A Reminder About The Food We Eat: “Every Seed We Place In The Earth Is An Act Of Trust”

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It’s been interesting to be part of an all-inclusive tour of the Caribbean during one of the coldest weather snaps in recent memory. High winds and rough seas prevented us from visiting each originally planned destination. Since travelers were required to stay on the ship instead of touring cultural sites, an activity had to be substituted for sightseeing. Not surprisingly, guests chose to indulge themselves with the cuisine offered at various dining rooms. Watching diners choose among an array of colorful and aromatic meals made me think a lot about the food we eat — not just on special trips but, even more importantly, during our regular daily lives.

Our diets are, to a large degree, the result of routine. We commute, so we grab a coffee and pastry. We quickly swallow a fast food lunch between meetings. We’re too tired at home late in the day to cook from scratch, so we’re grateful for the ease and tastiness of processed meal selections. These are the dietary realities of our busy contemporary lives.

Through it all, we take great pleasure in eating. It is a reward for the drudge of life’s responsibilities. So we indulge, creating leisure spaces that incorporate food as the medium for social gatherings.

Accepting the boundaries of our food preparation limitations and our cultural dietary histories, however, doesn’t change the fact that the planet is experiencing a biosphere crisis. Agriculture production is a significant part of that damage. How can we reconcile our love of breaking bread with the reality that, all too often, the foods we eat are sourced in ways that are warming our planet and creating climate havoc?

Our Individual Actions: Considering The Food We Eat

Once upon a time, world leaders set a global warming target of 1.5°C. They didn’t enact enough changes to achieve that goal, however, and now that threshold has been revised to 2°C. globally. Importantly, food systems account for more than one third of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.

How much of planet’s heat budget can we continue to spend on producing, moving, and eating food if we’re serious about the 2°C limit? That’s what some researchers wanted to find out. They looked at everything from farm inputs and processing to transport, retail, cooking, and waste. The study exposed a familiar inequality: the top 15% of individual food emitters generate about 30% of total food emissions, roughly the same as the entire bottom half of the world combined. The data was also clear about the biggest food culprit: raising beef is the dominant source of agricultural emissions.

When enough people shift demand toward lower carbon foods and talk about it, corporations respond. Can we resolve to eat just enough, say, to 80% of our full appetite, as do the Japanese? Might we rethink the items on our plates so that they’re locally sourced whenever possible? If so, corporations would take notice, and other ripple effects would occur. As Andrei Ionescu explains on Earth.com, the next steps are “public procurement standards, fair support for farmers to transition, clearer labeling, better cold-chain efficiency, smarter waste policy.”

You’ve heard me say it before (here, here, and here, for example), but if you switch to even a partial plant-based diet, you’ll be contributing a vote for reconsidered food cultural norms for a healthier planet.

Food waste is another important consideration — it’s a smelly byproduct that we’d just as soon forget. Discard it, quickly — out of sight, out of mind. Yet that same leftover that we’re so eager to dispose of was produced by lots of energy and with soil that’s likely depleted. Then we move the food refusei into landfills, where it emits methane.

Respect For The Land: Helping To Boost Biosphere Health

In 2017, a farmer from New York state chronicled his growing awareness of the impact of a warming climate on crop production. Keith Stewart noted that he was experiencing a longer growing season due to incremental annual increases in temperature. Crops like tomatoes have more time to ripen. The fall became an extended run of hardier crops like broccoli, kale, and cabbage, which can handle moderate frosts but not frigid conditions. A new winter farmers market benefits the farm’s bottom line.

Even with those gains, Stewart recognized the trouble ahead with global warming, which would mean “a world with dwindling resources and a few billion hot and hungry people… rising population, competition for ever-smaller slices of the shrinking earthly pie.” Nearly a decade ago, the farmer questioned why the US would choose “to increase our use of fossil fuel rather than move more aggressively toward renewable energy is hard to fathom.” He continued, “Being good stewards of this planet that so generously sustains us is the single most important thing we humans can do; to disregard its health is to disregard our own health and the health of so much other life.”

Fast forward to 2026. Has much changed? It seems not.

On February 3, a bipartisan group of 27 former Agriculture Department officials and leaders from farm and commodity groups wrote to agriculture committee leaders of both chambers with a dire warning about “the damage that is being done to American farmers.” This, they argued, is a result of Trump administration policies and Congressional inaction: increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, lost reliable labor pool, and defunded critical agricultural research and staffing.

Francesco Sottile, speaking at the UN Assembly of Peoples in Perugia, Italy, similarly admonished Europe to assume more responsibility for its agricultural and food policies. “Europe must restart with a pact for food and agriculture that recognizes the land as a common good, enhances the continent’s biological, cultural, and food diversity and makes equity the pillar of coexistence.” The slow foods proponent and a professor of Biodiversity and Quality in Food Systems at the University of Palermo see agriculture as a culture of peace. “Every seed we place in the earth is an act of trust,” Sottile described. He asked us to trust that nature “will respond, trust that there will be a tomorrow, trust that the harvest will serve not only us but also those who come after. “Food is not just nourishment: it is culture, identity, and shared memory,” he reflected.

Agricultural policies must declare that nations want a future “where producing food does not mean destroying the land, where feeding people does not mean exploiting others. They are the recognition that climate neutrality allows us to make peace with the climate, to make what happens in the fields normal and natural, and to guarantee access to food without distinction.”

Resources

“A dark road to take: Climate change from a farmer’s eyes.” Keith Stewart. Hudson Valley Magazine. May 31, 2017.

“Dietary GHG emissions from 2.7 billion people already exceed the personal carbon footprint needed to achieve the 2 °C climate goal.” Juan Diego Martinez and Navin Ramankutty. Environmental Research Food Systems. November 11, 2025.

“Eating for the planet: Why half the world must change its diet.” Andrei Ionescu. Earth.com. December 24, 2025.

“Let food once again be a language of peace.” Francesco Sottile. Slow Food. October 20, 2025.