Eating the Earth

Michael Grunwald on How Diet Drives Climate Change

Years ago, I visited the Everglades with a group of colleagues and drove everybody crazy with my never-ending questions. Finally, a park ranger handed me a copy of Michael Grunwald’s The Swamp. “Just read this,” he said. I started the book on my flight home and didn’t put it down until we landed. It answered all of my questions, and many I hadn’t thought of. It’s a superb book that I highly recommend.

So I was excited when I learned that Mike was publishing a new book, We Are Eating The Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. It’s another superb book that I think readers of this newsletter will appreciate.

This topic—how land use driven by agricultural expansion, and more specifically, the meat business, is worsening climate change— has long been a key focus of mine. I’ve also been concerned by related issues, like biodiversity loss and animal welfare. So I thought I was pretty well-informed on these matters.

Turns out, I still had a lot to learn. I suspect you might as well. Fortunately, Mike agreed to talk with me about his findings.

Meet Michael Grunwald

Mike, congratulations on another outstanding book. You are a great journalist and writer. Tell us a bit about how you got here, including your interest in environmental topics?

Mark, thanks so much for your kind words. I really admire the work you’ve done, and I’ve learned a lot from reading your writing as well.

It’s funny, my understanding of the outdoors was mostly limited to tennis until 25 years ago, when a wetlands lawyer named Tim Searchinger gave me a tip about the Army Corps of Engineers that led me to spend a year exposing its environmental follies in the Washington Post. He later gave me a tip about the Everglades that led me to move to Florida to write that book you said such lovely things about, meet my wife, and start a new life at Ground Zero for climate change in Miami. I’ve written at least part-time about the environment and the climate ever since. But more recently I realized—after yet another chat with Searchinger that I describe in the new book—that food and agriculture was a massive driver of our environment and climate problems, and that I knew nothing about it. I figured if I was this spectacularly ignorant, other people probably were too. That’s what led me to write We Are Eating the Earth, and to make Searchinger (who still has no scientific degree but has, in his unique way, transformed himself into the leading scientific authority on these issues) the main character.

Elaborate a little bit, if you would, on the book’s title. How does eating—meat in particular—drive deforestation and climate change?

Agriculture is what’s eating the earth. We hear a lot about urban sprawl; well, cities and suburbs cover 1% of the land on Earth. Farms and pastures cover nearly 40%. We lose a soccer field worth of tropical forest to agriculture every six seconds. And three quarters of our agricultural land feeds livestock. Cattle are especially land-intensive; when you eat a burger, you’re not just eating a cow, you’re eating macaws and the rest of the cast of Rio. You’re eating the Amazon, because beef is the leading driver of deforestation. So not only does agricultural expansion create horrible biodiversity losses and pollution and water shortages—agriculture uses 70% of our fresh water—it also creates climate change. Partly from fossil-fueled tractors and fertilizers, partly from cattle burping and farting methane, but mostly from the loss of forests and wetlands that store a lot of carbon and also absorb a lot of the carbon we pump into the atmosphere.

I like to say that trying to decarbonize the planet while continuing to convert forests into farms is like trying to clean your house while smashing the vacuum to bits in the living room. You’re making a huge mess, and you’re also crippling your ability to clean up the mess. We’ve all got to eat, but somehow, we’ve got to make even more food with less mess.

Despite the pleasant, accessible tone of your writing, your reporting is sometimes quite chilling. You point out how time after time what we view as some of our best “solutions” end up causing more harm than good. For example, biofuels, biomass energy, organic farming, and nature-based carbon removal projects can all have negative climate outcomes because of the resulting increased demand for more land (especially to graze or feed cattle). Can you say more about this for our readers?

I always figured most people didn’t know much about these issues, but I also found through my research that a lot of what people think they know just isn’t so. I have entire chapters about why biofuels, biomass power, and low-yield organic farming are all climate disasters masquerading as climate solutions. And it mostly comes down to climate analysts blowing off land use.

When you use farmland to grow fuel instead of food, you’re going to need more land somewhere else to grow food, and that’s probably not going to be a parking lot; it’s going to be a forest or other natural landscape that’s going to lose carbon. Organic farms—where soil is treated with love and animals have names instead of numbers— make less food per acre than the chemical-drenched monocultures and industrial feedlots everyone hates, they need more acres to make food, so they eat more of the earth. And look, I’m on a jihad against biofuels—the ethanol industry named me its Public Enemy Number One—but they only eat a Texas worth of the earth. Agriculture eats 75 Texases worth of the earth. So this very common notion that farms should be more like nature even if they make less food is very dangerous if we want to protect actual nature.

Also, the idea that we can reverse global warming by sequestering carbon in farm soils through regenerative practices—a popular notion pushed by Michael Pollan on the left, Joe Rogan on the right, UN agencies, major philanthropies, major environmental groups, a lot of Big Food and Big Ag conglomerates, documentaries like Kiss the Ground and Common Ground—is mostly bullshit. It’s not impossible to sequester more soil carbon; leguminous cover crops might help a bit, and you’ve written about the intriguing possibility that the mysterious worldwide web of mycorrhizal fungi could help as well. But most of the science in this area is super flimsy.

The part of this I found particularly chilling was how environmentalists and even peer-reviewed science journals sometimes knowingly obscured these problems. In my environmental work I pretty much always thought I could trust peer-reviewed journals. I guess I was naive. What’s your take on how environmentalists and scientists handle these matters?

Everyone makes mistakes; it was understandable that so many enviros and scientists who care about climate got excited about biofuels at a time when there were no other viable alternatives to fossil fuels. I profiled three characters who were honest enough to change their mind about bioenergy once Searchinger’s work proved they had gotten it wrong—one enviro, one scientist, and one government official.

But most human beings aren’t good at admitting mistakes, and there’s been way too much retrofitting of facts to justify outdated conclusions. I thought the stories I told about how scientists working on California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard and even the IPCC’s bioenergy chapters engaged in logical and technical acrobatics to manipulate facts and models to make bioenergy look better would get more attention.

Look, plenty of this is politics. I tell a bunch of wild stories about the outsized influence the farm lobby has in academia as well as government. That said, the Upton Sinclair line about how it’s hard to get a man to believe something his salary depends on not believing applies to self-image as well as salary. If you’ve spent a decade studying how biofuels can save the planet, you’re not likely to say, “Oh well, I guess I wasted a decade on a dead end, thanks for setting me straight, I’ll find something else to study.”

I happen to be a long-time vegan. I became one originally for animal rights reasons, but I was also motivated by climate and biodiversity considerations. Your book explains better than I’ve seen anywhere else how meat-based diets drive deforestation and associated problems of climate change and biodiversity loss. I had—again perhaps naively—believed that when better-tasting meat alternatives like Impossible Foods and Beyond Burgers showed up on the scene, people would eat a lot less meat. I also thought environmentalists would rally around these products and celebrate them. But I was clearly wrong. Why do you think that is?

Well, there was a rally when the first biotech burgers came out. Beyond had the biggest-popping IPO of the 21st century. There were all kinds of headlines about how “The Tipping Point Has Finally Arrived.” But while the new products were better than the old hockey puck veggie burgers, they weren’t better or cheaper than beef, so people didn’t keep buying them. People just love meat. The world eats 350 million tons a year—and every year that number increases. Our ancestors started eating meat 2 million years ago, and some scientists believe we evolved to enjoy the taste.

You should be proud of your diet; it’s the best for the planet. I’m too weak to go vegan, but I’ve stopped eating beef, which turns out to be about as good for the planet as going vegetarian; we all find the level of hypocrisy we’re comfortable with.

But most people don’t shape their diets around sustainable, they want delicious and cheap. I eat Impossible Burgers, and I think they’re probably 90% as good as carcass burgers, which is an incredible achievement. But most people don’t write climate books, and most people don’t want to pay more for a burger that’s 10 percent worse even if it’s 90% better for the earth. It’s terrible that some enviros have bought into the nonsense that fake meat is bad because it’s “processed food”—it’s not health food, but it’s already a bit healthier than beef, and believe me, the biological transformation of grass into beef inside a cow is a process—but I don’t think enviros are capable of shaming most Americans into eating eco-friendly food they consider a sacrifice.

The good news is that the cow is a pretty mature technology, while plant-based meat (as well as cultivated meat made from animal cells) will only get better and cheaper and healthier. Plant-based nuggets already beat chicken nuggets in blind taste tests. Who the hell knows what’s in a chicken nugget anyway? But make a better mousetrap, like Tesla has with its cars, and at least some of the world will beat a path to your door.

“Lab-grown” or “cultivated” meat is another solution that appeals to me. I know we have a long way to go here (but that hasn’t stopped Florida from outlawing them). What’s your view?

I’ve eaten a cultivated chicken filet, cultivated salmon nigiri, a cultivated burger, a plant-based meatball with cultivated pork fat—they all taste like the real thing, because they are the real thing. You can hear 2 million years of evolution telling your brain: Meat!

You’re right that this industry, which is exactly one decade old, is not quite ready to compete with traditional meat on price, but it’s closer than people think. It’s even closer than I thought when I finished the book; I’m working on a feature for my old bosses at Politico Magazine about all the progress happening behind the scenes.

But yes, the politics are tricky. As a resident of the Free State of Florida, it will be illegal for me to purchase cultivated meat once it does hit the market, because the supposedly pro-competition Republicans who run my state (and the cattlemen who fund their campaigns) think they have the right to decide what I can eat. It’s ludicrous. It was bad when electric vehicles were seen as Obamamobiles, and it’s a bad sign that biotech meat is being tarred as Bidenburgers. There’s nothing woke about innovation.

You defend traditional big ag in the book, arguing that because it produces more food per acre than any other approach, it’s the best way to feed the world from a climate and biodiversity perspective. Traditional enviros must hate the argument. Are you getting a lot of pushback?

Some! I debated an agro-ecology professor at Berkeley; the celebrity chef Alice Waters glared at me the whole time. What I try to make clear is that we need high-yield agriculture to feed the world without frying it; we’ll need 50% more calories by 2050, and even if yields continue to increase at the same rate they’ve increased since the start of the Green Revolution, we’re on track to deforest another dozen Californias to grow it. We don’t have another dozen Californias worth of forest to spare.

The math sucks, and I do squabble with advocates who want to replace industrial agriculture with romantic Old MacDonald farms that can’t feed the world without obliterating what’s left of our natural ecosystems. They often say we don’t need more food, we just need to stop wasting food, or eat less meat—and yeah, we need to do those things. But until we do, it’s wildly irresponsible to choose to grow less food on our existing farmland. And the math is so bad that even if we cut food waste in half, and the rich world cuts meat consumption in half, we’ll still need major yield increases to avoid major deforestation.

I get why people hate factory farms—they treat animals and people badly, they lobby against environmental regulation, they use too many antibiotics. But factories are good at making lots of stuff, and factory farms are good at making lots of food. I’d like to see a kind of grand bargain where we help them make even more food but force them to make less of a mess.

That said, I try not to be prescriptive about how to do high-yield agriculture and “sustainable intensification.” In Brazil, I saw ranches with kick-ass yields that used the kind of regenerative practices Michael Pollan would love; they let their cattle graze their cover crops and did rotational grazing in the pastures. They also did stuff Pollan would hate, like fertilize their pastures and finish their cattle with grain in feedlots. But they had five times as many cows per acre as some neighboring ranches, so they were using one-fifth as much of the Amazon and Cerrado. That’s awesome.

I should say, some environmentalists have embraced my message about the eating of the earth. I wrote this book because I felt like people weren’t grappling with these issues, and I do think they’re starting to grapple.

What’s your overall outlook for climate progress? How do you see the next 10 years unfolding?

We basically know how to fix our energy and climate problems—electrify the global economy and run it on clean electricity. Obviously, that will be hard. But the world is already starting to do it, even with all the outrages happening in DC right now. Solar is awesome. Batteries are getting cheap. The global automotive fleet is starting to go electric. Trump can slow down the transition in the U.S., but he can’t stop it here or anywhere else.

Unfortunately, even if the entire world stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, we’ll still blow past 2 degrees of warming if we don’t fix food and agriculture. And we haven’t figured out what to do about that yet; food and ag only attract 3% of climate finance, often for Kiss the Ground-style “carbon farming” that usually eats more of the earth.

I write about dozens of promising solutions in the book—alternative pesticides that use the mRNA technology behind the Covid vaccines to constipate beetles to death, alternative fertilizers that use genetically edited microbes to snatch nitrogen from the air, “biological nitrification inhibition” that makes me a real hit at dinner parties, a super-tree called pongamia that’s like a vertical soybean factory growing in terrible land without chemicals or irrigation. The thing is, none of those solutions has gotten much traction. We’re not making progress yet on food and ag issues.

One thing I say near the end is that we’ve got to move even faster on energy, especially the low-hanging fruit of clean electricity, because food and ag is going to take awhile. It’s insane and scary how many rural counties are banning solar and wind on farmland. On the food and ag side, we’ve got to do a lot of research to figure out what works, then we’ve got to deploy what works. As Searchinger says, we need to “hurry the fuck up and figure shit out,” and right now that isn’t happening much.

What advice do you have for citizens who care about the environment? How can we make faster progress addressing challenges like climate, biodiversity, and plastic?

I try not to be preachy—I have solar panels and an electric car, but I still fly too much—but I do believe individual actions can make a difference, especially with diets. Project Drawdown lists the top 100 opportunities for emissions reductions, and a shift towards plant-based diets is #1. There are dozens of things citizens can do to eat less of the earth, but the two big ones are simple: Eat less beef, waste less food. Beef uses half our agricultural land to produce 3% of our calories. The world uses a land mass the size of China to grow garbage. Those are the low-hanging fruit.

It’s actually unpopular in environmental circles these days to focus on our personal carbon footprints. That supposedly helps corporate greenwashers and fossil-fueled politicians get us to blame ourselves. But emissions are us! Donald Trump and JBS aren’t forcing the average American to eat three burgers a week, and if we reduced that to two, we’d save a Massachusetts worth of land every year.

Yes, political change matters more, but honestly I think it will be tough for activists to make the political case that emissions are an emergency while simultaneously telling people their individual emissions don’t matter. The famous climate scientist Michael Mann wrote an op-ed telling people they can’t save the planet by going vegan. I mean, sure. But it would help. It’s a drop in the bucket, but drops fill buckets.

We generally try as much as possible to take a non-partisan point of view at this newsletter. But that’s harder to do these days. How much harm is being done to environmentalists progress by the current administration?

Yeah, I’ve always been a nonpartisan factual journalist, but the fact is that the current Republican Party is an enemy of the climate. Some Democrats are better than others—and the food and agriculture issues I write about don’t break down ideological lines—but right now the Democratic Party is the only party interested in climate progress. My macabre joke is that while all my friends from my days working on energy and climate are devastated by all the progress that Trump is rolling back, the good news for food and climate is that there really hasn’t been any progress to roll back.

I don’t want to minimize the damage. It’s terrible and it’s dumb. It’s going to be hard to reverse. But one of the themes of my book is that all these problems are hard; if they were easy, they would’ve been solved, and I wouldn’t have had to spend five years studying them.

We like to encounter our readers - whoever they are - to try to get off the sidelines and engage in the environmental movement. We argue that folks can likely make a bigger difference than they might realize. Your book portrays some heroic and inspiring individuals. Do you have advice for our readers on how they might best engage?

I agree! And while this is literally talking my book, I do think getting involved in food and ag issues is a real opportunity to make a difference, because they’ve been neglected for so long. And honestly the environmental movement has been Pollan-pilled into some suboptimal positions on them, especially for people who really want to think rather than yell. I mean, energy is now a political problem, but food is still an analytical problem. We gotta figure out what to do. I’m biased, of course, but I think these carbohydrate problems are more interesting than hydrocarbon problems.

We like to ask our guests for book recommendations—both environmental and others. Tell us, what should we be reading?

I’ve learned so much from so many classic environmental books: Nature’s Metropolis, Cadillac Desert, The End of Nature, plus more recent stuff from Bill McKibben, David Wallace-Wells, Elizabeth Kolbert and Jeff Goodell. Even when I don’t agree with everything they write. The book that’s got me thinking right now is Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson—partly just because it’s a smart look at the future of progressive policy and politics, but also because I’m thinking so much about food abundance. Ezra and Derek are in my opinion too excited about vertical farms, but the idea that we need to make more food with less land and better technology to avoid hunger and deforestation is so important. Food really is like housing; higher supply means lower prices, denser production means less sprawl. And agricultural sprawl is 40 times worse than urban sprawl!

Thank you, Mike!

Readers, I hope you will check out Mike’s book and learn as much as I did.

Onward,