We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

by Jonathan Safran Foer

Climate change is the greatest crisis humankind has ever faced, and it is a crisis that will always be simultaneously addressed together and faced alone. We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, that fraught.

Globally, humans use 59 percent of all the land capable of growing crops to grow food for livestock. • One-third of all the fresh water that humans use goes to livestock, while only about one-thirtieth is used in homes. • Seventy percent of the antibiotics produced globally are used for livestock, weakening the effectiveness of antibiotics to treat human diseases. • Sixty percent of all mammals on Earth are animals raised for food.

People who eat diets high in animal protein are four times as likely to die of cancer as those who eat diets low in animal protein are. • Smokers are three times as likely to die of cancer as nonsmokers are.

Humans are now adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere ten times faster than the volcanoes did during the Great Dying.

According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.

When researchers at the Worldwatch Institute accounted for emissions that the FAO overlooked, they estimated that livestock are responsible for 32,564 million tons of CO2e emissions per year, or 51 percent of annual global emissions—more than all cars, planes, buildings, power plants, and industry combined.*

The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. • Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases. • Most people are not in the process of deciding whether to have a baby. • Eighty-five percent of Americans drive to work. Few drivers can simply decide to stop using their cars. • For Americans, 29 percent of air travel in 2017 was for business purposes, and 21 percent was for “personal non-leisure purposes.” Businesses must rely more on remote communication, “personal non-leisure” flights must be reduced, and personal leisure flights can and must be cut, but the fact remains that a sizable portion of air travel is unavoidable. • Everyone will eat a meal relatively soon and can immediately participate in the reversal of climate change.

Pounds of CO2e associated with a serving of each food: Beef: 6.61 Cheese: 2.45 Pork: 1.72 Poultry: 1.26 Eggs: 0.89 Milk: 0.72 Rice: 0.16 Legumes: 0.11 Carrots: 0.07 Potatoes: 0.03

Not eating animal products for breakfast and lunch has a smaller CO2e footprint than the average full-time vegetarian diet.

the average global citizen has a CO2e footprint of approximately 4.5 metric tons per year. • Not eating animal products for breakfast and lunch saves 1.3 metric tons per year.

There is a far more pernicious form of science denial than Trump’s: the form that parades as acceptance. Those of us who know what is happening but do far too little about it are more deserving of the anger. We should be terrified of ourselves. We are the ones we have to defy.

Most readers of this book live with some kind of debt, whether it be student loans, auto loans, credit card debt, or a home mortgage. (Seventy-three percent of American consumers have outstanding debt when they die.) When considering a loan, banks look at the applicant’s debt-to-income (DTI) ratio. Most financial planners consider a debt-to-income ratio of 36 percent or lower to be healthy. No one with a DTI ratio of higher than 45 percent is likely to get a loan from a bank. (A key part of the Dodd-Frank Act, a response to the financial crisis of 2008, was the qualified-mortgage rule, which stipulated that borrowers must have a DTI ratio of 43 percent or less to qualify for a loan.) Humanity has a DTI ratio of 150 percent, meaning we are consuming natural resources at a rate 50 percent greater than Earth’s ability to replenish them.

We dramatically overstate the role of science deniers, because it allows science acceptors to feel righteous without challenging us to act on the knowledge we accept.

I know too many smart and caring people—not advocacy narcissists, but good people who give their time, money, and energy to improve the world—who would never change how they eat, no matter how persuaded they were to do so.

When we think about food waste, we need to stop imagining half-eaten meals and instead focus on the waste involved in bringing food to the plate. It can require as many as twenty-six calories fed to an animal to produce just one calorie of meat. The UN’s former special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, wrote that funneling one hundred million tons of grain and corn to biofuels is “a crime against humanity” in a world where almost a billion people are starving. We might call that crime “manslaughter.” What he didn’t mention is that every year, animal agriculture funnels more than seven times that amount of grain and corn—enough to feed every hungry person on the planet—to animals for affluent people to eat. We might call that crime “genocide.” So, no, factory farming does not “feed the world.” Factory farming starves the world as it destroys it.

healthy vegetarian diet is, on average, about $750 less expensive per year than a healthy meat-based diet. (For perspective, the median income of a full-time American worker is $31,099.) In other words, it is about $200 cheaper per year to eat a healthy vegetarian diet than an unhealthy traditional diet. Not to mention the money saved by preventing diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer—all associated with the consumption of animal products. So, no, it is not elitist to suggest that a cheaper, healthier, more environmentally sustainable diet is better. But what does strike me as elitist? When someone uses the existence of people without access to healthy food as an excuse not to change, rather than as a motivation to help those people.

According to the UN, animal agriculture is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global … It should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale.”

The most comprehensive assessment of the livestock industry’s environmental impact was published in Nature in October 2018. After analyzing food-production systems from every country around the world, the authors concluded that while undernourished people living in poverty across the globe could actually eat a little more meat and dairy, the average world citizen needs to shift to a plant-based diet in order to prevent catastrophic, irreversible environmental damage. The average U.S. and U.K. citizen must consume 90 percent less beef and 60 percent less dairy. How would anyone keep track of that? No animal products for breakfast or lunch. It might not amount to precisely the reductions that are asked for, but it’s just about right, and easy to remember.

There are only two reactions to climate change: resignation or resistance. We can submit to death, or we can use the prospect of death to emphasize life.