From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate war: the fight to fix our food system.

Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions.

By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems.

“A thrilling and provocative survey of inventions, innovations, and wild flights of imagination…a bracing, beautiful picture of what's possible...This is a book about a looming catastrophe that contains a lot of laughs, refreshing honesty and the joy of learning.”

“We Are Eating the Earth is a savory, science-salted meal of provocative thinking about food. Grunwald investigates what we eat, how we grow it, and why getting better at it is key to addressing the climate crisis. It’s a wildly ambitious undertaking, but Grunwald pulls it off because he’s fearless and funny and knows his stuff.”

“Michael Grunwald never follows the crowd. Instead, he digs deep and finds actual, uncomfortable, and, yes, correct answers. We Are Eating the Earth tackles the complexity of our food and climate problems with captivating storytelling, and no agenda but our survival. Knowledge is about to be dropped. Pay attention.”

“The quest to feed humanity’s voracious appetites is consuming ever more land around the world. We Are Eating the Earth is an indispensable guide to the thorniest problem in global economics and environmental policy—an issue that most advocates ignore, but that we urgently need to face if we want to have any hope of solving it.”

“Grunwald is an engaging storyteller, and to his credit, he sticks with the terrible math even as it grows terribler and terribler.”

Michael Grunwald is an award-winning journalist who is a contributor to the New York Times opinion section. He is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time, and Politico Magazine. He is also the best-selling author of The Swamp, The New New Deal, and the forthcoming We Are Eating the Earth, a book about the race to feed the world without frying the world. He has won numerous honors for his work, including the George Polk Award for national reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting. He lives in Miami with his wife, Cristina Dominguez, their two kids, Max and Lina, and their three deranged dogs.

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January 16, 2026, 6:00pm

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