Plain English with Derek Thompson - What’s the Best Diet for Planet Earth?

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

If you love food and also consider yourself a good person, you probably care about where your food comes from, how it’s grown, and whether it's part of a system that is destroying the planet. After all, if you study just about any problem related to the environment, sooner or later your study will make solid contact with our food systems. Our food is responsible for 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. But not everybody who claims to care about the environment knows what they’re talking about. Eating local? Eating organic? Counterintuitively, these behaviors aren't as ecologically beneficial as many people claim. These facts and more come from Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist, the deputy editor of Our World in Data, and the author of a new book 'Not the End of the World.' As Ritchie argues at length in her book, a lot of liberals assume that anything that sounds like pastoralism and natural living is better for the planet. But in fact, it is technological progress that allows for highly efficient farming, high-quality foods with less land consumed by agriculture, less water wasted, and more forests spared. Many times, our pastoralist instincts to appear virtuous when it comes to food and the planet don’t actually achieve virtuous outcomes. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Hannah Ritchie Producer: Devon Baroldi Links mentioned: "Environmental Impacts of Food Production," Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode is about food, diet, and climate change. If you're a good citizen of the planet, the sort of person who loves delicious food,

but considers yourself a moral eater, a person who wants to be an ethical diner, my guess is that you think about where your food comes from, how it's grown. Is it local? Does it have one of those organic stickers on the fruit? Perhaps you know people that sound like that perfectly satirized couple on the show, Portlandia, from several years ago. The chicken is a heritage breed, woodland-raised chicken that's been fed a diet of sheep's milk, soy, and hazelnuts. Okay, this is local?

Yes, absolutely. I'm going to ask you just one more time, and it's local? It is. Is that USDA organic or Oregon organic or Portland organic? It's just all across the board, organic. That sketch, by the way, ends with the characters getting up, leaving the restaurant to personally inspect the home of the chicken, whose name is Colin. Now, the sketch is obviously absurd, but there's a way in which, like any successful piece of comedy or satire, it reflects a deeper truth.

If you study just about any problem related to the environment, sooner or later, your study makes solid contact with our food systems. Are you worried about carbon? Well, our food is responsible for 25% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Are you worried about deforestation? That is almost entirely a food problem. How about the world's supply of freshwater? Agriculture is responsible for around 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. You take all the ice and desert-free land on Earth,

half of it is used for agriculture. Three-quarters of that isn't even used for feeding us humans. It's used for feeding the animals that we eat. Those facts and more come from Hanna-Ritchie, a data scientist, the deputy editor of Our World and Data, the author of a new book called Not the End of the World. But if he returned to Fred Armisen and his date from that sketch, not everybody who claims to care about the environment

knows exactly what they're talking about. Eating local sounds very nice. But does it actually make a difference? Eating organic sounds great. But what does that actually mean? What is the sticker on that fruit actually referring to? And how sure are we that organic food is actually better for the environment, for land preservation, for biodiversity.

As Richie argues at length in her book, a lot of liberals assume that anything that sounds like pastoralism and natural living is naturally better for the environment and the planet. But in fact, it is technological progress that allows for highly efficient farming, high-quality foods with less land consumed by agriculture, less water-wasted, more forests spared. Many times, our Portlandian and pastoral instincts to appear virtuous when it comes to food in the planet do not actually achieve virtuous outcomes.

To guide us through myth and reality when it comes to food, diet, and climate change, today's guest is Hannah Ritchie. We talk about the myths of eating local and organic, the best diets for omnivores, the prospects of cellular meat and the upside of climate change optimism. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Hannah Ritchie, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. I believe you and I are both in our 30s and a lot of people our age who prioritize the issue of climate change the way that we do, who care about the issue of climate change the way that we do. I think a lot of people like us

think that what we're facing is something like the end of the world. that people like us believe that climate change will destroy the world really intriplicate, that the first order effects will be higher temperatures and sea levels. The second order effects will be drought and starvation, especially in low-income places. And the third order effects will be things like migration surges that reshape global governance for the worse. And the people who deny these facts most loudly, who say, this is no big deal, it's mostly a myth, the denialists, they tend to be people who do not engage with the numbers of global temperature.

and green energy. And that makes you a very special case because you take climate change very seriously, but you also engage just about as deeply as anybody I know with the numbers and the facts. Do you believe that the apocalyptic argument about climate change is wrong? I don't believe that we're headed for the apocalypse. I think the way I'd afraid climate change is that we are on course for really catastrophic impacts on the current trajectory that we're on. I think the problem with how we often frame the climate change problem is that we frame it as kind of of one or the other. It's either it's not problem at all or it's the end of the world. And the reality is that it's somewhere in the middle, there's a really broad spectrum of climate impacts.

And I think what's really important to communicate is where we end up on that broad spectrum of impacts is largely down to us. Like we're still in control of the temperature knob at the moment and it's largely determined by our emissions. So where we're currently headed on climate. We're headed for a world of between two and a half to three degrees. And for me, that that's pretty catastrophic. We will see extremely large impacts on that trajectory. I think where I kind of differ on some of the kind of doomsday scenarios, I think we can bend that curve. I think we are now starting to see action. I think many of the solutions we need are there. They're affordable. And I can see a trajectory where we start to bend that curve much,

much closer to two degrees, and ideally below two degrees, which is where we want to be. So I think my issue of many of these frameings is it's very polarized. It's either win-lose, but in reality it's somewhere in between, and we are in control of where we end up on that spectrum. Before we get into some of the details, you work at Our World and Data, which is this extraordinary index of searchable information on climate and energy. Let's say someone's listening to this show, and they say, okay, Hannah seems to know what she's talking about. She seems to have some kind of optimism that this is a solvable problem. What would you direct people to look at if they only going to look at one, two, three pages on the internet in order to get a sense of the optimism

that motivated you to write a book called Not the End of the World, where would you encourage them to look to get that optimism? I think two places. I think one place is, I mean, what I think makes me most optimistic is the plunging costs of low carbon technologies. I mean, where we were sitting a decade ago was, for me at that time, I was very pessimistic because the alternatives we had to fossil fuels were just so expensive. Like there was no way, I would struggle to even get rich countries to deploy them, but there was no way that middle and low-income countries would apply them because they were just far too expensive.

I think the really dramatic change we've seen is that the price of solar, wind, batteries, electric cars have plunged and they're actually still falling. And in many cases, they're competitive, if not cheaper than fossil fuels. So I think for me, that's where like a big part of the optimism lies. I think the other half to that equation is, I think when we would. think about climate impacts, we focus on the actual physical climate impact, like the actual physical thing that's happening. The other big part of the equation is one exposure, so the number of people in that harm's way, so the number of people on that coastline or the number of people

in that heat wave zone. And then resilience. And resilience, a big part of resilience is about having wealth, having early warning systems, having for storms, having sea walls against coastlines. I think there are a range of measures we can take against climate impacts, which make us much more resilient to them. And I think if you look at general human development trends, they also point in a very positive direction that while climate impacts will continue to escalate, we can also increase our resilience to them. My view of climate change is that too much of the conversation revolves around what I think of as the plastic straw problem. That is that what we need to do is focus on a thousand small decisions, like what our straws are made of, which to me can eclipse a more significant focus on a few big decisions. Like where someone lives in a downtown area or 50 miles outside of a city center that they commute to by car alone. that makes a billion times greater difference

than whether they use a plastic or paper straw in order to sip the latte in that city that they commute to. So we obsess over plastic straws rather than on big changes to energy generation and food systems. And food is really where I want to focus our conversation today

because it's here that I think individuals have a lot of agency. We can shift our diet more easily than we can shift the energy mix of our electricity. So I want to talk to you about separating myth from reality. when we think about climate change and food. And maybe one place to start is with a very apocalyptic claim.

In 2014, Scientific American reported that there would be, quote, only 60 years of farming left if soil degradation continues. This is one of the most common frightening claims that's made about our environmental mess, that we only have 60 harvest left, that essentially the world will not be able to produce food by the 2070s. In fact, in 2017, Michael Grove, Uncle Gove, excuse me, the UK's environmental secretary said the UK only has 30 harvest left,

which means that if someone born today turns 31, Great Britain will not be able to make any food at that point. You write that one thing these claims all have in common is that they are nonsense. Why are these claims nonsense? Yeah, they're nonsense. I think you can even tell that from the range of the numbers there. Like one is 30, one is 60, there's a lot of claims that's 100. I mean, those are massive differences. and if that claim is true, we should really get a grip on what number is it. Is it 30 years or is that 100 years?

I think the problem there is that there's really no scientific basis for these claims. Now, that's not to say that soil degradation isn't happening and it isn't a big risk to our food systems. There are. But the reality is that you cannot distill the world's entire agricultural system into like a single number. I mean, framing it in that way means you're saying, that at exactly the same time, every single soil in the world will be able to stop producing food.

And that's just not the reality. I think when you drill into trying to find the source of these kind of zombies assistants, because they're repeated over and over and over. And no one really checks to see where they've exactly come from. When you try to chase this paper trail, it's really hard to find where the claim comes from. And the kind of 60 Harvest Live claim tends to go back to someone, at a UN conference on a stage once that that was what the

number was. But there's no scientific basis to that. And no one's really stood up to say, oh yeah, that was me that said that and here's my justification. Actually, the botanist, James Wong has done a lot on this. And he tried to track, again, tried to track down where this claim comes from. And he also

asked a bunch of soil scientists about this claim. And, you know, they were all saying it's nonsense. I think some said almost insulting. So I think the key issue of that trend is that there's no single number by which all of the world's soils fail at exactly the same time. And in the book I cover a meta-analysis by scientists that looked at soil degradation rates across a wide range of different soils. And there you get very mixed results. Some soils are degrading and are degrading quickly. Others are stable.

And then others are actually like thickening and growing. So the notion that you can just boil us down to one number is completely wrong. I wanted to start here because this is a question not only about food, it is also a question about the confidence that the public has in claims made by environmentalists. And one thing that makes me nervous about some of the more catastrophic claims, like the world only has 60 harvests left before we can't grow food, is that the environmentalist movement is banking on an extraordinary amount of public trust. We are proposing to change the way we produce and use energy in the world.

We are proposing to change the bedrock of civilization, which is energy generation and energy use. Environmentalists need the public to trust them. And if they spout nonsense, if they traffic in hogwash, I'm worried they are salting the ground of trust. Am I being unfair? Yeah, I do worry about that. And I think as someone that works in this area, and I spent all my time trying to push climate solutions, push food solutions, very much. that's what I spend my whole life on. I think one of the barriers that I face

and many other kind of really good scientists working on this face is that we often get poor claims, claims that have not come true in the past, thrown back at us. So when we're trying to say, we really need to take climate change seriously, these are the potential impact. We get thrown, it claims thrown back at us of,

yeah, yeah, people said that fair years ago and here's this claim that they said that didn't come true. I think that's one of the big risks for me is that I think when we're asking people to act on climate and act on these environmental problems. They're acting on the basis that they trust the science. And we need to try to maintain that science over, this is decades-long journey for us to do this.

We need to maintain that trust over decades. And I think some of the really outlandish claims actually discredit us and make it very hard for us to maintain trust. I think there's two issues there. One is that on that side, it really polarizes people because these claims don't come true. On the other side, the really apocalyptic trend, claims, also for some people that believe them, then become quite paralyzed. It is very paralyzing

to think that the world's going to end in five years. And those are people that are actually really engaged in the issue, but could be really, really active. In some cases, they can't be active because they're kind of paralyzed by fear. I want to hold onto this theme of myth busting at the intersection of food and climate change. Let's start with what I would have to think is the single most popular word among eco-friendly types who care about food. And that word is organic. When I think about the word organic, the truth is no technical definition comes to mind. There is no five-point checklist of features common to every organic piece of food that materializes in my brain. It's just this general vague sense of something being kind of good for me and good for the planet. Hannah, what does

organic actually mean? And does growing and eating organic food, in fact, reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants? Yeah, so organic is generally defined as, and there's kind of certification that you need to be defined as organic on a kind of market basis. But it's generally very little or no synthetic inputs. So no synthetic fertilizers, no synthetic pesticides. Often GMOs, so genetically modified organisms, are also banned and don't. aren't included in organic farming. Yeah, so that's the general definition of organic. I think many people just automatically assume organics better.

We kind of get this impression because we often think synthetic stuff is bad and natural was good and I think that's where the roots of this come from. I think the issue often with organic is that you tend to get slightly lower crop yields from organic farming. Now that just means that to produce the same amount of food, you need to use more land. And a big part of environment-friendly farming is to use, for meat, it's to use as little land as we

possibly can. So you typically need more land. There are kind of meta-analyses that look at this and they tend to find that organic can get slightly higher greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional farming. And then another issue is what we call kind of water pollution

or water runoff. So when you put fertilizer on the soil, actually a lot of it or most of it runs off into the field, into the rivers and water systems, which is obviously very bad. I think the assumption on that is that organic is necessarily better, and that's not very clear from the data. If you take, for example, if you put manure on the soil, often just as much or more of this nutrient runs off into rivers and other ecosystems. So it's very, very inconclusive from the data that organic is necessarily better. I think another big issue with the kind of organic framing is it's a very all or nothing, right?

If you use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides of any kind, then you don't qualify as organic. And for me, and that seems to be like a bit of an issue for farmers, if there is a pest infestation or, you know, a disease that comes. and is threatening their crop. They're then very limited by the options that they have to use pesticides, for example, on that crop to try and salvage the harvest. So I think for me, like a bit of a problem is

the binary nature of organic farming. Whereas I think in conventional farming, there's a really broad spectrum of impacts from very, very bad for the environment to not so bad for the environment. And I think for me, it's about trying to optimise on that spectrum rather than being a bad or good. In your view, I should make sure I understand the case against organic here.

Is, in your view, is organic inherently worse, lower crop yields, higher rates of disease, higher rates of runoff? Or do you think of organic as this like diverse heterogeneous category that has this cultural gleam of being better for the environment? And yet in many cases, because there's the chance of lower crop yields or higher rates of disease or higher risk of runoff, it's not. not necessarily better. Like I'm trying to understand, in your view, is organic worse than normal, or is it just a category that has a broad range of emissions and runoff outcomes, many of which

are actually worse for the environment than we think? I think for some metrics, it's inconclusive, and I wouldn't argue either way that conventional, like organic farming is worse or better. I think the constraint in there is that I think at a global level, it would be very, very bad if we were to go organic. I think it would massively increase the amount of land that we're using for farming. What I wouldn't say is that it's not that I don't think there are

any local situations where organic farming is good or fine. Like I think there are, from the data, there's also, in some sense, local biodiversity benefits in some sense for organic farming. So it's not this necessarily, like I'm really anti-organic. I think the way I see it and

the way that I would look at it if I was shopping, for example, is that I just don't look Like, some people optimize specifically for organic labels because they think that's better. For me, I just don't look. I think at a local level, the differences are so marginal that it's not clear to me whether conventional organic farming is better or worse. Another place that very much, where there's this gap between the claim and reality is this common notion that eating local is green.

You have this very funny story in the book about sitting next to a professor. at a talk, at a climate change talk, and the professor orders a lamb and says, I'm being eco-friendly because I know that the lamb is sourced locally. And you're sort of laughing at yourself, but also, you know, crying silently. Why is it a canard for this professor or for anybody listening to believe that eating local is a green solution?

Yes, I think this is a really common misconception. And I think to explain the rationale of where I think that comes from, we know that transport emits CO2, right? We know that driving in a truck or shipping or flying emits CO2. Therefore, it's quite easy to come to conclusion. The further the food has to reach me, obviously the higher the emissions. So I should eat the local food and it will have a low-carbon footprint. If I'm shipping stuff in from, you know, another country,

then obviously that's going to have a big carbon footprint. The reality there is that when you look at the data on emissions from food systems, globally transport or kind of food miles only account for 5% right they're actually quite a small part of food system emissions most emissions from food come from kind of land use change so deforestation or using the land plus emissions like on the what we'd frame is on the farms that's stuff like fertilizers manure from animals kind of what we call enteric fermentation which is basically cows and sheep burpane and they emit methane so most of the emissions come from the production of the food itself, what matters much less is the transport,

the packaging, the processing. But that's the stuff we often focus on, right? We think the packaged processed food that's been shipped in from another country has a really high carbon footprint, and that's just not true. So when we think about eating locally, what we're essentially saying is this didn't come off a boat, but what we eat and where the food comes from and the farming techniques that are used in the place where the food comes from, that matters, that's 95% and the boat is 5%. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, so what food you're eating and how it is produced matters the most.

And how far it's traveled to reach you for most foods has a very, very little impact. And there we can think about the rankings of different foods from kind of worst to best. So if we just look generally at foods, typically the general. recommendation is that meat and dairy has a much higher carbon footprint than plant-based foods. That's the kind of general concept. So if you want to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet, eat less meat and dairy. That's probably the biggest thing you can do. But within meat and meat in particular, there are different breakdowns. And it typically goes from the bigger, the animal, the worst, to the smallest animal of the best. So you kind of, beef is the worst, followed by

lamb, followed by pork, followed by chicken, and then fish. So it goes from large animal to small animal. So that means two things. One, the biggest thing you can do is to reduce the amount of meat your eatine. But the second thing you can do, if you don't want to reduce your meat consumption or can't reduce your meat consumption, is to switch. So if you switch from beef to chicken, you will still significantly reduce your carbon footprint. I think it's worth pointing out just how significant that reduction is. According to data in our world in data, and we're going to link to that page in our show notes, and in your book, this is. is actually page 172 of your book as well.

100 grams of beef produces on average 50 kilograms worth of carbon emissions. The same amount of chicken produces just 6 kilograms. So on this measure, that means you could eat half a pound of chicken nine straight days and your diet will have a lower greenhouse gas effect than one eight-ounce steak for dinner. From a land use perspective, it's even more dramatic than that. To produce, say, half a pound of steak or lamb requires 23 times more land than half a pound of chicken. These are dramatic statistics. Maybe they are about averages rather than about specific farms.

Hannah, can you tell me a little bit more about this data and what we should take from it? Yeah, I think before we get to that, I think it's important because people always have this question of the numbers that are presented there are from a really large meta-analysis based on farms across the world, which have very different production systems. And I think the argument that always comes back from that is, so the numbers there are at global averages. I think the complaint there is always, well, my farm in the US or the UK, or my beef will be lower carbon footprint than the global average. And that is true, actually. So if you look in the UK or the US, it will be, your carbon footprint probably will be lower than the global average. But we can look at the fuel distribution of impacts from the worst

to the best producer. And even when you do that, you know the best and lowest carbon beef in the world still has a higher carbon footprint than the planet-based products. So even though there will be differences across countries, it's still very clear that beef tends to be top of the list regardless of where it's produced.

So this is really interesting to me. This is a place actually where eating locally can make a difference because different foods can have different missions and different land use techniques in different countries or even, I guess, in different farms within the same country, right? So it could make sense for someone to say, I'm being eco-conscious by eating locally

because I know that this particular farm has less of a land use hit to the environment and less of an emissions hit to the environment than the typical farm or then the global average of farms. But the idea that eating locally is inherently good because the food never made contact with a boat, that is the myth that we're trying to bust, right? Absolutely. I think if you take this as a fundamental level, it would be crazy to say that for every single person in the world, the local food that they eat is the lowest carbon footprint, food that they could eat. Because for some people, their local food is cutting down the Amazon rainforest to produce the beef. And that's their local food. So this cannot possibly apply to everyone. But you're right, if you really want to eat beef and you know that U.S. beef does have a lower carbon footprint than the global. average, then yeah, that actually, if you want to eat your local beef, your local beef will be best.

I think the reason to push back on this concept is just the fact that people believe that the local food is better because of the food miles or how far it's traveled. It's about the type of food you're eating and how it's produced, not how far it's traveled. I'll often read these sort of eco-naturalist arguments that the best way to save the planet is to return to our pre-modern roots, bring back hunting and foraging, bring back pastoralism. There's obviously a simplicity and logic

to these arguments. You did not have anthropogenic climate change before the Industrial Revolution. So if we just use the food systems of the pre-modern age, we can solve all the problems of the modern age. What is the problem with this argument? The problem of this argument

is that that worked in a world with millions of people, and we now have 8 billion people. So to give like a couple of examples, like I crunch numbers, and they're pretty rough numbers, but I think they give like some orders of magnitude. So to support 8 billion people just through hunting and foraging,

we'd probably need 100 to 10,000 times the amount of land that we have on earth, which we obviously do not have. If we were to go for pastoralism, you'd probably need 10 earths. So it's very, very clear if you just break down the numbers in a very rough way, that we just cannot feed 8 billion people.

using the methods that we did in the past and might have worked for millions. So here's what people are going to say in response to that argument. They're going to say, well, you just told me that the problem is population. And I've always thought that the problem with our food systems is the sheer fact that the world simply cannot adequately feed seven, eight, closing in on nine billion people. And this idea goes back to a lot of very famous, sometimes nauseous, public intel, intellectual work in 1968, the UN published a report about the impending protein crisis. There wasn't going to be enough protein to feed everyone. In the same year, Paul Erlich published what I consider

a quite reprehensible piece of work called the Population Bomb, where he talked about adding temporary sterilence to the water and refusing financial aid to families that were having more than three, five children, even subsidizing irreversible sterilization. So there was a long, half-century history of half century, going back to Malthus, there's a long multi-century history of people making the argument that we simply cannot feed eight going on 10 billion people.

What do you say? I say we can easily feed eight going on 10 billion people. I think what we often don't take into account there is just technological change. I think in the past it was true that it was really difficult to support bounds and bounds of people.

But we've had major technological advances and we're now in the position where we can easily feed 10 billion people. I think when we look at numbers across the world on, you know, undernourishment or hunger, for example. So you've got around 800 million people in the world don't get enough food to eat. They don't get enough calories. Now, I think based on that figure, if you ask people, how much does the world produce per person per day? They'd assume that it's kind of just above how much we need. So say we need 2,500 calories per person. They'd say,

well, maybe just above that. Maybe some people over-eat a little bit and then 800 million people underate a little bit. The reality is that we probably produce enough calories to feed everyone around 5,000 calories per person per day. Now, that's not the amount that actually ends up on people's plates, but that at the top of the chain, the amount of stuff that we actually produce in the ground,

that's how much we produce. Now, we can easily feed 10 billion people with that amount of food. the big difference that they are and what we would need to change is how that's distributed and how we use it. How is it possible that we produce enough food such that every

person in the world could have 5,000 calories? I guess even as I'm asking that question, I realize there's actually two questions embedded in it. One is a question about technology. What are the technological developments that have allowed us to adequately feed 8 billion people? Let's do that first. And then after that, I want to talk about why

if we can make enough food so that every person can essentially have like a double breakfast, double lunch and double dinner a day, why we still have a problem of famine, not enough food, getting to people? So let's first start with the technology. How is it possible that we can do this? What technological developments

have allowed us to feed 8 billion people? Yeah, so if you look at kind of agricultural history, for most of agricultural history, crop yields were just extremely low. They were extremely low and they weren't increasing. We basically had stagnant yields for, for millennia. There was a really big

inflection point and one of the kind of hindrances of increasing crop yields has been nutrient availability and in particular are many soils nitrogen, right?

A big problem was we didn't have enough active nitrogen in the soils in order to increase crop yields. The big kind of I guess inflection point

there was the ability to produce synthetic fertilizers so synthetic nitrogen that we could then put on the soils. And this was brought about by the Haber-Bosch process in the early 20th century where we could basically extract in-air, so inactive nitrogen out of the air, and produce active nitrogen that we could then put on the soil.

And that was a major inflection point and kind of got over this hurdle of not having enough nutrients. The other big inflection point came a bit later in the 20th century, and that came primarily from a guy called Norman Borlaug. and the kind of genesis of that was more along the lines of genetic breeding of really high, high yielding crop varieties. And that is about basically producing seed varieties that give you very high yields in particular locations. So it's very specific to different locations. And the really first sign of this was in Mexico.

So Mexico was really struggling with low crop yields. And Borlaug worked there for a long time to try to find high yielding varieties. of cereal crops. And he succeeded. And then he went to India and Pakistan and they did the same there. And what we've seen, especially over the last 50 years, is just this kind of explosion and crop yields across the world where we've seen in many countries doubling, tripling, sometimes even more. And this has been across regions and across countries. And it's kind of this combination of we now know how to get sufficient nutrients. We have improved seed varieties. And another big addition there has been irrigation so we can apply water when we need it rather than just waiting on whether

it rained or not. This is an amazing graph on page 152 of your book where you look at the people supported by food that does not use fertilizers versus the people supported by food that uses fertilizers, including synthetic fertilizers, which are made possible by the Haberbach process. And it essentially proves or essentially suggests that half the world's population, if the Haberbosch process and related technologies immediately disappeared, half the world's population would essentially starve. Then the other half of this is if we're making the equivalent to 5,000 calories for each person,

but some of them aren't getting it, it brings in this question of food waste. You report that about one third of the world's food goes to waste, and I think most people in the U.S. or in the West, when we think about food waste, we think about the food that we leave on our plate. But globally, food waste has a very different face. How is most food wasted? Yeah, that's right. I think when we think about food waste,

we think about consumer waste in restaurants or in the home and stuff we don't eat from our plates. But it actually starts much higher up in the supply chain. I think there are like what we'd call three big losses in the supply chain. One is just what we call food losses, which is food that gets, either it doesn't get picked from the farm because the kind of techniques aren't good or it gets kind of ruined in the farm, so it's just left in the field.

But there are other food losses where across the supply chain is damaged or there's insufficient refrigeration to keep it in a good state. So there are just food losses that we unintentionally lose. There are other two big ones. One is biofuels. So across the world, we just use, particularly in the US, We use a lot of cereals and other crops for biofuels. So that's food that we're growing, but it's not actually going into people's mouths.

And the third big one is animal feed. So we grow and feed a lot of our crops to animals. And the issue there is that at the end, you do get out like high protein meat from an animal, but most of the calories that go in are wasted. It's actually a very inefficient process to feed animal food and then get the meat at the end of the chain. So those are the big fundamental food losses across the supply chain. Like as an example, only around half of the world's cereals actually go directly into human

mouse. The other half are either put to biofuels or are fed to animals. If you look at soybeans, you know, three quarters of the world, soybeans are converted into animal feed and very few are going towards actual like direct food products. So these are losses that we don't really think of because we imagine, you know, just food that's left on the plate. But they fundamentally change the equation of, you know, how much food comes out the ground and then how much is available for people to eat. We think about solutions to the food waste problems that you're discussing. And this isn't food that we leave on our plate.

This is food that, for example, is, you know, collected in old material sacks and leaks everywhere, or crops that get infested with pests, pests and diseases. You were talking to one of your previous bosses, Mike Berners-Lee, and he told you that this was, quote, just a Tupperware problem. What does it mean that food waste is, in many places, just a Tupperware problem? Yeah, I think it was a kind of like offhand comment, like, oh, it's just a Tupperware problem. It's basically the problem that, especially in lower income countries, yeah, to gather food, out the field, they'll be using kind of fabric sacks rather than a plastic crate. And the problem is if you imagine you're gathering, you know,

tomatoes or fruits in a fabric sack, that stuff gets knocked around, the fruit gets bruised, it often will rot before it actually reaches kind of the market where people can sell it. If you just have a plastic crate, for example, and there are studies, you know, from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation showing this, you dramatically reduce the losses of these foods just by supplying simple stuff like a plastic crate.

I think the other big changes there would be stuff like refrigeration. So especially in hot countries, if you're pulling crops out the field and then unable to refrigerate them, they will just go off very, very quickly. And often before they can get to a market where they can be sold. So these are just fundamental supply chain issues, which in some sense could be fixed pretty easily and sometimes have very simple solutions. There are so many good reasons to worry about the sustainability of our food system. Our food system is responsible for one quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Our food systems stress freshwater supplies that lead to deforestation, as you were talking about in Brazil, reduces biodiversity. It creates water pollution. This is a big, big question that I'm about to hit you with. But if someone came to you and they said, we have to build a more sustainable food system, what idea, what goal is at the very top of your list? I think is dietary change. I think the biggest lever we could pull would be to reduce the amount of animals we're consuming. I think that would alleviate many of these pressures. We would dramatically reduce the amount of land we're using for food production. The biggest driver of deforestation is cattle ranching. Even if you look at soy, soy has also been a big driver of deforestation.

And again, as I said earlier, the three quarters of the world soy is fed to, animals. It's the biggest driver of biodiversity loss. And even if you look at food, like greenhouse gas emissions from food, again, the animal products tend to dominate. So I think for me, the biggest lever we can pull there is try to globally move towards more plant-based diets. And I think there are a range of potential routes to do that. I'm very unconvinced by the notion that everyone's going to move to like peas and beans and lentils. And I can say that as a vegan. I just don't think that's realistic. To me, we're going to need to create basically a like-for-like substitution. We will need a technological change by which we can basically produce

meat without the animal. That's the only viable pathway I see of us getting there. I was going to say, it presents a real conundrum to omnivores like me. When you look at these charts of the foods that have the worst hit to greenhouse gas emissions or land use or water pollution, over and over again, you get beef and lamb and beef and lamb and cheese and beef and lamb. And as you just suggested, people love meat and cheese. Meat and cheese taste really, really good. So, you know, one thing I love about your mind, the way that you look at these issues is that I feel like you have, you know, you have one foot in the world as you would like it to be, and you have another foot in the world as it is, in practicalities. I mean, it's very difficult for me to see any way that we can continue to produce meat and cheese, but do so in a way that dramatically reduces emissions in land use and water pollution.

And at the same time, I know of no lever to suddenly and dramatically reduce the amount of meat and cheese consumed by rich people, because across the world, you just see, and tell me if this is wrong, because you know the data better than I do. As countries get richer, they just tend to eat more meat and cheese. So help me think, help me understand how you see technology solving this problem. Sometimes I have a hard time seeing it myself. Yeah, I mean, I think of the issues that I cover in the book, like I'm way more optimistic about energy transition than I am about food. I think this comes back to the earlier comment that you made that like this is almost

entirely about individual choice, right? We make these individual behaviors, like behavioral choices like three or four times a day. and I think food is such a big part of people's identity and a big part of their life that I think it's really, really hard to shift this stuff. You're right that if you look at projections of global meat production, it will just continue to go up because there is a really strong relationship between meat consumption and income. So as people get richer, they move to more diverse diets and they tend to eat more meat in dairy.

So the reality on our current trajectory is we will just continue to increase the amount of meat that we're eating. I think it's going to be very, very difficult to bend that curve. I think there are, like, for example, there are a range of meat substitutes on the market already. And me as a vegan, like I really like them. I think they're really good. I think, you know, stuff like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. I think they're probably not, like, exactly like a beef burger, but I think they're pretty good and they're reasonably close. You're still not seeing that shift that you're going to need. like there's a really, really marginal shift, if any. To me, and I come to this very reluctantly

because I think it's going to be a really difficult solution to scale. For me, the only way I see us getting there is basically by producing lab grown meat. So people will basically have exactly the same beef burger, exactly the same texture. You know, it will be me. It just won't have the animal. I think us getting there and scaling that solution is still, a long way off. So I think on that transition, I'm much more pessimistic than I am on energy. I think there's maybe a potential midterm solution that might get us a little bit of the way

they are, which is that you could produce, for example, a hybrid burger, which is basically a burger where, you know, half, or you could vary the ratios in it, but say like half is like the actual beef burger, and then you fill that with a plant-based protein. And actually, when you look at studies doing blind taste tests on people with the range. of burgers like a plant-based burger, a hybrid burger, a beef burger. They actually tend to prefer the hybrid burger. The problem is that when you unblind them, they don't like the hybrid burger then. So I think there is like this kind of social pushback on this notion of a hybrid burger.

But if you can change some of the public opinion on that, if you just imagine if we just, you know, take global beef consumption and cut it in half and replace it with plant-based stuff for the other half, then you would just massively shift the amount of meat that we're producing. So I think there are potential mid solutions where you could go for this more hybrid approach. So when you talk about lab-grown meat, sometimes called cellular meat, I don't know if that is more or less delectable as a description for meat that is grown inside of a factory, essentially, without an animal attached to it. I imagine that listeners have one of two reactions to that. One reaction is going to be sheer disgust. You know this. It's obvious. The idea that my steak was grown in a petri dish, that it was

sort of combed over by scientists that didn't come from a cow is a little bit disgusting to a lot of people. On the other hand, I think that there's going to be a lot of people listening to this show who essentially buy everything that you're selling, except they still like meat. They buy that beef is incredibly carbon intensive and that it involves a ton of. of land use and even some freshwater withdrawal. They buy that climate change is a huge problem. They want to have this problem solved. They want to have the beef and eat it too.

What do we need in order to have a technological revolution in this space? Is what we need a revolution of energy superabundance to make electricity so cheap that we can run an incredibly energy demanding process like cellular meat and bring down the cost because the energy input is now very, very low because it's all running on solar and wind farms, the cost basically nothing? Or is there also something in like the modularization of this technology where we need to really bring the unit economics of cellular meat down by like an order of magnitude before people can enjoy at, you know, McDonald's and, you know, KFCs all over the world, cellular beef and cellular chicken, which by the way, will definitely have to rename.

But how much of this is an energy generation problem? How much of it is a unit economics problem in the technology? Yeah, it's interesting. I've been looking at this recently with some researchers at Oxford. And actually, we've been looking at a range of different technologies that we'd call as like landless agriculture. So one of them is like lab grown meat. But there are other technologies out there that we could basically deploy. and are available, they just have constraints that we could deploy basically to produce food without the land juice

and food indoors, for example. But on the lagromate in particular, we do have cost curves. And actually, if you look at it over time, there has actually really, has been a really rapid reduction and the cost of this technology. In some sense, it's following a kind of Moors Law type curve where there's been a really kind of stark decrease in costs

every two years or so. And actually, when you look at the unit economics, we're not that far off comparable to beef. We're pretty far off comparable to chicken. But we're not massively far off the cost of beef. So I think actually the price will get there. I think the constraint will be one is a scaling problem. We're only currently doing this on a very small scale. And I think then there will also be this energy question of, you know, we are trying to say,

scale low carbon energy very quickly. And in some sense, at a global level, we're in this kind of race of, can we keep up with existing energy demand, growing energy demand with low carbon energy? And that's a race that we're, like, struggling with at the moment. And if we switch, you know, to lab grown meat and producing all of our food, kind of fruit indoor methods, but we'll also increase pressure on that equation. But it is, for me, it is entirely feasible that we get pretty low cost. lab-grown meat, we could produce it with very low-carbon energy sources, so it would have a very

low carbon footprint. I think the issue would be the scaling and the total energy requirements of producing all of the world's beef through this method. Let's say I'm pessimistic that the world is going to stop eating hamburgers and steak, that we're going to shift entirely from eating cows and cheese in the next 50 years, and I'm looking for the next best lever to pull. What is that? Yes, I think on the dietary change, I think that's arguably the strongest labor we have. But I think on the production side, there are two big things.

I think one is I'm also really pessimistic that we very quickly move to a world with no meat. Now, there are obviously large variations in the greenhouse gas emissions of different production methods. So one thing is, how do we reduce the carbon footprint of the beef that we're producing? If we're not going to go straight to no beef at all, we can at least. optimise for the beef that we're producing for really low-carbon producers. I think that's one potential option. The other big one for me, and I focus on it on the book, is just crop yields, which isn't fancy, isn't exciting, but it's just a fundamental part of us

producing lots of food with very little land. The amount of land that has been spared from being turned into a farm, from the crop yields that we've seen over the last 50 years, just enormous. So we owe, you know, the forest that we still have standing today in large part to the massive increases in crop yields that we've seen. But there are still really massive differences in crop yields across the world. If you look at sub-Saharan Africa, for example, now yields there have increased a bit over the last 50 years or so, but they're way behind the global average and they're way behind what you would get in the US or the UK, for example. Here you're talking

about like five-fold difference. Now you can imagine what impact that would have. If you could even double triple five X crop yields in some Sahara in Africa, it would make a massive, massive difference to global food production. It would make a massive difference to food security in that region. And it would also make a massive difference on a kind of fundamental poverty level. Agricultural employment in sub-Saharanthaca is really, really high, right? A lot of people, that's their main source of income, is farming.

And a big constraint there is that they get really low productivity. They get really low labour productivity and really low land productivity, which is low crop yields. So I think for me, a really fundamental low-hanging fruit for addressing many problems at the same time, food security, poverty, environmental impact of food is focusing on trying to close yield gaps across the world. And what does that lever look like? For example, how have we seen crop yields improve in other low-income countries in the last few years that has created or given us the idea of some kind of template that could be used for increasing crop yields in other low-income countries? So I think there are a couple of fundamental things there.

I think if you could take the contrast of South Asia compared to sub-Saharan Africa. In South Asia, you kind of had this green revolution that I described from Borlaug, where you had kind of improved seed varieties that were really specific to that region, do really well in that region and different soil types. You had that combined with increased access to fertilizers, increased access to irrigation. I think in some sense in sub-Saharan Africa, that's kind of lagged behind. I think there hasn't been proper investment in trying to optimize seed varieties in different crop types. Fertilizer use for many farmers is extremely, extremely low and often don't have access to stuff like irrigation. So I think these are these compounding factors which mean that

crop yields in many countries in southern Africa are much lower than they could be. And I could easily see if there was proper investment there that yields could double or triple. I want us to close with a practical guide for someone who cares about the environment, wants to know what diet is best for planet earth, but also is not ready to entirely give up on animal meat. I know that for some people, especially for vegans and vegetarians listening to the show, they're like, you're like, you're like asking how to be a moral person and like occasionally commit manslaughter like every other year. Like this, it's, it's not coherent. But I'm trying to be both moral and practical here and recognize that we have to meet people where they are. It seems like a decent takeaway

from the last 40 minutes hour that we've been speaking. Some decent takeaways are, number one, don't worry so much about local because shipping costs to the planet are just about 5% of total emissions costs from the food. Number two, don't look at organic labels. It's not that all organic farms are bad, but organic is probably overrated.

In some cases, it might be worse, less efficient than other farms. But on the food itself, Give me an example of a practical, practical, of a normal-sounding diet that isn't fully vegetarian, isn't fully vegan, but nonetheless, you think, represents an enormous improvement over a diet that is eating, you know, hamburgers and lamb twice a week. What does that diet look like? Yeah, I think that's a really important point because I think most of the people I speak to, you know,

they're not going to go vegan overnight. and I think it's, it's, I'm never going to convince people to do that. I think for many people, like a reduction in the amount of meat that they retain is much more practical. So I think first step is if you can reduce the amount that you retain, then that's viable. You don't need to go fully vegan. You don't need to cut everything out. If you are having meat at every single meal, maybe you can have it one meal a day. Or maybe rather than having meat every single day, you can have a, it's called a meatless Monday, where you don't have meat.

meat. Or maybe if you typically have a hamburger in the evening for dinner, you switch that for chicken. I think this meat substitution is actually a really valuable way to think about it, because you're still having the meat, you're just having a different type of meat, but it can significantly reduce your carbon footprint. I think the one caveat that I'd say to that is that there is this inherent trade-off between the environmental impact and the animal welfare, where if you are switching from beef to chicken. One is that, you know, the number of chickens that you have to kill versus one cow to get the same amount of meat is massive.

So you're one, you're killing more animals. And I think I generally say that the animal welfare of chickens is worse than a cow in a field. I think there is this inherent kind of moral trade-off between the environmental impact and animal welfare. And how people navigate that is completely up to them. I went from being kind of pescatarian with some chicken

and that was my kind of standard diet my I then ultimately went vegan and it wasn't necessarily because I thought the environmental reduction would be massive from going from being a chicken eater to a vegan eater

because the reduction there is not massive but for me it was the animal welfare conflict that I then couldn't get around so it's also good to be aware of that inherent environment welfare trade-off as well. Hannah Ritchie, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening.

Plain English is produced by Devin Beraldi. We are off this Friday. I'll be on vacation, but we will be back with twice a week episode starting next Tuesday. We'll see you then.