I have spent much of my life staring at the dashboard of a civilisation that thinks it’s steering, while in reality its strapped to the front of a runaway helter-skelter, applauding its own acceleration. We obsess about climate, species loss, pandemics, inequality, geopolitical fracture – as though they are separate “files” on the desktop of public policy. Yet when you drill below the slogans and the theatrics, a single operating system keeps flashing red: food.
Not food as cuisine, or calories, or agri‑business. Food as a life-critical system; the primary interface between a society and the living matrix that sustains it. Food as the daily ritual through which an industrial worldview converts life into energy and energy into throughput. Food as the practical theology of industrial economism.
When you track the disintegration of Earth’s life support systems, food sits at the centre of the spider’s web. Agriculture is now the largest single driver of land-use erosion, biodiversity loss and freshwater depletion globally. When you factor in methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from fertilisers and CO₂ from deforestation, it becomes a towering contributor to global heating as well. Multiple independent scientific assessments – from those who map planetary boundaries to those summarising climate science and diet-health-environment links – converge on that basic picture. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet, bizarrely, we persist in treating food as a side issue in climate negotiations – a sort of awkward relative we keep out of the photographs.
This is not a trivial misalignment. It tells us that the story we are using to interpret collapse is wrong at source.
Land: The First Violence
Before the first tonne of CO₂ is counted, another, more primitive assault has already taken place. Forests are felled or burned. Wetlands drained. Grasslands ploughed into sterile rows. A bewilderingly intricate living fabric is flattened into a platform for commodity production. This is the original violence of industrial agriculture: the erasure of landscape.
Today, agriculture occupies roughly half of all habitable land on Earth, according to the best current global land-use assessments. Most of that is geared, directly or indirectly, to animal protein – meat, dairy, feed crops – while providing a far smaller fraction of global calories and proteins than the land footprint might suggest. The arithmetic would be comical if it were not lethal: a planetary-scale machine that turns vast landscapes into low-efficiency protein and high-efficiency extinction.
Once habitats are gone, most talk of “saving biodiversity” is elaborate theatre. No habitat, no species. We know this. We can measure the speed at which species disappear as we bulldoze forests, savannahs and coastal zones. Yet we still act as though treaties, targets and glossy reports can save what we’re physically evicting. It’s as if we imagine that life can be negotiated with, rather than given room to exist.
Removing fossil fuels from the energy system is crucial; I have argued that many times. But if land use continues on its current course – expansion of industrial monocultures, forest clearance, wetlands converted to feedlots and rice paddies emitting methane – then emissions reductions from energy alone will not secure a stable climate. We might succeed in cooling the air slightly while the ground beneath us continues to die.
Chemistry Without Memory
Industrial agriculture was sold to the public as a sort of planetary engineering miracle. And to some extent it was. A clean, rational, quantified triumph. In reality it’s become a global-scale chemical experiment with no control group and no recall mechanism. Synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides do not stay where agronomists claim they will. They obey physics, not PowerPoint. They wash into rivers, leak into aquifers, collect in estuaries, accumulate in sediments, and ripple through food webs. Elevated nutrient loads from agriculture are now strongly associated with dead zones in coastal waters, harmful algal blooms and the slow suffocation of lakes and rivers in many regions. Studies across continents keep reaching similar conclusions: the chemical “inputs” are making their way into the deep tissues of Earth’s metabolism and interfering in ways far beyond the original intention.
We frame all this under the banner of “feeding the world”. The phrase is repeated so often that it has become immune to scrutiny. Yet at least a third of all food produced is lost or wasted, and close to half of humanity struggles to access a healthy diet. If this is success, what would failure look like?
The uncomfortable possibility is that we are using chemistry to prop up a farming infrastructure so ecologically incoherent that it cannot survive on biological intelligence alone. Instead of adjusting our relationship with soils, water and species, we dose them with industrial products and call it progress. This is not technical sophistication. It’s amnesia.
A Systemically Unjust Feast
Food is often portrayed as the most intimate of human experiences: cooking, sharing, celebration, comfort. Underneath those personal rituals lies a global arrangement that’s structurally predatory.
Analyses of food-related environmental impacts show a clear pattern: the wealthiest fraction of humanity – perhaps the top third – accounts for a disproportionate share of the damage. High intake of animal products, ultra-processed foods and imported commodities piles up land, water and emissions footprints in other peoples’ backyards. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions remain undernourished and billions cannot reliably obtain diverse, nutritious diets. An arrangement that can ship berries across hemispheres in winter while children go to bed hungry is not a “system” in any sane sense of the word; it’s an organised derangement.
Subsidies in many countries still underwrite monocultures and chemical inputs. Trade rules favour large export-oriented players able to externalise costs onto ecosystems and precarious labour. Financial markets reward short-term volume and volatility, not long-term soil health or community resilience. Within that frame, the cheap snack on the supermarket shelf is not cheap at all – it is simply a clever way of hiding the bill.
The term “global food system” is too polite for such an arrangement. It is industrial economism made edible: a machinery that takes land, water, energy and labour from the many, translates them into uniform commodities, and funnels financial surpluses into the hands of those who already own most of the levers.
Climate Policy with Amnesia
Most climate roadmaps still treat food as an awkward appendix. The headlines emphasise electric vehicles, wind farms, solar arrays, green hydrogen. Agriculture is relegated to the small print – a few lines about “efficiency” and “innovation”, perhaps a token reference to dietary change, quickly buried. Yet a growing body of scenario work reaches an awkward inference: even if we decarbonise energy and industry at unprecedented speed, keeping global heating within 1.5°C becomes extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, without profound changes to agriculture and diets. Methane from ruminants and rice, nitrous oxide from fertilisers, and continued destruction of forests and peatlands occupy a stubborn slice of the remaining emissions budget.
If governments announce net-zero targets while leaving the food regime practically untouched, what exactly are they offering? A slightly cooler variant of an already degenerating civilisation. Solar panels on a sinking ship.
Climate is not only an engineering problem. It’s a mirror held up to how we inhabit Earth. By that measure, food is diagnostic. What we cultivate, what we eat, what we waste and who goes hungry tell us more about our collective worldview than any speech at a climate summit.
Farmers in a Cage of Someone Else’s Making
It has become fashionable in some circles to vilify farmers: to blame them for emissions, for water pollution, for animal suffering. This is ethically lazy and strategically suicidal. Farmers, by and large, did not design the rules of this game. They navigate a maze constructed by banks, supermarket chains, seed and chemical corporations, trade ministries and distant investors. In many regions, a farmer who wants to restore soil, reduce synthetic inputs, rehydrate landscapes or protect habitat finds themselves pushed to the margins. Lenders prefer “proven” models based on yield and volume. Procurement contracts demand uniformity and just-in-time delivery. Urban consumers – trained to worship convenience and “cheapness” – rarely glimpse the human and ecological costs embedded in those expectations.
Under those pressures, farms morph into factories. Animals become production units. Soil is redefined as a substrate for chemistry. The farmer is recast as a plant manager shackled to debt and paperwork. Unsurprisingly, rates of depression and suicide among farmers in many countries are alarming. When the custodians of land begin to break under the strain, that is not an incidental side-effect; it’s a sign that the operating system itself has gone pathological. Blaming the person on the tractor distracts us from the anatomy of industrial economism – a worldview that treats land as collateral, living beings as inventory, and food as a revenue stream.
Regeneration as Civilisational Therapy
The term “regenerative agriculture” is now everywhere. Some of this is genuine exploration. Much is marketing. I watch this trend with both curiosity and unease.
On the encouraging side, there is growing empirical evidence that farming aligned with ecological processes – building soil organic matter, increasing diversity above and below ground, integrating trees and animals thoughtfully, minimising or eliminating synthetic inputs – can protect yields, improve resilience to droughts and floods, and in some contexts even draw down atmospheric carbon. Examples are accumulating in multiple regions, from semi-arid rangelands to smallholder mosaics and temperate croplands. When communities work with the grain of local ecosystems, damaged land often recovers far faster than official models assumed.
The danger is that “regenerative” becomes a new sticker on the same old box. Without shifts in land tenure, finance, subsidies, corporate power and cultural norms about what counts as “success”, we risk turning regeneration into a decorative veneer overlaying an extractive core. A few charismatic demonstration farms, a new certification logo, some glossy annual reports – while the bulk of the system marches on unchanged.
So we are brought to a deeper line of inquiry: what is food for? If food remains the fuel for an economy that equates progress with endless accumulation, then “regeneration” will be tamed and absorbed. It will become another branch of agribusiness. If, however, food is recognised as the main way a society rehearses its relationship with the rest of life, then regenerative practice is not just a set of techniques. It is civilisational therapy.
Crucially, this cannot be a global franchise model. Agroecological traditions long practised in parts of Latin America, Indigenous foodways in Australia and elsewhere, communal land stewardship in many African and Asian communities, and countless smallholder innovations already embody principles that Western science is only now beginning to decode. The challenge is not to roll out a single design, but to stop bulldozing the intelligence already present in place-based cultures.
Beyond the Supermarket Imagination
The supermarket aisle has quietly become the central metaphor of modern abundance: bright, chilled, waxed, wrapped in plastic, endless. Food appears, sanitised and standardised, as if summoned by the invisible hand of “the market”. The messy realities of soil, sweat, slaughter, pollution and debt are kept offstage.
Most people now experience food almost exclusively in this performative space. The origin of the tomato, the actual life of the chicken, the river from which the irrigation water was taken, the migrant worker who picked the crop – all vanish behind barcodes. This is not just a logistical arrangement; it is a pedagogy. It trains us to see Earth as a vending machine. If any of us treated our own bodies as industrial civilisation treats the body of the Earth – constant extraction, chronic poisoning, ignoring feedback until organs fail – we would call it self-harm. Yet when done to landscapes and oceans, we call it “growth”.
Transforming food systems is therefore not a boutique cause for environmentalists, nor a lifestyle tweak for the affluent. It’s a direct challenge to the founding myth of industrial economism: that endless extraction on a finite, living planet is somehow rational, inevitable and morally neutral.
What happens if we reverse the usual line of inquiry? Instead of asking how to make agriculture more “efficient” in delivering commodities, we begin from a different question: how much and what kind of food is genuinely needed for everyone to live well within Earth’s biophysical limits? Immediately, cherished assumptions wobble. The cult of cheapness. The fetish for year‑round everything. The notion that convenience is a reliable proxy for progress. Even the idea that more trade is always a blessing begins to look fragile.
From that vantage point, food ceases to be a global conveyor belt of commodities and starts to resemble a web of relationships: between city and countryside, between upstream and downstream, between present appetites and future possibilities, between humans and the myriad more-than-human lives with whom we share each watershed and coastline. Such a web is inherently diverse. It sits uncomfortably inside trade agreements designed for uniformity. It does not conform neatly to GDP metrics. It might actually shrink the physical volume of “stuff” churned through the global economy while enlarging the depth and quality of life. For an ideology addicted to quantity, that is close to sacrilege.
Food as the Front Line of a Different Civilisation
If we’re honest – and honesty is in short supply in elite climate conversations – we already sense that electrifying cars and plastering deserts with solar panels while leaving the food regime largely intact will not deliver a liveable future. It will yield a slightly rebranded version of the same extractionism: green at the edges, scorched at the roots.
Food is where that pretence runs aground. You can offshore manufacturing. You can outsource data processing. You can’t offshore soil. You can’t download clean water. When pollinators vanish, you can’t summon them from the cloud. We are anchored through food in ways that no financial instrument can dissolve. That’s why any serious civilisational reorientation will show up first and most tangibly in food. Not as a salad garnish, but as the main course.
Such a shift will not be gifted from boardrooms or ministerial briefcases. It’s already emerging in disobedient fragments: farmers who walk away from industrial orthodoxy even when banks and neighbours shake their heads; communities in cities re‑creating local food cultures in alleyways and rooftops; researchers who dare to break disciplinary silos and work directly with local knowledge holders; policy-makers, in a few places, beginning to redirect public money away from extraction and towards living soils, clean water and healthy diets; people refusing to remain mere “consumers” and insisting on acting as citizens embedded in a living world.
None of this is guaranteed. It’s just as plausible that industrial economism will double down – more automation, more patents on seeds and microbes, more datafication of land and bodies, more technocratic fantasies about “precision” control, all in the name of resilience and efficiency. A high‑tech feedstock factory wrapped in green rhetoric.
The more arresting possibility is that food becomes the hinge on which a tired civilisation begins to turn. That we relearn what many cultures never entirely forgot: to eat is to participate in a cycle of gift and obligation, not merely to ingest products. Every meal becomes a quiet referendum on the kind of species we intend to be.
I am often asked whether I am optimistic. Wrong question. Optimism and pessimism are private moods. What matters is lucidity. The food regime as it stands is a diagnostic instrument. It shows us, with an almost indecent clarity, the worldview currently running our world: extractionist, short-sighted, addicted to growth, blind to its own dependencies.
The real inquiry is whether we are willing to install a different operating system while the machine is still running. That requires courage from farmers, imagination from policy-makers, humility from experts, and a radical shift in how each of us relates to the next mouthful we take. In the final analysis food is not a sideshow in the drama of collapse. It is the script. Rewrite that, and everything else begins to change.