Books addressing the contribution of humanity’s food systems to the climate crisis have been pouring in over recent years. After reading a few, I grew saturated with information and advice, and began to skip new tomes, but We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, by renowned journalist/author Michael Grunwald, drew me back in. Grunwald has an investigative journalist’s tenacity and thoroughness, and in podcast after podcast, has demonstrated a perceptive bird’s-eye view that appeals to my analytical side. To understand, one must condense and conclude. Anyway, such was my thinking when I commenced this recent book, and from the very first page, it was clear that I had alighted upon a wonderful contribution to Anthropocene understanding. By following a genius climate rationalist, lawyer Tim Searchinger, Grunwald finds the perfect anchor for a depressing tale. The global food system is responsible for about a third of global emissions and no traction at all has occurred in reducing that. The largest impact, it turns out, is due to land use and clearing, with agricultural land ruining the globe. The author pours scorn on biofuels, biomass, and regenerative agriculture (all of them result in more land clearing, at a time when we need to feed evermore people with less land), and charts the wild rise-and-fall market stories of fake meat and lab-cultivated meat. Grunwald finds hope in some high-tech possibilities but none of them cheered me up at all. The author is a feisty, clever stylist and We Are Eating the Earth is a charging bull of a story even as it ultimately depresses. A must-read.
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