Cooking Down the Planet

The great virtue of carbon-footprint calculators that tote up our individual contributions to the global climate crisis—like the one at the Nature Conservancy website—is that, with continual updating and refinement, they can highlight carbon-intensive practices we would otherwise have missed. By now it is fairly easy to make the connection between the distances we drive (and the cars we drive them in) and greenhouse gas emissions, because we can mentally picture the tailpipe adding its share to the atmosphere, but carbon may be the last thing we are thinking of when sipping a fruit smoothie or tucking into a grilled chicken breast. Yet, as Anna Lappé argues in her new book, our societal dependence on fossil fuels runs so deep that even the intimate act of eating involves us in long global chains that may have dire consequences for the planet's atmosphere. Estimates vary, but the industrial food system that brings bananas to Michigan and factory-farmed chicken to Hawaii is by most accounts responsible for approximately a third of the anthropogenic climate change that is now occurring.

As Lappé details, agriculture's contributions to the climate problem come from a variety of sources. Wherever forests are converted to cropland, their carbon-sequestering function is lost along with the trees and soil. Mechanized agriculture, already dominant in the Western world and now being actively exported to South America, South Asia, and Africa by multinational agribusiness, requires immense amounts of petroleum to operate at its preferred scale. Nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides, both synthesized from fossil-fuel sources (usually natural gas), are required to make up for unsustainable agronomical practices. Livestock, which are now slaughtered at a rate of 60 billion per annum, are major consumers of grain and emitters of methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than CO₂. Transporting both the inputs and products of this system adds yet another layer of carbon to the total, as does the eventual disposal of agricultural and food waste. Lappé touches credibly if unsystematically on all of these issues, offering a seven-point prescription for turning the tide against our climate-changing food system: whenever possible, eat unprocessed, local food (homegrown is best) while minimizing the consumption of meat and other animal products and eliminating food and packaging waste.

This is fine advice, but it does not go far beyond the consensus hashed out over the past forty years about the unsustainability of the US food system, a consensus that in recent years has been reaching a much broader slice of the population than ever via large-circulation magazines and syndicated newspapers. Filling the niche between academic research and magazine journalism, a book like Lappé's ought to delve more deeply into the structural and historical reasons behind our fossil-fueled agriculture. Too often, though, Diet for a Hot Planet is content to remain at a conceptual level and in an idiom more appropriate to the pop-journalistic side of the spectrum: "Systems, Oh My! The Complexity of Food" reads one representative section title. The interrelated food and climate crises, in Lappé's plausible judgment two of the greatest problems ever faced by humankind, surely deserve conceptually deeper and rhetorically more serious treatment.

Despite my gratitude for the contribution Lappé makes to raising our consciousness about our oily diet, by the end I found myself wondering whether the book was a hopeful sign of cultural change or a confirmation that contemporary America is now even further from getting to grips with its unhealthy, unjust, and unsustainable institutions than it was a generation ago. Lappé owes her title, of course, to her mother, Francis Moore Lappé, whose late-1960s samizdat critiques of the food system eventually appeared in one of the earliest hard-hitting books on food sustainability and justice, Diet for a Small Planet (1971). Most of the virtuous solutions and disturbing trends cited in her daughter's book, including the food...