We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate

by Michael Grunwald

From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate the fight to fix our food system.

Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, an ingenious phrase coined by Michael Grunwald, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems.

In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It’s an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it’s also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done—and trying to do it.

Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger. He chronicles Searchinger’s uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations—through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Environment, Food, Politics, Climate Change, Audiobook

384 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2025

Reviews

[Meagan]

Yeah once again just kind of like… if you care about the environment and climate change and the degradation of our natural systems in any way or form… grow up and stop eating meat… or eat way less of it… (not the main takeaway from this book and I knowwwww focusing blame on individual actions is just corporate diversion but as long as factory farms and industrial ag form the cornerstone of our food systems my point still stands).
But anyway- refreshing to read a “green” book that actually has a mostly correct take on biofuels (IMO). Also feeling a little snarky and frustrated that this type of book (usually) can only identify and propose solutions in a capitalist vacuum / echo chamber, as if that isn’t the reason we have ended up here in the first place. This is the type of thing I just have to let myself care less about because it is all-consuming otherwise. Sigh

[Ryan]

Thank you to LibraryThing and Michael Grunwald for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review.

Every few years something causes me to stop eating meat. Sometimes it's a book, sometimes a movie, sometimes a conversation with a friend. Sometimes it's because of animal cruelty, sometimes health, and sometimes it's for the sake of the planet we live on. I've always gone back to it after a fairly short amount of time, only to be reminded again of why it's not such a good idea. Halfway through We Are Eating the Earth I knew I was about to embark on a non-meat diet again. The book also helped me broaden my views of climate change. I've always thought of emissions as the main contributor and thing to focus on, but the way Grunwald presents land issues caused me to expand my mind.

Most of what I've read on climate change has been about cars, planes, etc, and the planet-destroying fumes they release. I remember when the biofuel boom happened and how exciting it was that we could run combustion engines on corn, releasing much less emissions. What I don't remember ever hearing about back then is how, if we dedicate a bunch of corn that was previously used to feed people and cattle, to fuel, we would need to replace that amount of corn. This means clearing new land and then all the heavy equipment and runoff that's involved with growing more food. Looking at it from that point of view (the same amount of grain is required to fill the tank of a Ford Explorer and to feed a human being for a year), it's hard not to change your mind.

Grunwald does a great job of presenting the issues; he's a journalist and is adept at writing about complex topics in an easy to understand way, backed up by a ton of facts. However, his solutions all seem to rely on capitalism and the ruling class. The only to get people to stop eating so much meat is to present them with an alternative that tastes good and is affordable. The only way to do the research quickly and proficiently enough (or to get anyone to help you) is to rely on corporations and the government handing out enough money. Then, not only are you in debt to these evil bastards, but you need to turn a profit really quick. The only way to turn a profit with these types of things is to keep increasing the scale, so that the prices drop to affordable and you sell enough to make a profit, which requires even more money, and the cooperation of distributors, retailers, the meat industry, law makers, and more. This has prevented any kind of alternative meat from taking a hold, and Grunwald doesn't offer any other solutions that think outside of the box.

He also tells the story of biofuels, fake meat, etc, through the biographies of a few men. This not only makes average people feel like they can't make a difference, but it also encourages us to wait for a hero to solve all our problems. This solution feels similar to another he offers: tax airplanes that continue to use fuel and tax meat. If that happens, the corporations will pass the tax onto the customer and the only people who will be able to afford to fly or eat meat will be the people who are already contributing to the destruction of humankind the most. The only way we're going to be able to make this huge shift is through community and the destruction of capitalism.

Maybe the biggest issue I had was when he was talking about meeting with a senator from the great state of New Jersey. Grunwald uses the term “no corn New Jersey.” No corn in New Jersey? That is probably the most ingorant line in the whole book, and it's not just because I'm from there. It's the garden state for fuck's sake.

But, we agree on his main point—the way humanity eats meat is not sustainable or ok. It's cruel and inefficient, and doesn't seem like it's going to change any time soon. People won't stop eating meat until they are presented with a reasonable alternative; kind of how people are buying less gas vehicles and making the switch to electric. In fact, when I rented a car recently, electric options were significantly cheaper than regular old gas and diesel.

Eat the Earth did was it was supposed to do though—it made me think deeply and make an important change in my life, and it gave me a bit more knowledge with which to change other people's minds. I also agree that what we're doing isn't working, I believe that if all we're doing is making things more expensive for poor people, we're doing it wrong. We are indeed eating this planet and a real solutions is going to require more than biofuels, billionaires, and bullshit.

[Max broad]

AS a long-time environmentalist I absolutely loved this book. Grunwald (author) and Searchinger (subject) are brazen enough to take on what the environmental movement has been underestimating for years: the massive climate impact of food production.

Our food systems are probably the most destructive force on the planet when you take into account climate pollution, biodiversity loss, water pollution, and air pollution (my words, not Grunwald’s). This book dives into why that is and cleverly frames the solution around efficiency: pointing out that the more food we can produce on less land, the more land we can keep in its natural state as forest, grassland, etc. And in its natural state is the peak form (for carbon storage, biodiversity, resilience, etc). I really hadn’t thought of the issue in this way—Grunwald even bucks popular climate ‘solutions’ such as regenerative agriculture in ways that deeply surprised me.

The book overlooks one technology that is devastatingly inefficient, though: the animal. As the author discusses, raising an animal for food means feeding crops to animals who *very* poorly convert those nutrients into muscle. How can I say Grunwald overlooks this when he spent half the book talking about it? Because he continues with the status quo perspective that people will continue to eat copious amounts of meat, and that it is the agriculture industry that should shift to accommodate climate goals. This is realistic, but it hardly fits with the stubborn “refusal to read the room” attitude portrayed in the book. We know that one of our best opportunities to reduce carbon pollution, writ large, is eating ‘plant rich diets’. One can still eat animal protein, but it is so damn destructive for the planet that reductions in consumption really matter. I would say the argument for demand-side solutions is undervalued. And, fair enough, Americans are protective of our meat-eating ways.

My two critiques of the book: 1) it is written by a white man and is mostly about white men (as is the author of this review). I know that reflects the state of the industry, but it also perpetuates it. If we want a world where everybody’s voices are equally valued, it is going to take intentionality to level out this imbalance. 2) I found the first few chapters to be quite slow. Perhaps that is because I had previously worked in that field so much of the content was not new to me. If you find this to be the case, keep reading—when the topic becomes about food, the read is riveting!

I highly recommend this book as one of the most important works on climate this decade. This angle of the climate conversation is deeply overlooked, and Grunwald will be remembered for taking on this topic when few others were doing so. As Searchinger’s analysis points out, we cannot meet the Paris Agreement goals without addressing emissions from food systems. Read the book and decide for yourself what needs to be done!

[Sarah Jensen]

Book Review: We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate by Michael Grunwald - A Public Health Practitioner’s Perspective

Michael Grunwald’s We Are Eating the Earth is a galvanizing exposé that left me equal parts horrified and hopeful—horrified by the food system’s staggering contributions to climate collapse and public health crises, yet hopeful at the grassroots and policy innovations fighting back. As a public health professional, I found myself scribbling furious margin notes, alternating between despair at systemic failures and exhilaration at solutions hiding in plain sight.

Emotional Impact: From Soil to Soul
Grunwald’s visceral storytelling—linking deforestation for cattle ranches to zoonotic pandemics, or nitrogen runoff to dead zones in vulnerable communities—triggered memories of pediatric asthma cases near factory farms and diabetic patients trapped in food deserts. The chapter on industrial agriculture’s antibiotic overuse (a ticking time bomb for antimicrobial resistance) filled me with professional shame: Why aren’t we treating Big Ag like Big Tobacco? Yet his profiles of regenerative farmers and urban growers reignited my conviction that food justice is health justice.

Key Public Health Insights
-Food Systems as Determinants: Grunwald masterfully connects dots between monoculture crops, soil depletion, and malnutrition—framing industrial agriculture as a vector for chronic disease.
-Climate-Health Nexus: The book’s global perspective (e.g., Sub-Saharan Africa’s climate-vulnerable food systems) underscores how food insecurity and infectious diseases will explode without systemic change.
-Policy Levers: From subsidy reforms to “soil-to-school” programs, Grunwald spotlights interventions public health should champion alongside clinical care.

Constructive Criticism
-Missing Voices: While Grunwald critiques corporate power brilliantly, the book could center more Indigenous and Global South perspectives on agroecology.
-From Farm to Clinic: A chapter translating food system solutions into healthcare actions (e.g., prescribing produce partnerships) would bridge gaps for practitioners.

Final Thoughts
This book is a defibrillator for public health’s climate complacency. It left me convinced that until we treat soil like a vital organ and food as medicine, we’re merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.5/5) – A rousing, research-packed call to action.

Gratitude: Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for the review copy. In a field obsessed with “lifestyle interventions,” Grunwald forces us to confront the systems making healthy choices impossible.

[Sara Milligan]

I am behind on reviews! Here's one:

1. Yep, yep, oof, and yep

2. Grunwald knows his way around a simile

3. Whole section on cow poo littered with "BS"es... can't knock that

4. So many comments on the jawlines of upstart execs? Seemed like a bit at one point?

Squarely skeptical-hopeful and not saccharinely hippie like I was expecting. I now have a slightly higher regard for the beyond burger.

[Bob]

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.

_______________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.

[Matthew Fitzgerald]

Normally, I like when journalists turn to the longer form of a book to explore complex ideas and give detailed analysis of important issues. Unfortunately, this book (and Grunwald’s writing) does not play to those strengths. Instead, we explore complex ideas here with … exhaustingly detailed, biographies of individuals, companies, and Silicon Valley venture capital investment fads. Do we really need to learn about the vicissitude of every plant-based meat start up in the last 10 to 15 years to understand how little progress we’ve made in weaning ourselves off of an animal-based diet? Do I really need to learn about the boyhood travels, college career, and document-reading habits of Tim Searchinger to understand his contributions to the legal framework (and, now, of environmental science) of land use and biofuels? Why cover such things in paragraphs, Grunwald seems to decide in this book, when pages and pages will do?

In addition to being overloaded with trivia and marginally useful details (that frequently drown out the larger issues at hand for pages at a time), the author brings a glib “magazine writer” style to this book. For all of its engagement with the science and detailed arguments, Grunwald all too frequently summarizes people with a memorable but idiotic quote, an argument with a lazy but striking one-off example, an entire industry or technological trend with a pithy internet meme of a sentence. Maybe that’s making these ideas accessible, but to me, it just made the tone of the book very annoying.

Despite all of these criticisms, I did find the book worth reading. Grunwald shows just how poorly suited biofuels are to meeting any of our energy need. He effectively shows just how nascent our solutions for agricultural emissions are so far. Despite my annoyances, the book does succeed in waving a big red flag for readers that we really do need to pay attention to this. And it’s a good grounding for anyone coming to this complex topic for the first time, and leaves readers with some understanding that solving ag emissions is as critical to the emissions equation and climate change challenge as renewable electricity or transportation electrification.

So, yes, I recommend this book. I just wish that recommendation came without that bitter tinge of bile in the back of my throat because of how the book is written.

[Kristine Linquist]

Climate change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Two thirds of the problem is from burning fossil fuels and one third is from land use and our food system. This book is about the problem of land use. A blurb inside the cover of the book says “…the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to make it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land.” Here are some of what the author discusses.

Corn Ethanol and biofuels are a climate disaster: Gas and diesel emit LESS carbon emissions that corn ethanol or other biofuels. Why? Because each acre used for ethanol means one less acre for food. That raises the price of corn and causes people to clear more forests, wetland and grasslands to grow corn. Those natural areas are the best way to absorb carbon and they are destroyed to create agricultural land. Using ethanol is mandated by our government, unfortunately, and supported by both Democratic and Republican politicians who want to please farmers. Many Republican counties are now restricting the use of farmland for solar and wind projects, but corn ethanol is 100 times more land-intensive than solar.

The message of the book is that land is not free – this is called the “carbon opportunity cost of using land.” This is an economic term the says that carbon storage is lost when land is used for agriculture instead of allowing it to revert to forests or grasslands or peat lands which can absorb more cardon dioxide. In the case of ethanol, people thought ethanol was green. We were just getting energy from the sun and putting it in our cars. But the cost is that food was no longer grown on that land and more land had to be cleared for food.

Meat: Eating beef is bad for the climate because it clears so much forest, wetlands and prairie for pastureland, as more beef is eaten each year. Much of the row crops we grow are fed to animals before we eat the animals to get the nutrients. Scientists have been trying to find various meat substitutes, made from plant materials or by growing meat in a lab, and skipping the long process of raising animals. These meats may be appreciated by vegans or vegetarians, but until meat substitutes taste as good as meat and are cheaper, the meat-eating public will not switch, especially those people who are coming out of poverty and finally able to afford meat. Eating less beef will help, but we need more than that for those meat eaters who love it. The author mentions research that chicken and pork production has less emissions.

A ranch in Brazil uses a combination of regenerative practices and industrial practices and has a yield seven times higher than many other ranches. They have healthy soil and feed more beef on less land. That keeps more of the Amazon from being cut down. Ranchers who just let their cattle wander all summer have more degraded lands and low yields, causing more forests or grasslands to be converted to pasture, as their own pasture is worn out. There was a story about a huge industrial finishing lot in Colorado. I have always seen these portrayed as bad factory farms, but since all the nearby ranchers bring their cattle to this lot for finishing, the large lot has more money to take better care of the animals, keep the manure cleared away each day and monitor the health of each head of beef. I like grass fed beef, but if the yield per acre is low, then even if the soil and biodiversity is healthier, there may be a financial incentive to clear more natural land for bigger profits.

Soil and carbon farming: I have been a fan of regenerative agriculture, which boost life in dead soils, and that boosts biodiversity around farms and pastures. However, what is good for the soil, may not actually do much for the climate of the planet. According to this book, not much carbon is added to the soil by no-till farming or cover crops because the soil can only absorb so much carbon without extra nitrogen fertilizer being added. The way we add extra nitrogen is to leave buffers of native plants along the edges of fields or next to streams, and letting trees and shrubs grow in unproductive areas of the farm. So, what is actually adding carbon to the farm soil is Not farming the land. We need to get the same yield as industrial farming or more land will be cleared to get the same yield. The author mentions a product called Proven. It is reengineered nitrogen fixing soil microbes that can be spoon fed to crops during the growing season. Even if fertilizer is washed away in rains storms these microbes keep feeding nitrogen to the plants. This product is starting to be used by farmers with positive yields.

We need to produce more food on less land and reduce our demand for new farmland. We can reduce our demand by eating less beef, wasting less food, using less bioenergy, and making more food on existing farmland.

Politics and Financing: The author mentions many scientists who are researching all kinds of solutions to try to make our farmlands more productive and deal with droughts and other issues farmers face. Very little of the financing for solving the climate crises has gone to food research, while much has gone to energy innovations. Most farmers do not want to stop growing corn for ethanol and they have a strong political lobby. Politics creates incentives, like crop insurance that pays people to plant crops in unproductive areas of the farm that are too wet, for example. An incentive to pay for farmers to produce more food with less land is a possibility.
Yes, we want corporations to take responsibilities for the problems they are creating, but we still need to urge corporations and politicians to do the right things. Eating less beef and asking our politicians to not subsidize ethanol may not seem like we are doing much, but thousands and tens of thousands of us taking action will be noticed.

[Andrew Fung]

This was an important and very informative read. I have long heard about the incredible climate impact that food has on the planet but have never really bothered to dig into what it actually looked like and how it fit into the bigger picture. This book does a great job at hammering home its central points about the crisis we face and how we’re blowing it with our response right now. I liked getting to dig into all of the various technologies and movements which are underway today (the section on cultivated meat was especially interesting). I found the first quarter of the book on biofuels to be a slog when I was reading it, but I can see in hindsight how important it was structurally to understanding the common themes and failures which stretch across the sector.

It is understandable, but nevertheless frustrating, to see how misguided so many attempts to address the climate ag problem are today. The way we think about food is shaped by aesthetics and the value we put in the vision of folksy, salt of the earth farmers, regardless of the facts about inefficiency compared to high tech big ag. Trying to persuade people of this point is incredibly challenging, but also of the utmost importance and urgency given the situation we face.

I really appreciated the point made during the epilogue about the relationship between individual agency, responsibility, and political persuasion. It’s easy to throw our hands up and accept the argument that we are doomed, with nothing to do as individuals to reverse the course. But change is possible, and making the right arguments politically and choices scientifically give us the best fighting chance to put ourselves on a better path.

[Laurenhat]

I learned a lot about what is most effective in fighting climate change and food waste. And I felt inspired, in spite of the huge challenges and a bunch of bummers covered by the book. It's inspiring that we can still make high impact changes to land use and agriculture policies & technologies, and that we are already making big improvements in some cases. And it's inspiring that a few people really digging into the data and recognizing issues with mathematical modeling can change minds over time (even though it's really difficult!).

The book could have been somewhat better written/edited; there were times when it felt too repetitive, too in the weeds, and overly focused on one person. But overall I'm very glad of the time I spent listening to the audiobook. And I want to do follow up reading, and also change some of my own habits.

[Kenneth]

A thought-provoking look at the assumptions and practicalities of biofuels, plant-based foods, GMOs, and agriculture. I think the book would have been better served by focusing on ideas rather than individuals, but Grunwald's approach is certainly more memorable. Much time is spent, though, on the biography of a certain Tim Searchinger, a person whose challenge to scientific consensus and lobbying behemoths makes for a gripping narrative but whose story muddied the coherence of the book's arguments. The fault of the book lies in its lack of self-knowledge—is it biography, essay, or how-to (think)? Its excellence in its ability to challenge fixed assumptions (even, when it comes to biofuels and ethanol, assumptions that Grunwald shows well have shaped public policy for the worse).

[Susan M.]

Such an important discussion. I know the food side including the players well and the author did an accurate job of reporting it. I am less familiar with biofuels and regenerative ag so learned some content there. The early parts of the book were a slog for me but it got better as I moved through it to the end.

[Amy Finley]

Very informative and very dense. I appreciated the overall argument and learned a lot; but I often got overwhelmed by the science. Although I persisted, and I am glad that I did, I think will get in the way of some folks’ enjoyment of this book.

[cj ye]

Not a fan of the writing style. And the framing of it loses its way. The message and content is great and I’m glad to be informed. Although it got repetitive.

[Shannon]

❌️ Overly long.

"The key, as always, will be to get the incentives right - so farmers can make more money by making more food with less land; forests are worth more standing and storing carbon than logged and burned; and nations and corporations that want to shrink their carbon footprints get rewarded for shrinking the eating-the-earth problem. None of that will happen without better funding and better policy. But it also won't happen as long as land is considered free."'

[Joel D]

Land is not free.

We are Eating the Earth is a book about land use. Specifically, the amount of land used for agriculture, which needs to fall radically even as food production rises and climate impacts hit agricultural yields worldwide. It’s a big challenge and to be honest the book doesn’t leave you with a great deal of hope!

The book is by journalist Michael Grunwald, and it is largely about Timothy Searchinger’s work on land use. You get the vibe that the journalist met Searchinger at some point and was pretty wowed by him and was keen to write a book that is in some part a tribute to Searchinger’s work but also, importantly, trying to educate a broader lay audience about the issues that Searchinger has spent his life working on.

And what the book says is this: land is not free.

Where the book begins, climate accounting is really stuffed, because it treats land as free. But in fact land is not free and has an opportunity cost, and when you take this into account things change a lot.

The book starts with biofuels as an example. You can grow corn, use it to make ethanol, and mix that in with liquid fuels to power cars. This is a bit similar to “E10” in Australian petrol stations. This in theory reduces emissions.

Now, there are a whole lot of questions about the energy used to grow that corn and ship it and process it, and you can calculate all the climate impacts of that. But Searchinger’s key insight is that there is a much bigger issue which is the land used to grow that corn, and the indirect land use effects of shifting the corn to biofuel production.

Let’s imagine the corn was previously used as food, whether for people or animals. If, instead, the farmer uses it for ethanol, the demand for feed corn doesn’t just disappear – it’s still in the system. So the indirect effect of one farmer shifting their land from food to biofuel production is that another farmer somewhere else in the world shifts land to food production. And in many cases the land that is shifted to food production would in fact be land, such as forest, that was previously doing a great job of carbon sequestration. So the induced deforestation from biofuels wipes out any climate benefit from reducing tailpipe emissions.

This is the core idea of the book, and it applies in multiple areas. Basically, unless carbon accounting considers the opportunity cost of land (land is not free!) there are several things that seem good for the climate that are actually bad. Biomass – using land to grow things to burn for energy – is another example.

The upshot of this is that we want to use much less land for agriculture so we can hand more land back to nature so it can help with carbon sequestration. The problem is that people love eating meat and that is not likely going to change. So what can we do?

Searchinger argues the key thing is actually to increase farm yields. If we can get more food out of an acre of land and replicate that across acres of farmland the world over, we can get more food with less land. With some extra forest protections in place, this means that we get the food we need, even as world food consumption increases, and we can also use land for carbon abatement to a greater extent (this is known as the Borlaug hypothesis). As Grunwald says in an interview: “I think farming should be productive so it doesn’t have to cover as much of the earth.”

This perhaps seems overoptimistic? But reader it is not. Apparently cattle farming in the USA is more efficient with land than cattle farming elsewhere in the world. If other farmland could improve its efficiency to just a fraction of that in the US, there would be less deforestation. And apparently there is a lot of low-hanging fruit – agriculture in much of Africa, for example, is quite inefficient, and relatively simple changes in practices or more use of certain chemical inputs (it’s all about nitrogen) could make a big difference.

Another interesting consequence is that it’s generally better if the most efficient farmers have more land under production. The book discusses the Danish pork industry, which is very efficient. But because Denmark is big on climate action, and the pork industry is somewhat emissions intensive, it gets a lot of critical attention within the domestic political situation. But Searchinger points out that if they reduce their pork production, it would likely result in increased pork production somewhere that is less efficient, which would ultimately use more land and be worse for the climate. In this sense it can be misguided to focus on reducing domestic emissions without thinking about how it would affect emissions elsewhere.

Relatedly, Searchinger is pretty critical of some of the greeny ideas in the agricultural space, such as “regenerative agriculture”. He thinks that some of the practices, such as “no till”, have pretty questionable climate benefits just on their own – it’s not clear that they actually sequester more carbon in the soil. But if they reduce yields then that’s very bad for the climate, because that means more land gets brought into production elsewhere in the system.

So here’s an idea: maybe it’s the wrong approach to focus on improving carbon sequestration from farming. Rather, we could aim to make farming as land efficient as possible, and be good at that, and then the land that is freed up we use to sequester carbon as effectively as possible. Farmland should be optimised for yield, forests should be optimised for carbon. Trying to do both with the same acre is the worst of both worlds.

Astute readers may ask: if African farmers improve the efficiency of their land, then won’t that encourage them to actually deforest more land? If land becomes more profitable, you may end up using more of it – this is the Jevons paradox, the direct counter to the Borlaug hypothesis I mentioned earlier. This question occurred to me too, and I’m happy to say that the book answers it – although I think the answer is somewhat unsatisfying and it would need more work. In short, the suggested approach is to increase the yield on farmland so that it’s possible to meet the world’s food needs with less land, and at the same time strengthen protections against deforestation. It’s sort of coming at the problem from both sides.

Beyond the big system-level things, another takeaway from the book is that the single biggest chunk of climate harm from agriculture comes from beef, which is about ten times worse than chicken and pork in terms of emissions, and worse still on land. This is because cows are ruminants that burp methane and that is very bad for the climate – much worse than carbon dioxide, especially over a shorter timescale. So, climate-wise, the most important part of vegetarianism is eating less beef. My own vegetarianism has been pretty loosey-goosey lately if I’m honest but after reading this book I have a redoubled commitment to avoid beef.

In conclusion I can say this was a compelling read that made me re-think some of my ideas about agriculture and climate impacts. I was already pretty confident that biofuels were bad, and that forests are good, but the idea of the opportunity cost of land is what brings it all together. More concretely, it is somewhat heterodox to suggest that we want more intensive, high-yield farming, but it may counter-intuitively be what is needed to save the climate.

[Jamie Pew]

Searchinger is one of the coolest names that a gallivanting lawyer who picks losing battles could have

Land is not free. The georgists have got to love this guy. And they’re right to do it

[Socraticgadfly]

Low-till and no-till will save us, right? Wrong.

A raft of new plants, like Kernza, a perennial-plant riff on wheat, will save us, right? Mostly wrong.

Veggie burgers will save us, right? Wrong as currently entailed, though with some missing information.

Lab meat will save us, right? Wrong totally, but also with some missing information.

GMOs could save us, right? He doesn’t get explicit, but seems to have “yes with caveats” as his answer. I offer a bigger yes with more caveats.

And, he has one good point at the end — we should bring back individual shaming, as well as stop looking for magical silver bullets. You bought the SUV. YOU bought the 1/3 pound hamburger.

Grunwald uses Timothy Searchinger as, well, the nonfiction equivalent of a protagonist for much of this book, though he also has other skeptics of the silver bullets above as well. Overall, the book is somewhere between good and very good. I hit on 3.75 stars rounded up, because most of the 3-starrers wrongly in my opinion thought it too long, and it needed to be this detailed.

He does a generally good job, but not perfect, especially later in the book.

No spoiler alerts on what he gets right, above. So, we'll tackle what's less than fully correct.

Grunwald fluffs Golden Rice even though, in early years, it had non-regulatory problems, namely, lower yields than conventional rice. I’m not anti-GMO, but, I want GMOs that prove out, and in this case, it didn’t for years and years after it was first created. Grunwald either knows this and ignored it because, contra preaching against silver bullets, he thinks GMOs are halfway one, or else he's not as well-read as he claims or presents himself as being.

Grunwald also ignores that Impossible Burger actually has as much saturated fat, and more sodium, than conventional food. Fake cheese, at least mainline commercial varieties, do have less saturated fat than the real deal, but do have more sodium, as I have discussed in some depth.

On lab meat? He doesn’t delve enough into the energy inputs it will need to scale up, let alone the need for computer chipmaking type clean room sterility. Grunwald should have, if he didn’t want to voice it himself, gotten a true skeptic to write in more detail, and also cover the energy inputs for the likes of Impossible to scale up.

The book is otherwise pretty good until around 250. Frank Mitloehner claims there’s no more “stooping labor” with today’s Big Ag animal farms. Really? There is. It’s called “illegal immigrants.” (I don’t know if the new round of people from the Levant and Africa get pushed into the same in Europe or not.) But, no, there's still plenty of “stoop labor” in US agriculture.

As for Ethiopians with stunted growth because of lack of animal protein? It may in part being stunted due to lack of protein period during Ethiopia’s famines.

Animal cruelty? Grunwald mentions modern poultry occasionally breaking legs. Doesn’t mention cows with what are likely painful udders. Or young bullocks-to-be castrated into steers. He does mention California’s “free roaming” pigs laws and says Searchinger is OK with them, if they don’t cut hog production too much. Well, that’s nice.

Touches a bit on the water issue, but not as much as it could. Ogallala Aquifer that waters all the High Plains farms that provide feed for all the High Plains feedlots, or the Big Ag High Plains beef rancher that has his own feedlot? Never mentioned, and when I checked the index when I was up to about page 280, and noticed that, that became the tipping point to drop from 5 stars to 4. This book could have used a good dosage of “Cadillac Desert.”

Finally, I can’t totally buy a key sub-thesis. I think not only is transitioning beef eating to chicken good, but lessening beef eating beyond that, and chicken eating as well is even better. (Grunbaum didn’t mention recent outbreaks of avian flu, as a reason to cut chicken raising and worry about chicken, and egg, costs.) I’m not saying we need to have the entire world go vegetarian, let alone vegan. But, the whole Western world could eat less of all meats, and all dairy products. If you do that, people might have less of a hankering for meat substitutes, which have the health issues noted above, and even with veggie burgers, not to mention lab meat, the energy input issues and more.

As I think about this, with updates, I reserve the right to drop this to 3 stars.

[Brian Clegg]

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment.

The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by burning wood chips, we are pumping extra carbon into the atmosphere - in fact more so that simply using petrol or coal.

This environmental economics error was pointed out by an unlikely figure Tim Searchinger, who was originally a lawyer. But he was also obsessive about going into detail and was able to present clear argued logic against the use of biofuels... only to have governments repeatedly ignore him. Admittedly this was in part because he seems to have been something of a pain. But it's no excuse.

There's an irony here that the country least likely to give any consideration to the environment (drill baby, drill) is the one where much of this story plays out in the book - although the US is not alone in making use of biofuels it was here that the corn farmers held sway (in the UK, for instance, it's more about beet), and it was here that the scientists and economists seemed to first totally lose the plot in assuming this approach was environmentally friendly, followed enthusiastically by the EU.

After the biofuels section we get onto another beef (as it were) - food production. Michael Grunwald presents well the really difficult balance between animal welfare and the environment, pointing out, for instance, that intensive factory farming may be distasteful... but it is usually better at limiting carbon emissions. Inevitably, then, the focus moves to taking the meat out of the system, which (particularly with cattle and sheep) is an incredibly inefficient way to produce protein. However, Grunwald is no vegan bore - he makes it clear most of are going to want to go on eating something that is at least meat-like so looks at both substitutes and lab-grown (apparently labelled 'cultivated meat' after the meat business objected to the term 'clean meat'). This part lacked some of the cohesion of the previous one as, rather than focussing on a single figure like Searchinger, we get the stories of a whole host of enthusiasts and wannabe food entrepreneurs. Even so, the story of the over-hyping and bursting of the bubble is powerful, with ultra-processed fake meat products disappearing from the shelves post-Covid. There's still the potential to provide some workable solutions here: but, as Grunwald makes clear, the first wave was disastrous.

Although Searchinger is mostly in the background during the meat-substitute section, he's back more openly for the final section on regenerative farming, which has been pushed on the assumption (with little scientific measurement to back it up) that this will result in carbon being sequestered in the soil, so much so that it is promised it will counter global warming. Suddenly, cows, for example, are not the bad guys: with regenerative farming they're an important part of the system. But once again Searchinger is the voice crying in the wilderness, pointing out the lack of evidence that there is any significant climate benefit. In fact, as soon as you take into account decreased yield it inevitably is more of a problem than a solution.

Grunwald gives us all this with enough storytelling expertise to keep us interested. The only criticism I have is that he does tend to go into too much detail. After I while, in various sections, I was thinking 'Okay, I get the point, move on,' while he went into yet another startup or attempt to persuade governments. That doesn't stop this being an impressive book, though. Recommended.

[Richard Derus]

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate the fight to fix our food system.

Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, an ingenious phrase coined by Michael Grunwald, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems.

In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It’s an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it’s also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done—and trying to do it.

Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger. He chronicles Searchinger’s uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations—through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If one emerges from this read an ardent capitalist, political "conservative", and a climate-change skeptic, one is defective intellectually and morally.

Honestly I could end the review there because anything else I say will only be repetition of these statements with embellishments.

We are at a crossroads in many areas of our existence as a species. We have access to immense mountains of information and have little training to contextualize and interpret it. We are, for the first time ever, able to see with our own eyes, the entire Earth as it appears from space...a literal god's-eye view...and have done nothing to make that unique in humankind's entire history as a species awareness part of our worldview. We act as though problems are local, or localizable, and have just one cause so need only one solution.

Nothing in Nature supports this delusion. It is debunked in immense bodies of data collected, analyzed, and tested over generations now. Bad-faith arguments made by profit-seeking entities have ruined, to an extent I naïvely thought was actually impossible, the very idea of the data we already have being usable to start patching up the mess we have before us.

Books like this one walk you through the way we know what we know...briskly, but with integrity and expertise balanced by enthusiasm...and what we can in fact do now to make a positive impact on the course we're taking. I could wish for more viewpoints drawn from our Global Southern neighbors, and the women who outside the West perform the vast majority of food growth and harvest. I could wish for a less preaching-to-the-choir bent to the narrative.

But I can't fault Author Grunwald's data sources or synthesis. I can't fault his palpable sense of urgency. I can't help but wish more of y'all would get the message he's putting out: Action is the need and it's an urgent one.

[Casual Ecocentrism]

I have a complicated view of this book. For one, it does a great job explaining the magnitude of the problem that is LULUCF. Since the public writ large has a limited awareness of how our land use harms the climate and the biosphere, this book is a positive contribution to combatting climate change. Even among the climate aware public, many people tout disastrous policies as climate solutions, such as biofuels and BECCS. The book does a decent job explaining why those approaches are so harmful. Finally, the book offers a useful overview of potential solutions and potential deleterious approaches to sustainable food production.

On the negative side, the author’s lack of education and experience into climate solutions pollutes his arguments in a few key areas. He offers reductive explanations of existing natural climate solutions, such as REDD+, particularly in his discussion of technical aspects such as additionally, leakage, and permanence. It reads like a trashy Guardian article at times. He seems to be sympathetic to the aesthetics of the common sense filled ‘real American’ in his cynicism toward land restoration strategies, both private and public, to the point of servility. I would recommend readers skip his summaries of land restoration or ecosystem protection schemes. You will not gain a better understanding by absorbing his commentary here.

The authors communication of leakage, which I believe he draws from searchinger, comes off as dogmatic. It is not true that restoring agricultural land will have a 100% leakage rate, but the author would have you believe that restoring food producing areas is futile. That is not helpful.

My other major problem is that the author lacks the courage to address the main issue facing sustainable land use, which to be fair, few mainstream voices do. That problem is demand, driven by unsustainable population growth. Humanity no longer has the luxury to not manage the consequences of over consumption. The world cannot both sustain a population of 8 Billion People, let alone 10 Billion, and have a functioning biosphere and hospitable climate. Real change needs to be happen in the food production industry to reduce production. Easy fixes to reduce food waste are a great place to start. Oddly enough the author does not discuss this at length. However, we as a species cannot acquiesce to the notion that the developing world should be able to attain the indulgent appetites of the rich developed nations. Simultaneously, politically unpalatable measures need to be passed in the developing world to discourage harmful eating practices by passing on the environmental costs of foods to consumers, and ending harmful food production subsidies. Finally, birth rates need to be arrested (through morally scrupulous methods such as access to birth control and empowering women) for us to have a chance to preserve the last fragments of the biosphere.


Hard to believe in the author’s ostensible “inconvenient truth” ethos when he does not take this issue head on.

Finally, there a few other jarring moments in the book that made this reader cringe. The author at various points indirectly, and at one point explicitly, virtue signals for a certain rogue state and its criminal military, which is all the more disturbing given the year in which this book is written. Additionally, toward the end of the book, the author makes a claim that covid is a challenge to the continuity of humanity on a similar level to climate change, which is wildly ignorant.

All in all, I give this book a 6/10. As a professional in the climate solutions industry, this book is a mixed bag. I learned some new things, but if I didn’t know better, I may have ingest harmful beliefs about other areas. That being said, I would still recommend this book to the general public to build climate awareness.

[Jim]

We Are Eating the Earth
Most of the book follows the career of Tim Searchinger, a lawyer that has worked on environmental issues for 40 years. The first 150 pages tell the story of how biofuels started in America and world wide and the efforts of Searchinger to convince people that they are a bad idea. It is the typical story of big Aariculture or big Lumber money winning government favors and implementing bad policy.

The author tells the many of stories in the book start with brief profiles of the people working on the issue. This is a common way reporters tend to tell stories about issues, but I wish they would try other ways. If there are a lot of different people each working on a different issue, does a thumbnail sketch of the person really help the book? Do I really care about how a researcher looks or talks, what his office looks like, etc? Some characters have such interesting back stories that it can be useful to expose them, but most do not.
The saga of cultivated meat and meat substitutes boom and bust showed more promise than I realized. It seems that with a lot more money invested we could make significant progress in replacing a lot of meat consumption.
He covers Regenerative ranching quickly, because even though it is very popular with climate activists, it doesn’t seem to work in capturing significant amounts of carbon.

The first 390 pages of the book can be summarized by the following quote:
“Biofuels and biomass power, supposedly climate saviors, are climate disasters. Carbon farming and vertical farming are wildly overhyped. Plant-based meat has floundered in the market, while cultivated meat hasn’t really made it to market. Genetically modified and edited crops and livestock still face all kinds of political and cultural obstacles. And a slew of other promising solutions—methane-suppressing feed additives, nitrogen-controlling biofertilizers, high-tech fish farms, high-yield pongamia—are struggling to scale. The eating-the-earth problem is getting worse”

Another quote summarizes the end of the book:
“The key, as always, will be to get the incentives right—so farmers can make more money by making more food with less land; forests are worth more standing and storing carbon than logged and burned; and nations and corporations that want to shrink their carbon footprints get rewarded for shrinking the eating-the-earth problem. None of that will happen without better funding and better policy. But it also won’t happen as long as land is considered free.”

The author knew he was telling a story that is largely depressing, since so little progress has been made and is being made in dealing with agriculture’s impact on global warming. He ends with a plea not to stop trying. The book is important and I hope it has an impact on policy. I learned which areas show promise and which efforts appear to be valuable but are not. However, I did find the book depressing and overly long.

[David]

***.5

While this is an incredibly important topic and the content is generally excellent, as a book it's not great. The first half follow the career of a single person, a lawyer turned environmental science activist. In fact, the first few chapters are only about him, and I almost gave up completely as I really don't care about this dude even a little bit. After a couple of hours Grunwald finally gets around to the point, which is that adding corn-derived ethanol to gasoline is a terrible idea and worse for the environment and the climate than just burning straight gasoline. Which could have been explained in a few pages, but is stretched out over multiple chapters, with various tirades excoriating the Bush, Obama, and trump administrations, a bunch of environmental groups, and various other governments and organizations for continuing to push an inherently flawed policy. It was super frustrating, and made worse by the smug I-know-better-than-everyone attitude, which is grating even when correct.

The second half of the book is a bit better, as he eventually moves on from biofuels to cover other topics such as vegan meat substitutes and regenerative agriculture. He dives deep into the divide between animal rights activists, environmental conservationists, and climate scientists, and how it has influenced government policies and popular opinion. But he keeps coming back to talking about the specific people involved, rather than deal with the issues themselves. If you are interested in the sartorial predilections of the various alternate meal executives, this is the book for you. But if you want to understand the difficulties involved in scaling up a single serving of lab-grown meat to mass production, you just need to accept his statement that it's difficult.

Although climate change is obviously a global problem, and a large part of his thesis is that local choices have global implications, aside from a few paragraphs here and there about Brazil and a mention of rain-forest loss in Asia to grow palm oil, 90% of the content is squarely focused on the US government. He goes deep into the policy decisions of the two main political parties, various legislation, programs, and of course the people involved. Because it is apparently very important to know the names of all of the presidential advisors from 20-30 years ago. And not so important to get a broader view of how different countries have handled the crisis and balanced the competing interests.

Despite really hating the writing and the misguided focus, this is still an important book as our agricultural system remains one of the largest contributors to fossil fuel emissions and land use tends to not receive the attention it deserves. And the point of the book, that what we eat matters, is often glossed over completely by otherwise smart and responsible people.

[Richard Thompson]

This book puts forward the idea that our biggest environmental problem is the dedication of more and more land to agriculture, which releases more and more carbon into the atmosphere so that even if we manage to get off fossil fuels, we will still have a climate disaster. I don't know. It's very Malthusian, but I acknowledge that it deserves serious consideration. It's not just that most farming produces atmospheric carbon. It does. And organic and no-till farming don't seem to make much of a difference. It's also that carbon sink forests continue to be cleared for agriculture, and that new agricultural land, which is by definition more marginal than the prime areas already dedicated to farming, creates greater carbon problems.

As we all know, one of the biggest problems is beef production. The burps and farts of cattle are bad enough, but, beyond that, the amount of food per unit of energy input is highly inefficient, and poorly managed grazing damages the carbon absorbing properties of the environment.

Interestingly, though Mr. Grunwald sees himself as an environmentalist, he says that the solution is in agribusiness and continued use of the industrial farming methods that many people decry. He sees this as the only way to produce enough food to feed the planet without destroying it. He just wants them to be managed a bit to be more efficient and environmentally friendly. I don't know. It feels like a pact with the devil to me. Betting on agribusiness reminds me of how a glut of natural gas from fracking was praised as an alternative to coal for power plants twenty years ago. I'm not sure how much that helped us. I do think that we will probably continue to need agribusiness for the foreseeable future because it has managed to produce astonishing amounts of food at prices that enable us to feed a huge population including many people who are desperately poor. And many of its worst evils can be managed with regulation and with technological advances that make environmentally damaging practices unnecessary or inefficient. But I'm not ready to give up on sustainable and regenerative farming or meat alternatives or reducing food waste. These are inherently better solutions if they can be made to work and if we don't continue to explore them and look for ways to make them better then we will never find long term solutions to this problem short of Soylent Green.

[Ula Tardigrade]

The most illuminating book about the climate crisis that I have read in a long time.

I was surprised by the scope of the author’s investigation. I expected just one more analysis of the flaws of modern agriculture. Instead, the first parts of the book are devoted to biofuels and biomass, topics that I had no idea were so controversial and important. It speaks to the author’s skill — after all, he is an accomplished journalist — that he also made these topics feel so fascinating. His great storytelling is supported by his choice of main character: You may not have heard of Tim Searchinger before, but I assure you that you will start to follow his career after reading about his life. Here is just one example of his insights:

“Searchinger pointed out that a European country could level the Amazon, import the wood, burn it for electricity, and count the entire process as a national emissions reduction. It was an honest mistake, and when he explained it to Sir Robert Watson, the British climate scientist and former IPCC head, Watson gasped: ‘We did that?’”

In the latter part of the book, the author focuses on food production itself, offering a deeply nuanced and surprising perspective once again. As he writes in the introduction:

“The inconvenient truth is that it’s complicated. Michael Pollan writes beautifully about rustic farmsteads that honor the rhythms of nature, but organic, local, and grass-fed are often worse for the climate than conventional, imported, and feedlot-finished. Fertilizer is a climate killer, because it’s made of natural gas and generates twice as many emissions as Germany, but also a climate savior, because it helps farmers grow more food per acre. The efficiency of hated agribusinesses like Cargill, Tyson, and Archer Daniels Midland cuts emissions, while their recent embrace of beloved regenerative practices may increase emissions. Forest protections can be pointless if they shift deforestation to unprotected areas, while boycotts of deforestation-linked commodities like soy and palm oil can backfire if they induce farmers to plant less efficient crops. Even ‘Paper or plastic?’ is a complicated climate question, because paper uses land.”

So prepare for a lot of "wow" moments, and be sure to read this unexpected page-turner!

Thanks to the publisher, Simon & Schuster, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

[RedReviews4You Susan-Dara]

This book leaves me with one controlling thought - We may not have planted these seeds—but we’re the ones left to harvest them. And, this book highlights the facts that after centuries of mismanaged land stewardship, broken food systems, and policy dead ends, inertia is coming to fruition. We now must face the reality that - What we grow, we eat. What we sow, we reap. And now we are facing a harvest we didn’t choose—but one that we cannot escape.

Michael Grunwald’s We Are Eating the Earth is a fascinating, frustrating, and essential read. It dives deep—not just into the intersection of climate and food crises—but into the historical scaffolding that led us here. There’s an overwhelming amount of information, meticulously researched and sharply presented. But the tone shifts several time throughout the book and it sometimes left me behind . With its heavy focus on the work of Tim Searchinger, the book sometimes reads less like a mainstream nonfiction title and more like an investigative / creative nonfiction piece for Harper’s Magazine.

That may push some readers away. I nearly stumbled on the dryness and shifting focus from chapter to chapter myself. But when I stepped back, I saw the connection: the first half dissects where we’ve been and what we've repeatedly misunderstood, while the second half clarifies why familiar answers—known ideas, legacy thinking, policy bandaids—won’t save us now. All of it highlights just how far-reaching and deeply interwoven this problem truly is. But this isn’t meant to make us feel small in the face of it; rather, it empowers the reader to recognize the significance of our individual actions and the societal obligation to align those actions toward meaningful change.

Here are a few word choice alternatives if you want to mix
Grunwald doesn’t sugarcoat. He doesn’t comfort. What he delivers is clarity—and the conviction that time is running out fast. This book refuses to wrap itself in optimism for optimism’s sake. Instead, it insists we face the present with unflinching urgency.

This isn’t a blueprint. It’s a clarion call

[Ben]

This is one of those books that changes how you think about an issue and also does a great job threading the needle on complex issues.

The premise as told through the eyes of an entertaining lawyer turned sort of scientist is that climate models fail to recognize the opportunity costs of land use and its critical role in meeting food demand as well as energy considerations. So subsidizing things like biomass can lead to greater usage of land for that purpose and that harms food production. The great free range type stuff that Michael Pollan writes about so lovingly can create problems because it demands more land use and is less efficient. It’s an amazing lesson in how failing to apply more basic economic principles can distort a whole field of work.

The problem also highlights the tensions involved. All things being equal raising fewer cows would be better. But if you stick with them, making them as efficient as possible because otherwise you’re using up too much land. Interestingly, Grunwald points out that the United States is very efficient with our cattle and that getting other countries to reach our levels of productivity would be good. It also highlights how the limited nature of land is interconnected. Reducing cattle farming in this country probably means more farming done in a less efficient manner elsewhere. And that’s particularly bad because the degree to which land is a carbon sink also varies.

The solutions part, unfortunately, is interesting but less promising. As you’d expect there’s no silver bullet but also a lot of things that have been tried have failed. The chapters on the rise and fall of plant based or lab grown meat is interesting. Probably the most promising thing is efforts to improve efficient farming in Brazil. But nothing is really ready to take off.

The result is a nuanced and complex picture that shows all the tradeoffs between environmental and animal concerns and what that means for land usage. A final part at the end also has a good argument for why it’s still worth thinking about doing your part for climate. And impressively none of it scolding.

[Ilya Scheidwasser]

This book explores the central idea that agriculture is the greatest threat we face to Earth's climate, due to the clearing of carbon-storing forests and other wild areas; and that less efficient agriculture (meat production, crops grown without proper fertilizer, irrigation, etc.) has a much higher climate footprint due to the greater amount of land needed to produce the same number of calories.

The book covers many topics related to this thesis, spanning various political and technological developments over the past couple of decades. One big topic is biofuels: the idea that we can replace fossil fuels with fuel derived from corn or wood, which was politically appealing due to its profitability to farmers, but which was worse for the climate than fossil fuels due to the increased land use and deforestation. Another is meat substitutes, either in the form of plant-based 'meat' products or lab-grown meat. A third is various kinds of farming reforms, which have often caused more harm than good even when being sold as climate-friendly.

The book does a great job of diving deep into the scientific, practical, political, and business stories of each topic it covers. It gives us detailed narratives of how these various climate-related developments have arisen, which have succeeded or failed and why, and how much they are actually beneficial or detrimental to the climate. One throughline is the stranglehold that the agricultural lobby has on policy and funding in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the ways in which this has sabotaged many efforts to produce food more efficiently; as well as the ways in which politicians and scientists ignore facts that disagree with the narratives that are most useful to them.

Many parts of the story here can be deeply frustrating or depressing, but the book also takes care to give us some practical solutions, some astonishing accomplishments and discoveries, and some hope, throughout it all. It's an enlightening guide to an important topic.

[Bargain Sleuth Book Reviews]

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the digital copy of this book; I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Our current food system is wrecking the planet! I really appreciated this deep-dive investigative work that ties together history, politics, and systemic injustice to present-day stakes. This policy-heavy look at climate and man’s use of the land is a slower, more reflective look at science-entrepreneurship across the globe was so interesting. Two such forward-looking farming companies from Wisconsin are featured, so yay, us. Our state motto is literally FORWARD.

We are Eating the Earth is a fascinating book that is digestible, but not always easily (no pun intended.) The fact that this is an under-reported topic just makes the urgency to make changes more important than ever. Realizing that the love of a pot roast is actually harmful to the earth can be tough. Understanding that a juicy hamburger also impacts the environment is challenging.

A very interesting part of this book is that all the experts said the Global South would be hit the hardest, and that has come true. The weather extremes are decimating places that were once habitable. Yet some of the biggest offenders in the Global North (I’m looking at you, U.S. Project 2025 folks) refuse to even acknowledge that there’s a problem.

The writing is engaging and sometimes quite humorous despite the heavy topic. This cerebral, solutions-oriented writing spotlights land and policy issues. It focuses not only on people but also on how they can help reverse the damage to the planet. It’s also a call to action. The climate change crisis is not easily solvable. Americans in particular should reevaluate what’s on their plates. It just reminds me of something I remember learning in grade school: if all the world were industrialized like the United States and China, the planet would be in even worse shape than it is now. But change is possible if we put the planet first and not our bellies.

[Daan Welling]

A data and climate nerd's delight. Michael Grunwald's We Are Eating the Earth takes on the most politically unpopular corner of climate action: food. It contributes a third of global CO2 emissions, receives 3% of climate action spending, and generates roughly zero mainstream political will. The book asks why, and then gets on with the data anyway.

What makes food so much harder than electricity is that we are not getting cheaper solutions — we are getting dilemmas. Taste, land use, efficiency bottlenecks, cultural identity, agricultural livelihoods. The trade-offs are genuinely difficult in ways that solar panels are not. Beef and lamb represent 3% of human protein diets but consume a staggering proportion of agricultural land. Vertical farming, often presented as a technological salvation, turns out to be hideously inefficient. The US would need to use 30% of its current solar capacity just to farm tomatoes indoors, a small crop in the grand scheme of things.

The honest picture is of a sector where the low-hanging fruit is genuinely low-hanging but largely ignored, and the harder interventions require confronting things people don't want to confront. Wetland restoration could save 1-2% of CO2 emissions. Paying rice farmers to flood their fields less often reduces rice emissions by a quarter at no cost to yields. These are tractable, affordable, available. They are not happening at scale.

The deeper problem the book surfaces is political rather than technical: food is intimate in a way that energy is not. You can swap your energy provider without changing who you are. Diet is harder. Until climate policy finds a way to work with that rather than against it, the arithmetic stays broken.