How to feed the world without trashing the planet. Q&A with Miami writer Michael Grunwald
Those just a couple of the takeaways from Miami writer Michael Grunwald's deep dive into how humanity's insatiable appetite is fueling both environmental destruction and the climate crisis. The title of his new book, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, sums up the path Grunwald finds us on.
Grunwald — author of the 'The Swamp,' a highly regarded history of the Everglades and the effort to restore it — specializes in big picture breakdowns of complicated issues. Like with Everglades restoration, some seeming food solutions produce problems of their own. The book's guide of sorts is land-use expert and environmentalist Tim Searchinger, who drew up a blueprint for how and what we should be planting and eating to both reduce agriculture's climate impacts and protect wild areas.
Grunwald explores the pros and cons of current practices, poking holes in trendy concepts of 'biofuels' like corn-derived ethanol, which he brands a 'fake climate solution.' He suggests there are lessons to be learn from often stigmatized 'factory farming.' And while he agrees going vegan is good, he may make you rethink that pack of organic carrots.
Grunwald, who will appear at Books and Books in Coral Gables, on July 14 at 7 p.m., sat down for a lunchtime interview at a restaurant of his choosing, Bayshore Club in Coral Gables. For the record, he ordered ahi tuna mini tacos and the fish of the day—corvina with plantains. He'll explain why in our Q&A, which has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: I would've thought you'd pick a vegan place with some cauliflower wings like Planta Queen but you picked a place with mainly seafood. Why?
A: I like the views and I'm close so I rode my bike. I stopped eating beef when I started the book. Going vegan is the best diet for the planet, but cutting out beef and lamb is as good as going vegetarian because beef and lamb are seven to 10 times worse than chicken or pork.
One of my messages from the book is that better is better than worse – and perfect usually isn't on the menu. And I love fish. Fish are actually pretty efficient creatures.
I do believe there's this notion, and it's big in the environmental movement and climate movement right now, that individual emissions don't matter. I get it right, what the government does is more important than what one of 8 billion people does, and what corporations do is a big deal too – but I think it's gone way too far.
I think emissions are us, and it's not like Donald Trump or Burger King are shoving all this meat down our throats. It's a choice we make. The average American eats the equivalent of three burgers a week. And if we ate two we would save a Massachusetts's worth of land every year.
Q: Your book chronicles how demand for food and land to grow it on is destroying global ecosystems. In Miami, we have the opposite, urban sprawl consuming the Redland agriculture area. Which is worse?
A: It's funny. Most of us live in the cities and suburbs, and this is where we live and work and go to school and play on the planet but the developed area of the planet is about one in every 100 acres. By 2050, it might be 2% of the planet. But agriculture is two of every five acres, it's 40%.
So people talk about urban sprawl, and I'm not saying it's not an issue, but agricultural sprawl is, like, 40 times bigger. And we know this, right? When you take a cross-country flight, and you look out, you see all those squares and circles. You can see that the natural planet is becoming an agricultural planet, and that's what my book's about.
But what's happening in the Redland, which is something that people should pay attention to, those are important questions, because they make food in the Redlands, and if that food becomes development, that food will have to be replaced somewhere else. It probably won't be a parking lot, right? It'll be a prairie or a forest or a wetland.
Q: Much of the mainstream discussion on climate and farming has focused on factory farms. Why zero in on land loss instead?
A: Even if you only look at it from a climate perspective, agriculture is about 25% of global emissions. And some of that is diesel tractors, crop dusters and other fossil fuel farm equipment. And some of it is the burping and farting cows that everybody talks about it. And then some of it is nitrous oxide from fertilizer, which is actually a huge problem. Fertilizer is literally made from natural gas.
But the main problem is deforestation and wetland drainage. There's a lot of carbon stored in nature, and we clear nature to grow food, and that nature ends up in the sky. And not only that, that nature was providing a service, it was absorbing carbon from the sky through photosynthesis.
Q: You make a counter-intuitive suggestion that to save the planet, we need to rethink eating organics. Why?
A: I try not to be too prescriptive about what specific type of farming we should have, but we need high-yield farming because we need to make more food per acre so that we can use fewer acres. Otherwise, we need more acres to make food, right?
Organic and regenerative practices have a lot of support all over the political spectrum. Everybody's pushing this idea that we should sort of transform agriculture to 'agroecology,' to make it kinder and gentler and more like nature, use fewer chemicals.
I don't have a problem with that, except when it reduces yields because the real environmental disaster of agriculture is when nature is transformed into agriculture. There are some bad things about factory farms. They treat animals badly. Often treat people badly. Too many antibiotics. There's a lot not to like – but factories are good at manufacturing lots of stuff, and we need to manufacture like 50% more calories over the next 25 years. We're gonna have to make more food over the next 25 years than we've made in the last 12,000 years.
Grass-fed cows that spend their entire life on pastures and never go to these horrible feed lots are considerably worse from an environmental and climate perspective. It takes them longer to get to slaughter weight, so they're alive to burp and fart more methane and mostly because they use more land and eat more of the earth.
There are a lot of people who see efficiency in agriculture as kind of a dirty word but efficiency saves resources. And efficiency saves land, and that's really important.
Q: You write about how the Bezos Earth Fund invested in meat alternatives (which Lauren Sánchez, billionaire Jeff Bezo's wife, announced at the Aspen Conference in Miami Beach). Why hasn't it caught on and does it still have a future?
A: The quick answer to the first question is, the dogs didn't like the food. There was a lot of excitement in 2019 when Beyond and Impossible got started as the first companies trying to grow vegan food for non-vegans, but they weren't better than meat.
So people got excited about them, and they tried them, but they didn't keep going back. Beyond went from $250 a share to $2 a share. Impossible's still doing okay, because it's good.
Plant-based meat which is grown in a fermenter from fungi comes out naturally meaty and shockingly healthy. That's just gotten started. Lab-grown meat, or cultivated meat they like to call it now, because, yeah, lab-grown sounds terrible, will be grown in a brewery, not a lab.
I've eaten this stuff and it's great. It tastes like meat because it's meat. It's grown from actual animal cells. People aren't going to buy it because it's like, good for the planet. But our species is good at inventing stuff, and it can get better, it can get cheaper, it can get healthier, and then it can make a difference.
Q: Florida is the first state in the U.S. to ban lab-grown or cultivated meat. Is this a step backward?
A: I mean, it's ridiculous. This is supposed to be the Free State of Florida, and they're telling us what kind of meat we can eat. And that's bull----. I can say that this shows the sort of danger for cultivated meat and meat alternatives being caught up in partisan culture wars. They've become 'woke' to eat. Since when do we think of technology that way?
Q: How can people change eating habits to make a difference in the climate?
A: First eat less beef, and second waste less food. Because when you waste food, and we waste a quarter of our food, you waste the farmland that was used to grow the food, the fertilizer, the water, the labor – the world uses a landmass the size of China to grow garbage.
If somebody says, what's the third thing, I would probably say, eat even a little less beef.
Q: You started and ended the book in the Everglades, why?
A: We visited the water treatment wetlands that turned out to be an inadvertent great land and climate solution and wetland restoration, which is what Everglades restoration is all about. Turns out to be the best bang for the buck that you can get for the climate.
I didn't want this to just be a Debbie Downer book. I'm writing about all these problems, and then I'm writing about all these solutions that haven't panned out yet. But, I do believe that things can get better. So I think part of the message is we've got to keep working on this stuff, and it's not like a guarantee that it's going to save the planet, but maybe some good stuff will happen.
Ashley Miznazi is a climate change reporter for the Miami Herald funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation and MSC Cruises in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners.
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Boston Globe
15 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Amid a culture of fear, a celebrated artist's most important exhibition is pulled from Smithsonian
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Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Singer Cleo Laine, regarded by many as Britain's greatest jazz voice, dies at 97
LONDON — Cleo Laine, whose husky contralto was one of the most distinctive voices in jazz and who was regarded by many as Britain's greatest contribution to the quintessentially American music, has died. She was 97. The Stables, a charity and venue Laine founded with her late jazz musician husband John Dankworth, said Friday that it was 'greatly saddened' by the news that 'one of its founders and Life President, Dame Cleo Laine has passed away.' Monica Ferguson, artistic director of the Stables, said Laine 'will be greatly missed, but her unique talent will always be remembered.' Laine's career spanned the Atlantic Ocean and crossed genres: She sang the songs of Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Schumann; she acted on stage and on film, and even played God in a production of Benjamin Britten's opera 'Noye's Fludde.' Laine's life and art were intimately bound up with band leader Dankworth, who gave her a job and her stage name in 1951 and married her seven years later. Both were still performing after their 80th birthdays. Dankworth died in 2010 at 82. In 1997, Laine became the first British jazz artist to be made a dame, the female equivalent of a knight. 'It is British jazz that should have received the accolade for its service to me,' she said when the honor was announced. 'It has given me a wonderful life, a successful career and an opportunity to travel the globe doing what I love to do.' Laine was born Clementina Dinah Campbell in 1927. Her father, Alexander Campbell, was a Jamaican who loved opera and earned money during the Great Depression as a street singer. Despite hard times, her British mother, Minnie, made sure that her daughter had piano, voice and dance lessons. She began performing at local events at age 3, and at age 12 she got a role as an extra in the 1940 movie 'The Thief of Bagdad.' Leaving school at 14, Laine went to work as a hairdresser and faced repeated rejection in her efforts to get a job as a singer. A decade later, in 1951, she tried out for the Johnny Dankworth Seven, and succeeded. 'Clementina Campbell' was judged too long for a marquee, so she became Cleo Laine. 'John said that when he heard me, I didn't sound like anyone else who was singing at the time,' Laine once said. 'I guess the reason I didn't get the other jobs is that they were looking for a singer who did sound like somebody else.' Laine had a remarkable range, from tenor to contralto, and a sound often described as 'smoky.' Dankworth, in an interview with the Irish Independent, recalled Laine's audition. 'They were all sitting there with stony faces, so I asked the Scottish trumpet player Jimmy Deuchar, who was looking very glum and was the hardest nut of all, whether he thought she had something. 'Something?' he said, 'She's got everything!'' Offered 6 pounds a week, Laine demanded — and got — 7 pounds. 'They used to call me 'Scruff', although I don't think I was scruffy. It was just that having come from the sticks, I didn't know how to put things together as well as the other singers of the day,' she told the Irish Independent. 'And anyway, I didn't have the money, because they weren't paying me enough.' Recognition came swiftly. Laine was runner-up in Melody Maker's 'girl singer' category in 1952 and topped the list in 1956 and 1957. She married Dankworth — and quit his band — in 1958, a year after her divorce from her first husband, George Langridge. As Dankworth's band prospered, Laine began to feel underused. 'I thought, no, I'm not going to just sit on the band and be a singer of songs every now and again when he fancied it. So it was then that I decided I wasn't going to stay with the band and I was going to go off and try to do something solo-wise,' she said in a BBC documentary. 'When I said I was leaving, he said, 'Will you marry me?' That was a good ploy, wasn't it, huh?' They were married on March 18, 1958. A son, Alec, was born in 1960, and daughter Jacqueline followed in 1963. Despite her happy marriage, Laine forged a career independent of Dankworth. 'Whenever anybody starts putting a label on me, I say, 'Oh, no you don't,' and I go and do something different,' Laine told the Associated Press in 1985 when she was appearing on stage in New York in 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood.' Her stage career began in 1958 when she was invited to join the cast of a West Indian play, 'Flesh to a Tiger,' at the Royal Court Theatre, and was surprised to find herself in the lead role. She won a Moscow Arts Theatre Award for her performance. 'Valmouth' followed in 1959, 'The Seven Deadly Sins' in 1961, 'The Trojan Women' in 1966 and 'Hedda Gabler' in 1970. The role of Julie in Jerome Kern's 'Show Boat' in 1971 provided Laine with a show-stopping song, 'Bill.' Laine began winning a following in the United States in 1972 with a concert at the Alice Tully Hall in New York. It wasn't well-attended, but the New York Times gave her a glowing review. The following year, she and Dankworth drew a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall, launching a series of popular appearances. 'Cleo at Carnegie' won a Grammy Award in 1986, the same year she was a Tony nominee for 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood.' A reviewer for Variety in 2002 found her voice going strong: 'a dark, creamy voice, remarkable range and control from bottomless contralto to a sweet clear soprano. Her perfect pitch and phrasing is always framed with musical imagination and good taste.' Perhaps Laine's most difficult performance of all was on Feb. 6, 2010, at a concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the concert venue she and Dankworth had founded at their home, during which Laine and both of her children performed. 'I'm terribly sorry that Sir John can't be here today,' Laine told the crowd at the end of the show. 'But earlier on my husband died in hospital.' Laine said in an interview with the Boston Globe in 2003 that the secret of her longevity was that 'I was never a complete belter.' 'There was always a protective side in me, and an inner voice always said, 'Don't do that — it's not good for you and your voice.'' Laine is survived by her son and daughter. Associated Press journalist Robert Barr, the principal writer of the obituary, died in 2018. AP writer Jill Lawless contributed to this report.


San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Singer Cleo Laine, regarded as Britain's greatest jazz voice, dies at 97
LONDON (AP) — Cleo Laine, whose husky contralto was one of the most distinctive voices in jazz and who was regarded by many as Britain's greatest contribution to the quintessentially American music, has died. She was 97. The Stables, a charity and venue Laine founded with her late jazz musician husband John Dankworth, said Friday it was 'greatly saddened' by the news that 'one of its founders and Life President, Dame Cleo Laine has passed away." Monica Ferguson, artistic director of The Stables, said Laine "will be greatly missed, but her unique talent will always be remembered.' Laine's career spanned the Atlantic and crossed genres: She sang the songs of Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg and Robert Schumann; she acted on stage and on film, and even played God in a production of Benjamin Britten's "Noye's Fludde." Laine's life and art were intimately bound up with band leader Dankworth, who gave her a job and her stage name in 1951, and married her seven years later. Both were still performing after their 80th birthdays. Dankworth died in 2010 at 82. In 1997, Laine became the first British jazz artist to be made a dame, the female equivalent of a knight. "It is British jazz that should have received the accolade for its service to me," she said when the honor was announced. "It has given me a wonderful life, a successful career and an opportunity to travel the globe doing what I love to do." Laine was born Clementina Dinah Campbell in 1927. Her father, Alexander Campbell, was a Jamaican who loved opera and earned money during the Depression as a street singer. Despite hard times, her British mother, Minnie, made sure that her daughter had piano, voice and dance lessons. She began performing at local events at age 3, and at age 12 she got a role as a movie extra in "The Thief of Bagdad." Leaving school at 14, Laine went to work as a hairdresser and faced repeated rejection in her efforts to get a job as a singer. A decade later, in 1951, she tried out for the Johnny Dankworth Seven, and succeeded. "Clementina Campbell" was judged too long for a marquee, so she became Cleo Laine. "John said that when he heard me, I didn't sound like anyone else who was singing at the time," Laine once said. "I guess the reason I didn't get the other jobs is that they were looking for a singer who did sound like somebody else." Laine had a remarkable range, from tenor to contralto, and a sound often described as "smoky." Dankworth, in an interview with the Irish Independent, recalled Laine's audition. "They were all sitting there with stony faces, so I asked the Scottish trumpet player Jimmy Deuchar, who was looking very glum and was the hardest nut of all, whether he thought she had something. 'Something?' he said, 'She's got everything!'" Offered 6 pounds a week, Laine demanded — and got — 7 pounds. "They used to call me 'Scruff', although I don't think I was scruffy. It was just that having come from the sticks, I didn't know how to put things together as well as the other singers of the day," she told the Irish Independent. "And anyway, I didn't have the money, because they weren't paying me enough." Recognition came swiftly. Laine was runner-up in Melody Maker's "girl singer" category in 1952, and topped the list in 1956 and 1957. She married Dankworth — and quit his band — in 1958, a year after her divorce from her first husband, George Langridge. As Dankworth's band prospered, Laine began to feel underused. "I thought, no, I'm not going to just sit on the band and be a singer of songs every now and again when he fancied it. So it was then that I decided I wasn't going to stay with the band and I was going to go off and try to do something solo-wise," she said in a BBC documentary. "When I said I was leaving, he said, 'Will you marry me?' That was a good ploy, wasn't it, huh?" They were married on March 18, 1958. A son, Alec, was born in 1960, and daughter Jacqueline followed in 1963. Despite her happy marriage, Laine forged a career independent of Dankworth. "Whenever anybody starts putting a label on me, I say, 'Oh, no you don't,' and I go and do something different," Laine told The Associated Press in 1985 when she was appearing on stage in New York in "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." Her stage career began in 1958 when she was invited to join the cast of a West Indian play, "Flesh to a Tiger," at the Royal Court Theatre, and was surprised to find herself in the lead role. She won a Moscow Arts Theatre Award for her performance. "Valmouth" followed in 1959, "The Seven Deadly Sins" in 1961, "The Trojan Women" in 1966 and "Hedda Gabler" in 1970. The role of Julie in Jerome Kern's "Show Boat" in 1971 provided Laine with a show-stopping song, "Bill." Laine began winning a following in the United States in 1972 with a concert at the Alice Tully Hall in New York. It wasn't well-attended, but The New York Times gave her a glowing review. The following year, she and Dankworth drew a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall, launching a series of popular appearances. "Cleo at Carnegie" won a Grammy award in 1986, the same year she was a Tony nominee for "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." A reviewer for Variety in 2002 found her voice going strong: "a dark, creamy voice, remarkable range and control from bottomless contralto to a sweet clear soprano. Her perfect pitch and phrasing is always framed with musical imagination and good taste." Perhaps Laine's most difficult performance of all was on Feb. 6, 2010, at a concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the concert venue she and Dankworth had founded at their home, during which Laine and both of her children performed. "I'm terribly sorry that Sir John can't be here today," Laine told the crowd at the end of the show. 'But earlier on my husband died in hospital.' Laine is survived by her son and daughter.