In this episode, iHeartradio host Phil Tower welcomes Michael Grunwald, New York Times-bestselling author.
Michael's new book is We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, from Simon & Schuster Publishing
Michael told us that humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions.
By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds.
“Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems."-Michael Grunwald
Grunwald's compelling new book explains how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land.
But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death.
Get the book: We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
Michael's new book is We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, from Simon & Schuster Publishing
Michael told us that humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions.
By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds.
“Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems."-Michael Grunwald
Grunwald's compelling new book explains how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land.
But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death.
Get the book: We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is iHeartRadio's West Michigan Weekend. West Michigan Weekend is
a weekly program designed to inform and enlighten on a
wide range of public policy issues, as well as news
and current events. Now here's your host, Phil Tower.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
In this segment, we're going to tackle the environment a bit.
We don't do this a lot on the program, and
this is an important topic because there's a very interesting
connection between our food system and our climate. Nobody knows
that better than author Michael Grunwald, New York Times bestselling
author of The Swamp and The New New Deal. He's
got a brand new book just out in early July.
(00:40):
The book is called We Are Eating the Earth. The
Race to fix our food system and save our climate.
It's a big challenge, but Michael Grunwald was up to
the challenge. Michael, welcome to the program.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
First of all, Well, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
You know, this is a big issue. It's a big challenge.
It's a centuries long challenge that's been building. What made
you decide to tackle this in this book, Michael.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Well, honestly, I've been a policy reporter for thirty years
and written a lot about the environment and the climate
for twenty So, Phil, I've been a policy reporter for
thirty years. I've written about the environment and the climate
for twenty but that has always been about energy and climate.
And honestly, I realized I didn't know squat about food
(01:27):
and climate, and the food system is like a third
of our climate problem. It's also an even bigger percentage
of our water pollution and water shortages and deforestation and
biodiversity problems. So I realized, like, if I didn't know
anything about it, then probably a lot of people didn't.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
And you know what, I would say, ninety eight percent
of people have not a clue, not a squat above
the food system, which is normal. You know, it's on
the grocery shelf, we pick it up, the meat is
in the deli, we taken home, we grill it, or
we put it in a sandwich. We love it. We
don't think about the impact on the environment because we're
(02:06):
a selfish lot, Michael Grunweald, and that's very normal. But
you've explored a lot of connections here, including one that
involves the fuel that we thought was going to save
the oil crisis, which was ethanol. You've got a fascinating
section in the first chapter of We Are Eating the
Earth about really, I'm going to call it this kind
(02:28):
of the scam, the government perpetuation of ethanol, and of
course farmers and a farm lobby a huge part of
this ethanol as the savior for the oil crisis and
you know, something that was going to make greenhouse galect
gases less of an issue. Talk about that if you
would please.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Sure. Well, like you said, the book is called We
Are Eating the Earth, right, and the idea is that
essentially agriculture is eating the earth. That it's two of
every five acres of this planet are now cropped or grazed,
while only one of every one hundred acres our cities
or suburbs. Right, So you know, we kind of know,
(03:06):
you know, we know that there's a lot of agriculture
out there, but really it's about how our natural planet
has become an agricultural planet. And so the idea of
biofuels was, hey, you know, fossil fuels are this big problem,
so we're gonna we're going to just grow fuel instead
and then that'll replace it. And you know, growing the
growing the fuel when you actually you know, growing porn
(03:28):
that that's going to actually soak some carbon out of
the atmosphere, and that'll make up for burning the you know,
burning the corn and an engine and creating carbon emissions
that way. And what people forgot was the land. And
that's really what the book is about, is that is
about land use. And it turns out, of course, that
if you grow fuel to replace and you stop growing
(03:48):
food on that land, somewhere else, you've got to replace
the food. And it's probably not going to be a
parking lot. It's going to be a forest or a
wetland that that stores a lot of carbon and also
absorbs carbon than from hard fossil fuels. So ultimately, like
trying to decarbonize the planet while you're continuing to cut
down trees is like trying to clean your house while
(04:10):
you're smashing your vacuum cleaner the bits in the living room,
you're making a mess and you're also you know, eliminating
your ability to clean up the mess. And that's what
biofuels are doing. They were sort of creating deforestation, so
they turned out to be much worse than gasoline. And
then the punchline fill is that biofuels are eating about
a Texas worth of the earth, but agriculture is eating
(04:32):
seventy five texases worth of the earth, and so it
turns out to be a you know, while biofuels could
be a really huge problem, agriculture in general is much bigger.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
And genetic modification of crops and just the whole genetic
modification thing for big ag Michael has got to play
a big role in this as well.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Right, well, yeah, I mean, you know, people complain about
it and like they you know, it's like, oh, it's
in food. It's you know, it's terrible. It's banned in Europe,
although I noticed they do import our GMO grain and
feed it to their animals, so you know, it's kind
of hypocritical there. But honestly, nobody's found anything. You know,
there's nothing wrong with GMOs for your health. There's They're
(05:17):
like the most studied substance on Earth. And while some
of the kind of you know, people who love GMOs
have exaggerated some of the benefits in terms of increasing
yields and growing more food per acre, it does have
some benefits. And certainly these future technologies with gene editing
that can be much more precise, they can you can
(05:37):
imagine you're already seeing more drought tolerant crops, flood tolerant crops,
heat tolerant crops that are going to be really important
as the as the world gets hotter. And that idea
of trying to make more food per acre so that
we don't need as many acres to make food is
just so important. I think a lot of people kind
(05:58):
of handwave of that away and they're just like, ah,
you know, we don't like big egg, we don't like
we don't like these intensive farms. But again, if you
can grow more food in one place, you don't need
as many places to grow food, And those other places
are going to be forests and wetlands and nature, and
that's what we need to stop. We're on track right
(06:19):
now to DeForest another twelve California's worth of land by
twenty fifty and you just can't do that.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, and palm this is fascinating. Palm oil is a
big part of this, and palm related products, especially in
Southeast Asia, massive defortation, deforestation, which you never see that
in the news because it's just happening. We're consuming all
these products. Is that the problem right there where we
don't care enough before it's too late. I guess this
(06:51):
is really hard to get people to get that alarmed.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
About it is certainly, I mean with Palmhile is like
Indonesia is you know, they're turning jungle into oil right now,
and and you're seeing this around the world, certainly in
you know, Brazil, where there's there's you know a lot
of deforestation as well. Remember Indiana used to be eighty
five percent forest, right, so it's like we deforested our Amazon,
(07:18):
you know, in the nineteenth century. So we can kind
of shake our finger at at you know, at Indonesia
and you know and say, oh, Brazil, you're terrible, but
they are, you know, they sort of want to do
what we're doing. A lot of this does come down
to sort of, you know, like you said, the demand side,
and I get in trouble for saying it. But the
real problem is cattle. Cattle, Like when you eat beef,
(07:43):
you are you know, you're not just eating the cow,
You're eating the caws and the rest of the cast
of rio. You're eating the Amazon. Beef is about ten
times worse for the climate, and they use it about
ten times more land than eating chicken or pork. So again,
we need to make beef better, because it would be
(08:03):
much better if it was only three or four times
worse than chicken or pork. But again, especially in the
rich world, where we eat four times as much as
much beef as the global average, you know we're going
to have to do a little bit like what the
Chick fil A cows on the billboard day and eat
more chicken.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Nice unintended plug for Chick fil A.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
There.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Michael Grunwald is with us. His new book is We
Are Eating the Earth Race to fix our food system
and save our climate. I want to be clear for
our listeners, this is not an all doom and gloom
book about our food system wrecking our client climate. You
are proposing that there are some good things already happening,
(08:45):
especially with respect to We've got science and entrepreneurs trying
to come up with ways to make our food better.
We've got, you know, fake meat that we can already
buy in the grocery store. We've got This is really interesting.
You talk talking about a crop they're growing called is
it pojamia?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
How do youangamia? Yeah? Talk about that? Sure? I mean
that is it is true? I did I didn't want
to do another Debbie down or climate book about ago
We're doomed because we're not. You know, there's just like
you know, there's better and worse, and better is better
than worse, you know. So far, I do write about
a bunch of these like exciting solutions that I've got
(09:26):
to admit, none of them have a lot of traction yet,
Like you mentioned the sort of you know, fake meat,
the plant based meat, which you know, everybody was really
excited about it in twenty nineteen because it, you know,
it tasted better than the old kind of vegan hockey pucks.
But it turned out it didn't taste better than meat,
you know, So it hasn't done that well yet, but
(09:46):
you know, maybe someday. The nice thing about humans is
that we're good at ingenuity and innovation, and maybe they'll
get better and cheaper and healthier and then they'll start
to make a real dent. Ponkami is another they're perfect example.
It's this kind of miracle tree that it grows this
these you know beans that are very much like soybeans,
(10:08):
and they have this and it produces this incredible golden
oil that's just like olive oil. But it's a tree,
so it actually has yields that can be like four
to ten times soybean yields. And you know, there are
like three hundred and fifty million acres of soybeans around
the world, so that could be a that could be
a really big deal. It can grow in really bad land,
(10:30):
it doesn't need fertilizer, it doesn't need irrigation. It's like
super awesome. One of the problems that I unfortunately, as
I talk about in the book, so far it's only
on fifteen hundred acres of the of the planet, so
it's got a long way to go. These solutions, you know,
they're very exciting, but it's going to be hard. And
(10:51):
what I say kind of bang my spoon on my
hyechair about is this idea that we are not even
grappling with these problems. We haven't even thought about them.
You know, energy twenty years ago there were no solutions.
You know, there was really no wind, no solar, no
electric vehicles, and now there's really been this clean energy revolution.
(11:11):
We need that kind of thing to happen in food.
We need to at least start grappling with it. And whatever.
You know, I'm sure people are going to take a
lot of shots in my book, but it does grapple.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, well no, And I want to celebrate you for
writing about it because I hope people just hearing this
conversation on the radio will think about it, hopefully by
the book, but most importantly realize we've got to address
this sooner and later, because we've already got people saying,
you know, we should have addressed climate warming fifty years
ago and taken it seriously. The other thing is when
(11:44):
we talk about some of the positive things you're spotlighting
in the book, something that I already know and I've
talked about a couple of people about it's happening here
in West Michigan and Grand Rapids vertical farming farms that
are inside buildings and growing ops year round. And that's
a positive thing. Although I got to ask you before
(12:04):
we run out of time. You also talk about tinder
for livestock. You got me in that one. You tease me,
and I want to know about tinder for livestock. Michael Grumwald.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well, first let me say about vertical farms. It's like
another perfect example of how you know, it's actually a
very cool solution for lettuce and you know, we should
have lettuces mostly water anyway, and we shouldn't be trucking
it around the around the around the country. But lettuce
is like, you know, tens of thousands of acres you know,
(12:36):
of the United States, while we have hundreds of millions
of acres of farms. And I think vertical farms can
really help with the lettuce problem. They might help with
the strawberry and weed problem, you know, don't I don't
know if they're I don't know if they don't seem
like they're going to solve the food problem. The ninety
eight percent of the land we used to grow kind
(12:57):
of staple crops, tinder for cattle, yeah, I mean there's everything.
There's uber for tractors. The Tindriver cattle is the kind
of like using you know, using modern information technology to
kind of match up, you know, to breed breed cattle
more efficiently. Right, I don't think that. I don't think
the cows are actually on the apps, you know, looking
(13:19):
for a looking for a suitable mate, but the pers
and ranchers are, so you know, Uh, it is another
example of how we can use you know, modern artificial
intelligence and robotics and uh have more precision agriculture and
all of these things are you know, efficiency is going
to be really important.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, and and and I think one of them. There's
so many great things to unpack in your book. The
book again is called We Are Eating the Earth, The
Race to fix our food system and save our climate.
I want especially our listeners to check out the story
about Tim Searchinger, who is kind of your hero in
the book. He's a food and and expert. And I'm thinking,
(14:01):
is we wrap up our conversation Michael Gruenwald, Maybe schools
and teachers need to celebrate more people who become food
and land experts and really study this because they're going
to save the planet. We just need a whole new
generation of them, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
I mean I chose him because I mean, look, he's
a a brilliant guy. He's a relentless guy, sort of
a pain in the ass. He's certainly a character. He's
you know, screaming about all the time about you know,
you know, he doesn't understand why everybody else isn't as
brilliant as he is. But what he is mostly is
he is a facts guy, a data guy, a science guy.
(14:40):
He literally has a his doormat to be on his
front porch says no, no dogmas allowed. He is not
an ideologue. He just wants to figure out what is
the right thing to do and you know what the
facts say, and he that is that is a very
lonely to be in modern America. You know, he runs
(15:04):
into he tells people a lot of things that they
don't want to hear, and there is a lot of
wish casting, even in the scientific community sometimes, and I
do you know, to the extent there's a kind of
maybe meta narrative of the book. It's definitely this idea
that you know, these are hard problems. We need to
look at the details and take this stuff seriously and
(15:25):
figure stuff out. And that's why my main character is
kind of a figure outer.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, And you do a great job giving the background
and telling his story. And again, I hope it gives
hope that there are more Tim Searchingers out there. Michael
Gruenwall has been our guest. His book is We Are
Eating the Earth, The Race to fix our food system
and save our climate, and it's a great read. Highly recommend.
(15:51):
It's available wherever books are sold. Michael Grunwald, thank you
so much for your time.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
That's been great talking to you, Phil.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
You've been listening to iHeart Radio's West Michigan Weekend. West
Michigan Weekend is a production of Wood Radio and iHeartRadio
This is iHeartRadio's West Michigan Weekend. West Michigan Weekend is
a weekly program designed to inform and enlighten on a
wide range of public policy issues, as well as news
and current events. Now here's your host, Phil Tower.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
In this segment, we're going to tackle the environment a bit.
We don't do this a lot on the program, and
this is an important topic because there's a very interesting
connection between our food system and our climate. Nobody knows
that better than author Michael Grunwald, New York Times bestselling
author of The Swamp and The New New Deal. He's
got a brand new book just out in early July.
(00:40):
The book is called We Are Eating the Earth. The
Race to fix our food system and save our climate.
It's a big challenge, but Michael Grunwald was up to
the challenge. Michael, welcome to the program.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
First of all, Well, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
You know, this is a big issue. It's a big challenge.
It's a centuries long challenge that's been building. What made
you decide to tackle this in this book, Michael.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Well, honestly, I've been a policy reporter for thirty years
and written a lot about the environment and the climate
for twenty So, Phil, I've been a policy reporter for
thirty years. I've written about the environment and the climate
for twenty but that has always been about energy and climate.
And honestly, I realized I didn't know squat about food
(01:27):
and climate, and the food system is like a third
of our climate problem. It's also an even bigger percentage
of our water pollution and water shortages and deforestation and
biodiversity problems. So I realized, like, if I didn't know
anything about it, then probably a lot of people didn't.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
And you know what, I would say, ninety eight percent
of people have not a clue, not a squat above
the food system, which is normal. You know, it's on
the grocery shelf, we pick it up, the meat is
in the deli, we taken home, we grill it, or
we put it in a sandwich. We love it. We
don't think about the impact on the environment because we're
(02:06):
a selfish lot, Michael Grunweald, and that's very normal. But
you've explored a lot of connections here, including one that
involves the fuel that we thought was going to save
the oil crisis, which was ethanol. You've got a fascinating
section in the first chapter of We Are Eating the
Earth about really, I'm going to call it this kind
(02:28):
of the scam, the government perpetuation of ethanol, and of
course farmers and a farm lobby a huge part of
this ethanol as the savior for the oil crisis and
you know, something that was going to make greenhouse galect
gases less of an issue. Talk about that if you
would please.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Sure. Well, like you said, the book is called We
Are Eating the Earth, right, and the idea is that
essentially agriculture is eating the earth. That it's two of
every five acres of this planet are now cropped or grazed,
while only one of every one hundred acres our cities
or suburbs. Right, So you know, we kind of know,
(03:06):
you know, we know that there's a lot of agriculture
out there, but really it's about how our natural planet
has become an agricultural planet. And so the idea of
biofuels was, hey, you know, fossil fuels are this big problem,
so we're gonna we're going to just grow fuel instead
and then that'll replace it. And you know, growing the
growing the fuel when you actually you know, growing porn
(03:28):
that that's going to actually soak some carbon out of
the atmosphere, and that'll make up for burning the you know,
burning the corn and an engine and creating carbon emissions
that way. And what people forgot was the land. And
that's really what the book is about, is that is
about land use. And it turns out, of course, that
if you grow fuel to replace and you stop growing
(03:48):
food on that land, somewhere else, you've got to replace
the food. And it's probably not going to be a
parking lot. It's going to be a forest or a
wetland that that stores a lot of carbon and also
absorbs carbon than from hard fossil fuels. So ultimately, like
trying to decarbonize the planet while you're continuing to cut
down trees is like trying to clean your house while
(04:10):
you're smashing your vacuum cleaner the bits in the living room,
you're making a mess and you're also you know, eliminating
your ability to clean up the mess. And that's what
biofuels are doing. They were sort of creating deforestation, so
they turned out to be much worse than gasoline. And
then the punchline fill is that biofuels are eating about
a Texas worth of the earth, but agriculture is eating
(04:32):
seventy five texases worth of the earth, and so it
turns out to be a you know, while biofuels could
be a really huge problem, agriculture in general is much bigger.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
And genetic modification of crops and just the whole genetic
modification thing for big ag Michael has got to play
a big role in this as well.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Right, well, yeah, I mean, you know, people complain about
it and like they you know, it's like, oh, it's
in food. It's you know, it's terrible. It's banned in Europe,
although I noticed they do import our GMO grain and
feed it to their animals, so you know, it's kind
of hypocritical there. But honestly, nobody's found anything. You know,
there's nothing wrong with GMOs for your health. There's They're
(05:17):
like the most studied substance on Earth. And while some
of the kind of you know, people who love GMOs
have exaggerated some of the benefits in terms of increasing
yields and growing more food per acre, it does have
some benefits. And certainly these future technologies with gene editing
that can be much more precise, they can you can
(05:37):
imagine you're already seeing more drought tolerant crops, flood tolerant crops,
heat tolerant crops that are going to be really important
as the as the world gets hotter. And that idea
of trying to make more food per acre so that
we don't need as many acres to make food is
just so important. I think a lot of people kind
(05:58):
of handwave of that away and they're just like, ah,
you know, we don't like big egg, we don't like
we don't like these intensive farms. But again, if you
can grow more food in one place, you don't need
as many places to grow food, And those other places
are going to be forests and wetlands and nature, and
that's what we need to stop. We're on track right
(06:19):
now to DeForest another twelve California's worth of land by
twenty fifty and you just can't do that.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, and palm this is fascinating. Palm oil is a
big part of this, and palm related products, especially in
Southeast Asia, massive defortation, deforestation, which you never see that
in the news because it's just happening. We're consuming all
these products. Is that the problem right there where we
don't care enough before it's too late. I guess this
(06:51):
is really hard to get people to get that alarmed.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
About it is certainly, I mean with Palmhile is like
Indonesia is you know, they're turning jungle into oil right now,
and and you're seeing this around the world, certainly in
you know, Brazil, where there's there's you know a lot
of deforestation as well. Remember Indiana used to be eighty
five percent forest, right, so it's like we deforested our Amazon,
(07:18):
you know, in the nineteenth century. So we can kind
of shake our finger at at you know, at Indonesia
and you know and say, oh, Brazil, you're terrible, but
they are, you know, they sort of want to do
what we're doing. A lot of this does come down
to sort of, you know, like you said, the demand side,
and I get in trouble for saying it. But the
real problem is cattle. Cattle, Like when you eat beef,
(07:43):
you are you know, you're not just eating the cow,
You're eating the caws and the rest of the cast
of rio. You're eating the Amazon. Beef is about ten
times worse for the climate, and they use it about
ten times more land than eating chicken or pork. So again,
we need to make beef better, because it would be
(08:03):
much better if it was only three or four times
worse than chicken or pork. But again, especially in the
rich world, where we eat four times as much as
much beef as the global average, you know we're going
to have to do a little bit like what the
Chick fil A cows on the billboard day and eat
more chicken.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Nice unintended plug for Chick fil A.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
There.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Michael Grunwald is with us. His new book is We
Are Eating the Earth Race to fix our food system
and save our climate. I want to be clear for
our listeners, this is not an all doom and gloom
book about our food system wrecking our client climate. You
are proposing that there are some good things already happening,
(08:45):
especially with respect to We've got science and entrepreneurs trying
to come up with ways to make our food better.
We've got, you know, fake meat that we can already
buy in the grocery store. We've got This is really interesting.
You talk talking about a crop they're growing called is
it pojamia?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
How do youangamia? Yeah? Talk about that? Sure? I mean
that is it is true? I did I didn't want
to do another Debbie down or climate book about ago
We're doomed because we're not. You know, there's just like
you know, there's better and worse, and better is better
than worse, you know. So far, I do write about
a bunch of these like exciting solutions that I've got
(09:26):
to admit, none of them have a lot of traction yet,
Like you mentioned the sort of you know, fake meat,
the plant based meat, which you know, everybody was really
excited about it in twenty nineteen because it, you know,
it tasted better than the old kind of vegan hockey pucks.
But it turned out it didn't taste better than meat,
you know, So it hasn't done that well yet, but
(09:46):
you know, maybe someday. The nice thing about humans is
that we're good at ingenuity and innovation, and maybe they'll
get better and cheaper and healthier and then they'll start
to make a real dent. Ponkami is another they're perfect example.
It's this kind of miracle tree that it grows this
these you know beans that are very much like soybeans,
(10:08):
and they have this and it produces this incredible golden
oil that's just like olive oil. But it's a tree,
so it actually has yields that can be like four
to ten times soybean yields. And you know, there are
like three hundred and fifty million acres of soybeans around
the world, so that could be a that could be
a really big deal. It can grow in really bad land,
(10:30):
it doesn't need fertilizer, it doesn't need irrigation. It's like
super awesome. One of the problems that I unfortunately, as
I talk about in the book, so far it's only
on fifteen hundred acres of the of the planet, so
it's got a long way to go. These solutions, you know,
they're very exciting, but it's going to be hard. And
(10:51):
what I say kind of bang my spoon on my
hyechair about is this idea that we are not even
grappling with these problems. We haven't even thought about them.
You know, energy twenty years ago there were no solutions.
You know, there was really no wind, no solar, no
electric vehicles, and now there's really been this clean energy revolution.
(11:11):
We need that kind of thing to happen in food.
We need to at least start grappling with it. And whatever.
You know, I'm sure people are going to take a
lot of shots in my book, but it does grapple.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, well no, And I want to celebrate you for
writing about it because I hope people just hearing this
conversation on the radio will think about it, hopefully by
the book, but most importantly realize we've got to address
this sooner and later, because we've already got people saying,
you know, we should have addressed climate warming fifty years
ago and taken it seriously. The other thing is when
(11:44):
we talk about some of the positive things you're spotlighting
in the book, something that I already know and I've
talked about a couple of people about it's happening here
in West Michigan and Grand Rapids vertical farming farms that
are inside buildings and growing ops year round. And that's
a positive thing. Although I got to ask you before
(12:04):
we run out of time. You also talk about tinder
for livestock. You got me in that one. You tease me,
and I want to know about tinder for livestock. Michael Grumwald.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well, first let me say about vertical farms. It's like
another perfect example of how you know, it's actually a
very cool solution for lettuce and you know, we should
have lettuces mostly water anyway, and we shouldn't be trucking
it around the around the around the country. But lettuce
is like, you know, tens of thousands of acres you know,
(12:36):
of the United States, while we have hundreds of millions
of acres of farms. And I think vertical farms can
really help with the lettuce problem. They might help with
the strawberry and weed problem, you know, don't I don't
know if they're I don't know if they don't seem
like they're going to solve the food problem. The ninety
eight percent of the land we used to grow kind
(12:57):
of staple crops, tinder for cattle, yeah, I mean there's everything.
There's uber for tractors. The Tindriver cattle is the kind
of like using you know, using modern information technology to
kind of match up, you know, to breed breed cattle
more efficiently. Right, I don't think that. I don't think
the cows are actually on the apps, you know, looking
(13:19):
for a looking for a suitable mate, but the pers
and ranchers are, so you know, Uh, it is another
example of how we can use you know, modern artificial
intelligence and robotics and uh have more precision agriculture and
all of these things are you know, efficiency is going
to be really important.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, and and and I think one of them. There's
so many great things to unpack in your book. The
book again is called We Are Eating the Earth, The
Race to fix our food system and save our climate.
I want especially our listeners to check out the story
about Tim Searchinger, who is kind of your hero in
the book. He's a food and and expert. And I'm thinking,
(14:01):
is we wrap up our conversation Michael Gruenwald, Maybe schools
and teachers need to celebrate more people who become food
and land experts and really study this because they're going
to save the planet. We just need a whole new
generation of them, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
I mean I chose him because I mean, look, he's
a a brilliant guy. He's a relentless guy, sort of
a pain in the ass. He's certainly a character. He's
you know, screaming about all the time about you know,
you know, he doesn't understand why everybody else isn't as
brilliant as he is. But what he is mostly is
he is a facts guy, a data guy, a science guy.
(14:40):
He literally has a his doormat to be on his
front porch says no, no dogmas allowed. He is not
an ideologue. He just wants to figure out what is
the right thing to do and you know what the
facts say, and he that is that is a very
lonely to be in modern America. You know, he runs
(15:04):
into he tells people a lot of things that they
don't want to hear, and there is a lot of
wish casting, even in the scientific community sometimes, and I
do you know, to the extent there's a kind of
maybe meta narrative of the book. It's definitely this idea
that you know, these are hard problems. We need to
look at the details and take this stuff seriously and
(15:25):
figure stuff out. And that's why my main character is
kind of a figure outer.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, And you do a great job giving the background
and telling his story. And again, I hope it gives
hope that there are more Tim Searchingers out there. Michael
Gruenwall has been our guest. His book is We Are
Eating the Earth, The Race to fix our food system
and save our climate, and it's a great read. Highly recommend.
(15:51):
It's available wherever books are sold. Michael Grunwald, thank you
so much for your time.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
That's been great talking to you, Phil.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
You've been listening to iHeart Radio's West Michigan Weekend. West
Michigan Weekend is a production of Wood Radio and iHeartRadio
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