Book Review: "We Are Eating the Earth"

A provocative book takes on the global food system's climate problem

Some months back, a journalist named Michael Grunwald with whom I’d exchanged a few emails mentioned to me that he had a book coming out on agriculture and climate and he hoped I’d review it. I had to disappoint him by telling him I wasn’t writing many book reviews these days, but I eventually got a chance to hear him talk at an event in DC, where I bought his book. Now that I’ve read it, even though the window for placing reviews in media outlets has long passed, I thought I’d add my few cents. After all, if nature — the theme of this (too-infrequently published — I’m sorry!) newsletter — is to survive on this human-dominated planet, it must find ways to coexist with agriculture.

Grunwald’s title is, unconventionally, a declarative sentence: We Are Eating the Earth. It’s a sentence that makes you sit up and take note. We are probably all aware at some level that the production of our food harms the environment, though we may prefer not to think too much about it. And as a journalist who has covered many of the topics Grunwald does, I should be more aware than most.

Yet even I had never put the full picture together the way Grunwald does. He emphasizes that while the farms that feed the world’s 8-billion-plus people might not consume the entire Earth (the title notwithstanding), they cover 40 percent, or two-fifths, of our planet’s land area — a sobering figure, to say the least. More sobering still, that figure is growing as the global population continues to grow and more people become wealthy enough to eat meat. And when it comes to food, meat — beef in particular — is by far the most land intensive, and the worst for the climate.

My favorite part of the book starts on page 240, when Grunwald whisks us off to Brazil. I’ve read countless odes to the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest and impassioned pleas to end deforestation, yet I’d rarely read about the farms that have displaced Brazilian forests. I was excited that Grunwald found Brazilian farmers implementing cutting-edge practices that allow them to produce more food on a given amount of land, thereby reducing the need to cut down additional forests. Grunwald then introduces us to some American farmers doing the same thing.

I found these sections especially illuminating because I spent two seasons of my pre-writer life working on small organic-ish vegetable farms that are the diametrical opposite of the mechanized mega-operations Grunwald visits. While sowing seeds and picking produce by hand, my colleagues and I congratulated ourselves for being environmentally and morally superior to industrial farms, but Grunwald forcefully challenges these notions. Reading his book, I found myself grudgingly admiring the sophistication of GPS-guided tractors, precision fertilizer application and other tech tools farmers are using to eke ever greater yields out of farmland, while looking through somewhat less starry eyes at the intense tillage and laborious weeding my former farmer colleagues and I practiced. (But only somewhat less starry eyes — I plan to keep growing my own veggies and frequenting my local farmers market!)

Sadly, Grunwald’s fascinating and provocative romp through global farm country lasts only 26 pages, whereas the book itself is 334 pages long.

Perhaps half of the rest of the book offers the reader a parade of entrepreneurs who promise and mostly fail to save the world by inventing foods or other high-tech solutions to the Earth-consumption crisis. Many of these stories, on their own, are quite interesting: for example, I now understand why alternative-meat companies such as Beyond and Impossible burst onto the scene six or seven years ago and then all but vanished. I also really enjoyed reading about Pongamia, a hardy legume-producing shrub I’d never heard of that truly seems like a miracle plant. And even though I’ve written enough about soil carbon that Grunwald kindly credited me in his source list, his book covered the various players and climate-saving schemes in this area in more depth than I have, and I learned a lot.

Unfortunately for the book and the planet, many of these companies and schemes had folded or were well on their way to folding by the time the book came out. Their stories followed a familiar formula: Cocky entrepreneur (almost inevitably male) invents a product to save the world, raises millions of dollars in venture capital, hits the “trough of disillusionment” when it turns out to be really hard to get people to change their diets en masse, company loses nearly all of its value. In the end, I would have preferred to spend more time with farmers actually producing food and less with tech bros flailing about in their attempts to do so.

The other half-or-so of the book exhaustively follows the career of a headstrong, highly self-confident environmental lawyer-turned-scientist named Tim Searchinger. Searchinger is the kind of person who will cold call you in the middle of the afternoon and bend your ear for an hour why you should cover his latest report. I know this because he’s done this to me on a couple of occasions.

Grunwald does probably as good a job as anyone could of making a compelling lead character out of a scientist whose main activities seem to be researching obscure topics, penning 500-page reports and arguing with people. Searchinger is clearly a smart and innovative thinker who has poked holes in a fair amount of “green” puffery, called out some good-sounding ideas that turned out to be very bad and pursued a more data-driven approach to the problem of Earth-eating than most — especially those pushing one political agenda or another.

In particular, Searchinger seems to have put the notion of “indirect land use change” on the climate policy agenda — namely that when someone uses land inefficiently in one place, say to produce biofuels or farm without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, new farmland must be created somewhere else. And that creation often involves clearing forests or other natural ecosystems, with associated harms to the climate.

Choosing Searchinger as protagonist also creates several challenges for Grunwald. For one, Searchinger’s I’m-right-and-everyone-else-is-wrong shtick, even if justified in many cases, gets grating after a while.

Secondly, Searchinger spent much of his early career fighting to save wetlands and then fighting against biofuels — the growing of crops to fuel cars, trucks and power plants. Grunwald devotes the first third of his book — more than 100 pages — to these battles, which feels like a long digression from the book’s main subject: food. Ultimately we learn that biofuels, for all their faults, affect the climate far less than food production. Much of this early scene-setting material could likely have been condensed to speed us along to the meat of the book, pun intended.

Probably most significantly, by the end of the book, it seems Searchinger has mostly been frustrated in his efforts. He has gotten some wetlands protected and restored, helped prevent Massachusetts from cutting down forests for energy and pushed Danish agriculture policy in a more climate-friendly direction. Beyond that, Searchinger seems to have done any number of brilliant analyses but lost most of his real-world battles, which he more or less admits by anointing himself the “patron saint of almost-lost causes.”

However brilliant he is, Searchinger struggles to persuade people with real power to adopt his ideas. Perhaps it’s his personality, or perhaps it’s just really hard to get people to care about how their food choices may affect land thousands of miles away and atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases they can’t see or measure. Grunwald hints at this struggle in places, but I think he could have productively explored why someone as smart, passionate and driven to change the world for the better hasn’t made more of an impact.

Grunwald also seems to view Searchinger’s findings almost as gospel truths. While I am persuaded that Searchinger is right significantly more than he’s wrong and has made unique and valuable contributions to the conversation around climate and land use, his analyses are not always accepted even by his scientist colleagues. For example, a Searchinger-led paper arguing that logging’s climate impact has massively been underestimated — which Grunwald mentions — was critiqued by another group of experts, something Grunwald does not mention.

The broader context of a lot of this argumentation is a long-running debate between land “sparers” — those who argue for producing as much food as possible on a given amount of land so the rest can be left wild — and land “sharers” — those who want to use the same land to both produce food (generally with lower yields) and provide habitat for wildlife. Searchinger is a hard-core land sparer, and he makes a strong case. But there are also compelling arguments for some amount of land sharing — for example, many trees and shrubs, while perhaps not as brutally efficient on a calorie-per-acre basis as a Midwestern corn field, can produce substantial food and/or feed livestock while absorbing carbon. The land-sharing side of the debate gets shorter shrift in this book. All told, I think Grunwald could have benefited from some critical distance from his main source and done more to situate Searchinger within the larger scientific and policy discourse.

As far as writing style, Grunwald is a disarmingly informal writer and can be quite funny. I laughed out loud at lines such as comparing cattle vocalizations to “the ‘uhh’ middle-aged dads make when getting up from their comfy chairs.” Grunwald has a special talent for deftly capturing someone’s personality with a pithy, striking phrase or two — a good thing, given the many and sundry characters he introduces us to. At other times I wish he had tried a bit harder to elevate his prose above the level of dudes bullshitting over beers, but that could just be my personal taste.

One last quibble is that Grunwald seems to have a particular beef (no pun intended — or maybe pun intended) with Michael Pollan, whom he seems to almost single-handedly blame for the fact that many people buy food from small, organic and/or otherwise inefficient farms that Grunwald (following Searchinger) views as a collective scourge upon the planet. This seems unfair on several levels. First of all, Pollan is hardly the first to celebrate boutique farms. Why not rant against Wendell Berry, or any number of earlier small-farm / pastoral agriculture romanticizers?

Secondly, reading Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma as nothing more than an “elegy to…small pastoral farmlands,” as Grunwald does, misses much of the point of the book, in my opinion. Yes, Pollan does admire a grass-fed animal farm he visits in Virginia. But that admiration is embedded in a broader and deeper exploration of the challenges and consequences involved in choosing how and what to eat in the modern world.

Lastly, even if some of Pollan’s readers — me included — have been inspired to shop at farmers markets, the vast majority of us still feed ourselves mainly with industrial food produced on efficient, conventional farms. Beyond a residue of small pastoral farmlands kept afloat by bleeding-heart liberals with disposable income, efficiency has largely won the game, at least here in the U.S. where Pollan has had the most influence.

Nonetheless, Searchinger, and by proxy Grunwald, seem to want to push efficiency’s dominance even further, shoving aside all values except for the number of molecules of greenhouse gases emitted in the production of a given unit of food. The last chapter of the book is essentially a lament that this kind of cold, quantitative, climate-centric approach has largely failed to move the needle. Grunwald is also clearly — and understandably — chagrined that the Trump administration is gleefully dismantling much of the halting political progress that had been made, while on the cultural front, climate advocates seem to be losing ground to forces such as meatfluencers and the MAHA movement.

The backlash may disappoint those of us who care about the climate and natural ecosystems, but it doesn’t surprise me. Eating is, after all, not just a way to supply our bodies with calories. It’s fundamental to how we see ourselves and define ourselves, much more so than other product classes like appliances or furniture. We impose all sorts of values on our food — environmental, yes, but also cultural, health, social, political, even spiritual. We choose local tomatoes, organic eggs and grass-fed beef not just because we believe (correctly or not) that they’re better for the environment or for us, but also because they represent values that for most people are more concrete and salient than the state of the global climate.

Finally and at a macro level, one might wonder, even if agriculture around the world were to become maximally efficient, would the spared land really return to nature? Or would it instead be used to produce (and likely waste) even more food, fuel and fiber? This would be an example of the so-called Jevons paradox that explains why, for example, energy use often increases even as societies become more energy efficient. While it’s clear that agricultural efficiency, like energy efficiency, has many benefits, it’s less clear whether saving the global climate is one of them.

Despite these quibbles, I do recommend this book. It did the two things I ask of any book I devote time to: It entertained me and made me smarter. Like everyone else whose brain has been semi-ruined by social media, truncated news stories and other technological assaults on our attention spans, I find it harder and harder to get through an entire book these days. Many a half-read book sits on my shelf, provoking guilt. But I made it through this one in one week while on vacation. That by itself is a selling point.

And even if I didn’t always agree with Grunwald’s challenges to my beliefs — admittedly sometimes perhaps more sentimental than rational — I enjoyed grappling with them. It’s good to put one’s biases to the test now and then. If nothing else, I now feel better prepared to defend my local and organic food choices should the need arise. And because Grunwald tells us the most climate-friendly things we can do food-wise are to eat less meat (especially beef) and waste less food, I also got to indulge in a bit of self-righteousness, since I already do much less of both than the average American!

Bottom line: Grunwald’s deep research, globe-trotting reporting, juicy insider gossip and lively writing combine to make We Are Eating the Earth a worthy read for anyone interested in pondering the impact of their food.