission. At this point, bird flu’s future has no good options—only one that’s bad, another that’s abysmal, and one that relies on nothing but dumb luck.
Today, for the third time in two years, President Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19, the White House said. The president was in Las Vegas—attempting to convince voters, donors, and his fellow lawmakers that he is still the candidate best poised to defeat former President Donald Trump in November—when he fell ill with a runny nose and cough, according to a White House statement. He’s already taking the antiviral Paxlovid and will isolate at his home in Delaware.
Since Biden’s first two COVID bouts—an initial case and a rebound shortly thereafter in 2022—much has changed for the president, and for the trajectory of the pandemic. Biden’s cognitive abilities have come under more intense scrutiny, especially following a debate with Trump last month in which the president demonstrated difficulty completing sentences and holding on to a train of thought. Reported rates of COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths have declined—thanks in large part to vaccination—and precautions have become ever more rare. Biden is vaccinated and has superb access to medical care. Chances are, he will be fine. Yet one basic fact remains unchanged: COVID is still capable of inflicting great damage, especially upon the elderly.
In June, according to provisional CDC data, about four out of every 100,000 Americans over the age of 75 (or 0.004 percent) died with COVID-19. That’s a far cry from the staggering fatality rates of 2020 (roughly 0.17 percent for the same age group in April of that year), but still sizable in comparison with younger Americans’ risk. The June 2024 COVID death rate among 30-to-39-year-olds, for example, is two out of every 10 million. Hospitalizations tell a similar story for the elderly: Last month, more than 60 out of every 100,000 Americans over 75 were hospitalized with COVID. And according to the CDC, this is likely an undercount.
Still, the risks of COVID seem to increase over even just a few years of life for the elderly. People 75 or older are currently 3.5 times as likely to be hospitalized and seven times as likely to die with COVID as people ages 65 to 74. And people in their 80s can accumulate health problems with startling speed. Heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, cancer, and stroke—all maladies more likely to affect older people—increase a person’s chances of serious complications from COVID.
Biden is as likely as any American of his age to come away from this infection with minimal long-term effects. So far, according to the White House’s statement, his symptoms are mild, he has no fever, and his blood-oxygen level is normal. He was first vaccinated against COVID in 2020 and has received several shots since, most recently in September. Vaccines are proven to mitigate the most serious risks of the disease, especially among the elderly. And should things take a turn, Biden, as president, has care teams and resources at his instant disposal.
That said, as far as COVID is concerned, good for an 81-year-old is not reliably good. And COVID does not have to kill someone to have troubling, lasting effects. Even mild bouts of COVID can lead to symptoms that linger for weeks or years and range from inconvenient to debilitating. In a study published today, about 7.8 percent of patients infected since Omicron became the dominant variant in the United States developed long-term symptoms. Given current concerns about the president’s health and brainpower, any further deterioration is a sobering prospect. A report published by the National Academies of Science last month found that older Americans are especially at risk of cognitive impairment following a COVID infection. What would that mean for a man who has already shown signs of substantial decline—a man subjected to the rigors of one of the most demanding jobs on the planet during the most crucial political campaign of our lifetimes, who refuses to lift the burden of American democracy from his aging shoulders?
Ten days ago—after Biden’s feeble debate performance, but before a gunman attempted to assassinate his opponent at a rally—the president made a perplexing statement. Addressing the crowd at a Pennsylvania campaign event, he declared, “I ended the pandemic.” The reality is that COVID continues to upend lives every day. Americans should be mindful that it could still upend elections, too.
Lila Shroff contributed reporting.
A large digital thermometer sits at the entrance to the gleaming mid-century-modern visitor center in Furnace Creek, California. When I arrived on Sunday afternoon, it was thronged with people with their phones out, taking pictures. A mood of anticipation hummed through the crowd. A few hours east of us, in Las Vegas, temperatures would rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, smashing that city’s record by three degrees. But news reports suggested that here in the heart of Death Valley National Park, the high could reach 130, matching the hottest-ever day reliably measured on Earth. At 1 p.m., the big thermometer was already flipping back and forth between 126 and 127.
A ranger told us not to get excited, as the thermometer runs a degree or two hot. Our hopes were undimmed: There were still several hours to go before the day reached peak heat. In the meantime, a circus atmosphere was taking hold. I saw a man kneeling close to the ground, surrounded by a camera crew. I edged closer, thinking that he might have caught a scorpion or tarantula, and saw he had a frying pan instead. He was trying to cook a raw egg in the sun. When the clear and runny part turned white, he brayed at his doubters in triumph.
People stood together in clusters, wearing floppy hats and neckerchiefs. I heard lots of French and German, and a bit of Dutch. Over the years, I’ve run into many Europeans in the big western parks. Europe has no great desert, and as a consequence, its people have become great pilgrims of arid expanses: seekers of heat, space, and light. A trio of Germans took pictures of themselves pointing to the temperature. I, too, was a tourist, and I, too, had retained a childish enthusiasm for superlatives. I wanted to experience world-record heat, not as a number in a headline, but with my body. I’d heard that Death Valley’s summers were becoming hotter, as they have been in many other places. I imagined my physical person as a kind of tuning fork for planetary change.
At 3:18 p.m., the slightly overactive thermometer ticked up to 130; I later saw that, according to the National Weather Service, the temperature was only 129. I was no stranger to the scorching feel of a desert in high summer. My dad lived amid the red rock of Southern Utah for more than a decade, and I visited him in all seasons. I was just there a few weeks ago when temperatures reached 113. But 129 hits different. When you emerge into that kind of heat from an air-conditioned space, you feel its intensity before the door even closes behind you. It sets upon you from above. It is as though a clingy gargoyle made of flame has landed atop your head and neck. This gargoyle is a creature of pure desire. It wants only one thing, to bring you into thermal equilibrium with the desert. It goes for your soft spots first, reaching into the corners of your eyes, singeing your nostrils. After a few minutes pass, it tries to pull moisture straight through your skin. You feel its pinches and prickles on your forearms and calves. The breeze only makes things worse, by blasting apart the thin and fragile atmosphere of cooled air that millions of your pores produce by sweating. Your heart hammers faster and faster. Your cognition starts to blur. Only eight minutes in, I looked down at my phone. It had shut down entirely. I chose to view that as an act of solidarity.
The next morning, I went for a ride with Nichole Andler, the park’s chief of interpretation. She helps visitors understand what they’re looking at, so they do more than gawk at the park’s spectacular geology. She’d sent me an email a few days earlier, “to set expectations.” We could be outside her vehicle only for 10 minutes at a time, it said. I’d rolled my eyes—I confessed this to her later—thinking that her caution was excessive, but my encounter with the heat the day before we met changed my mind. We drove along the eastern side of the valley in a white Jeep Grand Cherokee. A walkie-talkie in the center console occasionally piped up with bursts of static or number-coded reports called in by other rangers. She pointed to a hill covered in black volcanic rock. She said that in the 1970s, Carl Sagan had used its terrain to test-drive a prototype of a rover that later landed on Mars. Death Valley has also stood in for fictional planets. The Tatooine scenes in Star Wars were shot in the park because it was the kind of landscape that could have plausibly been scorched by two suns.
We soon arrived at Badwater Basin, a playa wedged between two mountain ranges that shoot up straight from the valley floor. These mountains aren’t thickly forested like the Appalachians. They’re the stark, charcoal-and-brown peaks of the basin and range. The highest among them is 11,000 feet. A deep Ice Age lake once covered the valley, but after the planet warmed, it evaporated, leaving only trace minerals behind, mostly salt crystals. They lend the playa its distinctive white shimmer. At 282 feet below sea level, Badwater Basin is the lowest point in North America. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, not even a cirrus wisp or fading contrail. (The next day I did see a small cloud hovering over the valley’s edge, but it looked so out of place that I briefly wondered if it was a child’s lost balloon.) There isn’t much atmospheric cover, and July sunlight slams down into the valley, unimpeded, for 14 hours a day. The thick air near the bottom absorbs its heat, and rises, but not high enough to clear the mountains. Instead, the still-warm air settles back down to lower elevations and accumulates, an effect that Andler compared to that produced by a convection oven.
On certain days, she said, the heat feels like it has drilled through her skin and muscle and into her bones. After a brief spell outside in 120-degree heat, rangers are advised to take anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes to cool down. They do everything they can to shorten these cool-down periods, in case they’re needed for a rescue or other urgent business. But they have to be careful: “Sometimes I get back into a hot Death Valley vehicle, turn the air-conditioning on, and start to feel refreshed, only to realize that my back is a completely different temperature than my front,” Andler said. (I pictured the gargoyle smirking at her in the rear-view mirror.) Death Valley allows its rangers to leave their parked cars running, so they are ready to serve as cooling chambers.
The day before I arrived in Death Valley, the rangers had received a distress call from Badwater Basin. A group of six people had ridden motorcycles into the park and were showing signs of heat illness. “They were in the front country, and we knew their location, so rangers responded immediately,” Andler said. One of them was declared dead at the scene, not far from where Andler and I stood on the valley floor. Three others were brought to the visitor center for emergency medical attention, including one who was evacuated to a hospital in Vegas. The evacuation took extra time, because the air was too hot to send a helicopter into the park. “It’s tough when you’re on a motorcycle, because you’re exposed to the elements and you’re wearing heavy gear,” Andler said. “The only thing that I can assume is that they didn’t take enough time to cool down.” A sad silence passed between us.
[Read: A new danger at America’s national parks]
That night, I went to Zabriskie Point to watch the setting sun turn the valley’s wrinkled rock formations gold and pink. A crowd of extreme-heat tourists had assembled, but Andler’s story about the bikers made me feel less festive. After the sun went down, I drove back to Furnace Creek. Desert mice flitted across the road in my headlights. They were the only nonhuman mammals I’d seen apart from a coyote that padded through some sand dunes I visited at sunrise. It took two hours for Death Valley to darken. When the moon is full, the park’s salt flats take on an eerie glow, but that night the moon was just a thin crescent. It soon became so dark that I couldn’t see my own outstretched hand. One of the Milky Way’s starry arms arced from one horizon to another. I wanted to stargaze deep into the night, but could manage only half an hour: At 10:30 p.m., it was still 119 degrees on the valley floor.
On my way out of the park early the next morning, I turned onto a private road. I passed a no trespassing sign and made my way onto Timbisha Shoshone land. At a small administrative office, I met with Mandi Campbell, a 50-year-old woman who serves as the tribe’s historic-preservation officer. We had just sat down to talk when an extreme-heat alert lit up both of our phones. I asked Campbell what the tribe made of all the people who come to the park just for the thrill of experiencing near-130-degree weather in person. “We think that they’re crazy,” she said. “We don’t understand why they do it. I have a police scanner at home, and it keeps going off. I keep hearing, ‘dehydration, dehydration, dehydration.’”
Campbell is one of 25 tribe members who live in the Timbisha Shoshone’s ancestral homeland on the valley floor. Most have been here since birth. “This heat is nothing new to us,” she told me. “We know how to hunker down inside of our homes and try to stay cool.” Now that tribe members have air-conditioning, they live here year-round, but Campbell’s ancestors had the good sense to decamp to higher elevations during the hot months. They built a camp of summer homes on the shoulders of one of the park’s peaks centuries ago. “It’s 80 degrees up there right now,” Campbell said. “It’s nice.”
The Timbisha Shoshone had been in Death Valley for more than 1,000 years when white settlers arrived during the Gold Rush. The environment proved difficult for the extractive industries. Less than a century later, the major mining company in the area pivoted to tourism. One of its executives lobbied Herbert Hoover to make Death Valley a national monument in 1933. Its first superintendent spoke openly about his desire to remove the Timbisha Shoshone. In 1957, after tribe members had left the valley floor for the summer, the park staff called in fire trucks, and ordered them to turn their hoses on the tribe’s adobe buildings. Many of their walls were reduced to mud. Only six remain, including three that house tribe members to this day.
Despite this history, Campbell told me that she personally has a good relationship with the park, now that some of the tribe’s land has been returned. “We have to work together to protect this place,” she said. But she remains irked by the name Death Valley. “They called it that because they didn’t care for this place,” she said. “Their settlers weren’t making it here. But there is nothing dead about this valley. It is alive. There is plenty of food. My ancestors hunted bighorn sheep here. They hunted rabbits. They collected mesquite beans and ground them into flour to make bread. They knew where all the springs were. They had their trails, their ways. That’s how they were able to survive.”
Campbell’s aunt, Pauline Esteves, was the driving force behind the tribe’s effort to reclaim its land from the U.S. government. She served as both chief activist and negotiator. I asked Campbell about her. I must have slipped into that subtle tone you use when you assume that someone is dead. “She is still alive,” Campbell said, almost in retort. “She will be 100 in December.” Esteves lives only a few houses away from the tribal office, as do two of the tribe’s other eldest elders. “They’re tougher than us,” Campbell said, and then she started to laugh. “When the electricity goes out in the summer, we are screaming to leave, but not the elders. All they want is a wet sheet to be put over them. They don’t want to go nowhere.”
A well-stocked grocery store is a wondrous place. Among the gleaming pyramids of fruit, golden rows of bread, and freezers crammed with ice cream, time and space collapse. A perfectly ripe apple might have been picked a year ago; a cut of beef may have come from an Australian cow. Grocery stores defy seasons and geography to assure shoppers that they can have anything they want, anytime.
For a moment last year, those promises no longer seemed to hold up: The egg case at my local supermarket in New York City was stripped bare. Bird flu had decimated chickens across the country, and the egg supply with it. Americans hoarded whatever eggs they could find, sometimes paying up to $18 a carton.
Bird flu is a unique, extreme case, but food shortages of all kinds keep hitting the grocery store. In recent months, olive oil, cocoa, and orange juice have been in short supply, sending prices skyrocketing. The problem is largely climate change. Olive oil has more than doubled in cost over the past two years because drought and bad weather in the Mediterranean have shriveled olive groves; so many orange trees in Brazil are diseased and weakened by heat and drought that producers have considered making juice from other fruit. Higher temperatures have even made it harder to control the spread of bird flu, contributing to the egg crisis.
These aren’t isolated events. Peanuts, sugar, vanilla, and beef—among other foods—have also been in short supply at points over the past few years. “We are entering an age of disruption,” Evan Fraser, a food-systems expert at the University of Guelph, in Canada, told me. Soon, Americans may no longer be able to count on supermarkets that are perpetually stocked with cheap food. The era of grocery abundance is ending, and a more somber one is taking its place.
The magic of the supermarket is that it hides the inherent variability of agriculture. Every clamshell of arugula might look the same from season to season, even if the harvests differ dramatically. Stable weather is one of the major factors necessary to keep supermarkets well stocked, Fraser said—and its future is not looking good with climate change. This week, extreme heat in California, where the bulk of America’s fresh produce is grown, singed salad greens and bruised berries. At the same time, Hurricane Beryl, an unprecedentedly strong and early storm that previously demolished farms in the Caribbean, flattened corn and sorghum crops in Texas.
Heat, drought, flooding, and other climate effects are making it harder to grow crops, and importing them from elsewhere isn’t always an option. That certain crops are grown in just a few areas in the world has made food especially susceptible to shortages. An ongoing surge in sugar prices in the United States—reflected not just in table sugar but in all sorts of sweets—is being driven by unusually dry conditions in India and Thailand, where much of the global crop is harvested. And in March, a cyclone hit Madagascar, the world’s biggest vanilla producer, threatening about half its harvest and the price of ice cream.
Climate change is also worsening the conditions that allow pests and disease to thrive. Along with heat- and water-related stress, “it’s very clear, globally, that both are becoming more common,” David Lobell, a professor and the director of Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, told me. Over the past two decades, Florida’s orange and grapefruit production has plummeted more than 75 percent because of citrus greening, an infection spread by tiny bugs that is now also ravaging fruit in Brazil. Other impacts of climate change on agriculture are less visible. It has dried up fields of grass, which farmers rely on to feed their cows. Last year, beef prices hit a near-record high.
What makes climate change so troubling is that it affects so many aspects of the food system. Cargo ships stuck in massive seaside traffic jams—some due to low water levels caused by climate change—are holding up food deliveries. Events such as the war in Ukraine—which has curtailed production of wheat, the country’s major export—“may not have any obvious connection to the climate, but they’re happening on top of a baseline,” Lobell said.
All of this means higher prices and patchy supply. It’s already happening, but you might not have noticed. Inflation has masked some of the price hikes. In some cases, climate-related shortages can be remedied by importing food from places that aren’t affected. For basic commodity crops such as cocoa, wheat, and coffee, price increases may seem minor compared with what’s happening on farms themselves; these goods are typically stockpiled, which means there’s usually a backup supply to draw from if there’s a shortage, softening any upticks in price. The sheer range of products available allows most shortages to be sidestepped painlessly: Shoppers can swap olive oil for canola; juice makers can substitute mandarins for oranges. Food companies also have tricks so that you don’t notice food shortages. In March, Cadbury confirmed that it had downsized one of its chocolate bars because cocoa has become more expensive thanks to poor harvests.
Wealthy nations are generally shielded from the worst effects of crop shortfalls, Lobell said. The food sold in those countries is usually more processed, so the cost of raw ingredients is just one component of the overall price. Poorer nations that depend on unprocessed ingredients are the hardest hit. In the U.S., diminished wheat imports from Ukraine raised flour prices; in Egypt, they halved bread consumption.
But Americans will feel the squeeze eventually as the planet warms. Already, drought-related shortages of avocados in Mexico, which is responsible for 90 percent of the U.S. supply, have meant less guacamole during the Super Bowl. When reserves of commodity goods run out, prices will rise; this is expected to happen with cocoa in the next few years. Perishable goods can’t be stored away in case of emergency. Even the ubiquitous banana isn’t immune to rising prices: Higher temperatures are worsening the spread of a catastrophic fungal disease, and the sophisticated storage chambers that make bananas cheap year-round may not be enough to buffer the coming shortfalls. Of course, poorer Americans will bear the brunt of rising costs.
Certainly, the consequences could be lessened. Crops that get too hot for one area may still grow in fields elsewhere, or even in greenhouses or so-called vertical farms. According to Lobell’s research, bolstering U.S. agriculture against climate change would require up to $434 billion in research and development. That might include technology such as improved machinery, as well as seeds and livestock that are genetically modified to withstand climate stresses.
This is where the new age of grocery stores begins. They aren’t about to become Malthusian—just a little sad. Most likely, “it would be more of the same” of what’s happening now, Lobell said: The produce you’re looking for may be more expensive or out of stock more frequently; the prices of basic foods, such as sugar and flour, won’t be reliably low. Maybe guacamole will become too costly to be a Super Bowl staple, or burger prices will start to resemble those of steak. If extreme heat continues to crush tomato harvests in Australia, Spain, and California, you might even think twice about that bottle of ketchup.
But perhaps the most devastating toll for Americans may be psychological. The idea of the supermarket “was based—and still is based—on endless abundance,” the author Benjamin Lorr writes in The Secret Life of Groceries. All of that bounty has long reassured Americans that food is plentiful and affordable, shaping our approach to eating, cooking, and shopping. It’s the reason you can look up a recipe today and likely have all the ingredients for it tomorrow, regardless of whether it’s July or February. But the grocery is transforming. Shoppers once walked in thinking, What do I want? The more salient question may soon be: What can I have?