Farming Already Uses An Area Equivalent To All Of Asia Plus All Of Europe And We're Still Razing Forests For Cheap Meat

EDIT

Why our food system remains a climate disaster, and how we can extricate ourselves from this mess, are central questions pondered in a new book called We Are Eating the Earth by the journalist Michael Grunwald. Grunwald is unsparing in his diagnosis of the challenge, estimating that agricultural production will need to expand by about 50% in the next 25 years to feed a growing human population of 10 billion people while somehow also not wiping out the world’s biodiversity and carbon-storing trees while doing so.

Given the world has already, according to Grunwald, devoted an amount of land equivalent to all of Asia and all of Europe for farming, however, the maths in doing this is “terrible” and “remorseless”. As so little funding and thought has gone into making our food climate-friendly, there is no obvious template for ramping up food production in a way that doesn’t eat more of the Earth. “We’re clear-cutting and broiling the planet to stuff our faces,” Grunwald writes, adding that “feeding the world without frying it” will be an even bigger task than ending the age of oil. “This carbohydrate problem will be even trickier to solve than the hydrocarbon problem,” he states.

EDIT

So what of other potential remedies? The burst of hype around plant-based meat appeared to hold promise, and undoubtably provided an upgrade on previous iterations of veggie burgers, but the book documents how by 2023 the bubble had mostly burst and the media was “throwing dirt on the sector’s grave”. Beyond Meat, previously at the forefront of the sector, lost 95% of its stock value, with plant-based items yanked from the menus of major chains. “The theory was: if we build it, they will come,” Max Elder, who had just shut down his pea-based chicken startup Nowadays, told Grunwald. “Well, we built it. They didn’t come.”

EDIT

Vertical farming, too, has fizzled. It was hoped that giant warehouses with floor-to-ceiling vegetables requiring few of the inputs of traditional farming would save space and cut pollution but, as Grunwald notes, the practice is a “ludicrous energy hog” to the extent, he calculated, that it would require every megawatt of renewable energy in the US just to grow 5% of America’s tomatoes. Several startups in this realm have gone bust. “Carbon farming and vertical farming are wildly overhyped,” Grunwald sums up. “Plant-based meat has floundered in the market, while cultivated meat hasn’t really made it to market.”

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/14/we-are-eating-the-earth-book-climate