We Are Eating the Earth
We Are Eating the Earth, Michael Grunwald. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9781982160074) 2025.
Summary: The sustainability of our food system, feeding earth’s population, and the impact it has on our climate
You’ve probably heard this before. We can only live a few minutes without oxygen and fall unconscious in seconds. We can only live a few days without water. And we can only live a month more or less without food. This book is about the third of these. It is incredible, but with proper distribution, we are able to feed a global population of over 8 billion human beings as well as the other creatures with which we share the planet. To feed the Earth’s population, a land mass equivalent to all of Europe and Asia is already devoted to food production.
The rub in all this is that we are continuing to consume more of the Earth to accomplish this vital end. That means clearing forests and other uncultivated land. Not only does this remove the trees that absorb carbon dioxide and exude oxygen in far greater quantities than our crops. Our food production contributes a quarter of all greenhouse emissions. This includes tractors, fertilizers (that sustain high yields), and livestock burps and farts, a source of methane that is worse than CO2 . Decaying food waste generates additional emissions.
The author’s deep dive into this subject came when he called Tim Searchinger, a Princeton research scientist who began his career as a lawyer, to factcheck an article. Searchinger will feature prominently throughout this book. It had to do with quitting meat. He asked Searchinger if meat is really that bad. Searchinger’s answer boiled down to this. “It’s land….Meat uses too much land. just like ethanol.” Livestock currently use the equivalent of fifty Texases and pound for pound, emit fifty times more greenhouse gasses than coal.
And the ethanol remark leads to an account of how Searchinger fought a battle to convince governments that ethanol made from corn would result did not come free. Land is not free and land is needed for food as well as fuel production, and is far more efficient at the first of these. If land is taken out of food production, other land would be put into food production. For example, forests, bogs, previously “marginal” lands.
Subsequent chapters look at other examples of flawed reasoning that didn’t take land into account. For example, he chronicles the biomass loophole European nations fell into in their plans to convert to woodburning, that actually resulted in net increases in carbon emissions. He looks at “carbon farming,” the problem being that it actually removed land from food production.
He considers what we eat. Basically we need to eat food that uses less land. And we need to produce more food on that land. He shows that at least some forms of sustainable agriculture result both in lower yields and use more land.
Then he turns efforts to create meat alternatives and the failures to come up with marketable products. He looks at ways to reduce the land use and emissions of livestock as well as new developments in producing more on less land. One point Grunwald makes is that the amount of research money devoted to this sector is still a pittance.
At the end of the book, he summarizes the actions Searchinger recommends to reform our food system in four statements. Produce more food per acre. Protect key habitats and keep them off limits to food production. Reduce our demand for meat, biofuels, and other land consuming products. Restore unproductive lands to nature.
In conclusion, he advocates both systemic change and personal action. Each of us is eating the earth and how we eat matters. I’ve seen how concerned citizens can protect key habitats. Several years ago, local residents fought off an effort to develop a wetland that was supposed to be set aside “in perpetuity.” It continues to do all the good things wetland do. At very least, this book is making me look, as the new year approaches, how we might change our own patterns of consumption and food waste. As the author notes, even drops fill buckets.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.