Agricultural innovation key to avoid extinction from western systems

The Western diet—packed full of industrially grown processed meats, saturated fats, salt, corn-derived fructose syrup, refined grains, washed down with large volumes of alcohol—is taking over the world. Low on fruit and vegetables, this is both cheap and heavily marketed as aspirational, the diet of the middle classes, and viewed as a symbol of success and wealth. With its origins in the Industrial Revolution, the Western diet is associated with obesity, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases.

The goal, then, is to shift away from this toxic diet toward richer, more varied diets that reduce risk of these diseases, and reduce the risk of destabilizing the planet. These changes must also be accompanied by fairer distribution that makes healthy food affordable and accessible to those living in urban food deserts and other underserved regions.

Our analyses show there is space on Earth, without expanding agricultural land any further, to feed at least nine billion people a healthy, nutritious diet. Indeed, our work builds on the seminal analysis conducted by the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Ultimately, this means reining in over-consumption of industrially produced meat and dairy in some places, but it does not mean forcing a vegan or vegetarian diet on anyone.

A shift from the typical Western diet to a planetary health diet, notes Andrew Haines, means far more than just reduced industrially produced meat consumption. It involves a large increase in consumption of fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds. Many health benefits arise from these changes. With them, some ten million premature deaths could be prevented annually by 2040.17 Much more importantly, poor nutrition still affects hundreds of millions of people, so a planetary health diet must focus on underconsumption as much as overconsumption.

The ocean is another important source of healthy food. Currently, 3 billion people get 20% of their animal protein from seafood. Sustainable aquatic food has the potential to prevent 166 million people from suffering micronutrient deficiencies. Global demand for seafood will roughly double by 2050, according to the 2021 Blue Food Assessment published in the journal Nature.18 This demand will be met primarily through increased aquaculture production rather than by capture fisheries. But aquaculture must use sustainable practices.

Innovation will likely play an important role in the transition toward a planetary health diet. Plant-based alternatives to milk are growing in popularity and increasingly marketed and perceived as “aspirational” foods. So too are plant-based and “lab-grown” alternatives to beef and chicken. We are also heading for an innovation revolution in the field of “precision fermentation and cellular agriculture”—in which microorganisms directly produce the kind of proteins we would typically get via a cow, fish, or bird. Precision fermentation uses the large and mostly untapped variety of yeasts, fungi, mycelium, and microalgae as hosts to produce ingredients identical to animal proteins, for example egg whites or dairy. The 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that emerging food technologies such as cellular fermentation, cultured meat, plant-based alternatives to animal-based food products, and controlled environment agriculture can bring substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from food production. Of course, we must be careful not to replace one problem with another. As always, we need to look at the entire food system and adopt solutions that are holistic while ensuring that we feed as many people as possible nutritious food within planetary boundaries.

This diversity of new ideas and innovations is good as it pushes people to think more broadly about what they eat and why they eat it. Undoubtedly, the rise of these new industries in some places is a sign that a significant transformation is beginning. The Earth4All model allows us to test the effect of different assumptions concerning the future fraction of climate-neutral meats, whether grass-fed or “new meats.” To achieve a Giant Leap, we must assume that 50% of all red meat is climate neutral by 2050. In Too Little Too Late, we see that only 10% has shifted by 2100, meaning that new meat remains a pretty marginal product in TLTL. The consequences for cropland and fertilizer use are shown in figure 6.2.

Solution 3: Eliminate Food Loss and Waste

With a growing population, potentially reaching nine or ten billion people, it makes sense to worry about our scale of food production and use. Can Earth provide enough food for an additional one to two billion people given that hundreds of millions of people still go hungry each year? Approximately one third of all food is either lost or wasted, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which translates to some 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This mountain of rotting food is set to keep growing. Absent significant policies or behavioral change, food waste is predicted to double by 2050.19

When it comes to solutions for the food turnaround, reducing loss and waste is arguably the lowest of low-hanging fruit (pardon the pun). And it is clear where the problem lies. In wealthy countries, fussy consumers buy more than they need and discard anything with the slightest imperfection. Retailers both train consumers to over-consume and then jump to the tune of the consumers’ unsustainable and often arbitrary demands. Regulations and education can help reduce waste.

Growing more food than is consumed means that we are using land that could instead sustain greater biodiversity. Because we are, in most cases, saturating that land with chemicals along the way, we are also depleting soil and polluting land and waterways, all for naught. So reducing true waste is critical. But the unused food that remains should be directed away from landfills and used to address hunger, most importantly. It can also be used to create soil-building compost, supplement animal feed, or create energy through biogas operations. While not the highest priority for food waste, biogas can be a significant source of energy. Anaerobic digesters, which use bacteria to break down organic matter in oxygen-free reactors, can power 800 to 1,400 homes a year by turning 100 tons of food waste per day into biogas.20

In low-income countries, food waste is often unintentional and caused by poor storage conditions or transportation difficulties. This can be improved by better infrastructure to store, process, transport, and distribute food. New food enterprises can work with excesses in crops that ripen all at once—by turning fresh mangoes into dried mango chips, for instance. And recapturing nutrients by techniques such as biogas and composting at scale can reduce runoff and get nutrients recycled to the soil. But food wasted in one corner of the world can’t really be diverted to feed the hungry in another.

Giant Leap calls for reducing food waste by 30% by 2050. Slow the pace down to just a 10% reduction by 2100, and you get the Too Little Too Late scenario.