Back in the early aughts, biofuels such as ethanol were looking like a powerful answer to our then-emerging understanding of the climate crisis and our reliance on foreign oil: Using renewable fuels made from plants like corn, experts said, could significantly reduce energy emissions when compared with gasoline. Even better was the future promise of “advanced biofuels,” which would one day use inedible biomass instead of food.

To environmental lawyer Timothy Searchinger, however, something about diverting land from food into energy just didn’t add up. Use one field to grow corn for fuel, he pointed out, and other land will invariably have to be cleared to grow food, house livestock and grow feed for livestock. When those trees are cut down, carbon is released and climate change gets worse.

In February 2008, Searchinger published a paper in the journal Science that dismantled the environmental case for biofuels. The findings were covered widely by the media, and the National Resources Defense Council abandoned its biofuels campaign shortly thereafter. Political bodies have been harder to persuade and biofuels have hardly disappeared. But they have, at the very least, lost much of their environmental shine.

The crux of Searchinger’s argument — land is not free — made him a logical protagonist for Michael Grunwald’s We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix our Food System and Save Our Climate (Simon & Schuster, July 2025). Grunwald, a former politics reporter at The Washington Post and Politico, points out that livestock is food’s biggest driver of climate change. So if Searchinger was right about the perils of using more land for biofuels, then using more land for livestock will also increase emissions. And if we’re already doing an inadequate job of feeding the planet’s 8 billion inhabitants, using the same tactics to feed 10 billion by 2050 won’t work.

It’s a conclusion Searchinger himself eventually reached, courtesy of a 2006 United Nations report entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” The report called out animal husbandry for contributing more than half of all agriculture emissions, and in July 2008 one of its co-authors critiqued Searchinger’s biofuels paper by pointing out that animal agriculture occupied 30 times more land than energy crops.

Searchinger’s epiphanic response, and his own prescription for the world’s food system, came by way of a 564-page report published by the World Resources Institute in 2019, encompassing research on everything from agroforestry (planting trees and bushes alongside crops) to rainwater harvesting (what it sounds like, but methodical). In We Are Eating the Earth, Grunwald establishes the same central premise about food’s climate impact — though it takes him 124 pages to get there — and much of the book likewise indexes the many ideas, good and bad, for fixing the food system.

The good ones are encouraging. There’s the resilient pongamia tree, which can produce more food than soybean plants, whether planted in the arid fields of India or the depleted citrus groves of Florida. In Colombia, beef cattle graze on a “super-shrub” called Leucaena with high protein leaves that also pull nitrogen out of the air to fertilize the grass. A study out of the UK found that for every British pound spent on a food waste awareness campaign in London, households saved £90 by throwing less in the trash. Denmark will start taxing farm emissions in 2030, and is re-naturing farmland, subsidizing farmers who enact climate-friendly practices and aggressively promoting eating less meat.

Grunwald’s book is informative, highly readable and often funny. But for all its embrace of Searchinger as an avatar of gut-checking good-faith ideas against their practical outcomes, Grunwald falls into some of the same traps.

In his own report, Searchinger is clear-eyed that there is no single big solution, no silver bullet, for fixing the food system. It will instead take the deployment of many smaller-scale fixes to make more food on less land. Perhaps because of that reality, Grunwald seems to absolve himself of articulating how some solutions could be applied beyond a single project or country. Worse, he devotes many pages to what one might argue is the most misleading silver bullet since biofuels: various forms of techno-foods, from Beyond Burgers to cultivated chicken potstickers.

We Are Eating the Earth catalogues the absurd number of startups in the techno-food space in 2019, many of which would soon fail thanks largely to products that didn’t taste very good. This is something Grunwald seems to recognize: Startup Just Eat’s “eggs” made from mung beans had an “earthy off-taste,” he writes, while Beyond Burgers on the grill “smelled like someone literally peeing in the wind.” The best of the lot, Impossible Burgers, promised to be indistinguishable from beef; when slathered within the trimmings of an Impossible Whopper, Grunwald writes, it had “basically” achieved that goal.

The companies were also familiar with these shortcomings. Josh Tetrick, chief executive officer of Eat Just, told Grunwald the company was “not there yet” on taste, while Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown told him the Beyond Burger was “nowhere near where it needs to be.” Impossible's chief science officer promised Grunwald they would “continue to get better.”

These products were also more expensive than their animal-based counterparts, and none were particularly healthy. But by 2023, Grunwald seems to have been swayed by newer iterations. Beyond Meat’s steak tips, which debuted in late 2022, had a “pleasant meaty flavor,” he writes. Upside Foods, which grows cultivated chicken from extracted animal cells, served him a handmade “filet” that was 99% animal cells and “tasted better than most chicken.”

The later plant-based offerings had improved upon taste, though not enough to stop their sales from tanking. And many reviews suggest that cultivated meat has truly replicated the taste of meat, but scale and cost remain major issues. Upside’s chicken was only available to the public through one restaurant, once a month, in tiny quantities. After less than a year, it was gone. And while Grunwald writes about the company’s plan to start commercial production in 2025 of a half-cultivated, half-plant-based chicken that would cost less than $10 to make, it’s unclear whether Upside Foods is on track to meet that goal. (The company did not respond to requests for comment. In March, Upside conducted layoffs as part of a reorganization to “focus on commercialization,” it told AgFunderNews.)

Therein lies the central disconnect between Searchinger, who recognized the error of promoting corn ethanol as a “bridge fuel” to something better that didn’t yet exist, and Grunwald, who seems to hail Searchinger’s foresight without embracing it himself. Grunwald simultaneously understands the complexity of the climate/food challenge and seems to bank on a fake-meat bridge to nowhere to solve it. He pegs his optimism largely on changing human behavior with either experimental products like Upside’s, or commercial ones like Beyond’s, that taste, at best, “pleasant.”

I know Searchinger from my own work writing about food and climate, so I had to ask him: Did he agree with Grunwald on the potential of cultivated meat in particular as a potential climate solution? He said he was “skeptical,” but thought the endeavor was worth trying. There is promise for products, he says, that taste as good as the real thing, cost a bit less and contain just a small amount of cultivated meat that is mixed mostly with plants.

No such product is currently on the market, so I told him that all sounded a bit like the “better biofuels” that never showed up. His response: “Touché.”