Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?

Early into his new book The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos, ecologist Mark Easter poses a playful, but loaded, question: “How could a morning piece of toast or a plate of dinner pasta be such a world-altering culprit?” This, like many ideas Easter digs into in his illuminating debut, is a glimpse at how the author goes about breaking down the climate toll of the U.S. agricultural system: One dish at a time.  

Seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and pie are just some of the quintessentially “American” kitchen table staples Easter structures the book around as he tries to help readers understand how greenhouse gases move into and out of soils and plants on land across the country. Each of the nine chapters examines how a single dish is made; from the soil needed to grow the ingredients, to the people who manage the land and the laborers who toil to get it to the table, and the leftovers that remain — documenting the emissions created each step of the way. 

The Blue Plate also takes a look at some of the innovative practices being implemented around the U.S. to make such culinary favorites more climate-friendly. Stopping off at an Arizona produce farm, a Wyoming fertilizer plant, a Colorado landfill, an Idaho fish farm, and several dairies, Easter shows how small businesses are making conscientious changes to how they work. He theorizes how each could be applied at scale while quantifying how the widespread adoption of such techniques, and minimal shifts in consumer purchasing and consumption habits, could reduce agriculture’s gargantuan role in warming. 

It’s a topic driven by Easter’s own family history. His great-grandmother was a farmer during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s who, along with others growing grain at the time in the Great Plains, unknowingly contributed to the release of one of the greatest known pulses of carbon emissions. The book uses her story to probe how the Great Plains was transformed from one of the planet’s most carbon-rich grasslands into one of its largest agricultural complexes. 

By analyzing the emissions released when food is grown, produced, harvested, and shipped, The Blue Plate makes the case that curbing the carbon footprint of what we eat won’t require an agricultural revolution. It’s already happening, in bite-sized cases across the country. 

Grist sat down with Easter, a research affiliate at Colorado State University, to discuss what his vision of eating our way out of the climate crisis would look like in practice. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Q: In The Blue Plate, you dig into the emissions impact of the production and consumption of everything from husks of corn to hunks of meat. What led you to decide to focus on the ingredients of, in your words, “a typical meal at an American weekend dinner party”? 

A: I sat down one evening with a plate of food in front of me, and I looked at it, and I realized that there were critical stories tied to the climate crisis in every single item of food that was on the plate. I also realized I’ve been working with farmers and ranchers around the world who were already implementing the practices that could help reduce and actually reverse those emissions. And I saw the basis for the book in that moment. 

Q: At Colorado State University, you belonged to a team of “greenhouse gas accountants” who tally the tens of billions of tons of carbon that move each year between the Earth’s plants and atmosphere — a huge focus of the book. What, exactly, does that look like? 

A: It’s very much like what an accountant for a business or a bank does. We’re basically trying to tally the flow of carbon and nitrogen back and forth between the Earth and the atmosphere and try to understand, “Do we have too much flowing in the wrong directions?” And that’s basically what’s been happening. Not just from the fossil fuel industry, and for generating electricity, for heating homes, for transportation, but also from the way we’ve been growing food and managing forests. We’ve been essentially exhausting the ecosystem capital of organic matter and sending that into the atmosphere. When really, what we need is for that flow to be stabilized and reversed, so that we have that flow of carbon back into forests, into pastures, into crop fields, and into the plants that sustain us through agriculture. 

The carbon and nitrogen in ecosystems, they’re really like the capital in businesses. If you’re burning through your capital, that’s a warning sign for business, and they can’t sustain it very long, eventually they’ll go bankrupt. And that’s essentially what’s been going on with agriculture. 

Q: Let’s talk more about that, through the lens of bread. Something that has stayed with me is a line in the book where you note that although humans eat more of it than any other food, bread and grains have some of the smallest carbon footprints, on average, of any food — about a pound and half of CO2 equivalent for every pound of bread, pasta, or tortillas. But you argue that the emissions impact of producing bread and grain is larger than that, because of its soil impact.  

A: This is one of the most interesting stories when we think about the food that’s on our plates: the role that carbon, organic matter, has in the soil, supporting the crops that we grow. The more organic matter we have in the soil, the more fertile the soil is going to be, the more abundant the crops will be, the more resilient the plants will be in terms of being able to fight off disease and be able to deal with drought. 

It’s part of that ecosystem capital. The carbon that’s in the soil there accumulates over millennia. It can take five to ten thousand years for that ecosystem capital to build up and fill what we call the soil carbon vault that sustains the ecosystem. If we’re not careful, we can burn through that soil carbon vault over a short time. We essentially exhaust that capital. Burning through that vault, and that’s just an enormous amount of carbon in the soil, that is essentially a climate burden that comes with every loaf of bread. 

Q: In The Blue Plate, you visited a Colorado farm where the farmers have eliminated things like mechanically tilling the soil or leaving land fallow, both of which degrade soil. They’ve also weaned off of chemical fertilizers and planted cover crops. In what way are these compounding practices restoring the carbon that past generations of farmers have mined from their soils? 

A: What these growers are doing is reversing that process of degradation that started when the land was first settled, and what we now know as industrial agriculture was brought to those fields. And they are restoring it through these really straightforward practices that have been around in some form or another since the beginning of agriculture, and they’re implementing it at a scale that’s very focused on ending that cycle of degradation and actually restoring, regenerating, the soil. 

A story I tell in my book is of Curtis Sayles, who talks about how his soil had hit rock bottom. His focus has pivoted entirely to looking at the health of the soil, and he tracks that through the amount of organic matter, the carbon, that’s in his soil. And he’s steadily adding back the carbon into his soil. It’s extraordinary to see it come back to life. 

Q: What would scaling this require? The book notes that many U.S. farmers still intensively till cropland every year. Is it feasible to imagine large-scale changes? 

A: It’s important to understand that the decisions to regenerate soil, and to improve soil health, and to increase the organic matter in the soil, happen one farmer at a time, one rancher at a time, one field or pasture at a time. And there are hundreds of thousands of farmers and millions of pastures and fields around the country where the effects of those decisions can play out. 

There’s been a tremendous emphasis upon soil health within the farming and ranching community today. As soon as the U.S. Department of Agriculture started talking about this in the context of soil health, it really started getting people’s attention. And now, we see some of the fastest-growing practices in the country are changes to reduce tillage and to start to incorporate cover crops. There’s still a lot of barriers to it, and those barriers are cultural and social. And some people are uncomfortable with change. But that said, farmers are increasingly seeing this as an opportunity for them to increase their yields. 

Q: In the book, you pay homage to your great-grandmother and how she lost her farm during the Dust Bowl. How do you see her story, and historical accounts of farmers like her, reflected in how we talk about the role of agriculture in driving climate change? 

A: The story of my great-grandmother Neva and the story of her farm was a story that played out on literally billions of acres across the world. And not every farmer at the time was generating the kinds of emissions, degrading the soil, the same way that she was. But her story was not unique. What she did on that 160 acres of land in southeastern Colorado was similar to what was happening on farm parcels everywhere across the U.S., especially where people were homesteading under the Great Plains. 

In the process, they emitted as much carbon dioxide from the soil as we produce in a single year, in total, for all the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The magnitude of that was just extraordinary. And that is what really made my great-grandmother Neva’s story so personal to me. To realize that one of my ancestors had played a role there, unwittingly, in just trying to live a good life and fight for herself, and for her family. 

Q: Soil is a cornerstone of the global food system, and very much a focus of The Blue Plate. But it’s not the only focus. For one, you examine the emissions footprint of things like steak and salmon, but you notably do not advocate for Americans to stop eating meat or seafood or dairy altogether. In fact, you explore what the solutions could look like if these emissions-intensive foods remain on kitchen tables. Can you explain how you came to that conclusion? 

A: A lot of people are asking me about meat and their consumption of meat and “Do we need to stop eating meat?” I think what’s become clear is that we eat too much meat, whether it’s cattle or pigs or poultry. But I don’t think the answer is as simple as stopping eating meat. In some parts of the world, where millions of people live, trying to grow wheat or tomatoes, or other crops, would be an environmental disaster. It would completely deplete the soils. And some of those places, the best choice for the landscape, where it’s compatible with local wildlife and with the ecosystem as a whole, is to graze livestock. We have to be cognizant of that. 

I think the message that I’m trying to get across to the public is that if they eat meat, they need to consider pastured poultry, or try to source from regeneratively grown livestock herds and dairy products, wherever possible. And farmed shellfish, which can help restore oceans, estuaries, or our coastlines. People should search for foods in the grocery store that have a “regeneratively farmed” label attached to them. Finally, to avoid foods that travel by air, and the carbon emissions that come from that. And I know that’s not possible for everybody.

Q: The through line of The Blue Plate is this question: “Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?” You wrote that the answer is “a partial yes” but that we need to reframe the question. How would you like to see it reframed? And how would you answer it? 

A: How can we end the process of burning fossil fuels? And then what role can the way we grow, process, ship, cook our food, and deal with the leftovers, play in reducing the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels? 

We are burning fossil fuels at such a high rate and the impacts are so large we have to stop, as quickly as possible. Growing food differently, using regenerative methods, using these carbon farming methods, has the greatest potential to draw down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and back into the soil, back into the Earth, where we need more of it to lie. In that process of drawing down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we’re going to be helping to cool the planet, and reduce the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels. 

Editor’s note: Patagonia, the publisher of The Blue Plate, is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.