“Less Holocaust, more Anne Frank,” was the advice Michael Grunwald received from the CEO of a publishing house who opted not to bid for his latest book, We Are Eating the Earth. Grunwald took notice. He decided to veer away from the well-trodden path of climate alarmism and towards a dogged and nonconformist personality, Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute thinktank.
But, first, Grunwald had to make another shift—in his own thinking. His book, he tells me via video link from his home in Miami, was triggered by a sudden realisation of his ignorance about agriculture. Whereas we and he—a “policy reporter who wrote a lot about energy and climate,” he says—are familiar with the capability of renewable energies, such as wind and solar power, to replace fossil fuels, few have grasped that food accounts for a “third of the climate problem and a big part of the biodiversity, water pollution and water shortage problems”.
“I was like—holy shit!—this is a big deal and people don’t know about it,” continues Grunwald. “Agriculture is eating 40 per cent of the earth. We need to grapple with that.” And so, to figure out just how big a deal eating—particularly meat-eating—is for the climate and nature, Grunwald called Searchinger. The pair had worked together a decade before, after Searchinger, a freethinking lawyer and climate analyst, had published a scientific paper “exposing farm-grown fuels like corn ethanol as climate disasters masquerading as climate solutions”.
“I liked that he always told the truth, always did his homework, and often zigged when the herd was zagging,” writes Grunwald in the book. Searchinger’s answer to the problem was to insist: “If we don’t get serious about land, we’re fucked!”
Grunwald may have opted to ditch the doomism, but We Are Eating the Earth contains its fair share of terrifying facts about food, farming and their impacts. “Humans now ate 350m annual tons of meat, nearly a thousand Empire State Buildings in carcass weight,” he writes of the immediate past. “Animal agriculture used a land mass the size of Africa. If we kept eating more meat, especially beef and ruminant meat, we’d have no realistic way to close the land or emissions gaps.”
In other words, we have no chance of meeting the global goals established by treaties such as the Paris agreement—no chance of keeping emissions and temperature rises below the most dangerous levels, or of protecting and restoring nature—if we continue to clear forests so that we can chomp through ever more steaks and stews, burgers and bolognese. “We simply can’t decarbonise the atmosphere if we keep vaporising trees. It’s like trying to clean the house while smashing the vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room,” writes Grunwald.
This offbeat analogy is typical of Grunwald’s style which, I imagine, may elicit Marmite-style reactions, with readers either loving or hating his informal approach to such a serious subject. Words frequently appear in capitals or italics when the author believes something needs particular emphasis. And for when even more emphasis is required, the f-word peppers the text more frequently than my mum would deem acceptable. Grunwald admits he is “a bit of an effer and jeffer”, adding that, rather than a spoonful of sugar, “you need some drama and narrative to make the medicine go down.”
“I think my special sauce as a reporter has been writing about stuff that is maybe a little bit complicated and quite obscure and quite important, and trying to make it accessible to people who are not in the weeds,” says Grunwald. His previous two books dealt with Barack Obama’s response to the 2008 financial crisis and the destruction (and potential restoration) of the Everglades.
He underlines the importance of making his books entertaining: “If I just gave a list of statistics and screamed, nobody would get past page six.” Hence the decision to make Searchinger his leading man and to surround him with a compelling cast of supporting actors, many of whom have made it their life’s work to create something people will eat instead of beef or chicken.
‘If I just gave a list of statistics and screamed, nobody would get past page six.’
These characters include Pat Brown, a “pioneering biochemist” who set up Impossible Foods to provide plant-based foods that taste as good as meat. Having interviewed Brown during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, I can endorse Grunwald’s description of him as someone who exudes “mad scientist confidence” about his company’s “inevitable triumph over factory farms”.
Then there is Josh Tetrick who, with another Josh (Balk), started a company called Hampton Creek to engineer egg substitutes from plants. Tetrick is “a little bit of a bullshit artist who was sort of faking it until he makes it,” says Grunwald. In the book, he depicts Tetrick as a “rudderless searcher who spoke with great fluency and frequency about using capitalism to help the world, but had never done it”; “a cocky, bro-ish, ultra-competitive pitchman who could sell water to the ocean”.
Ethan Brown, “the vegan entrepreneur behind Beyond Meat”, comes across as a more likeable chap—“just a lovely guy”—even if, says Grunwald, the same can’t be said of his firm’s burgers: “I thought Beyond Burgers had an off-putting grassy aftertaste—and, on the grill, they smelled like someone literally peeing in the wind.”
Grunwald’s comments are uncompromising, but he insists that his book “was written with love for those guys. I am a reporter, not an advocate. I admire their efforts to change the world, even if I was critical of some of the execution, and I portrayed their follies, flaws and very real qualities.”
Ultimately, though, Grunwald is sceptical that a bunch of “mission-driven vegans” will manage—by themselves—to deliver the “pretty radical change” so urgently needed to reduce emissions and stop the destruction of nature, all while feeding a growing world population.
Alternative proteins will have their place, but so too, Grunwald believes, will technologies that are often less palatable to green campaigners: lab-grown meat; sustainable intensification where livestock productivity is increased but the horrors of factory farming reduced; or gene editing to create drought-tolerant or pest-resistant crops. “We’re going to have to do lots of stuff to eat less of the earth, because we are on track to deforest another dozen Californias by 2050 and we don’t really have another dozen Californias,” he says.
Like the British writer and environmentalist George Monbiot, whose 2023 book Regenesis covers similar ground, Grunwald urges an end to the romanticisation of farming and farmers as a first step towards changing the thinking around our food system. “Every farm, even the scenic ones with red barns and rolling hills… is a kind of environmental crime scene, a pastoral echo of whatever carbon-absorbing wilderness it once replaced,” he writes.
Both authors argue for ideology to be replaced with evidence and data, even if their conclusions do not always converge. Monbiot is a committed vegan who wants all animal farming to stop. Grunwald has given up beef, though he fell off the wagon in Brazil because “nobody has created steaks out of plants, cells or fungi as exquisite as the carcasses I devoured medium rare on that trip.” He emphasises: “I don’t expect people who are not writing books about food and climate to give it up out of the goodness of their hearts.”
The food and farming sector is “about 25 years behind” the energy industry. New threats to the land abound, not least from crops grown for biofuels and, more recently, with the push from policymakers for sustainable aviation fuels as a means of decarbonising flights. But Grunwald ends his book on a cautiously positive note, highlighting not just the growth of renewables, but also the restoration work happening in the Everglades after more than 100 years of being drained and damaged.
“I believe we can make shit better,” he says. “We probably won’t make shit perfect, but it is a worthy thing to try.”
