We Are Eating the Earth
The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
Published on 14. August 2025
Book
Hardback
384 pages
978-1-9821-6007-4 (ISBN)
Description
From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate war: the fight to fix our food system.
Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we're going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can't feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we'll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don't solve our food and land problems.
In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It's an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it's also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done-and trying to do it.
Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger. He chronicles Searchinger's uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations-through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.
Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we're going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can't feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we'll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don't solve our food and land problems.
In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It's an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it's also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done-and trying to do it.
Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger. He chronicles Searchinger's uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations-through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.
Reviews / Votes
"A thrilling and provocative survey of inventions, innovations, and wild flights of imagination aimed at feeding more people while using less land...People who would rather solve problems than posture over them, people who understand that popularity is no measure of truth, will find in this book a bracing, beautiful picture of what's possible-and a sobering look at the difficulty of change."-The Washington Post
"We Are Eating the Earth is a savory, science-salted meal of provocative thinking about food. Grunwald investigates what we eat, how we grow it, and why getting better at it is key to addressing the climate crisis. It's a wildly ambitious undertaking, but Grunwald pulls it off because he's fearless and funny and knows his stuff. If you want to save the planet, read We Are Eating the Earth."
-Jeff Goodell, New York Times bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First
"Michael Grunwald never follows the crowd. Instead, he digs deep and finds actual, uncomfortable, and, yes, correct answers. We Are Eating the Earth tackles the complexity of our food and climate problems with captivating storytelling, and no agenda but our survival. Knowledge is about to be dropped. Pay attention."
-Brad Meltzer, bestselling author of The JFK Conspiracy
"The quest to feed humanity's voracious appetites is consuming ever more land around the world. We Are Eating the Earth is an indispensable guide to the thorniest problem in global economics and environmental policy-an issue that most advocates ignore, but that we urgently need to face if we want to have any hope of solving it."
-Matthew Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans
"Food is now as big a climate challenge as oil, and We Are Eating the Earth is the most vivid and inspiring reckoning with this wicked problem written in this age of climate crisis."
-David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
"Grunwald does the important work of translating the legal, scientific, and often esoteric aspects of the issue into immediate action. Ambitious in scope, the book provides a roadmap of environmental policy relating to agricultural land in the past few decades and the emergency we're now facing. An accessible and alarming look at the planet's land crisis."
-Kirkus Review
"In this bracing report, journalist Grunwald...offers a myth-busting overview of current debates around how to improve the world's agricultural systems. This provides much food for thought."
-Publishers Weekly
"Engaging, informative, witty, convincing, and ultimately sobering offering... While the content is disturbing, Grunwald's delivery helps gets his message across: the need for land-use reform, immediately."
-Booklist
"Grunwald's book is informative, highly readable, and often funny."
-Bloomberg
"A lively, reportorial world tour through the misunderstood science and politics of agriculture...intelligent, highly timely...We Are Eating the Earth is, to a great extent, a work of unsentimental pragmatism, which makes the spirited case for principled idealism in the book's final moments all the more potent."
-Vox
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Illustrations
16 page b&w insert
Dimensions
Height: 230 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 39 mm
Weight
576 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-9821-6007-4 (9781982160074)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2025
Simon + Schuster LLC
€14.83
Available for download
Person
Michael Grunwald is the bestselling author of two widely acclaimed books, The Swamp and The New New Deal. He's a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time, and POLITICO and winner of the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Award for investigative reporting, and many other journalism prizes. He lives in Miami.