Justin Hintze, owner of the popular food cart and soon-to-be restaurant Jojo, can’t remember all of the times he has been forced to close his cart due to extreme weather in the last two years.
“I don’t remember heatwaves anything like the ones we get multiple times a year,” said Hintze, who grew up in Portland. “One hundred degrees was unheard of. Now it’s pretty normal. It’s definitely really scary, and it makes me wonder where we’re going to be in ten years.”
Hintze said that cart closures due to extreme weather—be it heat, wildfire smoke, or snow—have cost his business $120,000 in gross income over the last two years. Factor in closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which evidence suggests is climate change-related anyway, and that number rises to nearly $300,000.
For everyone in the food industry, from restaurant and cart owners to food service workers, climate change has begun to have an easily measurable, frightening impact on their ability to survive year-to-year.
