Drawdown Food

I’ll admit it: I like beef. Like many Americans, I was brought up to believe that beef was a central part of a traditional family meal. My mom made it. My kids ate it. Marketing campaigns told me it was healthy. Everywhere I went, I saw Americans eating lots of it. And for many years, I didn’t question these choices.

Animal agriculture has a climate problem.

In 2022, I gave a presentation about climate change solutions to the Canadian Parliament. During that meeting, I had the opportunity to hear a presentation from a beef producers group about how they intended to rely on a new synthetic methane inhibitor (not approved in Canada at the time) as the heart of efforts to curb their greenhouse gas emissions. 

It surprises many people to learn that the food we eat, the farms that grow it, and the landscapes we’ve cleared all contribute to climate change. And contribute in a big way.

To stop climate and build a sustainable future, food matters – a lot! What we eat and how we grow it is responsible for around 20–35% of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. 

Agriculture has disrupted the planet more than anything we have ever done, including burning fossil fuels. A sustainable future depends on recognizing this fact – and radically changing how we farm and eat.More than any other invention in human history, agriculture has radically transformed civilization and our relationship with the natural world.How did this happen?

The global food system isn’t broken, yet it needs fixing.