Is this the future of food? (with Michael Grunwald)

Can humanity feed nearly 10 billion people without frying the planet? That question is at the heart of journalist Michael Grunwald’s provocative argument in Sorry, This Is the Future of Food, his recent New York Times essay and the basis of his forthcoming book, We Are Eating the Earth. He warns that we’re clearing an acre of rainforest every six seconds to grow more food — and even if we quit fossil fuels, we won’t avert climate chaos unless we fix how we use land. In this episode, Grunwald makes the case that high-yield industrial agriculture, for all its flaws, might be our best chance to grow more food on less land. 

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Guest

• Michael Grunwald, Journalist and author

Host

• Jack Thompson, TABLE

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler and Jack Thompson. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew Kessler

A few months ago, the New York Times published an essay called “Sorry, this is the Future of Food.” Highlighting a benefit of industrial agriculture, the essay notes, “It produces enormous amounts of food on relatively modest amounts of land.”

For those deep in the food systems world, many of the listeners of this podcast, this article was pretty polarizing. Responses ranged from: “Finally, someone is speaking the truth” all the way to “This guy is completely missing the point and the bigger picture.” 

Michael Grunwald

For a lot of people, I think the two words together, industrial agriculture, right? It's like partisan bickering. It just means bad. You know, factory farm, you know, that's like, as opposed to, you know, wholesome, small family farm. 

Matthew

That’s Michael Grunwald.

Michael

So I'm Michael Grunwald. I'm an American journalist, the author of the forthcoming book We are Eating the Earth, which is about the race to feed the world without frying the world.

Matthew

And author of this much debated New York Times Opinion article.   

Michael

The headline was, Sorry, this is the future of food, which was maybe a little snarkier than I would have been, but it's about - there are a lot of fantasies right now about how we need to replace industrial agriculture, get rid of factory farms, go towards a sort of kinder, gentler form of organic, regenerative agroecology. 

And the piece was really making the case that if we're serious about feeding the world and fixing the climate, that what we need to do is really reform industrial agriculture and not replace it, that the incredible efficiency and high yields that you get from a factory farm, like just about any factory, it's really good at making lots of stuff. And to feed 10 billion people, by 2050 we're going to need to manufacture a lot of food.

Matthew

Pushing back against certain ideologies was part of the purpose of this piece, but maybe more importantly for Michael

Michael

And I was trying to explain to people that land matters, and that industrial agriculture, I was not trying to cover up its problems, you know, the the way it treats animals, the way it treats people, it's the way it, you know, lobbies against climate action, you know, the way it's a pandemic risk, the way it overuses antibiotics. I'm not trying to make excuses for any of these things. In fact, I'm arguing that, you know, the part of our grand bargain with industrial ag, has to be like, Hey, do a better job. Be less destructive.

Matthew

Welcome to Feed, a food systems podcast, presented by TABLE. While I’m your normal host, Matthew Kessler, I’m handing over the hosting mic to my colleague at TABLE Jack Thompson, food systems journalist, who interviewed Michael Grunwald last month. It’s a fascinating conversation that explores the different tensions and tradeoffs within food systems and doesn’t offer any easy solutions. This gave me more a lot more insight into Michael’s thinking in the article and his forthcoming book “We are Eating the Earth.” Here’s Jack.

Jack 

And this is probably a good point to introduce myself as I am new to Feed listeners. So my name is Jack Thompson. I'm your host for a few months while Matthew is on paternity leave, and I produced the series, the recent series, Fuel to Fork, investigating the fossil fuels in our food system. And, yeah, I'm delighted to speak to Michael today. 

Michael

Thanks for having me. 

Jack

I'd say we're, we're kind of similar, but different in some senses. So I'm, we're both journalists who write about food, farming and climate, although very different stages of our career, undoubtedly, but we got into it in very different ways. So I what I'd like to discuss in this episode, is you know, not only your article and your like career and food, but how your life experiences have shaped how you think about food and farming and so it would be great to hear, yeah, what got you interested?

Michael 

I'm like, a suburban kid turned urban adult, you know, I've, I've never lived in rural America. For a long time, my sort of idea of the outdoors was playing tennis. and I became a journalist. It was, really was, when I was at the Washington Post, I started to write more about environmental issues and stumbled into the Florida Everglades. Ended up writing my first book that's called The Swamp, and that's sort of a history of the Everglades, but that was really, that's, that's really when I became a sort of environmental reporter, and I've always been a policy wonk, and kind of led me into writing about the climate, but always from an energy perspective, writing about fossil fuels. I had an energy column for Time magazine. My last book, which was about the Obama administration, focused a lot on the various ways that they were kind of jump starting the clean energy revolution in the United States. And so I'd always been a kind of a climate guy. 

I wrote a magazine piece at this point. I was at Politico magazine about my own green life because I had gotten solar panels, I had gotten an electric car, a Chevy Bolt. And the point of my piece was, this was back in 2018, I wanted to write about how, you know, I'm not some eco- saint. I’m just an ordinary, greedy guy. And I wanted to write about how clean energy was starting to pencil out. And so I had this kind of throwaway line about how, you know, I don't unplug my computer at night. I don't line-dry my laundry. I didn't quit eating meat. 

And as I was fact checking it, looked at it, and I was like, is meat even bad for the climate? I genuinely didn't know. And you know, and I didn't want to, you know, I knew that when you look at those, you know, 50 things you can do for the climate books, they always say meatless Mondays. And I'd heard people sort of joking about the farting cows. I had a sense that that was actually a thing, but I didn't really know if meat was an actual environmental problem or if it was just something that vegans and left wingers use to virtue signaling way to show that “They were kind of greener than thou.” So I called a guy I knew who I was interested in, in agriculture and climate, and I asked him, Is meat really that bad for the climate? And he sort of paused for a second, and he said, “Yes, duh.” And now it's kind of the beginning of my journey. This guy actually ended up becoming the main character of my book. But what I realized at the time is that, you know, look, if I'm not even sure if meat is bad then, and I've been covering climate for a decade, then probably most people don't really know. And what you end up finding is that food and land, it's about a third of the climate problem, but it's about maybe 4% of the climate conversation, and about 2.5% of climate finance. And so it's this really undercovered and under understood part of the climate story, and that really set me on this six year journey to try and figure out what the hell was going on.

Jack 

Yeah, that's interesting, because now that you explain that, actually, I think there are certain parallels. So I grew up maybe on the other side of the spectrum, I grew up as a son of a fifth generation farmer in the UK. I've been surrounded by farming my entire life, but somehow felt quite disconnected from it at the same time. You know, I was collecting eggs in the week, I was driving tractors in the summer, but I wanted to get out. That's why I studied French and Spanish, and it was only when I met a very like, I guess the only way to put it, it's like, very challenging German farmer. And, he talked to me about climate, about politics, about the power. And I was like, “Oh, like that. That's fascinating. And I have a kind of inside view into how that works. And without realizing it I kind of knew quite a lot.” And so it's, you know, it's kind of like similar, in a way, kind of not really, not really knowing, and then being like, well, of course, this is hugely important. And then kind of, in a nutshell, that's what like thrusted me to write about it.

Michael 

That's a great story, because I think that there is this idea that this is this kind of learning journey for so many of us. Most of us who have been covering the climate for a long time, and obviously it's, you know, we've focused on energy. And don’t get me wrong, like energy is really important, right? Fossil fuels are two thirds of the problem. But at this point, it's not really a learning journey anymore. We basically know what needs to happen. You kind of need to electrify the global economy and and use 0 emissions electricity, right? We're starting to do that, you know, not fast enough, and it really matters whether it takes 30 years or 20 years, but it's not really an intellectual question anymore. It's a political question. 

So for people like me who are just, you know, I'm curious. That's why I became a journalist. This was something I knew nothing about, and, actually, you know, the world really food is about 25 years behind energy when you comes to thinking about this climate stuff and the world, not only do we not basically know what to do, like, we don't really even know what we need to know. 

Jack 

Yeah, that's something that you know, that TABLE tries to do is, like, hold all of these different visions and different ideas of how to go about this and and I think it's, I think it's really interesting, I've also been, like, immersed in lots of different tribes. You know, my dad is a conventional farmer. I've worked on an organic farm. I've got a cousin who works for an agrichemical business. I live now in West Africa, going to see small scale farmers. I've, like, you know, I've got quite a broad outlook, and that definitely shapes how I see certain solutions. So I wonder, like, how your experience, as like a relative latecomer and a kind of background and energy and climate, how that frames the problems and solutions for you?

Michael 

Well, I really tried to come into this with an open mind. You know, it was kind of the nice thing about being ignorant, you know, I really didn't know anything, so I was open to learn. And what you find is that there are all kinds of solutions on the demand side, right? Because if you think about this as essentially, agriculture is using about 40% of the world's land - right two of every five acres on earth. And you know, this is wildly oversimplified, but ultimately, the big challenge over the next 30 years is, how can we prevent it from using any more, you know, and taking down more carbon-storing forests and wetlands, we need to at least keep agriculture's footprint the way it is and preferably shrink it. And so when you start to think about how you do it, it's like, well, can you, you know, can we use less land? It turns out that we, like we discussed meat, and particularly beef, use a ton of land. So can we eat less beef? I've actually, in my personal life, I've cut out beef and lamb. I still eat chicken and pork, which it turns out, are not as good as beans or kale, but are so much better than beef and lamb that I mean. I couldn't justify it. And honestly, when you're writing a book about food and climate, if I kept eating beef, I think it would have been hard to explain to people. But so there you have stuff on the demand food side, can we waste less food? Can we use less land to grow biofuels, even population stuff? Are there sort of non disgusting ways to you know that we could see lower increases in future population, and therefore, you know, less demand for meat and less demand for less demand for food, without telling the poorest of the world's poor that, no, you can't have meat. You can't have nutrients that are, you know, important to your survival. 

So and then you also have to think about it on the supply side, right? Like, how can we make more food with less land? How can we reduce our emissions from doing that? How can we, like, have the cows burp less? How can we have the fertilizer produce less nitrous oxide emissions. And how can we cut down fewer trees and drain fewer wetlands? Can we actually restore some, some wetlands, rehydrate them? Can we reforest some, some unproductive farms? So there are just a million different issues. And I really didn't have, like, you know, I didn't come into it saying, like, the answer is vertical farming, you know, or the answer is agroecology. You find, once you get into this stuff, that there are all these tribes, there are the foodies. There's the, you know, the regenerative types, there’s the aggies, the different varieties of enviros. I don't think I really ended up in any one of those tribes, you know, you sort of the answer is, you know, it's not all of the above, but it's kind of most of the above. 

Jack 

Do you think there's, like, a, I almost get a sense of urgency, and, like, there is, obviously, there's a huge sense of urgency. But in your kind of own writing, and maybe coming to this a bit later, you're like, oh, there's so much that we need to do.  

Michael 

That's a really great, you know, question point to bring up, because certainly, like, climate is such an urgent problem that, you know, obviously, the last 10 years have been the 10 hottest years ever recorded. And everybody knows, all you know, like, we're swaddling this planet in the, you know, same gasses that make Venus not so pleasant, right? I mean, we don't want to do this. We want to stop. But one thing about the food part of the problem. I mean, with energy, that's, like, it's particularly frustrating, right? Because we know what to do and we're doing it, and it's like, “Gosh, solar is amazing. Why don't we just do more of it? These batteries are fantastic. Geothermal, oh my god. Like more and more. Like deploy, deploy, better policy.” For food, it's really tricky, and because there's been so little progress it, you know, it's a little bit of a trap, you know, the right answer is not necessarily, you know, what can start reducing emissions the most tomorrow, right? Because, you know, and I don't want to give too much of a spoiler for the book, but honestly, like the next, certainly five years, we're not going to move the needle very much. You know, when I started working on this book, there was this unbelievable excitement about alternative proteins, right, the meat and dairy substitutes. And I actually, with my first reporting, I went to a conference about them, and it was, like, unbelievable. I thought it was accidentally going to raise like, ten million in the drinks line. It was just, you know, everybody wanted to fund these, you know, like, Beyond Meat had just gone public. It's still the biggest IPO in the US in the 21st century, Impossible Foods was even bigger. I went back to the same conference four years later, and it was doom and gloom. And honestly, the truth is probably somewhere in between, right, the irrational exuberance was wrong, and now the irrational, you know, non exuberance is probably just as wrong.

But what's true is, like, you know, we're not going to get rid of meat, and you know, in five years, we've been eating it for 2 million years. It's delicious, and these things are going to take time, so I think it's going to, you know, I think we really have to, you know, there's a lot of math in my book, not hard math, but it's math and economics and science, and you have to take it seriously. And, you know, I'm probably making my book sound a little more boring than I hope it is, you know, it's a narrative. These are, you know, I'm hopefully, a storyteller, but you can't just, you know, some of this stuff sounds great. Oh, we're gonna have agroecology. We're gonna treat the soil differently. And all the carbon that we're pumping up into the atmosphere through our fossil fuels is going to miraculously, you know, be sequestered in our soils. And, no, that's not going to happen either. It's like not going to happen overnight. And honestly, that's just not going to happen on any type of the scale that people are talking about. So I think you know, honestly, what needs to happen right now. The most urgent thing is the energy stuff, you know, including in agriculture, like, I'd like to see more solar and wind in agriculture, when in the United States, you have a bit of a backlash against some of that stuff happening in farm country. But in terms of actual food and ag solutions, I think we're going to have to be, you know, honest about them. We're going to need real research behind them. We're going to need real pilot programs. And then we're going to really have to put a lot of money behind the stuff that works.

Jack 

Something you said earlier about the alternative proteins, about it being somewhere in the middle, like, actually, that that kind of strikes a chord in the sense that, are we going to find ourselves, you know, not everyone doing agroecology and living in the land again, but actually maybe borrowing some ideas from agroecology, maybe, you know, mixing a couple of these visions together, because we feel like we can't be in these tribes anymore. We need to, we need to borrow each other's ideas and kind of collaborate a bit better.

Michael 

I mean, I think that's a great point. And I know, I know you wanted to discuss my New York Times piece, which is, again, like sort of talking about how we're not going to be able to ditch industrial agriculture. I'll tell you a little story about, I went to, I went to Brazil, and I was looking at cattle ranches. And by the way, I should admit to your listeners that I've now been off beef for, I guess, four years, except for the week that I spent visiting cattle ranches in Brazil. I was like, I fell off the wagon. It was too delicious.

But, I went to one ranch. It was actually in the Cerrado, which is, you know, this kind of woody savanna, and it doesn't get as much attention as it should, because everybody's freaked out, legitimately so, about the Amazon. But the Cerrado is, like, gigantic and biodiverse, and sort of the next frontier where there's just been unbelievable amounts of deforestation, and it's essentially turned into a farm. I visited this one guy who had this it was a corn and soy operation with beef and and in many ways it was sort of like the kind of, you know, a lot of the regenerative principles that you hear, you know, the agroecology that, a lot of the good hippies and Michael Pollan, and then also in, you know, and now it's become a kind of right wing thing in the United States. It’s like, ah, no pesticides, no, no chemicals. But the actual practices are mostly it's about not tilling the soil, using cover crops to keep the land covered, integrating your livestock in with your crops. So they're, you know, they're, they're sort of eating the, eating the cover crops to save you from running your tractor over there and then also pooping on the actual crops, so you don't have to use as much fertilizer. And people think that's the answer. But what was interesting about this farm is they were doing a lot of that stuff. 

And I remember the farmer knelt down in the dirt, like, and it's like a classic cliche from regenerative agroecology, picked up some picked up some dirt, and showed it to me. And they were, you know, and it's rich and black, and there's a couple of earthworms squiggling around in there, right? The engineers of good soil. But the punchline is that this guy was not some, like, you know, hippie singing, you know, folk songs about the soil. He had a feed lot. He had, like, serious industrial practices on this land. He had gigantic tractors. He fertilized his pastures. These weren't purely grass fed cows. He fed them some of his corn and soy but what was incredible about this place was not, you know, their sort of attitude to it, like they had no philosophy about regenerative, you know, about the beauty of getting in touch with the land. This guy, he was, you know, he was a Bolsonaro fan, you know, like he loved the way Bolsonaro was setting farmers loose to basically, you know, take down the Amazon. He had no particular love for the environment. What he loved was his yields, and they were extraordinary. He was running corn and soy in rotation, which we also did in the United States, but he was rotating them the same year, and getting US style yields from both crops, so essentially doubling US yields. But he was also in that same year, running his cattle on that same land, and his beef yields were like 10 times US yields, just extraordinary. And this was a long winded story, and I apologize, but this was a guy who did not have any particular farming ideology, but it turned out he was mixing industrial practices with regenerative practices, and he was kicking ass. And I think that's the ultimately, the answer, particularly on the beef side. You know, we've talked a little bit about how beef really is the baddie, and yes, the world, the rich world in particular, needs to eat less beef, but because it's so bad, that means that making beef better is an extraordinary opportunity to reduce emissions. If you care about emissions, you have to care about beef because that's where the emissions are.

Jack 

So I think that's probably a good point to get into the New York Times article that you wrote. And we kind of addressed quite a few of the points along the way. But I guess, it would be interesting to know what you wanted people to you know, what you wanted readers of The New York Times to come away with, because it has ruffled some feathers, hasn't it? 

Michael 

Yeah, again, partly because people know I'm a climate guy, right? And I was trying to explain to people that land matters, and that industrial agriculture, and I did not, I was not trying to cover up its problems. I'm not trying to make excuses for any of these things. In fact, I'm arguing that, you know, that part of our grand bargain with industrial ag, has to be like, Hey, do a better job. Be less destructive. But as we did, you know that green revolution? You know, it wasn't just, it wasn't for funsies. You know, there were a lot of people saying that we were going to have just a perpetual future of mass famines. And industrial agriculture has prevented that. And n ot only that, but industrial agriculture has saved what's left of the Amazon. We know how to make a lot more food by just cutting down a lot more trees. The challenge is making more food with less land and the last 50 years of 60 years of green revolution, we haven't quite done that. You know, we have had to continue to cut down a little bit more land. But, you know, without these industrial advances, there would hardly be any trees standing. And so I was trying to show people that this isn't, you know, this isn't the easy, you know, kind of neat, tidy, you know, the guys, the guys with their big industrial farms and their monocultures where they do perennial chemical warfare, they are evil. And the nice farmers who, you know, their cows have names instead of numbers, and they're nurturing their soil, and it's practically like a garden. You know, those are the good guys. We need more like that. It's a complicated situation, and I try to humanize but also rationalize these agricultural problems.

Jack 

And so one of the, like, the big kind of critiques that I saw, it's like, well, you know, why are we thinking about making it better? We just need to, We need to stop eating and producing beef and meat, like industrial meat. It's not that we don't want to apologize to industrial meat. We just need to stop doing it. So how would you respond to that? 

Michael 

Right. I had a line saying, you know, we need to eat less beef. We need to waste less food. We we should stop wasting land to put it in our fuel tanks, you know, in the form of ethanol or soy biodiesel. And I think people were saying that, I just sort of blew off those questions. And I think that was kind of a fair a fair critique. In my defense, I had, a year earlier, written an essay in the in the same New York Times about essentially about how the world desperately needed to eat less beef. And I'd written a, the year before, I had written an essay about how corn ethanol, which had been hyped as a great climate solution, was actually a climate catastrophe. So I had pretty good credentials in actually caring about this stuff. 

But what I should would have, you know, if I could have done it again, what I would have explained in a little more depth was some of the math that I was talking about earlier, even if you do a kind of best case scenario, because, like, let's say we're, like, we've been eating beef for, you know, or meat for 2 million years, we're not going to stop tomorrow. We're not going to stop if you do a kind of best case scenario by 2050 and imagine that in the rich world, where which really eats the right now the vast majority of the beef. Imagine we cut ruminant consumption 50% which would be pretty tremendous, you know, when, especially when you consider how many people just don't want to, right? And, you know, people say like, oh, well, you'll just tax meat, or you'll, you know, make it more expensive. I mean, we just had an election decided over food prices. It is not a simple solution. But even if you did, in our dream world, and we cut out half of our beef consumption and also reduced food waste in half, and stopped using biofuels entirely, we would still need a lot more food with no more land, and the amount of more food is really extraordinary. We're currently on course, if you imagine our continuing course being we're going to keep increasing yields, not just like keep these same yields, but we're going to keep increasing yields at the same rate they've been increasing since the Green Revolution began, which would be, which is a pretty extraordinary rate, we're still on track to basically deforest about two more India's worth of land by 2050. And that's like game over for the Amazon. Now, if you just say we're going to keep on the same course of yield growth that we've had since, like, 2000 which is a little bit less. Then we need three Indias. If we just keep yields what they are today, we need seven Indias, you know. And that's, and that's the time when we have to sort of figure out something for, you know, planet B. So even if you do all those other things, we really do have to grapple with this idea that yields are just the indispensable, you know, prerequisite for fixing our food and climate problems,

Jack 

Yeah, kind of the fact of life, something we don't want to talk about, but it's actually, you know, one of the most important factors. 

Michael 

Yeah. I mean, I wish the math wasn't that bad, but the math is the math.

Jack 

And so one thing that I've been thinking about is that actually a lot of our food is currently making us ill. So like, on these trajectories where we need to say that we're, you know, we need more calories, we need more, we need more foods.       We need more quantity, like, sheer quantity of food. Does that slightly ignore the fact that the current way we produce food is actually not at all aligned with, like, what makes us healthy as well?

Michael 

Well, that's two, those are two kind of separate and really interesting issues, right? You know one thing that, when you talk about things that could help, solutions that can help, right? These, these, like ozempic type things that are that are going to reduce people's appetites, if those really catch on in a mass way. And so that instead, people who are currently devouring, you know, 3000 calories a day are only going to want 2200 you know, over a large enough population that is going to make a dent. It's not going to solve the whole problem. But yeah, I mean, obviously, particularly in the West, we eat too much. We haven't. We have a too much food problem, not a not enough problem. Then again, in the developing world, there really is a we'd like to see people have more calories, and that's really important. So I think that's a very difficult problem. You raise a second question, which is the kind of food, right? And, and there. Look, these are, these are tricky. And I don't want to put myself out there as a nutrition expert, you know, I'm more the climate guy, but I do think, you know, you hear a lot about Ultra processed food, and you hear about, you know, it's corn and soy and you know, and these, you know, and it's being packaged into Doritos and Twinkies. But that's, I guess you know this is a deeper discussion, but what I would say is that it's not really the corn and soy’s fault. Corn and soy are pretty efficient ways of making calories. Now it is true that, particularly in the United States, they often get packaged into crap, and often exceedingly tasty crap that people eat too much of, and that's a problem, but it's not really a farming problem, right? Soy is in tofu too. And nobody's, you know, saying that tofu is at the root of our, root of our health problems. 

Jack 

How would you think about like power in this scenario? In the kind of corporate, like big corporations, who, you know, need lots of corn and soy to make it into into food that's highly addictive, intentionally, and how that it's not a farming problem, but it is very much like a food problem, and the incentives to grow certain crops are kind of out of whack? 

Michael 

You know, again, like I hear what you're saying, and look, I think a lot of you know, there's certainly a lot of power lurking behind everything I write about in the book. And it's pretty much a worldwide phenomenon that the agricultural lobby has outsized political influence just about everywhere. It's not a coincidence that the world subsidizes agriculture to the tune of about $600 billion a year, and $300 billion of that is direct subsidies. And, you know, one of the things I call for is that, you know, I try to be a realist, and I don't think we're going to suddenly dismantle the power of the agricultural industry was worldwide, but I would like to see at least some of that $300 billion tied to some more, you know, climate smart stuff. Now, as for the specifics of of you know, are we? Are we eating Twinkies because Cargill wants us to eat Twinkies? I'm not sure that's true. And in fact, you know, it's interesting, as so many people are giving up on the idea of, you know, plant based meat or or, you know, fungi based meat, or even cultivated meat made from animal cells down the road. And people are saying, like, ah, the market has spoken The Cargills and Archer Daniels Midlands of the world. Like they don't really care what people eat or even what people farm. They just want to sell it. And they, you know, with the better, higher margins the better. And it turns out that they're still very focused on this, on this, you know, these meat and dairy alternatives, which happen to be like a huge victory for the climate, if they ever happen. But you know, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Cargill doesn't care that much about that, but they care about selling lots of stuff to make lots of food. And they're happy to, you know, they're happy to do that in whatever form. I don't think they're necessarily, you know, tied to, oh, we know how to make corn taste good. We know how to make the suckers, you know, eat soybeans look most of that stuff goes into cows and, you know, and chickens anyway, I just, you know, I really do try to push back against this notion that that, you know, what we grow and even what we subsidize has a lot to do with, you know, the sort of these kind of larger food and climate issues. Because the fact is, like, you know, you hear, like, Michael Pollan has a very convincing riff about how, you know, we grow so much corn because we subsidize corn. But honestly, if you took away corn subsidies tomorrow, like, like, a lot of corn farmers would be pissed off because, they wouldn't be able to buy a fancy new f1 50 every year, but it wouldn't really change their planting decisions. Like, the middle of the country is corn and soybeans, because those are spectacularly efficient crops, and that feed help feed the world and and that soil is really good at growing them. Yeah,

Jack 

I think we could go very deep into this, and I've got a few more questions to ask you, but, you know, like, the kind of the generations of, like, research that has gone into certain crops, and, making them more efficient is also part of that structure. And, you know, I think part of this conversation is that it's, it's so messy,it's so complex. 

Michael 

No, you know, I think that, look, I think that's a very fair point, but I am going to be the guy who's like, banging my spoon on my high chair and saying, like, I get it, like, you don't like palm oil. Like, there's a lot of deforestation happening for palm oil, and that sucks, right? That? Like, I don't like that. But then, so it's like, Ban palm oil. No more palm oil. Well, like people are still going to want vegetable oil, and the other vegetable oils are not as efficient as palm oil, so you're going to need more land, and ultimately that's going to mean more deforestation. You know, corn and soy, exactly like you know, you can have these soy boycotts, but so what's going to be the alternative? Are you just going to grow the soy somewhere else, where it's less efficiently grown? Are you going to grow a different feed crop that's less efficient than soy? You know, soy has some nice, you know, it's a legume. It actually stores some nitrogen in the soil. It's again, I am not denying that there are a lot of problems with the way we grow corn, the way we grow soy, though, you know, the way we grow palm oil and, like, I think we should try to fix those problems. But there is, I feel a little bit of a baby and bath water problem in some of these discussions.  

Jack 

You think that's like a, sometimes an issue of, like, wanting to see the world a certain way, but not seeing it as it is?

Michael 

Simple. Yeah, simple is how people want to see the world. The world is complicated. People are complicated. You know, agriculture is complicated. You know, there's this whole, I think a lot of the, and this is I, I have a lot of respect for a lot of what regenerative farmers are doing. And I think, you know, they're finding some very cool things about the farm, about, you know, ways to make the soil healthier, and that's important, right? We don’t want dust bowls. And I do think there's a lot of evidence that, you know, the environment really took the hit when we went from nature to agriculture, not when we went from agriculture to more intensive agriculture. But that's a sort of more complicated story to tell than, like, what hath we wrought, you know? Hopefully people will buy the book anyway. But it's not, it's not a simple story.  

Jack 

Yeah one book that has really, that I had really had that realization with, was Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. 

Would you disagree in with the even the label of regenerative farming, that it feels like your framing of agriculture is like, inherently degenerative. There's no way of getting round that, that kind of simple fact that growing food is fairly extractive, and how do we make it the least extractive? Or, you know, how do we offset it type thing?

Michael 

You know, certainly the line that I think you know, or one of the lines that I got a lot of pushback for in the New York Times piece, is I did say that that every farm you know, even the you know, pastoral bucolic, regenerative farms, is a kind of environmental crime scene. It's this sort of echo of the natural landscape that was there before it and and yes, agriculture has an impact. 

So I do think there is a sense that, uh, you know, I'm wildly skeptical when you hear about, you know, Carbon Neutral Milk and Carbon Positive farming. I think agriculture has an impact, but it provides a service, right? You know, people forget about this, like, you know, we need agriculture. We need to eat. 8 billion of us need to eat. It's really important. It's an incredible thing that. Far, they're really good at it. They, you know, they turn sunlight and water and soil into nutrition. It's like an incredible alchemy that they do every day. I mean, the problem is that they're also like, we're taking down a soccer field worth of rain forest every six seconds. So I really do think the challenge is not to come up with this kind of fantasy agriculture that's going to make everything okay. It's to limit the impact of agriculture. And to think seriously about it, you know, to like, what kind of impacts are we okay with, and how can we help farmers be less destructive? Look. I think a lot of individual farmers will talk about how they really care about their stewardship of the land, and I believe them, but it's also true that collectively, they're stewarding a mess, and I think that's going to have to require all of us. Like they're doing it for us, right? We, you know, we are partaking in the agricultural system. Every time we go to the grocery store. That's like that. It doesn't grow on shelves, right? It grows out in the land that most of us only fly over. So I think this is a, you know, this, there's a collective responsibility to do something about it. And I'm not trying to demonize anybody and say, like, Oh, you're, you know, this is terrible, the mess you're making. It's like I'm eating your your products, you know, I appreciate what you're making for me. Let's just, you know, how can we help you do it better?

Jack 

Do you think, as a final question, do you think you've got any blind spots?

Michael 

I'm sure I have blind spots. I mean, look, I, you know, to give myself a little bit of defense first, like I did a ton of research, I talked to a couple 1000 people, I read all the things and I know that some of what I'm saying is going to be controversial and unloved and, and I'm okay with that. And, and I think there are some of the, you know, I try to distinguish between the things that are just wrong and the things on which reasonable people can disagree. I had one guy wrote a big essay, like a very long essay, about how the blind spot in my New York Times editorial was that I didn't, you know, I didn't write about any of this from the animal's perspective, from the livestock perspective. And my kind of instinct, with my first instinct, was like, Well, did you think? And then I was like, I. Now that's just a good point, and that's totally fair and and so in that sense, I do think, you know, we all have our priorities. You know, I'm a climate guy, I'm a, you know, I'm a nature guy, but partly because I'm a humanity guy, and I think that, you know, I think this is an awesome planet. It's like the only one we're aware of that has pizza and reliable Wi Fi and anxious to save it. I'm worried about the trajectory we're on. I guess if, if I knew what my blind spots were, they wouldn't be blind. But I'm sure I've got some.

Jack 

Well, I think that's a good place to leave it. Thank you, Michael, for joining us today. That was, yeah, super interesting. So

Michael 

Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. 

Jack
Firstly, I'd like to say thanks to Michael Grunwald for joining us. It was a fascinating conversation at Table. We're still talking about it, weeks after the interview. Lok out for his book coming out in July. The link is in the show notes. 

It's now been a while after the original interview, and I've been thinking about it a lot. I've talked to my colleagues at Table, and I've arrived at three main reflections. I don't necessarily agree on a narrow focus on yields and climate, as Michael does, and I think this is potentially where I might expect some listeners to push back to. I think at Table, we like to think about systems, how biodiversity, health, food security and climate all interact, not just the one aspect, but what I think Michael is pushing back on is that productivity and yields are being left out of some of the conversations around the future of food, but they are a vitally important part of the food and climate question. 

I guess in the same way, when Michael says the math is the math? Is it so simple? I mean, what are the inputs into the math? If you're thinking about how to solve climate change, then you might get to the same math. But I think if you prioritize other outcomes, such as food security, nutrition, livelihoods, you might have different math. I also think there's a kind of low tolerance for uncertainty in these predictions. What do they miss? No one would have predicted that COVID 19 could happen and change our lives so radically, and our capacity to change. Finally, I'm not so convinced that the health impacts the ultra processed foods on our industrial farming systems are not connected. Michael said that the fact that corn and soy get packed into junk food isn't a farming problem, but in many cases, the businesses doing the farming and the businesses making the food aren't so separate. But I really enjoyed stress testing my own assumptions about these questions power and interconnection. I think that's really important to do. 

Michael actually commented on these reflections and said that, you know, they were totally fair, especially the stuff about nutrition. He said that that's a much longer discussion, but one thing he would point out is that it's legitimate to push back against the mass maybe other stuff will happen, like terrorists creating a global depression that, as he says, scrambled the projections, but the math could get worse as well as better. Basically, what did you think we'd love to hear your views and feedback to the episode. You could even record your own reflections and send us an email in the show notes. 

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please do tell a friend who might enjoy it. Rate it and review wherever you listen and to subscribe to our newsletter, fodder for expert analysis, food systems, research, events and jobs. The link is in the show notes too. Table is a collaboration between University of Oxford, Wageningen University Swedish, University of Agricultural Sciences, University of Los Andes and national, Autonomous University of Mexico. This episode was produced by Jack Thompson and Matthew Kessler, edited by Matthew Kessler. Special thanks to reviewers, Tara Garnett, Rachel Headings, Ruth Mattock and music by Blue Dot Sessions. Thank you and talk soon..