In the ensuing decade, we have been thrilled to see the conversation about food systems grow—and so we were delighted to see the latest missive: The Washington Post’s feature on the environmental cost of the food we eat. But we were disappointed with its narrow focus. By pitting one food against another—rice or potatoes? salmon or cod?—the piece misses a big opportunity to help consumers think about the climate consequences of their food buying decisions. 

One of the reasons our food system is a driver of environmental crises, including the climate crisis, is because of how food is grown, particularly our system’s dependence on the fossil-fuel based inputs of pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. Pesticides are fossil fuels in another form: 99 percent of all pesticides are derived from fossil fuels. And greenhouse gas emissions from nitrogen fertilizer alone are greater than all commercial aviation worldwide, noted a recent report by the Center for International Environmental Law. The good news is that, unlike aviation, we have technologies to free agriculture from fossil-fuel dependency through methods like organic and regenerative agriculture. Indeed, these production systems—that reduce the burden of costly and polluting inputs like pesticides and fertilizers—were identified as key climate solutions in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. So for readers who want to lighten the environmental load of their diet, reaching for the organic label or seeking out products raised with regenerative practices is a powerful place to start. 

We’re pleased to see mega-platforms like the Washington Post take on these big issues—we hope these deeper connections get exposed. 

FYI — Unpublished LTE 

As someone who has been trying to raise the alarm about the environmental impacts of the global food system for years, I was delighted to see The Washington Post’s headline: “This is the environmental cost of the food we eat.” But by pitting one food against another — rice or potatoes? salmon or cod? — the piece misses a big opportunity to help consumers think about the climate consequences of their food buying decisions. One of the biggest reasons our food system is a driver of environmental crises, including the climate crisis, is because of how food is grown, particularly our system’s dependence on the fossil-fuel based inputs of pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. Pesticides are fossil fuels in another form: 99 percent of all pesticides are derived from fossil fuels. And greenhouse gas emissions from nitrogen fertilizer alone are greater than all commercial aviation worldwide, noted a recent report by the Center for International Environmental Law. The good news is that, unlike aviation, we have technologies to free agriculture from fossil-fuel dependency through methods like organic and regenerative agriculture. Indeed, these production systems—that reduce the burden of costly and polluting inputs like pesticides and fertilizers—were identified as key climate solutions in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. So for readers who want to lighten the environmental load of the foods they eat, reaching for the organic label or seeking out products raised with regenerative practices is a powerful place to start. 

Anna Lappé | Founder and Strategic Advisor, Real Food Media |Author, Diet for a Hot Planet

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What Biden’s burger boondoggle tells us about partisan politics and spin-doctoring.

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Anna was thrilled to be a keynote speaker at the 2020 50×40 Global Summit—the global network committed to reducing industrial animal agriculture 50 percent by 2040. Anna talked about the incredible toll of factor farming, from squandering land and other natural resources to huge greenhouse gas emissions and the exploitation of workers and abuse of animals. She shared the staggering rates of meatpacking workers contracting Covid-19, with over 50,000 workers infected as of January 20, 2021. 

We believe this conflux of crises offers us the opportunity to upend the global industrial meat model, but as Anna mentioned in her talk, only if we make it so: 

“The pandemic is an opportunity only if we make it one… When it comes to fighting for a more moral food system—one that protects workers and farmers alike, one that is humane to all the world’s creatures—we must act now and act boldly.”

How do we do that? We do it together. 

Here are four ways to harness our collective power:
 

1. Be bold. Our role as organizers and advocates is to show what is possible—the policies will follow. 
2. Be confident in communicating complexity. Silver bullet solutions won’t do the job here. We have to get to the root causes to create real, radical change. 
3. Think globally. Focusing attention on our individual locales only creates the opportunity for agribusiness to move the problem elsewhere.
4. Celebrate our very big tent. Issues such as the industrial meat model touch on so much that people care about. As we develop strategies, communications, and policy asks, this big tent can be our biggest asset, but only if we consciously nurture these connections. 

Watch the full speech here and make sure to check out out some additional resources:

• Food Mythbusters video: Do We Need Industrial Agriculture to Feed the World?
• Real Food Reads podcast episode 44,  Bite Back: People Taking On Corporate Food and Winning featuring Jose Oliva 
• Foodtopias podcast episode 1, Laboring in a Pandemic, featuring Christina Spach and Axel Fuentes
• Tackling Climate Change Through Food, an organizing toolkit

The post Fighting for a Moral Food System appeared first on Real Food Media.

A new study published in Science offers a stark warning about the climate crisis: Even if we completely halted fossil fuel use in the near term, we would still blow through the carbon budget needed to avoid catastrophic climate change unless we change the trajectory of emissions from the global food sector. Although many have warned about the climate impact of modern food production and land use, this new science is soberingly clear, and it has garnered attention around the world.

Without radically reducing emissions from agriculture, the research shows we won’t meet the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit average warming to 1.5°C – 2°C degrees. And yet, even those targets still position us to face some pretty extreme climate impacts.

Civil Eats talked with Michael Clark, a researcher at the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors on the study, about the findings, what they teach us about collective action to move the needle on climate, and how we might build the political will to do so.

Why does the food system have such a big climate toll?

One of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions from food systems is meat, and within that red meat from ruminants: beef, sheep, goats, and—to a lesser extent—other livestock like pork. The reason why ruminants have a relatively large impact is two-fold: They’re particularly inefficient at converting grass into things we can eat; or, if they’re not being fed grass, converting soy or other feed into food for humans. This matters because you have to include the climate impacts of producing the feed we then give to cows and other ruminants. Another reason why ruminants are particularly high emitters is because during their digestive process, they convert their food into methane, a potent greenhouse gas that they then burp.

The other large source of emissions within food systems is from fertilizer use—from how it is processed to emissions from application. Nitrogen naturally converts into nitrous oxide, which is one of the other very potent greenhouse gases.

This I think has been a blind spot. We’ve disrupted the carbon cycle, but we’ve disrupted the nitrogen cycle, too.

Exactly. Estimates are that humans have doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in the world—that is human sources of reactive nitrogen are at least as large as the amount of reactive nitrogen that is naturally available. Not ideal.

Your findings paint a picture based on current trends. What trends did you track?

Very broadly speaking, emissions from the food system are a function of what we eat, how it’s produced, and the size of the population. We looked at these three factors and trends to date and projected out if these patterns continue over the next several decades.

What we found at a global scale is that the most important driver is changes in dietary habits; populations eating more food and eating a larger proportion of that food from animal sources, either meat, dairy, or eggs. Population growth is an important driver, but it’s not as important as dietary habit change. And while changes in food production—like having better management techniques and reducing emissions per unit of food—could counter those shifts, it would not be by a huge amount.

Now, all this is at a global scale; for any single country, that global pattern may not match up. Diets are changing, but not uniformly. For instance, diets are not changing by a huge amount in the United States, but if you go to a place like China or Brazil, countries experiencing large economic transitions, there are massive dietary shifts happening and with them those emissions are going to be driven up.

Do you feel the story of food systems emissions has been late to the game in climate change?

Rightfully, a lot of the effort, focus, and political will has targeted emissions abatement through fossil fuels. That makes a huge amount of sense. But we’re getting better knowledge about the impact food has had on the environment—and the trajectory of emissions—and starting to see, thankfully, food becoming a bigger part of the conversation.

Talk about some of the main levers for change. First, plant-rich diets: Let’s get into what you mean by that and why this diet shift makes a difference.

We mean a reduction in meat, dairy, and eggs and an increase in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and so on. What’s critical here is that while the endpoint is similar for everyone in the world, the direction you might need to go to get there will be really different. In the United States, for instance, this shift in diets might mean a typical person eating much less meat and much more fruits and vegetables. The second thing I really want to stress is that these plant-rich diets are associated with pretty large increases in health outcomes. While for this paper we focused on climate, plant-rich diets have enormous co-benefits.

Let’s talk about another lever for reducing food system emissions; what you and your co-authors call “healthy calories.”

Approximately half the global adult population is eating too much or not enough. In certain countries the figures are even more extreme. For my co-authors and me, the healthy diet lever means—independent of a plant-rich diet—what proportion of calories are coming from fruit, vegetables, and other healthy sources of calories. We know that so many people are not getting the right amounts of food for a healthy diet. Similar to the plant-rich lever, this means in some places, eating a lot less, in other places, it will mean people eating more [healthy foods].

Food waste has gotten a lot more attention in the past few years—in part, I think, because the percent of food that is wasted is so high and because addressing food waste feels so doable.

Yes, it’s pretty shocking: About one-third of all food that is produced remains uneaten, ether because it’s thrown away, rots, or otherwise doesn’t get to the people who want to eat it. The sources differ widely by country, sometimes it’s a lack of refrigeration, lack of storage, grain silos, and so on. In the United States, a family of four wastes on average $1,600 worth of produce a year. That’s a pretty big incentive to act.

It always surprises people that if the emissions associated with food loss were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world.

Let’s talk about what you are seeing in terms of policy responses.

One of the joys and complications of working on a global study is that the policy responses are going to look very different wherever you are. We talked earlier about the climate impacts of nitrogen fertilizer use. One policy that has really been effective has been the 1991 European Union Nitrates Directive. Now, when it was passed, it was designed to reduce nitrogen runoff because agricultural sources of runoff were one of the main causes of water pollution in Europe. Since then, fertilizer applications per hectare have decreased by about half, yet crop yields have continued to increase as they were before. It’s just one example of a relatively large geographically scaled policy that is working. While it wasn’t specifically designed to address emissions, it most certainly has had emissions benefits.

We can look at farmers choosing different production pathways. Like in some cases adding more crop rotations into their planning or using agroecological approaches, such as planting hedgerows, agroforestry, and more. Honestly, there really is a huge amount that can be done. But it’s important to stress that no single action is going to solve the problem.

One of the big food-climate debates is about soil carbon sequestration and livestock. What do you think about those who argue for livestock’s ability to rehabilitate soils?

We know for sure we can be doing a lot better in terms of soil carbon storage. And we are seeing incredible results from a range of strategies, like some I mentioned: planting cover crops, intercropping, and silvopasture, planting hedges between fields that can prevent soil loss—and more. All of these can help sequester more carbon in the soil, but I think the key message should be: Soil carbon sequestration is part of the solution, but it isn’t the only solution.

Now, for the debate about cows! The instances where I’ve seen cows or other ruminants’ potential to be net negative in terms of greenhouse gas emissions—after accounting for methane emissions—is over short timescales, in certain conditions, on previously degraded land. So, yes, it may be possible for cows to play a helpful role, but in a limited way. How the cows are raised matters; but how many cows you’re raising matters more.

Do you feel like any parts of your paper have been misunderstood as this complex story gets translated for the general public?

I actually think the coverage has been good. There are basically three main points and I think the media has been capturing them well: One, food matters to climate and if we continue eating the way we are, it will result in catastrophic climate change; two, there is a lot we can do; third, everyone has a role to play—consumers, businesses, food processors, everyone.

I know one question those who work on climate often gets asked is, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?”—but, I feel I should ask the same of you.

I’m laughing because it’s an uncomfortable question to answer. We are starting to move in the right direction, but honestly, we’re not moving anywhere close to as fast as we need to. We need to start acting now. It would have been great to have made these changes years ago, but we didn’t.

Right. As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is today.

Exactly.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Anna was featured on a special Retro Report mini-documentary on climate, industrial meat production, and our diet. 

The post Our Appetite for Beef Is Growing. So Are Climate Worries. appeared first on Real Food Media.

I was pleased to get to weigh in on Burger King’s announcement—via a (literally) moldy ad—to go preservative-free. As I said in this ABC News segment, the fast food chain’s decision was just one more signal that companies are responding to the tectonic shift in the marketplace, as eaters across all demographics are seeking out foods without preservatives and other additives, food grown without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and meat raised with routine antibiotics. I did note that we would all do good to remember that, preservatives or not, fast food is still not healthy food. I also stressed that the biggest health and environmental impact of Burger King’s supply chain isn’t its preservatives, it’s the beef. Last year, the company bowed to public pressure and agreed to root out deforestation in its supply chain, but gave itself a 2030 deadline for doing so. That’s not nearly soon enough—and we should keep the pressure on to make the company do more, sooner.

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The New York Times Retro Report—a series I’ve always loved—pays tribute to my mother’s influence on the plant-based meat alternatives taking off today. I appear late in the nearly 14-minute video, emphasizing that the core message of my mother’s seminal 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet, wasn’t actually about food, per se, it was about democracy—about who has the power to decide how land is used, what food is grown, how animals are raised. I try to stress what my mother has always been interested in not what she would love our plates to look like, but what our world should look like. Nearly fifty years ago, my mom was trying to expose the political and economic forces driving the industrial agriculture revolution that spawned the highly inefficient, inhumane, environmentally disastrous system of factory farming. In other words, her message was a much more nuanced story than meat vs. no-meat. With these new products in the marketplace, I think this message is as important as ever: We should remember that what we’re fighting for is real food, produced in a way that’s good for the planet and good for the people raising it—whether it’s from the plant kingdom, or not. I’m glad we got some of that story into this segment—along with a nice shot of my garden office.

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By Clyde Haberman, The New York Times

Even as Americans mass in cities and their suburbs, the range-roaming cowboy has endured as a national symbol, along with the cholesterol-laden diet he represents: heavy on steaks, hamburgers, sausages and the like. What if that iconic image were replaced someday by, say, a technician in a lab coat producing a facsimile of a traditional burger, one made from plants and not animals?Not very likely, you say? Perhaps not right away. But the lure of the cowboy notwithstanding, more Americans than ever are eating plant-based meat, convinced that it is less harmful to them and less taxing on the environment. Millennials in particular are giving the phrase “all sizzle, no steak” a positive spin it never had.This slow but perhaps inexorable shift in food preferences is explored by Retro Report, whose mission is to focus on how the past influences present-day policies and customs. In this video offering, it turns to Frances Moore Lappé, whose 1971 best-selling book “Diet for a Small Planet” changed the way many people viewed global hunger in an era of rapid population growth. Ms. Lappé (pronounced Luh-PAY) concluded that there was plenty of food to go around. The problem, she said, was one of distribution. Too much of it went to nourish animals on four legs rather than directly to those on two.“I just said, “O.K., I’m going to figure out are we really at the Earth’s limits — is that really the cause of hunger?” she told Retro Report. She took her father’s slide rule and “just sat there hour after hour literally putting two and two together.” Her bottom line: The world’s grain supply was “more than enough” to feed every human on the planet.

“What I wanted to get across is that our current food system is inefficient, unjust, illogical and destructive,” Ms. Lappé said, adding, “We need not have hunger.”

The inefficiency of a diet based on animal protein is evident in more recent studies as well. In one chart, Ms. Lappé illustrated how more than 21 pounds of protein fed to a cow made just one pound of protein for people. According to United Nations researchers, roughly 80 percent of agricultural land worldwide is used to sustain livestock, a proportion that is unlikely to drop much when a leader like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is committed to deforesting the Amazon to clear a path for more cattle raising.“We use 77 percent of our agricultural land in the world for livestock that gives us 17 percent of our calories,” Ms. Lappé, 76, told The New York Times Magazine in 2019. Those figures reflect the great influence wielded by the cattle business, she said: “I’m saying that if we had real democracy, if the agribusiness industry and the meat producers didn’t have the political wherewithal that they do, then we could really talk.”There is also the impact on the air that surrounds us. Animals belch and break wind copiously, releasing huge amounts of methane, a prime greenhouse gas. When it comes to carbon dioxide, the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems calculates an emission of 6.6 pounds for every 4 ounces of beef that is served. By yet another measure, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says that livestock accounts for about 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with two-thirds of the total coming from cattle alone.In short, the studies suggest that devoting vast tracts of land for the purpose of converting plant energy into animal energy is as inefficient a method as can be for humans to get their protein.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these findings have encouraged the production of alternative meats, though cattle ranchers and their supporters in some statehouses are pursuing legislation to ban the word “meat” for anything other than that which comes from a live animal. A decade ago, Ethan Brown started a company called Beyond Meat, producing plant-derived burgers and other foods that their advocates say have all the sizzle, smell and taste of the animal variety. They require far less land and water, and lead to far fewer greenhouse gas emissions, than traditional meat production.“If we can make it so it tastes and delights just like animal protein, I mean, very few consumers are going to say, ‘Nah, I just don’t want to do that,’ ” Mr. Brown said to Retro Report.Perhaps also not surprisingly, meat producers and their allies have pushed back against the notion that tofu or other protein sources make the grade. They challenge, for instance, the notion that plant-based burgers are healthier, noting that while those foods have less saturated fat and no cholesterol, they also are very high in sodium content. As for the planet’s well-being, they say that meat production’s contribution to greenhouse gas levels is greatly overstated.To be sure, McDonald’s and its brethren are not about to shut down anytime soon. Across a 12-month stretch ending last May, beef burgers outsold plant-based ones at fast-food outlets by a margin of 28 to 1 — 6.4 billion servings compared with 228 million. Still, plant-based producers believe they are riding a commercial tide.Jaime Athos, the chief executive of Tofurky, a company whose products are rooted in soy protein, pointed to sales figures from the last two years, when real-animal meat sales were flat while sales of meat alternatives grew by about 37 or 38 percent. “So that’s how a revolution happens, that kind of growth rate,” he said.Anna Lappé, like her mother a food writer and environmental activist, told Retro Report that her interests go deeper. The effects of food production on the world’s ecology deserve greater attention, she said. “I think the question should be not just is something meat or is not meat, but were pesticides used, toxic pesticides,” the younger Ms. Lappé said. “Were synthetic fertilizers that are incredibly energy intensive to produce? All of these questions go into essentially understanding what is the impact of the food we’re eating.”Her mother, meanwhile, is convinced that “there’s been enormous change in our culture around food since I wrote my book.”That would seem indisputable. And who knows? If sales of plant-based meat soar, we may even need to rethink those cowpokes who ride the range. Take an old country hit like “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” It might better serve a new generation if “don’t let ’em pick guitars or drive them old trucks” were followed by a line like “make ’em eat tofu and whole grains and such.”The video with this article is part of a documentary series presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report, led by Kyra Darnton, is a nonprofit media organization examining the history and context behind today’s news. To watch more, subscribe to the Retro Report newsletter, and follow Retro Report on YouTube and Twitter.

Originally published in The New York Times. 

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By the late nineteenth century, Americans rich and poor had come to expect high-quality fresh beef with almost every meal. Beef production in the United States had gone from small-scale, localized operations to a highly centralized industry spanning the country, with cattle bred on ranches in the rural West, slaughtered in Chicago, and consumed in the nation’s rapidly growing cities. Red Meat Republic tells the remarkable story of the violent conflict over who would reap the benefits of this new industry and who would bear its heavy costs.

Joshua Specht puts people at the heart of his story—the big cattle ranchers who helped to drive the nation’s westward expansion, the meatpackers who created a radically new kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and the stockyard workers who were subjected to the shocking and unsanitary conditions described by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle. Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He shows how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex—centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated—was a consequence of the meatpackers’ ability to make their interests overlap with those of a hungry public, while the interests of struggling ranchers, desperate workers, and bankrupt butchers took a backseat. America—and the American table—would never be the same again.

A compelling and unfailingly enjoyable read, Red Meat Republic reveals the complex history of exploitation and innovation behind the food we consume today.

The post Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America appeared first on Real Food Media.

By Anna Lappé

When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area a few years ago, Real Food Media shared offices in downtown Oakland with Amazon Watch, and I’ve served on the board of Rainforest Action Network (RAN) for more than ten years. From my work and collaborations with these organizations, I’ve learned how important it is that we follow the money to the companies, banks, insurers, and others that profit from environmental destruction. 

It isn’t just about one rogue head of state. To get to the underlying forces of much of the world’s deforestation, from the lush Amazonian rainforest or the carbon-rich peatlands of Indonesia: Who is profiting from the development that leads to this destruction? Read about who is driving, and profiting from, the fires in the Amazon in my latest piece for The Atlantic. 

“As the climate crisis worsens, dialing down demand for industrially raised meat is certainly crucial. But so is upholding the rights of indigenous peoples who protect the Amazon; exposing financial institutions that profit from rain-forest destruction; and condemning elected officials bankrolled by these institutions.”

Feeling like there’s nothing you can do about the Amazon fires? There is: stand in solidarity with environmental defenders and Indigenous peoples, donate to these great organizations, and speak out against (and divest from) the financiers of destruction. And our Tackling Climate Change through Food toolkit has many more great ideas on how to get active.

Header photo by APIB

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