We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate

In this bracing report, journalist Grunwald (The Swamp) explores the challenges of developing a more sustainable agricultural system through an extended profile of Tim Searchinger, a hard-charging environmental lawyer whose skepticism of claims about ethanol’s viability as a fossil fuel alternative inspired him to take on a second line of work as an agriculture researcher at Princeton University. Grunwald details how in the late aughts, Searchinger’s research on how a congressional mandate for plant-based fuels exacerbated deforestation (producers razed land to grow corn that could be transformed into ethanol) helped turn the tide against them in environmental circles. Instead, Searchinger argues that humans should avoid the creation of new farmland by making existing tracts more productive. Surveying ongoing controversies over how to do so, Grunwald explains that while some believe replacing beef with plant-based meat would reduce methane emissions, the foods are ultraprocessed and unhealthy, and that while some decry GMOs as unnatural, Searchinger believes they hold promise for boosting harvests. In capturing Searchinger’s “pain-in-the-ass tenacity” and iconoclastic spirit, Grunwald offers a myth-busting overview of current debates around how to improve the world’s agricultural systems. This provides much food for thought. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (July)