Here’s a book that addresses almost every question likely to occur to you environmentally-conscious consumers. Is organic food healthier? Are dairy products as bad as some people claim? Is buying local food always better for the environment? Should we avoid genetically modified crops? What about palm oil, pesticides, ultra-processed foods, sustainable fish or meat substitutes?
These are unavoidably the questions that animate our shopping dilemmas and Dave Goulson’s new book, Eat the Planet Well, tackles each in short, self-contained chapters, never pretending that complicated issues have simple answers but avoiding false complexity too.
Part of the authority behind Eat the Planet Well comes because Dave is writing not as a commentator but as one of Britain’s leading field ecologists. Since joining the University of Sussex in 2013, he has built an international reputation for research into bumblebees, pollination and the effects of pesticides on insect populations. He is in the news just this week because of his campaigning work around the failures of DEFRA to comply with environmental law.
With Eat the Planet Well, Dave has broadened the focus of his earlier books to cover the whole ecological crisis. He is exploring how our agriculture and food system can sustain, not just insects, but all wildlife and human life too.
Following the science
One of the most helpful features of the new book is Goulson’s gift for explaining trade-offs, recognising uncertainty where it exists, and challenging fashionable assumptions when the evidence points elsewhere. There is something rather fitting about these arguments emerging from Sussex. Ours is a county where productive farmland sits alongside internationally important chalk downland, ancient woodland and one of Britain’s finest coastlines. The tensions between food production, wildlife recovery and climate action are not abstract policy questions here: they are written across the landscape.
Of course, this is not a book only about Sussex but Sussex informs its outlook. The examples he uses throughout the book – the decline of pollinating insects, the consequences of pesticide use, the value of species-rich grassland, the possibilities of rewilding (the story of the fabled Knepp Estate features here) – are precisely the issues that have become familiar to anyone following environmental debates in Sussex.
It would be easy to caricature this as another handbook for affluent consumers worrying about the provenance of their sourdough or the ethics of their almond milk. Goulson himself is too shrewd for that. The reality is that our food choices matter because the food system matters. It’s getting through to the wider population now that around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions arise somewhere along the food chain – from farming itself through fertiliser manufacture, livestock production, transport, refrigeration, processing and the extraordinary amount of food we simply throw away.
After another sweltering summer (June’s heat wave being so severe that the team from Brighton’s Climate:Change had to take the event they had planned for London Climate Action Week online because Southern Rail judged it unsafe to travel to London), Goulson’s insistence that our food system deserves equal attention with power stations, aircraft and electric vehicles, feels particularly timely. Indeed, if there is a central contribution this book makes, it is to relocate food from the margins to the heart of climate policy.
The challenge of the livestock industry
Goulson’s fundamental argument is that the modern food system embodies almost every climate challenge simultaneously. Livestock generate methane. Nitrogen fertilisers require huge amounts of energy to produce and release nitrous oxide, an exceptionally potent greenhouse gas. Vast areas of land are devoted to grazing animals or producing animal feed instead of storing carbon in forests or supporting wildlife.
Food waste magnifies every one of these problems because every discarded meal has already consumed land, water, fertiliser and energy. Thinking about food therefore means thinking about climate in a much richer and more systemic way than simply adding up carbon footprints.
Goulson’s discussion of livestock is particularly interesting. He avoids the moralism that sometimes accompanies debates about meat consumption. He is not demanding universal veganism or insisting that every form of livestock farming is environmentally disastrous. Instead, he carefully marshals the evidence (and draws on South Downs examples) to show that beef and lamb, because of methane emissions and land requirements, have disproportionately large climate impacts compared with most plant-based foods.
That conclusion is difficult to escape. Reducing consumption of ruminant meat emerges as one of the single most effective actions individuals can take to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously releasing land that could support biodiversity and store carbon naturally.
Challenging prevailing orthodoxy
Equally refreshing is Goulson’s willingness to puncture popular myths. Local food, for example, is not automatically low-carbon. Production methods usually matter more than transport distances: locally produced beef generates far more emissions than vegetables imported by sea freight. Organic farming offers important biodiversity and pesticide benefits but does not necessarily produce nutritionally superior food.
Palm oil is not inherently evil: the problem lies in where and how it is grown. Genetic modification should be judged by evidence rather than ideology. These are not fashionable positions but they are thoughtful ones, and they demonstrate Goulson’s commitment to following the science rather than the prevailing orthodoxy.
Of course, those who don’t want to know about climate change won’t want to know about this stuff either. That is hardly Goulson’s fault, but it does raise the familiar question of how far consumer choice alone can transform a food system largely shaped by governments, supermarkets and multinational food companies.
Goulson recognises those wider structural issues, yet his optimism rests substantially on the idea that millions of individual purchasing decisions can collectively reshape markets. Whether that proves sufficient remains to be seen.
The road to a lower-carbon future runs through breakfast, lunch and dinner
Optimism is one of the book’s greatest virtues. At a time when environmental writing can feel depressing, Goulson offers something more constructive. He demonstrates that there are practical steps available to all of us: wasting less food, eating less beef and lamb, supporting farming that works with rather than against nature, growing some of our own produce where possible, and becoming more informed consumers.
None of these measures is presented as an act of personal purity. Instead, they are incremental changes which, multiplied across millions of households, could make a substantial contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while improving biodiversity and public health at the same time.
As a footnote, I need to add that Goulson has one fascinating chapter on foraging and another on associated recipes. I’ve already been out there collecting nettles and rustling up a tasty soup. I am still reflecting on his recommendations around roadkill, “by far the most environmentally friendly source of meat”. Never mind rabbits and pheasants, apparently, if you have a freezer, “a single fallow deer will keep your family in meat for months”.
This is an abridged and amended version of a longer article that appeared on the Climate:Change website on 2 July.
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