Planetary Eating

A scientifically rigorous guide to making the best dietary choices for both our personal health and our environmental footprint.

Many of us try our best to eat foods that are healthy and environmentally sustainable. But are we getting it right? Which foods amount to “wise” choices, and which ones are best avoided? Common views often range widely and are sometimes even contradictory. It’s most unfortunate when conscientious individuals who go to great lengths in their quest to minimize environmental impacts follow the wrong advice. In Planetary Eating, Gidon Eshel aims to minimize such misuse of good will by providing scientifically untrained readers with the tools needed to make the best choices for themselves and for our planet.

Eshel writes that dietary choices, and the corresponding agricultural patterns, are, for most of us, our principal form of planetary agency—the main ways by which we impact our overburdened and undernourished host planet. Agriculture and diet are therefore most productively examined through the planetary science perspective. Starting from rather basic (but not quite first) principles, Planetary Eating offers impartial, fact-based analysis with firm foundations in earth and planetary sciences on how to make the right dietary choices.Prologue
Introduction
Ch 1 - On Impacts of Food on the Environment
Ch 2 - Of Beef and Public Confusion
Ch 3 - Of Rangeland and Cropland
Ch 4 - On Optimal Grazing Practices
Ch 5 - On Earth Shaping Agriculture
Ch 6 - From Sunshine to Food
Ch 7 - On Earth Operations
Ch 8 - On Bringing Planetary Eating Home
Acknowledgments“In utter detail Gidon Eshel understands the relationship between diet, agriculture, and planetary health, perhaps better than anyone else. In Planetary Eating, he makes this relationship—and our dietary choices—eminently clear.”
—Mark Bittman, author of Animal, Vegetable, Junk

“Planetary Eating gives us a geophysicist’s deep analysis of the environmental cost of beef production and the benefits of replacing meat with plants. Salads, he argues, are a blueprint for rebellion against corporate-run agricultural systems.”
—Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat, Slow Cooked, and Unsavory Truth

“Using the lens of planetary science, Eshel describes persuasively why replacing beef with alternative protein sources is essential for limiting climate change. Better health is a welcome side effect. His message is highly readable and urgent.”
—Walter Willett, author of Eat, Drink, and Be HealthyGidon Eshel is Research Professor at Bard. He completed a postdoc at the Harvard Center for Planetary Physics, where he was a NOAA Global and Climate Change Fellow, and received a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2016. He has written tens of papers on the geophysics of food.