This story is part of Degrees Of Change, a series that explores the problem of climate change and how we as a planet are adapting to it. Tell us how you or your community are responding to climate change here.
A quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from putting food on the table. From the fossil fuels used to produce fertilizers, to the methane burps of cows, to the jet fuel used to deliver your fresh asparagus, eating is one of the most planet-warming things we do.
And as climate change gets worse, we’re seeing more flooding rains, more heat waves, and more droughts—indicating that this problem in part created by our eating habits is turning round to endanger the future of food.
Science writer Amanda Little examines that future in her new book The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World, and explores innovative ways that farmers are adapting too, from aerial farms and aquaculture to robotic weed pickers. The message is clear: There might be a way out of this, if we rethink how we put food on the table. Read an excerpt from The Fate of Food.
We’ll also be examining the solutions to our carbon-hungry food chain. Stefano Carpin of the University of California Merced is designing a smarter way to water crops, by surveying fields with drones to figure out where to water, and then sending in fleets of robots to send squirts of water from irrigation tubes. He’s currently designing the system for California’s warming vineyards.
Food waste is another significant problem—40% of food goes wasted in this country. Julie Goddard of Cornell University is designing smart packaging that can keep foods fresh, all without the addition of preservatives, which consumers increasingly prefer to avoid. We’ll talk about all those solutions and more in this chapter of Degrees of Change.
Q&A With Amanda Little On Eating Smarter
David Church in Jacksonville, Florida: What about plant-based meat alternatives? They’re highly processed. I think that would take up a lot of resources.
Amanda Little: Beyond Meat, which is a leading brand in plant-based proteins, runs its pea proteins through a simple process of heating cooling and pressure to create this fibrous structure. So it does take processing, but it’s more sustainable and humane than conventional meats. A University of Michigan study compared the production of Beyond Burger to a ¼ lb US beef burger. It took 99 percent less water, 93 percent less land, and about half the energy. According to the study, the production of a Beyond Burger emits 90 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Ed Whitehouse in Mount Pleasant, Michigan: What is the time frame for lab-grown meat be rolled out and affordable?
The timeframe generally ranges from “a couple years” to “five to ten years.” The startup Finless Foods, a producer of cultured tuna, said they’ll have a product ready for market in 2020, but then shifted to: “we’re not giving public timelines anymore.” Another producer of lab-grown sausage has said they’ll have a market-ready product by 2021 and the Israeli startup Future Meat Technologies has referenced roughly the same timeframe. The biggest brand in cell-based meat, Memphis Meats, has been careful not to give a rollout date — they say they want to achieve optimal quality as well as cost. The cost of cultured meats has come down dramatically the recent years, but it’s still in the hundreds of dollars per pound. There’s little doubt that with economies of scale, cell-based meats will be cost-competitive with, or cheaper than, conventional meats, it’s just a question of when.
1. How much does our food choices impact climate change vs. other life style choices like flying?
2. Is it better to eat imported meat substitutes than locally produced meat?
3. Can food be climate positive (e.g. better than neutral)?— nielswadsholt (@nielswadsholt) July 2, 2019
Amanda Little: Many of us meat-eaters generate more planet-warming emissions from eating than we do from driving or flying. Broadly, food production accounts for about a fifth of total greenhouse gas emissions annually. Upshot: agriculture contributes more than any other sector, including energy and transportation, to climate change.
There have been claims that you can produce a “climate-positive” hamburger, but the data is vague and the farming practices behind such burgers are very rarely implemented. But there great strategies for climate-positive progress in agriculture, that range from better fertilizer management (chemical fertilizers evaporate into the air, producing nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas) to reforesting unused or poorly used pasture and farmland. See this excellent report by The Nature Conservancy, “Natural Climate Solutions.”
1. What is the relative environmental impact of different levels of animal product elimination? (Just beef, beef + pork, beef + pork + chicken, pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan)
— Alissa Farina (@FarinaAlissa) July 2, 2019
Amanda Little: Let’s compare beef to fossil fuels: if you give up one 5-ounce steak and eat beans instead, that’s the equivalent of saving about 2/3 of a gallon of gas. More excellent deets [in this Washington Post article] Yet another fascinating WaPo piece by Tamar Haspel offers a calorie-for-calorie analysis of the carbon impact of veggies vs. meats. Broccoli, for example, has a higher carbon cost per calorie than chicken and pork. Haspel says: “Beef and lamb are still way worse than anything. Substituting chicken or pork for beef is, from a carbon perspective, almost as good as substituting a plant food.”
2. Are there any veggies that are surprisingly bad for the environment? Are there any veggies with env impact similar to an animal product?
3. Which favorite beverage is the best/worst for the environment: beer, wine, coffee, tea?— Alissa Farina (@FarinaAlissa) July 2, 2019
Amanda Little (question 2): Yes. Asparagus! If it requires jet fuel. And many other air-freighted vegetables and fruits. Check out this National Geographic piece: “The Surprisingly Big Carbon Shadow Cast By Slender Asparagus” which gives a breakdown of fruit and veggie carbon costs.
Something You Can Do!
- The biggest change you can make, according to Little, is to reduce your consumption of beef and lamb. Whether you count by the kilo or the calorie, those two food products result in the highest carbon emissions.
- The second thing you can do is identify, observe, and begin to address the amount of food waste in your home. In her book, Little talks to Darby Hoover of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who worked on the NRDC’s Wasted report on food waste. Hoover says: “Food waste is riddled with unexpected contradictions, and one of them is that healthier diets tend to be the most wasteful diets.” A recent study in the journal PLOS ONE came to the same conclusion—and that’s because healthy, fresh foods are also the most likely to perish. So unless you have a plan to use that crate of strawberries or the two pound bag of specialty lettuces, don’t buy it. Little provided these practical tips for wasting less:
- When produce begins to wilt, use it for soups and blended drinks
- Freeze fruits and vegetables if you can’t eat them all before spoiling
- Buy more frozen fruits and vegetables if fresh produce tends to go wasted in your house
- Store your leftovers in glass rather than plastic containers, to extend the life of your food and preserve its flavor
- Finally: Don’t forget to eat your leftovers!
Further Reading:
- Listen to an interview with Amanda Little on Fresh Air.
- Learn more about the impact of giving up eating beef.
- Read up on how climate change will influence what’s on our plates by 2050.
- Listen to Julie Goddard explaining how to reduce food waste and improve food safety.
- Learn more about how robots and people can work together to improve water and agriculture use.
- Compare the calorie-per-calorie cost of a vegetarian diet versus an omnivorous one. (You may be surprised!)
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Segment Guests
Amanda Little is the author of The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World, and a professor of Investigative Journalism and Science Writing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Stefano Carpin is a professor of Computer Science and Robotics at the University of California, Merced in
Merced, California.
Julie Goddard is a professor in the Department of Food Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
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