Feeding the World But Killing the Planet w/ Michael Grunwald

Michael Grunwald, author of the new book, We Are Eating the Earth, speaks with Anne Kim and Bill Scher about the devastating environmental impacts of agriculture. Grunwald challenges conventional wisdom about the benefits of biofuels and explains why organic farming is bad for the planet. He also offers tips for what ordinary people can do to adopt a more earth-friendly diet and reduce food waste.

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Below is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity:

Anne Kim: Hey, Michael, welcome to the show and congratulations on your book. It’s great to have you. 

Michael Grunwald: Thanks so much for having me. I’m such a Washington Monthly fan. This is very cool. 

Anne Kim: Thank you. Well, the first question we have is about the title of your book. You’ve titled it We Are Eating the Earth. What exactly do you mean by that? 

Michael Grunwald: The short answer is agriculture is eating the earth. Two of every five acres of habitable land on this planet are now cropped or grazed. Just by contrast, you hear so much about urban sprawl. Well, one of every hundred acres are cities or suburbs. So really this natural planet has become an agricultural planet. We’re losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest to agriculture every six seconds. 

So really, you know, that’s a disaster for deforestation, for biodiversity loss, for pollution and water shortages, but it’s also a disaster for the climate because those trees and wetlands and prairies that we’re destroying used to store a lot of carbon and they also used to absorb the carbon that we’ve already pumped into the atmosphere. So I always say that trying to decarbonize the planet while you’re continuing to vaporize trees, it’s like trying to clean your house while you’re smashing the vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room. You’re making a mess and you’re also crippling your ability to clean up the mess. And so that’s really what the book is about. 

Anne Kim: And most of us aren’t farmers, we’re eaters. Can you drill down a little bit about the specific practices that are having the devastating impacts you’re talking about?  

Michael Grunwald: I think for a lot of us, we kind of take a cross-country flight and we see all those squares and circles out the window and kind of say like, wow, there’s a lot of agriculture out there. But it’s flyover country to us, right? We don’t live it that much. part of the, so yes, there are certainly, there are diesel tractors and crop dusters that create a lot of carbon dioxide. You’ve probably heard about the cows burping and farting and that creates methane and fertilizer creates nitrous oxide. But really the biggest problem with farming is just the fact that it uses so much land. We’re talking about 12 billion acres of the planet and it’s on track to use another 12 Californias worth of land by 2050 if we don’t change some stuff. 

So essentially, you know, we need to make more food with less land. That means that more efficient farming, which we actually do have in the United States, can be less, less devastating to the environment than the kind of inefficient farming where you just, you know, cut down many acres of of Amazon and put a few cows on it. 

Bill Scher: So when you talk about cows, that puts you on a glide path to the beef debate, right? And I don’t come into this with any kind of set position, just like the average American, want to eat my beef. Is there any, the book argues that beef production is just an enormous land suck. Is there any way to sustainably produce beef? If you’re getting beef from a local family farmer, is that better than from a big agribusiness company? Or is it just so completely inefficient that there’s no justification for it? 

Michael Grunwald: Well, beef is bad. So, you know, if the best thing you can do for your personal climate footprint is to eat less beef, that is true. But just like Willie Sutton, you know, he said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. It is true that if you if you care about emissions, you got to care about better beef, because that’s where the emissions are. Now, unfortunately. 

Better beef is generally not the kind of local grass-fed, know, organic, twee beef that you can get at the farmers market. You know, that’s usually worse for the planet and the climate because it uses more land and it also because it takes the cows longer to get to slaughter weight, they’re alive longer to burp and fart methane. Really, but I went to Brazil and I saw incredibly efficient beef ranches where they had improved pastures where that had gone from maybe one cow on every five acres to one cow per acre. And that meant they were using one fifth as much of the Amazon. So yeah, mean, even though that beef was then going to a feedlot that a lot of people might not like, and even though they were fertilizing their pastures in a way that Michael Pollan might not approve. 

Anne Kim: So yeah, I read that chapter about Fazenda Tropical. That was just really interesting. Why don’t ranchers in Montana, you know, adopt those same kind of techniques? Like, what is it about American beef, the American beef industry that makes it difficult to adopt those kinds of models? 

Michael Grunwald:  Well, American beef is pretty good. The main character of my book definitely bangs his spoon on his high chair about how beef is terrible. He’s often then asked, “Well, then what should American beef producers produce?” And he’s like, “Beef.”  American beef is five times more efficient than the beef produced in Africa, it’s using one fifth as much of the forest. And that’s really important. Beef right now generally worldwide is about 10 times worse than chicken and pork in terms of emissions, in terms of land use, if it was only like three or four times worse, that would make a huge difference. So, I’ve cut out beef in my own diet, beef and lamb. 

Going vegan is the best thing you can do for the climate and for the planet for your diet, but I’m weak and I’m a hypocrite. But it turns out that just cutting out beef and lamb is about as good as going vegetarian because vegetarians tend to eat more dairy and again cows are bad.  It’s less bad when they’re making dairy because they make milk like several times a day while they only make beef like once in their lifetime. So that’s why beef is so extraordinarily bad. But again, everybody kind of finds the level of hypocrisy that they’re comfortable with. I do think there are a lot of things you can do to reduce your impact, but just a little less beef, even if you replace it with chicken or pork, that’s probably the best thing you can do. 

Anne Kim: Now what about Beyond Burgers and Impossible Burgers – fake meat? You had a chapter on that and there’s kind of this cautionary tale on just how hard it is to replace beef. 

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, well, that’s definitely one theme of the book is that I look at really dozens of kind of promising, I think, exciting solutions. But the fact is none of them really have a lot of traction yet. And all of them are going to be really hard because, right, we’ve been we’ve been eating meat for, know, our ancestors started two million years ago. We actually evolved to  enjoy the taste of meat. When we started eating meat, we started getting bigger brains and smaller stomachs. And it’s definitely a part of who we are.  

The long story short is that back in 2019, after Beyond went public and was suddenly worth a third as much as Tyson, people thought it was going to take over the world. It was like extraordinary excitement. I actually started reporting this book at the Good Food Institute conference in 2019. That’s the kind of coming together of all the different fake meat companies, whether it’s plant-based or cell-based or fungi-based, everybody’s there. And they were talking about whether they were gonna replace the meat industry in 15 or 20 years. My joke was that I thought I was gonna accidentally raise a Series A round in the drinks line.  

I finished my reporting at the same conference in 2023 and it was doom and gloom. Beyond has gone from $250 a share to $2 a share. Everybody’s like, oh, it was a fad. It’s never going to work. And my feeling is like, well, it was better than the old hockey puck veggie burgers that vegans used to eat, but it’s not yet as good as meat. And until it gets as tasty and as cheap as meat, it’s going to really struggle in the marketplace because most people aren’t writing books about food and climate. So they’re not going to give up beef for the sake of the planet. That said, think humans are not so good at making sacrifices for the planet and not so good at being nice to each other. But we’re really good at innovation and inventing stuff. And I think fake meat can still get better and cheaper and healthier. So I expect people will keep trying. 

Anne Kim: It probably doesn’t help to call it fake meat. It probably needs some sort of other label on it. 

Michael Grunwald: Yes, yes, the industry likes me, except when I use the phrase “fake meat,” and then they all yell at me and I’m not supposed to call it “cell based meat” either. It’s “cultivated meat,” right? Sometimes people call it “lab grown meat.” That’s like very bad. Do not call it that. Stephen Colbert once called it “shmeat.” I don’t think I don’t think that went over big. 

And some of this is going to be some of this definitely is going to be about selling it. You don’t want what happened with GMOs to happen with with meat substitutes where even before it came out people were like, that’s gross. It’s frankenfood. But the Tesla example shows that if you make a good product at a competitive price, some people will buy it. 

And look, I had an Impossible sausage at Starbucks this morning and it’s really good. Plant-based nuggets now in blind taste tests, they pretty much outcompete chicken-based nuggets. I mean, who the hell even knows what’s in a chicken nugget anyway, right? And they’re mostly just vehicles for sauce. So it shows that it can be done.  

Bill Scher:Now you get into GMOs in the book. I mean, a lot of the book is diving into these incredibly controversial subjects that even can divide people within progressive circles. And I’m not, I’m not planting my flag anywhere here. I’m just asking questions. But, know, GMOs definitely took a big hit from the left but they’re still in the food supply and they’re not talked about as much. There’s kind of quietly in there. And I just want to get your general take. Is this considered generally a good or bad thing? Is it helping the climate? Is it hurting us in other ways? What’s your overall view? 

Michael Grunwald: I mean, GMOs are fine, right? They’re not unhealthy. They just aren’t. They’re like the most studied substance on earth, and there’s no evidence of any health problems from eating that stuff. Now, I do talk about in the book how some of the yield benefits of GMOs have been exaggerated by their fans. So far, while some GMOs, particularly the ones that have the kind of natural insecticide,  so that you don’t have to apply as much insecticide. Those have been really helpful for the environment, as well as yields, particularly in places like India, where they don’t have as many pesticides. But in general, think they have not always lived up to the hype. But I’m very excited about the idea of gene editing, which is much more precise and should be even less dangerous, not that GMOs are dangerous at all.  

Anne Kim: I feel like your book is going to be a revelation for a lot of people who care the most about the climate, because these are also the people who read Michael Pollan and are part of the “slow food” movement, organic and all of that. Some of the practices that you write about that people who care about the climate embrace are also actually the most damaging for the planet, right? 

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, I mean, like Michael Pollan is a beautiful writer. And that’s kind of a problem. I think a lot of people believe some wrong things because because he’s explained them so beautifully.  I did an event in Berkeley where I debated a kind of professor of agroecology who is kind of pushing for kind of a global transition to no chemical, organic, low yield farming that in my opinion would be a real disaster for the planet and the climate. It was funny, Alice Waters, the famous chef from Chez Panisse, she was sitting in the third row, just glaring at me the whole time. It was like a room full of 200 Michael Pollan readers and they were out to hate me. But it was actually the response was mostly really great. The Paul Newman’s daughter who now runs Newman’s Own Organic came up and said like  exactly what you said, that that was revelatory.  

I think a lot of people, they see industrial agriculture and they are understandably upset. It treats people badly. It treats animals badly. It makes a huge mess. It’s like all the fertilizers are creating that dead zone the size of Connecticut and the Gulf of Mexico. They use too many antibiotics, which is a public health disaster. Their politics really suck. Right? They’re always lobbying against regulation just for the environment, for the climate. So people hate them. And there’s this sense that, the kind of Michael Pollan rustic bucolic farms with red barns where the animals had names instead of numbers and the soil was treated with love and the farmers looked like American Gothic —  that that kind of good, natural, kinder and gentler farming was good for the environment.  

But the fact is that the real environmental tragedy was the transformation of the prairie or the forest or the wetlands into those nice Michael Pollan farms. That’s when you lost the carbon. That’s when you lost the biodiversity. And there was an additional cost to the intensification. But really, it’s those low yield farms just creating agriculture in the first place where you make the big mess. And the thing about low yield agriculture is if you’re making less food per acre. 

You need more acres to produce food. And that is the simple idea behind “we are eating the earth.” We’re going to need 50 percent more calories by 2050. And we can’t keep tearing down land. You can’t keep using more land.  

You see what happened in Sri Lanka where they banned agrochemicals, they banned fertilizers, they banned pesticides, they went all organic. And within a few months, their farm yields crashed. They were no longer self-sufficient with rice. They started having food shortages and food riots. The government fell and they changed their mind because it was a bad idea.  

I do think the kind of like there’s the left wing and now on the right wing with Bobby Kennedy and and Joe Rogan. There’s this notion that farming and food should be natural, but nobody really knows exactly what that is. And I think farming should be productive so it doesn’t have to cover as much of the earth. 

Anne Kim: I want to ask about one more sacred cow or rather in this case, sacred corn. And that is biofuels. You have just an amazing takedown of the biofuels industry and this mythology that has risen around biofuels as the key to solving climate change while allowing us to keep our gas cars and that kind of thing. I remember when ethanol was a thing back in the day. So can you tell us a little bit about biofuels and why biofuels are actually super bad.  

Michael Grunwald: Well, it’s still the thing. It’s 10 percent of your gasoline. And yeah, I mean, right. Biofuels sound good. It’s like plant based fuels, farm grown fuels. But, you know, in general, you kind of plants are good when they’re plants and not so good when you’re burning the plants.  

And essentially, biofuels, first of all, they were seen as climate salvation because at the time in the early 2000s, there really were no other alternatives to fossil fuels. Solar and wind just weren’t a thing. There were no electric cars. So people were coming out and saying like, this is going to replace fossil fuels. And it’s great because when you you burn the corn in your engine and it comes out the tailpipe and that goes into the sky, but then you grow the corn in your field and that soaks up the carbon. So it’s great. It’s just a win-win. And then the hero of my story, Tim Searchinger, who was at the time just a wetlands lawyer, was like, but wait a minute, those fields are already growing corn. And if you grow fuel instead of food, then you’re gonna have to grow more food somewhere else. And it’s probably not gonna be a parking lot. It’s gonna be a forest or a wetland.  

The punch line is that the climate analyses of biofuels and really everything else were ignoring land. And when you took into account the land use, the indirect land use change that these biofuels were going to induce, that really biofuels were twice as bad as gasoline for the climate.  

Anne Kim: Well, okay, so corn is not the miracle plant we thought it was gonna be, but you do write about a miracle plant. That seems pretty cool. It’s a plant I had never heard of – pongamia. What the heck is pongamia, and why is it so good, and why aren’t we all eating pongamia burgers or butters? 

Michael Grunwald: It’s kind of another cautionary tale about how hard it is to make this stuff work. Because Pongamia really is a miracle tree. It’s a super tree. It grows, you know, in horrible land without irrigation, without fertilizer, without pesticides. It’s got sort of natural pesticides. And it’s essentially it’s like vertical soy. 

It grows something that’s very similar to a soybean. It’s got the protein meal and it’s also got the oil. But it’s a tree, so it grows a lot more of it. And it also stores carbon because it’s a tree and you can see it above the ground. You can see all that carbon. So it really is awesome. I tell the story of this company called Terviva, which first their problem was like, this stuff is amazing. 

But it’s been really hard and it’s hard to get farmers to plant it. It’s hard to, you know, get food companies to use it. He’s now like 15 years into the experiment. It’s only on 1500 acres, and there’s one protein bar that used it. He’s got some deals to sell Pongamia oil for biofuels, which is certainly better than corn ethanol, but it’s not what he had hoped. So again, it’s another example of how these problems are really big and really hard to solve, even with the miracle tree. 

Bill Scher: Can you pinpoint what the obstacle is? Is it just a marketing problem or is there some other thing that’s more systemic? 

Michael Grunwald:  It is really hard competing with the Cargills and Archer Daniels Midlands of the world, who just have these massive volumes and tiny margins. 

It’s really hard to make food and agriculture work and farmers are very set in their ways. It’s very hard to get them to do something different, especially to grow a tree that takes four years before the first crop comes out. And then, you know, and then other people are going to wait and see if this stuff actually works and if there’s a market for it. So the, you know, change just seems to come very slowly in this entire space.  

Anne Kim: So Michael, final question for you. A lot of things that you write about are systemic, things that us as ordinary eaters can’t do very much about. But there are things you write about that ordinary people can do, and one of them is the shift in diet. You’ve talked about that. But what else can people do? Maybe if you can talk a little bit about food waste, maybe as something that we do have control over on an individual level that could make a difference. 

Michael Grunwald: There are a million things that people can do to reduce the impact of their diets. But I try not to weigh people down with so many. And it’s really eat less beef and waste less food. We talked a little bit about how beef is so much worse than other forms of meat. When you waste food, you waste all the farmland and the fertilizer and the water that went into growing that food. And globally, we waste about a quarter of our food. We use a landmass the size of China to grow garbage. The average American family wastes about $1,500 a year on food that never makes it to their stomachs.  

Even during this time of food inflation, Americans are not wasting less food, which is kind of crazy when you think about it, right? We’re super mad about how much we’re spending on food and yet we’re still throwing out probably in households in America about a third of it. So yeah, mean, there are things individuals can do in terms of planning your meals better, smaller portions, that kind of thing.  

But again, I don’t want to put too much hope in like people doing the right thing because behavioral change is really hard. And then in a lot of the developing world, it’s not so much food waste, you know, in the home or near the fork. It’s more near the farm with primitive harvesting equipment and, you know, bad storage and bad roads that make it hard to get food to market and no cold storage and structural change is hard too.  

Anne Kim: Yeah. Well, Michael, thank you for joining us and please tell everyone where we can find your book. 

Michael Grunwald: Well, it’s hopefully in bookstores and get it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble or your local independent. And I do want to give a shout out to the Monthly because they tell you when you write a book that you need to have a tribe. 

And of course, I’ve pissed off all the tribes in various ways, the vegans, you know, the foodies, the hippies, you know, the Aggies, you know, the Michael Pollan readers, the, you know, everybody’s mad at me. But in a way, like like my tribe is the Washington Monthly, like people who care about people who care about sort of dorky policies that are really important that, you know, haven’t been sexy to everybody else. But, you know, everybody lives on the planet and everybody eats. 

And so for people who care about like, you know, how to solve problems, which is like basically the whole monthly thing, you know, that’s that’s my tribe. 

Anne Kim: Well, thank you very much, Michael.

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