In my garden: Adapting taste to the changing climate

This piece first appeared in the summer 2025 issue of Gravy quarterly from the Southern Foodways Alliance, guest edited by Rough Draft’s Beth McKibben. You can purchase the issue of Gravy here for $12. Illustration by Disha Sharma for Gravy In my garden, a patch of collards has grown consistently for years, dying in the spring and coming back with vigor each fall. These are Georgia yellow cabbage collards, and every autumn, I wait with anticipation for the weather to cool and the greens to sweeten just a bit, turning from a slightly harsh bite to a smooth, mellow flavor so gentle I barely even need to add anything to make them perfect. Over the last decade, I’ve noticed our Atlanta summers have begun to feel a bit more intense. They swing between wet and hot or dry and hot—but it’s always hot. Our winters feel warmer, too. I wonder what changes the next decade will bring to my collards: Will milder winters mean less-sweet greens? Or will the rainfall and increased flooding alter them in other, unforeseen ways? When I first moved to the South, I grew Cherokee purple tomatoes religiously each summer. Plump, productive, delicious, and full of summer tomato flavor, my tomatoes always rode the line between sweet and tart, juicy and firm, never veering too far in any direction. In the last few years, however, I’ve switched to cherry tomatoes. They’re delicious and tangy, yet their size is far from ideal for a tomato sandwich. (One of my favorite summer staples.) But they grow quickly enough to ripen before their skins split from the summer rains that flood my yard, thanks to nearby development close to my home in southeast Atlanta. Illustration by Disha Sharma for Gravy. The seasons in the South used to be more predictable. Recent shifts in climate mean shifts in ingredient availability. My okra, for example, comes in later than it used to and isn’t always ready to harvest when my tomatoes are. So those first batches of okra and tomatoes don’t grace my stove together until the tomatoes have already been producing fruit for a while. And cooking with cherry tomatoes lends a slightly different texture to the finished dish. There are more bits of skin, sometimes more seeds, and depending on the varieties I use, I might get tartness from lemony yellow cherry tomatoes, or thicker skins from okra pods hardened in the summer heat. Dr. Mehmet Öztan, cofounder of Two Seeds in a Pod and director of community engagement at the RIDER Center at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, says that changing growing conditions are reflected in recent shifts in USDA growing zones. This results in changes in the size and shape of tomatoes. Dry conditions can cause fruit to become mealy. And depending on the variety, excessive rain can either intensify or dilute their flavor. For instance, thin-skinned tomato varieties become watery and split easily, losing their balance of texture and flavor.Steven Satterfield, chef and co-owner of Miller Union and Madeira Park in Atlanta, has built his career on local ingredients and on the rhythms of seasonal eating in the South. He currently divides the seasons into subseasons, each two months long: short winter, short spring, early summer, midsummer, late summer, and short autumn. As the climate changes, this helps Satterfield anticipate what will be ready when, and then he plans accordingly. Hot weather lasts through October now, he says, and some foods like blueberries and peaches are ready earlier in the season, while others (like okra) aren’t ready until later. For Satterfield, planning ahead for ingredients that can be swapped out ensures he can adjust his menus quickly. If arugula is on the board but a farmer doesn’t have it, he might instead use mizuna, or hakurei turnip tops, or upland cress. Satterfield’s close work with local farmers helps him adapt according to what’s currently in season.These days, fall menu changes happen in late October, rather than September, and spring brings short, fleeting ingredient availability that only lasts a few weeks. However, late August and September are easier to plan for, as many farmers don’t have much beyond eggplant, peppers, okra, and “really good late-season tomatoes,” he says.For chefs who may not be as climate aware as Satterfield, farmers grapple with how to educate them about changing availability and flavors. Some chefs “want things right now,” says Dave Smoke-McCluskey, a chef, grower, and miller of Corn Mafia Hominy in South Carolina, “and if it can’t be fulfilled right away, they’ll move on to the next thing.”Öztan agrees that farmers are increasingly under pressure from chefs who don’t understand growing cycles and seasonality. He also believes those chefs who source from small farms could inspire their peers to do the same.Embracing changing flavors is a form of adaptability. But identifying exactly how those flavors will change due to climate extremes—and what to do about it in the kitchen—is tricky, even for culinary professionals. Of the chefs I spoke with for this story, none could zero in on how these fluctuations in temperature directly alter the flavor of their finished dishes, though they talked a lot about how the changes affect availability of ingredients. Öztan notes that higher temperatures cause lettuce and other greens to bolt, or to shoot up a central flowering stalk, contributing to bitterness. Arugula, a plant in the mustard family, should have a peppery but not bitter bite. Heat causes premature flowering, and while scientists are still seeking to understand more about this reaction, the relationship between warmer weather and bolting has been established, possibly because the heat and accompanying lower moisture cause stress that puts plants into survival mode. It pushes plants to focus energy on reproducing rather than growing.Öztan encourages chefs and home cooks to ask how they can incorporate produce with bitter notes, like bitter lettuces, into meals. My garden has become a classroom for my own, once-bitter-averse palate, as my lettuces bolt earlier and their bite becomes more pronounced. I’ve learned to toss tough, bitter greens in cooked dishes like stir-fries, weave ribbons of greens through batches of kimchi, or use sweet-and-sour dressings to find balance in a salad. Cold influences flavor, too. Most notably, kale and other sturdy greens, as well as some fruits like persimmons, see flavor improvements after a frost. Cruciferous vegetables, like kale, turn starch into sugars when the weather turns cold, leading to a sweeter, more nuanced green. To me, these cold-weather greens are ideal because the added sweetness takes some of the sulfuric edge off their bite, meaning I don’t need to try as hard to balance the flavors. While it may not be easy, we can choose to meet change with open curiosity. There’s exhilaration to be had in discovering a new tomato variety that grows well through the summer without its skins splitting or building a dish off the creamy flavor and chewier texture of taro versus a Russet potato. Illustration by Disha Sharma for Gravy. With tomatoes, this might mean finding new varieties that connect us to old taste memories. We’ll also have to create new taste memories—and new ways of eating, too.Öztan has found several varieties that he likes, including the Turkish tomato Köpek Hayası, which has sweet and acidic undertones and can stand up to the summer heat. It reminds him of the tomato flavor he enjoyed from his childhood, he says.But diners also come to the table with their own expectations. “A lot of us do what we have to do to make customers happy,” McCluskey says. Not all restaurant and retail customers care about, or are willing to pay for, local and seasonal food. Educating consumers might help them reevaluate their priorities. People are “used to tasting things but they’re not used to tasting things,” says McCluskey. We need to “get people to value the food that they’re eating as something like the fashion they buy or the cars that they buy. For a lot of people, it’s nourishment over enjoyment,” he adds. Back in my kitchen, I’m learning to work with new-to-me varieties of beloved staples and adopting new staples, my own culinary map becoming a microcosm of the larger climatic and growing season shifts happening in the South. These days, my okra and tomatoes are still more likely to be studded with cherry tomatoes rather than big, beefy heirloom varieties. Lately, I’ve swapped out potatoes, which don’t grow like they used to in my garden, with the vigorous sunchoke I accidentally introduced from my compost a few years ago. Green onions, contained in a planter that can move around my garden as the seasons shift, are more common than white or yellow onions, which I do still grow, though less frequently. This summer, I’m growing Öztan’s favorite tomatoes—and dreaming of a day when the flavors of my past can meet the changing food of the South. But I miss those full, juicy, sweet tomatoes I started growing twenty years ago that could fill up a sandwich with a single slice. Tomatoes, so ripe I could smell them, plucked straight from the vine, still warm from the sun. I remember how their juices ran down the cutting board, making a welcome mess of the counter. The post In my garden: Adapting taste to the changing climate appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.