Solving climate change will require changing our diets, but changing diets lasts only if the change is fun.
Food is our first and most important industry. Most major early human inventions (tools, fire, language, writing, agriculture) served to get more food.1 Our quest for ever-greater amounts of food reshaped the planet: we ate all the large animals2 and turned half the world’s habitable land into farms.3 What we eat is also a primary cause of climate change.
In our current “holy crap” climate moment, we tend to focus on energy for machines: Greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are altering climate patterns.4 To feed the energy needs of an industrializing world, we have over the course of history released about 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels: 500 billion tons of CO2 from oil, 250 billion from natural gas, and 700 billion from coal.5
But this focus misses the fact that food is energy for humans. Yes, burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases; what fewer people realize, however, is that agriculture—particularly land-use change—does the same. Fossil fuels catalyzed global industrialization, and we used those fossil fuels in part to dramatically change the face of the planet, in service of procuring more food. Those changes set us up for our climate crisis.
If we broaden our view of climate change to account for the footprint of food and agriculture, we find two surprises:
Today, agriculture directly contributes 17–34% of annual greenhouse gases (including methane from cow burps and ammonia production).6 But this present-day activity is dwarfed by the historical greenhouse gases released from converting half the world’s habitable land into fields.
When we convert a forest or grassland into farms or pasture, the carbon that was previously stored in those trees and soils is released into the atmosphere. Either the living matter is burned (slash-and-burn agriculture7), or it decomposes. Both processes release CO2.
Since the agricultural revolution, agricultural land-use changes have released 1.7 trillion tons of CO2.8 The vast majority of that land-use change came after the 1700s, as globalization and fossil fuels created the economic systems and industrial machines that led to rapid forest-to-farm conversion.9 This spread of agriculture and the green revolution of the 20th century10 fueled the dramatic increase in population from 600 million people in 1700 to 8 billion today. We effectively doubled our emissions by using fossil fuels to cut down trees.
The upshot: Food alone is responsible for more carbon emissions than all fossil fuels burned to date11 (Figure 1).
The silver lining of these emissions is that the process is reversible: Allowing agricultural land to return to its forested state could absorb the same staggering amount of CO2. Converting to renewable energy can prevent emissions (carbon neutral); changing the way we eat could actually absorb emissions (carbon negative). So while we can’t stop growing food, improving land-use efficiency is one of our most powerful tools to combat climate change. Not to mention that none of the above gets at the inherent value of biodiversity and natural ecosystems.12
Of the different foods we eat, cows are uniquely inefficient. In many different metrics (land use, carbon emissions, water, pollution), food products from cows are often the worst by a large margin.13 They are especially land-intensive, with 41% of the land area of the United States used for cow pasture or feed—land that might instead be forests or grasslands.14
For most of human history, these inefficiencies were benign. For example, land use didn’t matter when your village was surrounded by seemingly endless wilderness. Cows miraculously turned some of this space into food: they wandered into forests and prairies, ate leaves and grass we couldn’t eat, and converted that plant matter into beef and dairy we could eat. This ability to turn cellulose into nourishing calories was and still is unique to cows and sheep15, since nonruminant animals (like pigs and chickens) cannot do this and require more directly nutritious food (like grain). But now, the same characteristics that made cows such a boon make them liabilities.
Although land-use change slowed as we ran out of untouched wilderness, cow pasture is still the top driver of land-use change, much of it in critical rainforest habitat in countries like Brazil. The physiology and microbiology (four stomachs and bacterial methanogenesis) that enable cows to digest cellulose produce methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Cows are one of the two largest sources of anthropogenic methane emissions16 (have you ever admired the smells on I-5 near Coalinga, CA?). Along with other livestock, they contribute 15% of annual global greenhouse emissions—more than all of transportation.17 Moreover, cows are inefficient as food because they require a lot of land, grow slowly, and use 83% of the energy they get from plants to stay warm and walk around instead of making beef or milk.18 Cows are so inefficient that, after beef and lamb, our most inefficient food is cheese,13 not even another meat.
We also raise a lot of them—more than 1.5 billion globally.19 Cows outweigh humans20; they outweigh chickens by 12 times.21
Compare this inefficiency with plants: The entire world’s protein needs could be met by a soybean farm the size of 1% of global habitable land22 or less than eight times the size of Iowa. Satisfying this need with cheese would require 120% of global habitable land or a farm covering the entire continents of Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Europe (Figure 2). To do this with beef alone, we’d need 955% of habitable land or nine more planets.23 What’s more, soy and many other plants24 don’t emit methane and require less water, machinery, fertilizers and pesticides. It’s vastly more efficient to grow a pound of soybeans than to grow 10 pounds of soybeans, feed them to a cow, and get a pound of beef or cheese.
We need to stop eating cows and start eating plants. But there’s one problem: cows and their milk are delicious. The sizzle of a steak, the juiciness of a burger, the stretch of pizza: no one can deny that cows make fantastic foods from less appealing plants like corn, soy, or grass. For much of history, cows provided critical nutrition in nonindustrialized food systems where calories and easily digestible protein were rare, and they often did it by grazing on land no longer suitable for agriculture.25 For these and other reasons, the meat and dairy industry grew to its current astonishing scale, forcing us to ask an uncomfortable question: will fighting climate change force us to give up foods we love?
In food, only three things matter—taste, cost, and nutrition.26 Without the first two, a food cannot be globally dominant. Without the last one, it's just sugar water.
The cheapest, healthiest, and most sustainable foods we make today are plants. Yet we farm corn and soy in such volumes not because we love to eat them but because they are efficient, and efficiency—doing more with less—is the heart of sustainability. The big problem with corn and soy is that they aren’t that tasty. So we use cows to convert that corn and soy into something we actually want to eat: beef and cheese.
At Plonts, we take a different approach: We take the most sustainable, inexpensive plants available and discover microbes that make them delicious.
Fermentation was humanity’s first biotechnology, providing a simple way to transform cheap but not particularly tasty ingredients like milk and wheat into delicacies like cheese and beer. During fermentation—which is distinct from precision fermentation27 that targets a specific molecular product—microbes digest proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, enhancing the underlying ingredients with three amazing benefits:
We are modernizing the discovery of fermented foods. For the last 10,000 years, humans have discovered fermented foods by accident (“Dude, I dare you to eat that”).29 This innovation-by-accident means that the possible delicious pairings between ingredients and microbes have been severely under-researched. Because of the essentially infinite diversity of microbial ecosystems, we focus on finding the microbes that transform whatever ingredient is most sustainable, cheap, and nutritious into something delicious. Our searches may result in familiar foods from unfamiliar ingredients (e.g., cheese made from cheap plants) or entirely new categories of fermented products. In this way, we’re not trying to imitate beef and dairy. We are discovering the delicious potential of what plants and microbes can be.
We aim first to make a cheese from sustainable plants that tastes better and costs less than commodity dairy cheese. We chose to start with cheese for five reasons:
Cheese was one of the first fermented foods. The flavors that people love in cheese—the funk of a camembert or the sharpness of a cheddar—don’t come from milk, which is bland. They come from the metabolism of microbes. Cheese is not a dairy product; it is a microbial product. Thus, our approach is to discover microbial ecosystems that transform plants into the flavors we love in cheese. We are creating a new category of cheese, akin to the creation of cheese from cow or goat milk.
In addition to flavor, texture is the other pillar of taste.32 Instead of matching cheese’s ooey-gooey texture by replicating the precise molecules in cheese—which would be expensive—we aim to replicate those melting and stretching functions by biochemically and physically manipulating inexpensive ingredients. Many molecules from the natural world melt and stretch because of specific molecular structures, and we use these rules and patterns to our advantage.
Meat and dairy are some of the most expensive commodity foods, despite massive subsidies from national governments, which keep them artificially cheap.33 Eating plants is cheaper than feeding those same plants to cows and then eating the cow or its milk. By transforming supremely inexpensive plants—like soy and corn—we can deeply undercut dairy cheese on the cost of ingredients (Figure 3).34
Although we focus on taste and cost as the drivers of food decisions, they are only proxies for the fundamental purpose of food—nutrition. Our approach provides all the health benefits of fermented foods while avoiding the health concerns of dairy. Making a delicious nondairy cheese would mean that many people wouldn’t have to choose between eating cheesy goodness and feeling like garbage an hour later.
We also love cheese—its depth of flavor, its comforting richness, its diversity across cultures, its stockpiling in a cave by the U.S. government,35 its application in fart jokes.36 Given the calamitous topics discussed here, we might most relish our ability to laugh at ourselves. We’re not saving the world; we just make cheese.
Nobody eats beef and dairy to bring down civilization. We eat beef and dairy because it’s fun to eat tasty things. But like fossil fuels and great recreational drugs, that fun sometimes puts us on a collision course. Yet the alternative—not eating beef and dairy—feels a lot like our parents scolding us to eat our vegetables. As many dieters can attest, it’s hard to maintain a diet based on what you “should” do.
We believe that sustainability is not about loss or guilt or a dystopian future but about fun. We also don’t think that a sustainable food system will be based on futuristic meals-in-pills, synthetic chemicals, or soylent green. We already grow more than enough healthy, sustainable plants. At Plonts, we make those plants actually fun to eat, using the same magic behind wine, beer, and cheese (really the best foods anyway). By pairing new ingredients with the right microbes, we accelerate the discovery of delicious, nutritious fermented foods, going from the happy accidents that brought us bread to a joyful hunt for the next great cheese.
Join us if you’re tired of taking foods away and instead want to discover what foods are possible.
For questions, please email hello@plonts.com.