Grist / Jody Gross; Simon & Schuster
This story was originally published by Grist in partnership with the Chicago public radio station WBEZ. It is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. .
When veteran journalist Michael Grunwald set out to write his third book, he was determined not to produce a “Debbie Downer.” And he hasn’t. That’s surprising considering his latest book, We’re Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System, wrestles with an increasingly thorny question: Can the world’s food systems be transformed in time to feed everyone without destroying the ecosystems that sustain us?
The math is brutal. With the global population projected to hit 10 billion by 2050, experts warn we will need to produce at least 50 percent more calories than we did in 2010. That surge in demand, he writes, is the equivalent of handing a dozen extra Olive Garden breadsticks to everyone alive—every single day.
“I’m an idealistic enough optimist to think that these smart people are going to figure out some cool shit and bring it to scale at some point.”
But the food systems that produce, process, package, and distribute crops and meat will need to accommodate the staggering demand and are already a primary driver of the climate crisis. The industry is currently responsible for about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. That footprint includes everything from methane in cows’ burps and decomposing food in landfills to nitrous oxide released by fertilizers.
To that end, Grunwald’s new book is a sustained search for the ideas that could kick off the next Green Revolution and provide new, climate-friendly ways of producing food. Many of these solutions, including using farmland to grow crops for biofuels instead of food, regenerative agriculture practices that restore carbon in soil, and replacing meat with fermented fungi, have fallen short, failed, or gone bankrupt. Still, Grunwald makes the case that it’s far too early to call it quits.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The book starts with your protagonist, Tim Searchinger, a longtime environmental lawyer on a crusade against ethanol, the biofuel made from crops like corn. What is it about ethanol that so effectively drives home agriculture’s climate problem?
The sort of punch line is that ethanol and other biofuels are eating an area about the size of Texas, and agriculture is eating about 75 Texases worth of the Earth. But what Tim discovered was that the climate analysis of ethanol was ignoring land use. The problem is that when you grow fuel instead of food, you are going to have to replace the food by growing more somewhere else, and it’s probably not going to be a parking lot. It’s going to be a forest, or a wetland, or some other carbon-storing piece of nature. That had been forgotten because the climate analysis just treated land as if it were free. The real message of the book is that land is not free—there’s a lot of it on Earth, but not an infinite amount.
So this gets to your idea that to feed our growing population, we’ll need to increase the yields of the farmland already in production or otherwise risk increasing our agricultural footprint. What does the drive to increase agricultural yield mean for the natural lands we have left?
Two out of every five acres of the planet are cropped or grazed, while only 1 out of every 100 acres is covered by cities or suburbs. Our natural planet has become an agricultural planet, and we’re going to need 50 percent more food by 2050. We’re on track to eat a lot more meat, which is the most land-intensive form of food. So we are on track to deforest another dozen Californias’ worth of land by 2050, and we don’t have another dozen Californias’ worth of forest to spare.
It’s a very simple idea—this notion that we need to make more food with less land—but it’s a really hard thing to do. We’re going to have to reduce our agricultural emissions 75 to 80 percent over the next 25 years, even as we produce more food. That means that we can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.
So far, the Trump administration has increased the renewable fuel mandate—a 20-year-old rule, which requires gasoline sold in the US to be blended with renewable fuels like ethanol—and worked to make it harder to put wind and solar on farmland. Are we digging the hole deeper?
The first thing the Trump administration has done is call for a massive expansion of soy biodiesel, as well as an expansion of sustainable aviation fuel, which is mostly made from corn and soybeans. Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture is on a campaign against the use of farmland for wind and solar. It’s incredibly short-sighted, because even though it is true that there is a cost to using land to make electricity rather than making food, it’s extraordinarily efficient compared to other forms of land use for energy, such as biofuels.
Because we are so far away from figuring out the food and climate problem, one of the things we really need to do is accelerate the parts of the energy and climate problem that we have figured out—particularly solar, and wind as well. Those are really efficient and quite cheap ways of solving our energy and climate problems. Obviously, Trump’s going the opposite direction.
You seem to have a real appreciation for the kind of output industrial agriculture can crank out. Where does Big Ag fit into the future of our food system?
Look, they treat people badly. They treat animals horribly. They often make a really big mess. They’re responsible for a lot of water pollution and air pollution. They use too many antibiotics. They’re always fighting climate action. Their politics really suck, right?
People hate factory farms, I get it. But factories are good at manufacturing a lot of stuff, and factory farms are good at manufacturing a lot of food, and agriculture’s number one job over the next 25 years is going to be manufacturing even more food than we’ve made over the last 12,000.
I don’t say that these industrial approaches are necessarily the only way to get high yields. I went to Brazil, and I saw how some ranches there are using some regenerative practices that are helping them get really kick-ass yields—and if they’re five times as productive as a degraded ranch, then they’re using only one-fifth as much of the Amazon. We’re going to need to make even more food with even less land and hopefully less mess as well.
You explore lots of big climate solutions, everything from plans to grow food indoors in vertical farms to meat alternatives made from fermented fungi. Each has hit a wall. Do you see this as a failure of political will or that people’s food preferences and personal diets are harder to change than previously imagined?
I wrote about two dozen really promising solutions, and none of them has panned out yet. That is a bummer. I say that kind of laughing; I do believe that human beings kind of suck at making sacrifices for the good of the planet, but we’re really good at inventing stuff. And some of these solutions, whether it’s alternative fertilizers made from gene-edited microbes, [using] alternative pesticides made from using the mRNA technology behind the COVID-19 vaccine to constipate beetles to death, or these guys who are trying to use artificial intelligence and supercomputers and genomics to reinvent photosynthesis, there are really smart people working on this stuff.
One thing you could also say is that a lot of government money went into helping to solve the energy problem, and you don’t see that right now in food. But these are solvable problems, and there are a lot of people smarter than me who think that there are technological solutions that can really move the needle. I’m an honest enough reporter to have to point out that none of these really has any traction yet, but I’m an idealistic enough optimist to think that these smart people are going to figure out some cool shit and bring it to scale at some point.
