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This essay is part of What to Eat on a Burning Planetjilibay, a series exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply. Read more about this project in a note from Eliza Barclay, Opinion’s climate editor.

Cast your eye across the menus of America’s most celebrated dining rooms, and among the scattering of earthy pastas, garden salads and esoteric proteins, nestled among labnehs and salsa machas, you’ll find them: the water guzzlers.

America is starting to confront the burning realities of climate change, but the seasonal, produce-driven cooking popularized on these shores decades ago remains wedded to thirsty crops such as almonds, pistachios, artichokes, figs, cherries, apples and tomatoes. From Alice Waters’s revered restaurant Chez Panisse and Thomas Keller’s the French Laundry to the Hollywood Boulevard favorite Kismet and Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, they are among the most popular ingredients for chefs advancing the frontiers of taste.

But California, with roughly half of the country’s land dedicated to growing produce, is in trouble. The state is in the midst of a water crisis that can’t be remedied by a few wet, snowy years; in some areas, years of overpumping have depleted aquifers and caused the earth to sink. This means we are hurtling toward a time when farmers may not be able to keep providing the bounty that chefs have come to rely on.

In the new age of chronic drought, chefs will need to adapt. But the transition to a less water-intensive diet need not spell the end of culinary invention. What is required is a reimagining of the types of foods that make for a nourishing and energetic culinary culture — and this is where California, with its sunny history of agriculture and hospitality, can play a leading role. The Golden State won’t have to do it alone. Australia, uncommonly parched and grappling with similar ecological challenges, has already shown how to create excitement about drought-tolerant foods.

Much of California’s mythos is tied to its status as a land of abundance. Over the past 50 years, a new generation of chefs (including Ms. Waters, Mr. Keller, Wolfgang Puck, Dominique Crenn and Nancy Silverton) pioneered a different approach to cooking and eating. The farm-to-table movement, locavorism and the transition to organic produce all owe a debt, in one way or another, to California chefs. And the culturally omnivorous cooking that today spills from the state’s most acclaimed kitchens — all those zhugs and pastrami-jeweled breakfast burritos — is a celebration of California’s bounty and of culinary borrowings.

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