A climate-friendly national food strategy would start with accelerating alternative proteins, reducing food waste and investing in agricultural innovation. Impossible Burgers sit on a tray. (Photo by Gao Yuwen/VCG via Getty Images) The Eating the Earth column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we […]
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A climate-friendly national food strategy would start with accelerating alternative proteins, reducing food waste and investing in agricultural innovation.
The Eating the Earth column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.
I don’t pay much attention to the circus that is British politics, but before Boris Johnson’s government suddenly and weirdly imploded, I did follow the debate over its new U.K. Government Food Strategy.
Basically, almost every British interest group (except the farm lobby) got angry that the government watered down its final strategy (to appease the farm lobby). It didn’t include salt or sugar taxes, fruit or vegetable subsidies, or meat reductions, all of which had been floated in a draft report.
The general consensus was that the strategy didn’t take sustainability, obesity or affordability seriously. “A feeble to-do list,” complained the food advocacy group Sustain. “Not just piecemeal and weak,” but “unethical,” groused the Food Ethics Council.“ Plan shows no stomach for bold action,” The Guardian summarized. Only the National Farmers Union hailed the strategy for “recognizing the importance of domestic food production.”
Now that the government is in shambles, it’s unclear what happens to the Government Food Strategy. But how cool is it that the U.K. even bothered to create one?
The U.S. certainly hasn’t. It’s got a global food security strategy for fighting hunger abroad, but there’s no coordinated plan for how we produce and consume food in America.
This is a food-and-climate column, so I won’t presume to say how Washington should promote more nutritious or affordable diets. But since I keep howling into the wind about our food-and-climate crisis, and I wrote a whole column complaining that U.S. biofuel mandates make it worse, I thought I’d take a whack at what a sensible national strategy to address it might look like.
One obvious place to start would be to ditch those famine-inducing, forest-destroying biofuels mandates, because most biofuels are even worse for the climate than gasoline, but that won’t happen. America’s farm lobby has even more political clout than Britain’s, so we’re going to keep using a third of our corn harvest to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. In fact, the otherwise climate-conscious President Biden is pushing to expand the federal biofuels mandate, and the otherwise climate-friendly Inflation Reduction Act unveiled by the all-powerful Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) includes several new biofuel boondoggles.
Similarly, beef is our most emissions-intensive food, but the backlash to a beef tax would make the Boston Tea Party look like a tea party, so why waste time dreaming about it?
We can all hope the politics of food will evolve, but hope is not a strategy, so I’m going to focus on policies with at least some tenuous connection to political reality.
The problem
Before proposing solutions, it makes sense to outline the problem — the problem of feeding the world without frying the world, the repetitive theme of this monthly Eating the Earth column.
To recap: The global food system generates a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, we’ll need to reduce those emissions 75 percent to meet the Paris climate accord’s targets. But we’ll also need to produce 50 percent more calories to feed our growing population. Unless things change, we’ll have to deforest at least 14 Californias worth of land to produce all those extra calories, which would make it impossible to meet those climate targets.
So things better change. Somehow, we’ll have to grow far more food while clearing far less land and emitting far less carbon.
In the words of one influential proponent of activist government: What is to be done?
The U.S. government can help shrink the eating-the-earth problem — by promoting more efficient consumption that reduces demand for land and more efficient production that increases the supply of food per acre. Not only is America a disproportionately large consumer and producer of food, we’re also an economic and technological superpower with disproportionate power to spread innovations around the world.
I’ll focus on three things the feds could do: accelerate alternative proteins, attack food waste and invest in agricultural innovation. There’s lots of good climate stuff in the Inflation Reduction Act, but not that stuff.
1. Accelerate alternative proteins
Governments have helped rein in energy emissions by promoting cleaner alternatives to climate-ravaging fossil fuels — solar, wind, electric vehicles. A great first step to rein in food emissions would be to promote cleaner alternatives to climate-ravaging meat and dairy products. With virtually no government help, American entrepreneurs have taken the lead in creating a trendy but relatively tiny alternative protein industry. Federal aid could help it grow into a jobs-producing, land-saving, emissions-slashing powerhouse capable of competing with animal agriculture.
In fact, a new Boston Consulting Group study found public investments in alternative proteins are the most cost-effective climate investments. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t make any of those investments, even though livestock generate one seventh of global emissions and U.S. meat consumption is at an all-time high.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that the current trajectory of global meat consumption, which is on track to almost double by 2050, would create a glide path to climate hell. Despite $5 billion worth of private investment in alt-protein startups last year, despite all the hype over plant-based unicorns like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, meatless meat is still barely 1 percent of U.S. meat sales. Plant-based milks are a more impressive 16 percent of the U.S. milk market, but they’ve had a three-decade head start. The climate can’t wait that long for the alt-meat market to ramp up.
Bruce Friedrich spent years masterminding PETA’s radical anti-meat campaigns, but he no longer thinks shaming and screaming can reduce meat consumption. He now runs the Good Food Institute, the alternative protein industry’s trade group, because he’s convinced the only way to beat meat is to develop cheaper substitutes that taste just as good. The young industry isn’t there yet — only 64 percent of consumers who try today’s plant-based meats come back for more — and he doesn’t believe it can get there without the same kind of aggressive government support for research and manufacturing that’s jump-started renewable energy and electric vehicles.
“This industry has made astronomically fast progress on its own, but it will stay niche if it’s got to keep asking people to pay more for products they don’t like as much,” Friedrich says. “If we’re serious that we don’t want the world to burn, government has to step up.”
