In this episode of Talking About the Future, I talk with Michael Grunwald about his new book We Are Eating the Earth on the impact of food production on the global climate. Grunwald is a Polk-Award-winning journalist and a best-selling author. You can follow him on Substack here and on Bluesky here. You can listen to our full, in-depth conversation using the audio player above or on most podcast platforms. Excerpts from our conversation, edited for clarity, are below. If you enjoy our conversation, please share it with others!
So, Mike, in what sense are we eating the Earth?
MG: Well, agriculture is eating the Earth, right? Our food comes from agriculture. So every time you take a bite of a sandwich, if it's beef, you're eating a little bit of the Amazon. The numbers are kind of shocking. Agriculture is tearing down a soccer field worth of rainforest every six seconds. The one that really surprises people is that two out of every five acres of land on our planet is our agricultural land. By contrast, if you think of our cities and suburbs and highways and driveways and all the stuff where we live, that's 1%. As we know, when we take a flight—well, you in Hawaii, when you take a flight out of town, you're just flying over water—but for those of us in the Lower 48, when you're over flyover country, you see the squares and circles and you realize, oh my God, this country is an agriculture country. I think a lot of our story is an agriculture story. From a purely climate perspective, everybody talks about energy. Energy is two-thirds of our climate problem, but food is the other third. While some of it is from the tractors that burn diesel and the farting cows with the methane and fertilizer with the nitrous oxide, the biggest problem is deforestation from our agricultural expansion. And that's us eating the Earth.
The global population is growing. It will probably be 10 billion plus in the middle of the century. We're eating more food individually and eating higher on the food chain. How many more calories are we going to need? Do we even have enough land on the planet to feed everyone?
MG: Well, the current projections are that by 2050 we're going to need about 50% more food in terms of calories. The demand is expected to be about 70% more meat, which is—as I'm sure we'll talk about—even more problematic for the climate. Now look, you never know what's going to happen with Ozempic and global wars and pandemics. It's impossible to know exactly how many people there are going to be. I think even since I started writing the book, the projections for 2050 have gone down from like 9.8 billion to maybe 9.6 billion, and that matters. But, basically, we know we're going to need a lot more food, and right now we're on track to need a lot more land to use it. We're on track to deforest about two more Indias worth of land. If yields don't increase, it would be seven more Indias, which would basically mean we need a Planet B. We don't have seven more Indias worth of land....
Hypothetically—and I understand there are problems with asking everyone to stop eating meat and probably even suggesting this is going to get me canceled—if we all just stopped eating meat would that solve the problem?
MG: It would solve a lot of it. It would make my book a lot less interesting, that's for sure. But, as you say, unfortunately for the world and fortunately for my publisher, we are not going to all stop eating meat. Meat consumption has gone up every year. There was a little blip around the Great Recession because it is just true that the first thing people start doing when they stop being poor is they start eating meat. For our species, it seems to be the welcome to the middle class. So there aren't a lot of scenarios where we just sort of lose our meat tooth. Now I'm excited about the prospects for alternative proteins, for trying to replicate the deliciousness of meat without killing animals and without using three-quarters of the world's agricultural land. There are even nudges that you can use that seem to work to reduce meat consumption. There are public policies—although I did talk to this one Democratic pollster who told me that in all the surveys he's ever done, meat taxes and other restrictions on meat are the least popular policies he's ever polled. So, yeah, it's going to be hard. I gave up beef when I started working on this book because it turns out that beef is like 10 times worse for the climate than chicken or pork, and, of course, like 100 times worse than beans or lentils. Giving up beef is, from a climate perspective, not nearly as good as going vegan. That's the best. But it's about as good as going vegetarian because vegetarians tend to make up what they don't eat in chicken and pork by eating more dairy, and cows are really the problem....
Are people going to read this and be upset that you're advocating for a kind of industrial agriculture that they don't like?
Well, yeah, people are getting pissed already. I did a debate at Berkeley with a professor of agroecology—lovely guy. It was actually a very civil discussion. Alice Waters, the regenerative chef from Chez Panisse, was sitting in the third row, glaring at me the whole time. She just wanted to kill me. Although I will say that she was sitting next to Paul Newman's daughter, whose first name is escaping me, who runs Newman's Own Organic. She came up to me afterwards and gave me a hug and talked about how great it was, and how much she learned, and that we should work together. So, yes, I think a lot of people are going to get pissed, and particularly people who think that there's something natural about the way animals are raised today. A lot of people are not going to like the idea that I'm sort of calling for better factory farms rather than abolishing factory farms. I wrote an essay in The New York Times that they put a kind of provocative headline on that made me sound like I was just the industrial ag guy [“Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food”]. I don't think of myself as the industrial ag guy, although I do think of myself as a little bit of the high-yield ag guy. I think it's really important that we take land seriously, and that it produce a lot of food....
Right now, does public policy give farmers an incentive to produce food in a way that's good for the climate?
Oh, no, it's terrible. I mean, right now you've got $600 billion of annual global subsidies for agriculture, and half of that is just like direct handouts. There are practically no strings attached to any of that money. You can do whatever you want. So I think if you were going to look for places to start trying to make agriculture a little cleaner, you would try to at least say, okay, you can still have your corporate welfare, but at least maybe don't drop so much poop into the rivers. And at least don't waste so much fertilizer, right? Half of all fertilizer is wasted. When you waste fertilizer, it ends up either in the Gulf of Mexico or some other water body or in the air in the form of nitrous oxide emissions. So there's a lot that can be done there in terms of better incentives.
The Biden administration made this unprecedented investment, $23 billion in climate-smart agriculture, and unfortunately it wasn't very climate smart. There were a couple of very exciting projects. There's one that I need to look closer at, but it was just a $7 million grant to some rice farmers to change their water management so that they don't keep their fields flooded as long and they reduce their methane emissions. They cut their methane emissions in half and they've expanded the program that now it's already covering 5% of US rice farmers. This could spread around the world, and rice emissions are like 10% of agricultural emissions, 2% of all emissions. You can imagine this $7 million grant could end up reducing as much emissions as planes emit every year. So that's the kind of thing they should have done, but mostly they just did the classic carbon farming stuff, the regenerative, farm nicer—and I get it. This is what Al Gore loves. This is what Joe Rogan loves. This is what Bobby Kennedy loves. This is what Jason Momoa loves and Sadhguru and Danone and Archer Daniels Midland and PepsiCo and the United Nations and the World Bank. Everybody's all excited about this regenerative ag stuff. I saw this slide deck where the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, which is like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Walmart Foundation, and they were calling for a $4 trillion investment in a global transition to agroecology. Like $4 trillion, that's like a lot of money—in order to try to make yields lower and increase deforestation. It doesn't seem like very good policy.
You can preorder Michael Grunwald’s We Are Eating the Earth here. I depend on reader support, so if you enjoyed this conversation please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Telling the Future. And please share it with others!
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