The brutal trade-off that may resolve the way forward for meals

[ad_1] Maybe probably the most essential concept for understanding our species’ future on this planet boils down to 2 boring phrases: land use.

To mitigate local weather change, people might want to extract important minerals to construct vast numbers of photovoltaic cells and wind turbines . We’ll want millions of tons of copper to wire continent-spanning energy grids. However probably the most immutable useful resource constraint we face — the one we are able to’t mine extra of — is land.

Though many people don’t see it, as a result of most humans now live in urban areas , the story of land constraints can be a story about agriculture, which devours practically half of our planet’s habitable land ; city and suburban areas take up solely a tiny fraction.

We’re not utilizing all that farmland very properly. Beef farming, for instance, occupies “practically half the world’s agricultural land to provide simply 3 p.c of its energy,” the journalist Michael Grunwald writes in his new ebook, We Are Eating the Earth . Partly as a result of it consumes a lot land, agriculture contributes between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse gasoline emissions, and as humanity’s numbers climb, its footprint will swell. “If present tendencies maintain, the world’s farmers will clear at the least a dozen extra Californias’ price of land to fill practically 10 billion human bellies by 2050,” Grunwald writes.

Grunwald’s ebook — a full of life, reportorial world tour by means of the misunderstood science and politics of agriculture, usually defined through Gen X film references — is amongst a slate of latest titles that I like to consider because the abundance agenda of meals.

Abundance , Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling it-girl of wonk manifestos, shares mental DNA with a rising set of concepts bringing supply-side financial rules to the way forward for farming. Simply as we are able to’t solve the housing crisis or the green energy gap with a politics of shortage, we are able to’t repair agriculture’s planetary influence by merely producing much less meals. We've got to develop sufficient meals to affordably and sustainably feed a world of 8 billion and counting. And since there’s a tough restrict on land, which means determining how one can squeeze extra meals out of our treasured acreage.

The proposed options would possibly shock you. They don't seem to be crunchy farming philosophies like local agriculture or so-called regenerative ranching — woefully inefficient, low-productivity techniques that, if deployed at scale, would imply mowing down the world’s remaining forests, accelerating local weather change and mass extinction. That’s as a result of wild, carbon-sequestering ecosystems are our greatest pure defenses towards local weather change, which is one thing that no agricultural sample can replicate. “Each farm, even the scenic ones with pink barns and rolling hills that artists paint and writers sentimentalize, is a form of environmental crime scene,” Grunwald writes. And at the moment, “international agriculture is shifting south, towards tropical forests and wetlands which can be the world’s most useful carbon sinks,” just like the Amazon.

Which means a very powerful determinant of agriculture’s planetary influence is how a lot land it sucks up — what Grunwald calls “the eating-the-earth drawback.” By this measure, typical, intensive, industrial crop farming like that practiced throughout the US, and heavily criticized by many environmentalists , outperforms natural agriculture or low-yield farming frequent in low-income international locations, for the straightforward cause that it produces probably the most meals on the least land (although there's, to make sure, nuance to this debate ).

We Are Consuming the Earth is joined by a grumpier, extra educational provocation on meals sustainability. Food Fight , by UC Davis agricultural economist Richard Sexton, decries the insurance policies being applied around the globe, usually within the title of serving to the setting, that may make farming much less productive and fewer sustainable, and meals costlier. “By no means have governments actively intervened to implement insurance policies assured to cut back meals manufacturing the way in which they do at the moment and promise to do into the longer term,” he argues, dismantling approaches starting from mindless ethanol mandates within the US and elsewhere to Europe’s pro-organic and anti-GMO policies .

These are clever, extremely well timed books that get many issues proper, surfacing the misguided pastoral fantasies and deadly misunderstandings of land use that make it onerous for us to pursue sane agricultural insurance policies. They encourage due respect for a contemporary industrial meals system that, for all its issues, has achieved spectacular feats of productiveness essential to assist a planet of billions of individuals.

However their emphasis on intensification additionally leads them someplace much more ominous: a protection of the worst a part of our meals system, one that may result in ever-more horrifying ranges of struggling and loss of life.

The rise of anti-anti-factory farming

Repairing our meals system is so confoundingly tough partly as a result of it usually feels extra intractable than it must be. We already know we may alleviate numerous the issue by eating less meat and dairy — the meals equal of coal energy — and extra crops, however convincing shoppers to try this by means of both coverage or suasion is really, really hard . (Consider me, I try ).

“One American pollster advised me meat taxes have been probably the most unpopular coverage he ever surveyed, ‘up there with veterans’ advantages for ISIS,’” Grunwald grimly remarks. And one of many surest bets you may place on the longer term, as each authors level out, is that as folks in low- and middle-income international locations turn into richer, they will eat lots more animal products . People already slaughter an eye-watering 80 billion land animals per year , a quantity that may proceed to soar.

Resigned to that dismal actuality, each We Are Consuming the Earth and Meals Combat replicate an concept that’s more and more prevalent in way forward for meals debates — that manufacturing unit farms, regardless of their cruelty, are a needed evil. Name it anti-anti-factory farming.

The reasoning is simple sufficient. Animal agriculture takes up a lot of land and sources — that’s why meat is dangerous for the setting within the first place. The one solution to produce it at scale with out blowing up local weather targets and clearing rainforests is to boost animals as intensively as doable by means of what’s referred to as “sustainable intensification.”

Manufacturing unit farms don’t exist merely to be evil, in spite of everything, however relatively as a result of they produce animal merchandise with the fewest doable inputs. Simply as a lot as these books puncture Michael Pollan-esque pipe goals of feeding the world with pasture-raised steak, additionally they have little persistence for animal rights activists who wish to regulate manufacturing unit farming out of existence.

Thus included on Sexton’s listing of misguided insurance policies are animal welfare legal guidelines like California’s Proposition 12 , which ban among the most excessive types of confinement for livestock, together with caging feminine breeding pigs in crates so small they’re comparable to spending a whole human life trapped inside a coffin.

“Insurance policies being imposed within the title of animal welfare scale back the productiveness of those animals and lift the prices of manufacturing animal merchandise,” he writes. In equity to Sexton, whom I've an unlimited quantity of respect for and have interviewed for quite a few tales, he suggests what he argues is another, less expensive path to attaining the welfare advantages of Prop 12. “I like animals and wish them to be handled effectively,” he writes.

<img alt="A stark, dimly lit photograph taken from a high angle shows several large, light-pink pigs confined in individual metal stalls inside what appears to be a factory farm. The narrow stalls are lined up in a row, barely wider than the pigs themselves, preventing them from turning around. The pig on the right looks directly up toward the camera, its snout and ears illuminated by the harsh overhead light. The floor is dark and appears wet, and the overall scene conveys a sense of intense confinement." data-chromatic="ignore" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-nimg="fill" class="mvmjsc0" style="position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, (max-width: 1023px) 50vw, 700px" srcset="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=256 256w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=376 376w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=384 384w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=415 415w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=480 480w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=540 540w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=640 640w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=750 750w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=828 828w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1080 1080w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1200 1200w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1440 1440w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1920 1920w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2048 2048w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400 2400w" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/WAM26914_27e7e6.jpg.webp?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400"/> Pigs housed in gestation crates. Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media

Grunwald extra gingerly suggests manufacturing unit farms stay an inevitable, if inhumane and never very best, a part of meals manufacturing. In a controversial New York Times essay final December, he argued , “the inconvenient fact is that manufacturing unit farms are the very best hope for producing the meals we are going to want with out obliterating what’s left of our pure treasures and vaporizing their carbon into the ambiance.”

One of many surest, most reasonable methods to cut back meat’s outsize land and carbon footprints this century, Grunwald writes, is for diets to switch beef with poultry and pork, that are far lower in climate impact . However that commerce could be morally calamitous — it takes far more individual chickens and pigs to provide the identical quantity of meat as beef cattle, and people animals are handled far worse.

The anti-anti-factory farming ethos is definitely a method of taking a look at our meals system. There’s a brutal logic to it that anti-factory farm advocates need to study to take care of.

Take dairy cows as only one illustrative instance: Breeding them for maximal productiveness has meant that “since World Warfare II, the US dairy herd has shrunk by two-thirds, but produces two-thirds extra milk,” Grunwald writes. Had that not occurred, we’d have extra dairy cows emitting extra greenhouse gases, and we’d probably have cleared extra land and harmed extra ecosystems to develop the crops that feed them. In a lot of the remainder of the world, dairy herds are a lot much less productive, thereby consuming extra sources and polluting the local weather extra for each gallon of milk produced.

But America’s hyper-productive turbo-cows have come at a severe cost to animal welfare . Dairy cows are among the most depressing animals in our meals system: Like all mammals, they solely make milk after giving start, to feed their infants, however they’ve been bred to provide way over a calf would drink. These astronomical yields destroy the dairy cow’s body , forcing her to channel “freakish” quantities of vitality into milk manufacturing, because the meals historian Anne Mendelson has written. (One would possibly argue that the counterfactual could be even worse: a world with extra, less-productive dairy cows, every enduring a lifetime of continuous being pregnant and separation from their calves. However, the sheer extremity of the fashionable turbo-cow’s struggling, and the prospect of bringing many extra of them into the world, crosses an ethical threshold.)

All this for a meals that also, even after cows have been pushed past the boundaries of decency, stays considerably worse for the setting than merely consuming plant-based meals. So is industrial milk actually a win for the planet?

Considered one of my favourite visualizations the worldwide meals system comes from Our World in Data :

<img alt="An infographic from Our World in Data titled “Global land use for food production,” which breaks down land usage in a series of nested charts.Chart Breakdown:Earth’s Surface:71% Ocean (369 Million km 2 )29% Land (141 Million km 2 )Land Surface: (A breakdown of the 29% Land)76% Habitable land (107 Million km 2 )14% Barren land (20 Million km 2 )10% Glaciers (14 Million km 2 )Habitable Land: (A breakdown of the 76% Habitable land)45% Agriculture (48 Million km 2 )38% Forests (40 Million km 2 )13% Shrub (14 Million km 2 )3% Water bodies (3 Million km 2 )1% Urban and built-up land (1 Million km 2 )Agricultural Land: (A breakdown of the 45% Agricultural land)80% Livestock: meat, dairy, textiles (38 Million km 2 , comprised of 32 million km 2 of grazing land and 6 million km 2 of cropland for feed)16% Crops for food (8 Million km 2 )4% Non-food crops like biofuels and cotton (2 Million km 2 )Food Supply Contribution:The chart then links land use to food supply, showing a disparity:Global Calorie Supply:83% from plant-based food17% from meat & dairyGlobal Protein Supply:62% from plant-based food38% from meat & dairyA footnote clarifies that if wild fish catch is included, animal products would provide 18% of calories and 40% of protein." data-chromatic="ignore" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-nimg="fill" class="mvmjsc0" style="position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, (max-width: 1023px) 50vw, 700px" srcset="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=256 256w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=376 376w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=384 384w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=415 415w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=480 480w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=540 540w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=640 640w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=750 750w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=828 828w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1080 1080w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1200 1200w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1440 1440w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1920 1920w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2048 2048w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400 2400w" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/Global-land-use-breakdown.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400"/> Plant-based meals — that's, all the things that’s not meat, dairy, and eggs — already provide greater than 80 p.c of the world’s energy, and practically two-thirds of our protein, with simply 16 p.c of world agricultural land. One conclusion you can draw from this chart is that animal agriculture is so inherently inefficient — we develop feed crops to boost animals that we then slaughter to feed ourselves — that we've got to work onerous to search out methods of constructing it extra productive. One other method of taking a look at it's that animal agriculture is so inefficient — and, by the way in which, it comes at an unthinkable ethical value, and it might start the next pandemic — that it could be the definition of lunacy to squander restricted international carbon budgets to provide an ever-greater share of our meals this manner.

However there’s no single council of humanity that may make that call for our species — solely billions of people making market decisions. They usually have proven each signal that they will maintain consuming meat.

So Grunwald requires an all-of-the-above method. We Are Consuming the Earth roots for the success of meat alternate options like plant-based and cell-cultivated meat — and it made me really feel extra optimistic about their future than I've in a very long time — simply as a lot because it embraces intensive animal manufacturing. Innovation can even make intensive crop agriculture extra planet-friendly, as Grunwald explores, by making it much less depending on inputs that hurt wildlife, like chemical pesticides.

The logic of anti-anti-factory farming genuinely challenged me, as a result of as not possible as its decisions really feel — will we torture a number of billion extra animals per yr, or let the Amazon burn ? — they're actual trade-offs that policymakers face on daily basis.

It’s onerous to match the despoiling of irreplaceable ecological wonders to the infernal horror of the manufacturing unit farm in keeping with a cost-benefit evaluation, as a result of they really feel incommensurate. But when we tried to do it actually, I’m undecided the reply could be as clear as manufacturing unit farming’s defenders recommend. Their case solely works as a result of meals techniques evaluation sees animals as financial inputs, not a lot completely different than a bushel of wheat, relatively than as who they are surely. It doesn’t significantly have interaction with what it actually means to livestock for meals — the incessant ache of a contemporary broiler rooster, or the mind-numbing despair of a caged mom pig used as a reproductive machine.

So let me supply yet another new ebook suggestion: my good friend the thinker John Sanbonmatsu’s The Omnivore’s Deception . One other rebuke of Michael Pollan and his protection of consuming animals, it’s the uncommon ebook that unshrinkingly names our tyranny over animals as a “civilizational error,” as Sanbonmatsu writes. It’s “about what occurs after we arrange our society, financial system, and every day lives round a radical evil, then have interaction in self-deception to maintain the reality of that evil from ourselves.”

We Are Consuming the Earth is, to a fantastic extent, a piece of unsentimental pragmatism, which makes the spirited case for principled idealism within the ebook’s closing moments all of the stronger. Typically progress will depend on a “refusal to learn the room and cease saying issues no person needed to listen to,” Grunwald writes. “It pays to maintain working and combating the great battle, as a result of perhaps one thing good will occur. Possibly it received’t, however should you don’t maintain working and combating, it positively received’t.”

We should always have a look at animal agriculture the identical method. We may proceed turning our planet into a large manufacturing unit farm, however then, what are we even doing all this for? If we proceed to disregard one of the greatest atrocities of our time — and develop it even additional — what could be the purpose of constructing such a world?

Everywhere in the globe, there are animal advocates urging their fellow people to vary course, and the one method we’ll really feel our method out of the manufacturing unit farm entice is to decide to that job. We don’t know if we’ll ever persuade humanity to desert the “radical evil” of manufacturing unit farming, however it could be an abdication to surrender making an attempt.

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