My biggest surprise when writing Local was how fascinated I became with food. The impact it has on our active physical health is something I’ve been interested in for ages – as I guess are most people who care about being fit and active. What I was completely unprepared for was learning what an impact our food choices have on the climate and nature (as well as the welfare of animals – something which I confess I’ve mostly chosen to not learn about over my life of enjoying chicken wings and milk shakes). The food we eat has an enormous impact on global emissions, land use, loss of wildness, loss of biodiversity and river pollution. I came to find this completely fascinating – and something so much more simple for me to help fix than, say, closing down power stations.

Here then is my first draft of the chapter on food that I wrote in Local. I had to trim it down for the final book as people kept telling me it was too much of a triggering rant! I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. If you’re interested in finding out more, the charts at Our World In Data are a great starting point.

I cycled to today’s allocated grid square down country roads, across a dual carriageway, around a housing estate, through some villages, past an orchard, a quarry, and lots of farmed fields. It occurred to me to think a bit harder about this ordinary mix of features I was familiar with and generally took for granted. How has it changed over time? How does it compare to yours? And what impact does the way we use land in our neighbourhoods have on the planet?

It is hard to grasp what Britain actually looks like, to understand the proportions of all the different things our country comprises. I hoped bumbling around my map would help me grasp it better. The official breakdown is that 28% of Britain is pasture, 26% arable, 9% peat bog, 8% forest, 5% homes and gardens, and a very precise 0.04% is fruit trees and berry plantations.

On a global scale, the numbers are quite different. 71% of the planet’s surface is ocean, not particularly habitable unless you happen to be in a rowing boat with a supply of dehydrated food, and I can’t recommend that as a barrel of laughs. That leaves 29% of the planet, of which almost a third is glaciers and barren land such as deserts, salt flats, rocks and beaches. The remaining area is all that we have on earth to live on and share with wildlife.

Let’s now break down this habitable area. Only 1% of it is built-up and infrastructure, which filled me with optimism to learn. I have often felt despondent that the world is disappearing beneath a crust of concrete. But we all need to live somewhere, and on a global scale, eight billion of us take up a reassuringly small amount of space. [FOOTNOTE: The population is set to peak at around 10.4 billion, before declining to a new equilibrium. Population size alone is not going to be the long-term catastrophe some fear it to be.] Urban living is also, potentially, the most environmentally friendly way for most of us to live as it requires fewer resources and less power and space per person.

Freshwater takes another 1%, 14% is shrub and 38% is forest. But I was stunned to learn that the remaining 46% of the planet’s habitable land is used for agriculture. My optimism about humans not taking up much space was crushed!

Food production takes up a staggeringly vast proportion of the planet – almost half of all habitable land – and exacts a devastating toll. What we eat and how we produce it is central to tackling climate change, addressing water and pollution crises, rewilding landscapes, and halting the runaway destruction of nature.

We all eat food, so everyone is involved in this issue in ways that are more understandable, interesting, and at the forefront of daily life than, say, whether our pension funds divest from fossil fuel stocks, or where the electricity that powers our employers’ offices comes from. And yet food is an emotive topic. If there is anything in these pages likely to goad you to hurl the book across the room, shout at me on Twitter, or add to my growing collection of not very glowing book reviews,[FOOTNOTE: See #NotVeryGlowingBookReviews on Instagram] then it is probably going to be this look at what’s for dinner. Skip to the next chapter if you get too cross with me!

This is a discussion about food and farming, but not about farmers. I live next door to a farm, have farmers in my family, and when I think of ‘home’, my mind turns to the farming village where I grew up. It is important not to turn conversations about the harm of modern farming into a rant against farmers. None of it is their fault, but they are central to fixing all the problems. We need to support our local farmers, and to pay them proper prices for producing proper food, as well as for looking after the countryside. Nor am I criticising nature-friendly farms using methods that champion sustainability and biodiversity.

I suspect most farmers care about nature more than the average citizen. And they work hard, in a demanding job, to provide consumers with the food we choose to buy, at prices we insist on, and within the parameters laid down by the governments we vote for. Farmers know more about farming than I ever will. When I wander around my map, I have very little idea of what’s actually going on in the farmland I see, and I have to trust them to repair the countryside once we start appropriately incentivising them and making it financially viable.

Over recent decades, most farmers probably haven’t often considered the ecological impact of their work. I don’t suppose many of us do. They have been too busy modernising and becoming more efficient to stay afloat, at the mercy of government policy and supermarket contracts. The green revolution has increased yields massively and we now produce enough calories to feed ten billion people, whilst the amount of land used for agriculture is declining.

Supermarkets demand cheap food from farmers and us consumers happily gobble it up with little interest or understanding of how unsustainable it all is. [FOOTNOTE: Since the Second World War, British families have gone from spending 35% of household income on food to just 10% today (though the lowest income families pay more), while the number of calories we consume worldwide has increased. Britain is the most overweight country in Europe. We eat up to 50% more calories than we realise, and 80% of us are predicted to be overweight or obese by 2060.] All this cheap food is the Pyrrhic victory of industrial farming, a Frankenstein monster. Industrial farming has fed so many people, but also spun off into terrible problems. It is cruel, revolting, and disastrous for our health, nature, and the planet.

There are so many issues caused by our farming and food systems. To keep vaguely within the scope of this book, I will not cover the revolting ingredients in processed food, [FOOTNOTE: the xanthan gum in your ice cream comes from the slime that bacteria produce to allow them to cling to surfaces etc.] the health crisis of excessive cheap calories, [FOOTNOTE: Type 2 diabetes, colon cancer, cardiac, respiratory and liver diseases etc.] or the cruelty involved in a lot of animal farming. [FOOTNOTE: China’s 26-storey pig skyscrapers slaughtering a million pigs a year, the poultry farm in Britain with 1.7 million birds crammed inside, the egg industry gassing or crushing unneeded male chicks etc.] I’m just going to stick to three ways that farming directly affects the planet: emissions, pollution, and land use.

Agriculture and the food system accounts for around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming. If the world has any chance of meeting its alleged commitment to the totemic, but surely doomed, 1.5-degree target of the Paris climate agreement, then this needs to change urgently.

The food we choose to eat has a colossal impact on the planet. And while there are many benefits to eating local food, what we eat dictates our environmental food footprint much more than where it comes from. We should worry much more about eating beef that is connected with deforestation in the Amazon than the emissions of transporting that food to the UK.

Meat and dairy products tend to emit more greenhouse gases than plant-based food, with beef, lamb, cheese and milk being the worst offenders – by far – per unit of protein produced. [FOOTNOTE: I don’t live on the coast, so there are no marine explorations on my map, but eating seafood is also often terrible for the environment, with overfishing being a major problem, fish farms causing pollution, trawling for prawns generating much wasteful bycatch, and 92% of the oceans being unprotected.] The emissions from British beef are about half the global average, but the methane emissions of the world’s 15 largest meat and dairy companies are higher than entire countries like Canada or Australia. They equate to over 80% of the EU’s entire methane footprint. [FOOTNOTE: Today, 60% of the mammals on earth, by weight, are livestock. Humans account for 36%, and wild mammals make up just 4%. The number of chickens has trebled since 1990, to over 34 billion, at the same time that half of wild bird species are in decline. Our human population is growing at 1% a year, while livestock is increasing at 2.4%. Global average meat consumption per person is 43 kg a year, and rising towards the UK’s level of 82 kg.]

Agriculture is also responsible for soil degradation, pesticide leaching and the pollution of 60% of Britain’s failing rivers. Animal effluent and fertiliser causes eutrophication and algal blooms. Take one of Britain’s loveliest rivers, the Wye, as a tiny example. Two-thirds of it faces ecological crisis, caused by run-off from 44 million chickens crammed into 1420 sheds along the river. Its beautiful clear water, home to fish and wildlife and much-loved by swimmers and kayakers, is now little more than a slime-covered drain. Our disconnection with the natural world means that we either don’t notice, understand, or care about this when we tuck into our roast chickens.

I began this chapter by highlighting that almost half the planet’s habitable land is used to feed us. That’s equivalent to all the Americas plus China and South East Asia combined! We would need to farm double that amount of land if the whole world adopted a British diet, and the planet is literally not big enough to provide everyone with an American, French or Scandinavian diet.

Of all this farmed area, 80% of it is used for beef and dairy production, much of it via the astonishingly inefficient process of growing food to feed to cattle, which then feed us. Not only do cows emit masses of greenhouse gases, they also take up an insane amount of space.

If everyone hypothetically became vegan, we could save an area of land the size of the USA, China, Australia and Europe combined! We could still grow enough calories to feed the world and reduce farmland by up to 75%. That is an astounding amount of space that could go towards carbon-absorbing wildernesses and the restoration of nature.

Cattle, and the crops grown to feed them, are the biggest global contributor to deforestation and habitat loss. The expansion of pastureland to raise cattle is responsible for 41% of tropical deforestation and almost 90% of soy output (often linked to deforestation) is used as animal feed.  [FOOTNOTE: Indulge me, if you will, with one more pretend scenario. Imagine everyone had always been vegan, and then someone came along and said, ‘let’s start eating meat and dairy! It’s tasty! Unfortunately though it will mean trashing the planet. Who wants a milkshake?’

What would we choose to do? The status quo bias causes us to stick with the way things are rather than considering alternatives. I had to read a lot of books about farming, food and the climate before I was reluctantly compelled to address the contents of my supermarket trolley!]

This scenario is hypothetical, of course, and there’s certainly plenty of small print for people to argue over around stopping farming animals.[FOOTNOTE: Issues of fertiliser use and distribution, local employment, the importance of a single cow for poor subsistence farmers, the benefits of grazing winter cover crops on arable fields, the biodiversity of having both grasslands and woodlands in rewilding areas and animals’ role in that etc. etc. etc.!] But the sheer scale of land devoted to meat and dairy, on top of all the greenhouse gases and pollution, must be food for thought the next time we contemplate a cheeseburger on the menu.

So how do we fix all this?

We need to change what we eat, change how we farm, and change the way we support farmers.

I began today’s explorations nosing around a farm shop selling ‘Pasture for Life’ meat. The Pasture-Fed Livestock Association promotes a system where animals eat only grass and forage crops. It produces meat that is healthier, tastier and less harmful to the planet than animals fed grain (though the pros and cons of pasture-fed meat are still debated).

Pasture for Life trumps the more common ‘Grass Fed’ label because the latter means only that the animals eat some grass, but could spend most of their life eating cereals, or soy grown on deforested rainforest land. The grassland on Pasture for Life farms is important for capturing and storing carbon, is less polluting, and can be very biodiverse.

If we are serious about sticking to our country’s pledges to get to net zero by 2050 and protect 30% of the UK’s land by 2030, then we simply have to consume significantly less meat and dairy. They must become occasional and expensive treats, bought only from regenerative farms and those that are improving ecosystems and biodiversity.

This change in meat’s provenance will be harder for the poorest in society for the farm shop’s mouthwatering ribeye steak – red, marbled and delicious – cost an eye-watering £35 per kilogram. Compare this to the £14.62 per kilogram at Lidl or £18.73 at Tesco and you see the impossibility of farming sustainable meat without pricing out most people most of the time. Even Waitrose’s was £10 per kilogram cheaper. [FOOTNOTE: You could get an equivalent amount of protein from £5.20’s worth of fava beans.]

Changing our diet will lower emissions, reduce pollution and deforestation, and repurpose land for sequestering carbon and wildlife. But appealing to people’s goodwill alone won’t achieve enough, quickly enough. As long as meat and dairy products are produced in cheap ways which damage the environment, there is little hope for reframing how society thinks about food. The hidden costs – negative externalities – need to be factored into prices as a sin tax to cover repairing their damage and to speed up behaviour change. [FOOTNOTE: Yes, this might mean that most of us can’t afford to eat meat and dairy as often as we enjoy doing now. So be it. That was how things were for thousands of years when we weren’t in the middle of a mass extinction and public health epidemic in a warming world that will kill millions, impact billions and cost trillions. After all, Indians eat only 3 kg of meat per capita per year, and it would be a brave, gammon-loving Brit who claimed that our food was more delicious than theirs!]

The second thing we must do is change the way we farm. This won’t be easy, and it is down to the government to change its subsidy schemes to make the shift viable. James Rebanks writes passionately about both his farming life and love of nature in English Pastoral. His grandfather taught him to work the land the old way, but he has witnessed how much has gone wrong since then. He warns that ‘the current economics of farming are such that almost no genuinely sustainable farming is profitable at present. Farming for nature is economic suicide.’

Rebanks points the finger at us as being part of the problem, with our demand for cheap food and being ‘strangers to the fields that feed us’. My weekly walks are my attempt to change that disconnection in myself. Of course, my observations only scratch the surface and there is no single answer. But that doesn’t mean we’re doomed. For there are many different answers and we can each be one of them, if we act.

Many farmers, like Rebanks, want to be commercially viable, whilst also caring for the natural land they love. We have to move towards food being a ‘byproduct of conservation’, rather than an apocalyptic obliterator of it. The large majority of British farmland is currently connected with rearing livestock, even though growing plants for humans to eat produces vastly more calories per hectare.

Farms need to start producing food in sustainable ways. This will involve a wide mixture of methods, ranging from intensive greenhouses to nature-led upland farms with low livestock densities. The key is to use each area of land in the best specific way possible. That means apples here and wheat there. It means rewilding here and organic there. And it means that considerable amounts of land can be devoted to nature, all while producing more food in our country and protecting our food security. Imagining the positive future of farming makes me very excited.

The good news for the vegan haters [FOOTNOTE: Being vegan is a huge missed steak.] is that livestock still plays a small but important role in the future of farming. As the regenerative agriculture slogan goes, ‘it’s not the cow, it’s the how.’ Regenerative agriculture is vital for our future. It swaps ploughing for direct drilling, and uses cover crops, crop rotation, and mob grazing to care for the soil. [FOOTNOTE: The Pontbren Project in Wales is a good example of farmer-led regeneration that improves both business and nature. It is an innovative approach to using woodland management and tree planting to improve the efficiency of upland farming.]

Where farmland isn’t suitable for growing plants for people to eat, livestock can help with agroforestry that combines trees with crops and animals, with rotational farming and fertilising, and they can also help increase biodiversity in habitats. The wildflower meadows we love but have almost completely lost, for example, depend upon low density, occasional grazing from livestock.

The third thing that has to happen is to support farmers properly. We need to pay them to safeguard our natural capital and provide public goods that include not only food, clean water, and healthy soil, but other things we value such as nature, beauty, heritage and connection. Farmers are the custodians of our countryside, responsible for much more land than our national parks or nature reserves. If we are to heal our nature-depleted land, farmers are the ones who will do it. But they need meaningful backing if they are to grow food, reduce emissions, plant trees, clean up rivers, and rewild land to mop up carbon.

Farms have been subsidised for decades according to the amount of land they farmed or the numbers of animals reared, regardless of damage done. The world still subsidises harmful agriculture and fossil fuel industries to the tune of £1.3 trillion (£1,300,000,000,000) each year! It makes much more sense to subsidise our farmers to fix nature rather than wreck it.

Subsidising positive work and keeping costs down is the other side of the treasury’s coin to taxing harmful practices and foods. Policy decisions need to combine laws, subsidies and taxes. Ban polluting rivers. Subsidise hedgerow restoration. Tax unsustainable foods. This is vital if healthy, sustainable food is to be affordable for everyone, whilst also tackling our commitments to reach net zero by 2050.

The government has introduced a new system of environmental land management schemes (ELMS) for landscape recovery, countryside stewardship, and sustainable food production. But farmers point out that the numbers rarely add up and can be little more than greenwashing. Yet if they get it right, ELMS could be an excellent system, and funding farmers to rescue nature is definitely a step in the right direction.

It is amazing to think that when we sit down for dinner this evening, we each make personal choices related to the public health dietary crisis. We directly impact wildlife, rivers, forests, nature and the climate. And we also send a message to supermarkets and policy makers about what matters to us in terms of food, farming and the planet. Whatever we choose to eat, we surely have a responsibility to know its provenance and impact.

Enjoy your meal!