We are eating the Earth

We are eating the Earth The race to fix our food system and save our climate

Michael Grunwald, 1970-

Book - 2025

"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, 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 ou...r 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"--

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Subjects
Food supply > Environmental aspects.
Land use, Rural > Environmental aspects.
Agriculture > Environmental aspects.
Climate change mitigation.
Published
New York : Simon & Schuster 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Michael Grunwald, 1970- (author)
Edition
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition
Physical Description
371 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 339-352) and index.
ISBN
9781982160074
  • Introduction: The Land Problem
  • 1. The Guy Who Figures Stuff Out
  • 2. Land Is Not Free
  • 3. Weird Science
  • 4. Destroying the Climate in Order to Save It
  • 5. The Menu
  • 6. It's the Food That Needs to Change
  • 7. The Fake Meat Hype Cycle
  • 8. The Soil Fantasy
  • 9. More Beef, Less Land
  • 10. More Crops, Less Land
  • 11. How to Save the World
  • Epilogue: Can We Do This?
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Image Credits
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

Discussions around our ability to feed the world center on food production systems, soil degradation, carbon emissions, and technology. This treatise is not for the fainthearted because all of these components are tackled in a way that raises questions about our ability to produce the food needed to meet the world's caloric needs while preserving the natural resources of water, soil, and air. The book repeatedly raises the question of the real carbon footprint of food and fuel production and whether current US agricultural policies are helping or hindering progress toward more efficient food production systems. A primary question is whether current methods of assessing the effectiveness of different practices, e.g., no-till on soil carbon sequestration, are correct in accounting for all of the factors involved in the production system. We Are Eating the Earth calls attention to our current production methods and argues that our choice of produced items may be slowly eating the earth by degrading our soil, air, and water quality, reducing ecological diversity and ultimately creating a more fragile food system. Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers. --Jerry L. Hatfield, formerly, USDA-Agricultural Research Service

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

At first glance, this engaging, informative, witty, convincing, and ultimately sobering offering seems to be a call for environmental action regarding land use. It's actually more of a career biography of Princeton sustainability expert Tim Searchinger, a passionate campaigner for food- and natural-resource-management reform. Author and investigative reporter Grunwald (The New New Deal) follows Searchinger's ongoing, groundbreaking research and evolving realizations that previous efforts to replace fossil fuels with ozone-depleting, corn-based ethanol and other, vegan diet--centered efforts, were misguided. Weaving in occasionally irreverent and always amusing details and personal observations, Grunwald describes Searchinger's passionate campaigns to get people to listen to him, especially his fellow academics. He details Searchinger's endless, relentless, and only occasionally successful battles with an array of international food producers, suppliers, and consumers, describing showdowns with billionaire rain-forest farmers and cattlemen, Big Agriculture, the EPA, the European Union, and other concerns. Grunwald includes character profiles, case studies, and realistic evaluations of probable success for interventions currently in place. He also proposes admittedly difficult but possible solutions. While the content is disturbing, Grunwald's delivery helps gets his message across: the need for land-use reform, immediately.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this bracing report, journalist Grunwald (The Swamp) explores the challenges of developing a more sustainable agricultural system through an extended profile of Tim Searchinger, a hard-charging environmental lawyer whose skepticism of claims about ethanol's viability as a fossil fuel alternative inspired him to take on a second line of work as an agriculture researcher at Princeton University. Grunwald details how in the late aughts, Searchinger's research on how a congressional mandate for plant-based fuels exacerbated deforestation (producers razed land to grow corn that could be transformed into ethanol) helped turn the tide against them in environmental circles. Instead, Searchinger argues that humans should avoid the creation of new farmland by making existing tracts more productive. Surveying ongoing controversies over how to do so, Grunwald explains that while some believe replacing beef with plant-based meat would reduce methane emissions, the foods are ultraprocessed and unhealthy, and that while some decry GMOs as unnatural, Searchinger believes they hold promise for boosting harvests. In capturing Searchinger's "pain-in-the-ass tenacity" and iconoclastic spirit, Grunwald offers a myth-busting overview of current debates around how to improve the world's agricultural systems. This provides much food for thought. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (July)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A journalist and bestselling author reports on the critical condition of our food system. In the midst of our climate change crisis is a land crisis. Within the next 25 years, current trends predict that "the world's farmers will clear at least a dozen more Californias' worth of land." Agriculture is the main driver of deforestation, as well as of water shortages and biodiversity loss. That means mass deforestation lies in our future, which will wipe out essential carbon sinkholes like the Amazon rainforest, as well as countless wetlands, prairies, and diverse ecosystems. As populations expand, it's an unavoidable fact that we need our planet to produce more food--according to Grunwald, it needs to produce "even more calories over the next 30 years than it had produced over the previous 12,000"--an imposing challenge. How to meet that demand without decimating critical habitat is the fraught question at the heart of the book. Grunwald gathers decades of history and research to examine how we got here and where we can go in the future. Along the way, he critiques biofuels and says environmental policy has not always been a productive mode for our planet's health. He commends the many scientists doing critical work on the ground. Among them is Tim Searchinger, a "brainiac among brainiacs" who appears as a guide through these pages. Grunwald does the important work of translating the legal, scientific, and often esoteric aspects of the issue into immediate action. Ambitious in scope, the book provides a roadmap of environmental policy relating to agricultural land in the past few decades and the emergency we're now facing. An accessible and alarming look at the planet's land crisis. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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