EAT Lancet misses the point

A diet is the wrong entry point in the analysis of the food system and planetary health.

Once more my series of articles on collapse is interrupted. This time by an urge to write a bit about the recent publication of The EAT Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food system.

It is a massive report (76 pages + annexes) and I can’t possibly make it full justice in this article. For sure, I will give a more nuanced perspective than mainstream media, which mostly has focused on the suggested Planetary Health Diet, the least interesting part of the report.

You can download a pdf-version of the article here

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Key takeaways

• EAT Lancet 2.0 has a wider focus on socio-economic factors, which is a great improvement. Despite talk about human rights and justice most of the analysis and suggested measures are grounded in the market framework, however.

• The agriculture part is recommending many good practices and a radical reduction in the use of pesticides. But is not very convincing when it comes to the impacts on yields and cost of production. It can’t resolve inherent contradictions between the modernist emphasis on efficiency and the need to reduce human demands on the biosphere.

• They project an increase of crop lands and a decrease of grasslands, as a result of a drastic reduction in ruminant livestock. To decrease the contributions to the agri-food system of grazing ruminants is simply a lose-lose.

• The Planetary Health diet is based on a view of the food system as consumer driven, which is mistaken. There is also mismatch between the diet and the agriculture realities.

• Instead of using a diet as the entry point of the discussions of the food system, we should start in how we can manage the various agro-ecosystems in an organic/regenerative way. Diet will follow, as it always did.

• The implementation of the diet and the other proposed measures will not result in a halving of green house gas emissions of the food system, which has been claimed by EAT. Most of the reduction of the emissions will come from the phasing out of fossil fuels in the whole system. That this will happen is an assumption in the report and not linked to the policies and recommendations of EAT Lancet 2.0. Unfortunately, the huge impact this will have on the food system is also neglected in the report, which undermines the credibility of all scenarios.

• The scenarios are also built on a growth of the GDP with 127 percent in 30 years. This is both implausible and not desirable.

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More justice

Already the title of the report indicates a shift in perspective. The previous report was called Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. The 2019 report was heavily criticized for the focus on a diet with radical cuts in animal foods, especially red meat. But there was also a more fundamental criticism that the report neglected the socio-economic foundations of the food system and issues such as poverty, agency and power.

They have listened and the new report, supposedly, integrates “distributive, representational and recognitional” perspectives and emphasize human rights and justice. According to the report, almost a third (32%) of food systems workers earn below a living wage. Meanwhile, the wealthiest 30% of people drive more than 70% of food-related environmental impacts, and despite global calorie sufficiency more than 1 billion people remain undernourished. 2.8 billion people can’t afford a healthy diet (according to my calculations that is an under estimate). In that context the report recommends among others:

• creating accessible and affordable food environments that increase demand for healthy diets;

• securing decent working conditions across the food system;

• ensuring meaningful voice and representation for food systems workers; and

• recognizing and protect marginalized groups.

The authors state that the food system has to shift from a focus on ”maximizing profits”. I couldn’t agree more. They recommend a range of policy measures to be implemented. Here I find that the report is weak and the suggested actions are not sufficient to make this shift as the underlying logic of the market economy, aka capitalism, is not challenged or even properly understood. The access to healthy food is discussed in terms of affordability and purchasing power and not from a food as a human right perspective, or a food sovereignty perspective despite the claimed focus on human rights and justice.

Still, there are many suggestions which make sense. I note in particular that the report recommends support to local markets and investments in community management of ecosystems. While I agree with many of the recommendations, many of them are political and value-based in nature and not based on scientific evidence, despite that the authors make that claim.

Sustainable ecological intensification

When it comes to agriculture practices, the report recommends what they call “Sustainable and ecological intensification”. Sustainable intensification as it is mostly defined has a very strong focus on efficiency and has in most cases motivated high yields per hectare. Ecological intensification supposedly uses ecological functions in a more active and intensive way. But there are many trade-offs to consider, and there is a fundamental contradiction here. The efficiency paradigm has led to crops with less roots and stems to increase harvest (it is called a high harvest index). That has reduced the amount of organic matter left in the field. To sequester carbon in soils means that more organic carbon remains in soils and promoting bio-diversity means that the share of human appropriation of primary productivity is reduced, again the opposite to efficiency. The grazing of ruminants is a good example of a system that has very low land use efficiency when measured by how much food you can produce per area unit, but that sequesters carbon in the soils and leave a lot of space and food for other organisms. Half of what a cow eats comes out in the other end as manure or urine. For efficiency obsessed techno-modernists this is waste, for an ecologically minded person this is energy and nutrients for life. For the herder, it is their life and culture.

The Commission recommends a radical reduction in pesticides, with at least 70 percent and preferably 95 percent. They also recommend a considerable reduction in nitrogen fertilizer use as well as a wider use of methods like cover cropping, crop rotations, reduced tillage, and agroforestry. I certainly agree with all this. The authors claim that this together can lead to slightly increased or at least maintained yields. They also project a reduction in food prices as a result of reduced costs for inputs and maintained yields. I consider this wishful thinking. For sure, in low yielding agriculture systems the introduction of organic or agroecological practices will normally lead to an increase in yield, but in high-intensive systems the opposite is true. In both, more labour is needed. Organic farmers have applied most of what is recommended in the report and their (our) yield is lower and the price of organic products is certainly not lower.

This is even more the case in the production of vegetables and fruit, the two crop categories where pesticides play a very important role and where nitrogen use efficiency in vegetables is also very much lower than in other crops. Those categories of production shall expand radically according to the Commission. I also find that the suggested policy measures fall short of accomplishing the shift in farming practices which are proposed.

All grass is not grazed

As for land use, it is unfortunate that the report equates the FAO statistics for grasslands with land used for grazing of domestic livestock. Several assessments of how big share of the grasslands that is actively grazed show that around half of the grassland area is not grazed by domestic livestock. The total land use by “agriculture” is then in the range of 3.2 billion hectares instead of the 4.8 billion hectares stated in the report. It is worth noting that the scenarios in the report expect “agriculture” land use to be reduced, but when looking into the details, crop lands are expected to expand while the reduction is only in grasslands. This is presented as progress, but it is not progress to convert grasslands to crop lands, forests, logistic hubs or golf courses. The report itself states that “only 30 % of intact grasslands are remaining, making them the most converted but least protected ecosystems globally” (p28). If one bother to follow the reference cited, it clarifies that all of the most intact grasslands are grazed with domestic livestock. It even states that: “Trees have no place in native grasslands as restoration agents nor as a means to better sequester carbon; productive grasslands are adequately effective at sequestering atmospheric carbon”. In Europe, the abandonment of grassland is a major biodiversity problem. There are certainly some recently deforested areas in the tropics where reforestation of grasslands might be valuable. To decrease the contributions to the food system of grazing ruminants as suggested is simply a lose-lose.

The Planetary Health Diet

Even if EAT-Lancet 2.0 has increased the focus and perspective, the Planetary Health Diet (PHD) is still a cornerstone in the report. It has been slightly modified and the Commission acknowledges regional variations and explicitly calls for “protecting and promoting traditional healthy diets“. Even if media, and to some extent the authors themselves, portray the PHD as optimised for health and the environment, the optimisation is according to the report only for health: “The PHD is based entirely on the direct effects of different diets on human health, not on environmental criteria.” (p.4).

One important observation for both the health effects and the environmental effects of the PHD is that it assumes that everybody eat according to the diet. This also means that obesity and malnutrition don’t exist. More than 45 percent of the claimed health effect (measured in reduced mortality) of the diet is not derived from its composition but from the reduction in obesity and underweight. Of the remaining dietary changes, the biggest impact is from increasing the share of whole grain in the diet. The reduction in red meat consumption to 15 gram per day, that is suggested and got most of the media attention, has a small impact on mortality.

The scientific evidence for the health effects of the proposed diets is not particularly convincing or conclusive. The recommendation for tubers such as potatoes is just 50 grams per day, which is 18 kg per year. The average Swede consumes four and a half times the recommendations. In the Nordic Nutrition Recommendation from 2023, equally claiming to be based on sound science, it is stated that “Potatoes should be included as a significant part in the regular dietary pattern” and there is no recommendation for a reduced consumption. For red meat the recommendations fail to differentiate between different kinds of meat raised and cooked in different ways, and in general the causal relationship between red meat intake and increased mortality is weak.

I note, with some pleasure, that the report says: “Our Commission concludes that most foods should be consumed whole, unprocessed, or minimally processed.” (p12) The Swedish Food Authority has, so far, refused to acknowledge that there is any problem with ultra-processed foods. The authors are also sceptical to the merit of the modern meat and milk analogues as they also are heavily processed. They also express doubts about if cellular meat and precision fermentation are realistic and desirable alternatives to meat (p.54).

A diet is the wrong entry point

The EAT Lancet Commission is basing its analysis on the notion that food markets is primarily demand driven. With that point of departure it might be reasonable to have a proposed diet as an entry point for transformation of the food system. But what we have eaten historically and what we eat today is to a very small degree decided by consumer preferences. The food system is largely driven by farmers and even more so by farm input markets, food industries and retailers as well as governments. They are the choice architects and they decide what the consumers will be able to chose. You can read a short version of this story here, or you can read my book, Global Eating Disorder, which gives a more detailed account and understanding of this.

The demand perspective and a lack of understanding how agriculture markets work makes the Commission draw mistaken conclusions. For example they state that prices of livestock products will fall with 31 percent as a result of reduced demand. The global expansion of meat consumption is largely a result of the falling price of meat and in particular chicken, it would be remarkable if this relationship would be reversed.

The linkage between the proposed diets and agriculture realities is weak. The radical increase in production of nuts – from 2 gram per person to 50 gram – that is supposed to happen is hardly realistic, even if welcomed by the California almond growers who now are “exclusive nut partners” of EAT. The increase in vegetable production will also be challenging. The diet includes substantial quantities of vegetable oils and an increase of per capita consumption of 35 percent. Only 13 percent of that should be palm or coconut oil. Today, those oils represent 40 percent of the global vegetable oil production. In addition, the second most important vegetable oil is soy oil with more than a quarter of the global oil production. The production of soy oil is intrinsically linked to industrial meat (in particular chicken and pork) and intensive milk production. In the soy mills beans are processed into approximately 20% oil and 80% protein rich soy meal used as animal feed. It is only if there is demand for the soy meal that the production of soy oil is competitive. To supply the vegetable oil needed, the production of other oil crops such as rape seed and sunflower must increase tremendously. In addition, as the demand for biofuels and other industrial uses of oil crops will increase as a result of the phasing out of fossil fuels the production of vegetable oil would need to increase even more.

There is also a mismatch between the recommendations for milk consumption and the consumption of beef and pork. Globally, more than half of the beef production originates in milk production which means that for one litre of milk, 60 grams of beef is produced. This means that the whole “red meat space” will be filled by beef based on a milk allocation of 250 gram per day. But according to the Commission there should be a bigger reduction in beef consumption than in pork. The figures simply don’t match.

If we want to promote a sound and healthy food system, regenerative/organic agro-ecosystems, based on local conditions and carbon, water and nutrient cycling should be the starting point, and the diet will follow. You can read more about that in:

Halving GHG emissions?

In the press release from Eat it is said: “Food systems currently account for roughly 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions globally. Transforming food systems could cut these emissions by more than half. ” And in the press release from Stockholm Resilience Center (corrected, I had written Stockholm Environment Institute earlier) it is said: ”By switching production and eating a “planetary health diet”, we can halve food’s climate emission”. But this is misrepresenting what the report says.

According to the report, roughly one third of the green house gas (GHG) emissions from the food system comes from the use of fossil fuels in the whole chain, another third from changes in land use (draining swamps and deforestation) and the last third comes from agriculture processes, mainly methane emissions and nitrous oxide emissions. There is a lot to be said about those and I have discussed them intensively in several articles (methane and nitrous oxide), but let’s discuss them according to the EAT Lancet Commission.

The scenarios are built on that the whole food sector has been de-carbonized until 2050. That is perhaps too optimistic and would certainly require a radical shift in policies. If we indeed do believe it will be both possible and accomplished, this will have profound impact on the whole food system as it will impact mechanization, transports and distribution and nitrogen fertilizer, all corner stones in the current food system. All three will become substantially more expensive and increased transport costs will have a huge impact on markets and the structure of agri-business. In addition, phasing out fossil fuels will radically increase pressure on agriculture for the production of biofuels and industrial feed stock. But the 75-page reports is basically silent on all this (fortunately, IPES-food has just released a comprehensive report on this, Fuel to Fork). The Commission just assumes that fossil fuels are phased out but that is not linked to any of the measures discussed in the report. So one third of the GHG emission are gone in that way.

The scenarios project that there will be no further land conversion to agriculture land, but rather a small reduction in land use. As discussed above it actually does project an increase in crop land and a decrease in grasslands. It is not very clear from the report how much of that is due to the implementation of the diet, how much is a result of the projected halving of food waste and loss (it is a massive report, with a lot of stuff buried in the five appendices, perhaps it is made clear some place?). Be that as it may, their calculation assumes that emissions will disappear just because land is no longer converted, but that is not at all the case. For example, huge areas of wetlands and swamps have been drained in the Northern hemisphere and they loose carbon dioxide continually. Most of the farmland in our homestead was drained 150 years ago, but the emissions of carbon dioxide from that land continue today. So even if there would be no draining of new land, the land already drained would continue emitting for decades or centuries.

The major changes in the projected greenhouse gas emissions in their scenarios are thus not a result of the diet and changed agriculture practices but are a result of other unrelated policies and processes. Even with policies of the report, a considerable share of the calculated reduction is not a result of the composition of the diet but a result of that overconsumption of food cease (the metabolic food waste) and that food lost and wasted is halved. The statement of a halving of food system emissions is thus grossly misleading.

127 percent GDP growth in 30 years, really?

Research like the EAT Lancet Commission build heavily on scenario building. Scenarios build on assumptions which basically determines the results. The scenarios used by the Commission are based on that the global population will increase to 9.6 billion and that the GDP will increase with 127 percent, per capita with 85 percent by the year 2050. I have my doubts about the projections of population growth and even more the likelihood of the expected GDP growth. With the slowdown in global productivity, the increasing scarcity of resources, the phasing out of fossil fuels as well as the impact of the policies needed to make that happen, the assumption that the global economy will grow 1.3 times in 30 years is heroic to say the least. And if the GDP is off the mark, all other projections are off the mark as well.

If the GDP projection would be accurate, considering the strong link between GDP growth and resource use, the global capitalist civilization is doomed regardless of how much nuts and vegetables people will consume. This is an appropriate lead in to my current theme of collapse.

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You can download a pdf-version of the article here